Table of Contents
Summary
Shadow Alley Press Mailing List
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Books, Mailing List, and Reviews
Books by Shadow Alley Press
Books by Black Forge
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Even More Cultivation on Facebook
Copyright
About the Author
About the Publisher
Summary
HE’S NEVER FAILED A witch hunt before. Until he must hunt the only woman he’s ever loved...
When Django Wong, a modern-day ninja turned sorcerer, takes a job to track down a newly Awakened witch, he discovers that his target is not only his lost love, but now she’s an enforcer for the Black Lotus Clan, a ruthless yakuza syndicate.
But time can change a person. Is she the girl who used to love him, a yakuza slave, or a deadly black witch?
With a smart-mouthed magical house cat as his ally, Django must protect her from other Hunter-Seekers sent to kill her until he can learn the truth of her allegiance. And not only that, if he can't stop her from stealing a powerful magical relic, the Black Lotus Clan will launch a bloodbath in Shinjuku’s streets.
Perfect for fans of Bleach or Fullmetal Alchemist, Tokyo Blood Magic brings you ninja sorcerers, femme fatales, savage monsters, martial arts action, and powerful cultivation. Pick it up now and start the adventure!
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Part I
Chapter One
HE TRACKED THE CREATURE through the rain by the sound of the child’s crying.
His soft-soled tabi kept his tread silent but did little to keep out the rain. The coal-black duster he wore shed the rain and the touch of any wandering gaze, but his feet were drenched as he stole along the dark alleys of Kabuki-chō, the adult entertainment district of Tokyo’s Shinjuku City. Close-packed skyscrapers hid the sky but didn’t stop the rain.
He paused at the mouth of a narrow alley.
A nearby garbage can stank of seafood gone rancid in the day’s muggy heat. The rain made halos around the lights of the izakaya, massage parlors, soaplands, hostess bars, love hotels, porn shops, and brothels. Their profuse lights glowed against the undersides of the low-hanging clouds. The tallest buildings disappeared into the fog. At this time of night, restaurants were long since closed. On a nearby street corner, a late-night udon stand looked like a drowned hound, unoccupied except for the proprietor, who sat asleep in the yellow globe of light under the awning, chin in his hand.
In the distance, a couple of drunk salarymen stumbled out of a dimly lit archway clutching girls half their age who squealed at the rain. The quartet rushed into a waiting taxi, oblivious to how close they had come to encountering something they really wouldn’t want to meet on a dark, rainy street.
Anyone who encountered what Django was chasing on this rainy night would surely regret it.
The taxi was the only vehicle on the glossy ribbon of deserted street.
He closed his eyes for a moment and plunged his attention into the indigo pool of mahō—black magic essence—behind his forehead, his Third Eye pool. Awakening his Third Eye turned the impenetrable night into coruscating shadows and auras, heightening all his senses, including his hearing. His coat felt heavier, the rain stickier, the nearby garbage can all the more pungent.
The ongoing wail of the child, disappearing into the distance, turned his head. A narrow street led toward Ōkubo Park, which wasn’t a park at all, but a flat expanse of concrete a hundred meters long and thirty wide with a few small trees planted around the perimeter, frequented mostly by homeless people. For all the Japanese love of nature, in a metropolitan area of some forty million people with skyscrapers reaching incredible heights, nature could be hard to come by. Tonight, the homeless had been driven under shelter.
The kami of the rain held sway now. Normally such spirits smelled and felt of water, cleansing but inexorable. It made the essence pool situated in his sacrum, associated with Water mahō, thrum with vigor. But tonight there was a sourness to the rain as if its spirits were tainted. It had come upon the city suddenly, after a clear, sweltering summer day with no rain in the weather forecast.
The rain’s source was not natural weather patterns.
With his Third Eye open, its corresponding essence pool pulsed with power, ready for use. Silent as a fish in deep water, he stepped into a shadow at the corner of Go! Go! Curry! and stepped out of a shadow half a block nearer the sound of the crying child, at the innocuous, dimly lit entrance to a hostess bar whose name he couldn’t parse. After ten years in Japan, he still had trouble with a few kanji characters, especially when someone was deliberately being opaque with their language, like those uninterested in catering to foreigners.
But all this he absorbed in less than a heartbeat with extended feelers of perception reaching into realms beyond the mortal one.
The child’s continuing wail was the beacon that led him on. Did no one else hear it? Did no one think to help the child?
One more Shadow Blink and he stood at the perimeter of Ōkubo Park, slipping from the dark shelter of an apartment complex’s back entrance. The park’s broad concrete slab was mostly dark, the shadows of the perimeter’s spindly trees pixelated by the rain.
There she was, crossing the concrete with a slow, shambling step. She dragged a burlap sack behind her. The sack writhed and shrieked with terror. Her drenched, colorless kimono clung to her emaciated frame, her obi sagging around her waist as if it couldn’t be wrapped tight enough. Her hair was a bedraggled mass that obscured her face but revealed the pale flesh of her neck. Her fingers were knotted fiercely around the sack, dragging it through shallow puddles.
Through his Third Eye, he studied her aura. It flickered with blue and violet, into the ultraviolet. All seven of his essence pools—located at his tailbone, his sacrum, his hara or belly, his heart, his throat, his forehead, his crown—tingled in anticipation with the influx of mahō he would claim when he dispatched this creature.
The arrival of rain suggested this yokai was likely an ame onna, a rain woman. The Shiseki no Gotairō, The Annals of the Council of Five Elders, said that ame onna were often the ghosts of mothers who’d lost their minds in despair and grief over having their children snatched away from them. As such, the creature could be somewhat of a tragic figure.
Except that it was dragging a living child away to its doom.
Perhaps it wanted to drag the child away into Jianghu, the Realm of Rivers and Lakes through which demons, gods, and supernatural creatures passed on their way to other planes or sometimes chose to reside. Perhaps it was taking the child straight to Hell.
The ame onna paused and lifted its head. Django knew better than to think of it as a woman, because nothing of a human female remained in its nature except distant echoes. It was operating on some purpose only it understood.
It turned toward him. Its voice was the hiss of the rain itself. “I see you, Kenji Wong.”
It knew his name! How did it know his name?
But he tamped down his surprise and stepped into the rain. He reached under his duster for the hilt of his katana and drew it. The sheen of steel, beaded by rain, glimmered in the meager light. “The child does not belong to you,” he said in Japanese.
Its eyes flared through yellow to red. “It is mine!” it hissed. “It should have been mine!”
He walked closer, opening his Fire pool—the crucible of Fire mahō in his belly. His blood heated as it suffused him, throbbing, pulsing through his spirit and body and into his weapon until his sword was part of his very soul and as sharp as his force of will—able to cut flesh and spirit alike. It was called the Sunblade.
“Give me the child, and go back to where you came from. You don’t belong here.”
The creature hissed, and her body recoiled like a snake. Her neck stretched to three feet, a gaping mouth opening impossibly wide. Those lantern coals of eyes blazed.
He raised his blade. “Obey me, creature, or I’ll send you straight to Jigoku.”
Its elongated neck distorted its taunt. “You’re welcome to try, Kenji Wong. Perhaps I shall take you with me.”
He slowed his approach but didn’t stop. “How do you know my name?”
The head bobbed like a cobra’s as it laughed. “Who does not know of ‘Django’ Wong, the Council’s loyal lapdog?”
This creature knew of the Council! The mortal world did not, and most yokai were all but mindless, possessed of only their own strange cunning, remembering only enough of their human lives to fuel the obsessions that turned them into monsters.
Django took another step. “What do you know of the Council?”
Screeching laughter grated on his ears. The monstrous aspect of her appearance disappeared as if by flipping a switch, leaving a beautiful young woman in a sodden, old-style kimono. With big, soulful eyes and full lips, her face held a demure beauty even through the white makeup of a geisha, now streaked with rain.
But it was just a flash, and then the streaks in her makeup turned red as blood poured from her eyes like tears. Her teeth turned black and sharp, and her eyes blazed like coals of hatred. Her hair sprang out like a nest of serpents, stretching and growing and darting toward him.
With a gasp of surprise and dismay, he rolled backward and came to his feet with sword raised, heartbeat hammering. Chill dashed through him, an intense cold that had nothing to do with temperature. His knees went weak.
This was not a rain woman.
It was an onryō—a grudge spirit—one of the most powerful ghosts in all the supernatural realms.
He extended a handful of Earth mahō drawn from his Root essence pool and swept it around him. The Earth essence bubbled forth instantly at his call and formed an invisible barrier around him. His Third Eye saw it as an ancient castle. It could protect him from most earthly threats, but it would not hold off an onryō for long.
Its hair stabbed into the cracks and crevices of the castle, like tree roots worming between boulders.
He slashed at the hair. It was tougher than steel wire, but his blade, infused with Fire mahō, could cut almost anything. Black snakes of hair splatted to the ground, writhed for a moment, then disappeared as tendrils of smoke.
The onryō lunged forward, bloody black talons outstretched, its screech of rage echoing through the canyons of steel and concrete. It slammed into his castle, buckling his defenses. The power of its lust for vengeance would permeate the dreams of everyone in Kabuki-chō. There would be murders in the days to come.
Django slashed a diagonal cut toward the ghost’s neck, but it dodged back with a deep hiss, then began to circle him. His hands trembled with fear. If that thing got its talons on him, he would die most horrendously, and it would still be free to rip swaths of vengeance and hatred through the mortal world.
From within his duster, he pulled three bo-shuriken, steel needles the length of a hand and the thickness of a pencil. With his left hand, he infused them with Fire and flung them at the ghost. It dodged one but caught the other two in its torso. The steel needles stabbed through its body and out its back as if it were only half substantial.
The onryō screamed in pain, ichor soaking its kimono. The lips of the wounds sizzled and glowed with embers.
He flung another barrage of Fire shuriken, but the creature leaped high into the air, and they skittered uselessly across the concrete. He gritted his teeth at the waste of Fire essence. Every time he infused a weapon or a handful of shuriken with Fire, it required a dose of essence. Once any given pool had been emptied, he had to rest and meditate to allow the cosmos to refill it. The last-ditch option was to refill them via his Brand, something to be done in only the direst of circumstances. Like fighting an onryō perhaps, but he was not yet that desperate.
The instant the monster landed it lunged toward him again, slamming into his barrier, shattering it. In desperation, he drove his blade through the ghost’s chest. It leaped back again, jerking itself free of his blade.
He chased it with another slash, another, another, driving it back and back. The stench of burning death filled his nose and cinched his throat tight. Wherever the sword found its target, the lips of the slice smoked and burned. Step by step, he drove the creature back toward one of the trees.
It dodged a cut that would have cleaved it from shoulder to waist. Instead, his slash felled the tree, slicing through the six-inch trunk as if it were a tatami mat, singeing the edges of the cut. The scent of burnt wood mixed with rain. The tree trunk slipped off its stump and fell between them, tangling his sword in its branches.
The onryō charged through the tree, insubstantial as smoke, then seized him in its talons by the shoulder and neck. Its scream blasted a fetid stench into his face. Its eyes were coals of hate, its mouth a forest of black fangs reaching for his face. One heartbeat from now, he would be headless.
In that last second before his death, Django’s mind flashed his old mentor’s words. You’re too arrogant about your skills. You don’t think you have to study or practice? Toshirō had told him on more than one frustrating occasion. The life of a Hunter-Seeker is one of constant cultivation! Talent and audacity will only get you killed facing the things we must face. The graveyards of history are filled with “talented” men who did not press on. Determination against distraction and lassitude! Humility against the arrogance of the “talented”! Martial training feeds your body, which feeds your spirit, which feeds your mahō, which feeds your spirit, which feeds your body, which feeds your martial training. Just as the farmer knows the cycles of earth and growth, how death and life embrace, through cultivation, to make new crops, you must not neglect cultivation. It is the key.
But Toshirō was dead now, so screw that guy.
The onryō’s foul teeth swept toward Django’s face.
He was done for, a goner. Soon he would be able to ask Toshirō if it was all worth it.
“Nyaaaar!”
A cat’s meow of challenge, loud and close, made both Django and the ghost jump. As the onryō turned, Django whipped out his wakizashi, his short sword, with his left hand and, with an upward slash, severed the arm gripping his shoulder. The forearm fell, twitching, and a gout of fetid ichor sprayed Django’s face. Revulsion surged up in his throat at the charnel stench of the creature’s ichor.
The on
ryō screamed in rage, snatched up the severed hand, and flung it at the snow-white cat standing two meters away. Huge, green eyes narrowed. Its ears laid back. It was big for a house cat, but it dodged easily. Its rain-slicked fur accentuated its muscles. It released another challenge and a hiss to match, crouching to spring, tail thrashing.
It was such an incongruous sight, so out-of-nowhere, that Django just stared for half a heartbeat. Tendrils of the onryō’s hair lashed toward the cat. The cat leaped almost three meters into the air and backward.
But this moment of distraction was Django’s opening.
He leaped forward, slashing at the onryō’s neck. His blade bit with trained precision, and the ghost’s head tumbled from its narrow shoulders.
The body staggered and flailed for a moment until it righted itself. The severed head’s seething fan of hair sprang out like tentacles, reaching for its body. Django laid a straight kick to the onryō’s belly, driving it away from the head. Three more swift cuts severed the body’s remaining limbs. The body lay in pieces squirming at his feet.
The cat eased back from its attack stance and gazed steadily at him, rain dripping quietly from its whiskers, as if to say, Are you going to finish it off or aren’t you? Given even a little time, the onryō would reassemble itself.
He sheathed his katana and knelt beside the head. Taking a deep breath, he sent the attention of his will from his crown, where the Celestial pool resided, down through his body through each pool toward his tailbone, his Root, where the element of Earth resided.
None of this would be visible to a human onlooker. All they would see was a man in a duster laying his palm atop a severed head and holding it there for almost half a minute, but they might not believe even that. Normal humans’ penchant for disbelieving what was right before their eyes was not only mind-boggling, it was how supernatural beings—and those who hunted them—managed to stay hidden and operate in the cracks of the world. A normal human wouldn’t see him focus his will to blast a mahō spear through the onryō’s Celestial pool, severing its connection to all the universes, a spear that shattered each pool in succession regardless of whether the head was still connected to its body. Nor would the onlooker see him siphon every last mote of the creature’s magical energy into himself in a great, flaring gush.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 1
