What did he have to lose? Listening to her this time, he obeyed.

Winds whipped around him, blowing the flames higher. The fighting tengu shrieked. The dragon reared up as the sky above darkened. His stomach pitched.

Something was happening. It might only be that he was losing his lunch, but something was in motion.

He just hoped it was something good. Something that didn’t come back out of that hole to join the others in wanting to eat him.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. “For once in my life, work!”

To his utter stupefaction, it did.

But not without a fight. The dragon lunged, trying to take him with it.

Masaru dropped Haruki to grab Ryuichi around the waist. Koichi slashed at the dragon with his sword, and Keiko used her powers to send blasts of fire against its chest.

They were helping him.

His friends.

His family.

With a loud, deafening crash, the dragon was sucked back through the portal, out of their world.

Keiko gave him a sad smile. “I’m sorry I locked up your powers when you were little. I was only trying to protect you.”

For once, he wasn’t mad at her. “It’s okay.”

But as he turned away, he smelled the horrid stench of burning timbers and leather. Heard the screams and moans of his other friends.

Where were they?

Was he too late?

Terror returned to him as he ran toward the nightmare his father had started.

“Takara! Kato!”

Keiko caught up to him. “Don’t panic. If their shadows are here, so are they. They’re alive. You can use the shadows to find them.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

He looked back to where he’d left the shadow versions of his friends. They weren’t moving. Instead, they remained clustered around Koichi and Masaru.

With a ragged breath, he decided to try and use his fledgling powers again.

Praying he got this right, he commanded those shadows to return to their bodies.

As if they knew what he was doing, they sneered at him before they dispersed.

Ryuichi ran after them, hoping they took him to his friends.

They did. He found Takara first. She was helping her brother, who was wounded, strangely, in the legs, as if Mikito had suffered the same injury as his shadow. “What happened?”

She swallowed hard before she answered. “It was awful. A bunch of monks attacked us.”

He scowled at her words. “Monks?”

“Yes, they . . .” Her voice trailed off as she met his gaze. “Ryuichi? What happened to your eye?”

“My eye?”

“It’s turned white.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Two days later, after everything had settled back to a seminormal state, Ryuichi stared at himself in the mirror, still unable to believe what had happened to his friends. What had happened to him. He was like Masaru now, only his friend had two white eyes.

He had one of each.

Because he was tied to both worlds.