Page 1 of Dragon 7

Prologue

The Smiling Dead

Hiro

In the war room, six oni masks rested along the massive table between me and the Claws. Polished obsidian. Gold leaf. Crimson silk cords pooled beside them like spilled blood.

Every mask carried its own expression—wrath, sorrow, cruelty, and hunger.

Art twisted into violence. Will this be enough?

I sucked harder on the pink lollipop in my mouth. When I bought the gender reveal lollipops for Sora, I’d kept two extra boxes for myself—pink and blue.

Now. . .

My heart ached.

Now I would use them as fuel for my vengeance.

I looked away from the masks and even the Claws, and focused on the smiling dead people beyond them. Ghosts. They stood there, bleeding, watching me with smiles too wide for their wounds.

Sora had died in the clinic today, due to Kiko infiltrating my brother’s men. Now he stood in front of them. He held a pink lollipop in his left hand and a blue one in his right. His wide grin was proud, the way it had been the day he showed me the ultrasound photo.

Welcome back, ghosts.

My Tiger had helped them disappear after the Claws party, but Kiko had called them right back in that clinic.

I rolled the pink lollipop against the roof of my mouth and put my focus on the oni masks spread across the table.

Demon.

That's what oni meant.

The thing in Japanese folklore with horns, fangs, and skin the wrong color. The thing that waited in mountains and ate what wandered too close. The thing wicked souls became after death—murderers, tyrants, punishers in hell or the ones being punished. That's what the legends said.

But I had never believed the legends.

I believed oni were made—mountain hermits, starving women, abandoned warriors. People driven so far past the edge of what a heart could carry that the heart became something else.

What if the demon was the final shape of survival? The terrifying shell that grew when the human could no longer protect the wounded heart inside.

It didn’t matter anymore.

Tonight, I would become an oni to win this war.

I bit down on the lollipop.

The candy cracked between my teeth as I picked my mask up.

Hannya. The horned female demon.

She had been human at first, then heartbreak had consumed her until sorrow transformed her into a terrifying demon.

My tongue found the cracked bits of lollipop.

The mask’s horns had been polished smooth at the base and sharpened to lethal points. I intended to drive them through my enemies and spill their entrails across the battlefield. By sunrise, I expected blood to coat the front and intestines to be hanging from the horns.

Soon.