Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1)

by Travis Heermann

  Django opened one of the sandwich packages for the cat, then sank onto the bed, feeling as if he might levitate six inches above it—right before he exploded like a stick of dynamite. He took several deep breaths and sank into meditation. There could be no interruption. If he didn’t do it now...

  His awareness descended into the seven pools of mahō essence arranged from tailbone to crown up through his body, each of them like a dimensionless micro-universe composed of its attendant essence: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Voice, Awareness, and the Celestial. He encompassed the tumult of the onryō’s magical essence in a cage of discipline, bending the raw essence to his will, forcing each mote or dram of mahō to settle into its place, and as it did so the resonance of his Celestial pool brightened until...

  It was as if a lock had been opened with the most satisfying click ever into a grand hall the size of the Milky Way, and his whole body and soul thrummed with it. A cosmic chorus opened up his skull and poured in harmonies of existence that connected him with everything and everyone in a bright and shining cascade that faded to...Awakening.

  Warmth suffused him like a loving hug as he opened his eyes, smiling.

  The cat, chin resting on his paws, opened half-lidded eyes.

  Jubilation such as Django could not remember having experienced before spurred him to leap out of his meditative position. “I’m starving!”

  The cat said, “I’m pleased to see your head did not explode. Now, if only we might reduce its swelling.”

  Django laughed. “You are one cheeky bastard. You didn’t eat all the sandwiches, did you?”

  The cat gestured toward a half-eaten one. “Be my guest.”

  Django polished off the remaining half of the cat’s tuna sandwich while the cat groomed itself. The oden was long since cold, but the ancient, third-hand microwave fixed that problem.

  The cat gestured to the ofuda hanging above the front door and each window. “Expecting company?”

  Django scrutinized the cat again. The strips of fine, white rice paper were talismans hand-brushed with arcane kanji in magical ink. These were yokai wards he had made to prevent the entry of curses and supernatural creatures. And yet this cat—who was clearly not just a cat—had strolled right in. “It’s a dangerous world,” he said finally.

  The cat continued placidly combing his fur with his tongue. “Indeed.”

  Still too keyed up to consider sleeping, Django shed himself of most of his weapons—he never went anywhere weaponless—ran his fingers through his shock of disheveled hair, and headed for the door. It was time for this new Level Three warlock to party.

  “You going to hang out here for a while?” Django said, opening the front window enough for the cat to slip out if it chose.

  The cat yawned. “Perhaps.”

  “Mess anything up and I’ll cut your head off.”

  “Better men than you have tried. Besides, anything I might do would alleviate the squalor.”

  Chapter Three

  THE HAPPY COCK CLUB was just the kind of place suggested by the name and the grinning rooster on the sign, a place to pick up or be picked up, with a dance floor lit from above and below. Lasers flashed through dry-ice smoke as teens and twenty-somethings thrashed and writhed to techno and house music in English and Japanese. As always, it was a target-rich environment.

  Django sat at the end of the bar with a glass of Suntory whiskey on the rocks, chatting up the male bartender, a New Zealand ex-pat who clearly enjoyed the attention of the nubile co-eds drenched in sparkles and allure.

  “You speak English like a native,” the bartender said at one point.

  “Don’t let this deeply Asian exterior fool you,” Django said. “I’m from Hawaii.” It felt good to relax his brain and speak English sometimes. His spoken Japanese was fluent by now, but it did still tax his brain.

  “Ah, got it. Haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “You must be new.” Django came to the Happy Cock Club whenever it came time to find a certain kind of companionship.

  “Been here a couple of months.”

  “Like it?”

  The bartender gestured around him. “What’s not to like?”

  Django raised his glass in salute. “What’s not to like.”

  “You? How long?”

  Ten years. “Long enough for some things. Not long enough for others.”

  The bartender cracked half a grin. “Cool as.” He turned his attention to serving drinks, leaving Django to his Suntory.

  Had it really been ten years?

  Ten years since the night in Honolulu when the Black Lotus Clan had slaughtered his parents and his brother.

  Ten years since that traumatic night had Awakened the mahō of his Fire pool and he had become a Level One.

  Ten years since the Hunter-Seeker known as Toshirō had arrived, spirited him across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, and brought him before the Gotairō, the Council of Five Elders.

  Ten years since he’d had to choose: accept the Brand, or die.

  Ten years since he’d been dropped penniless in the streets of Tokyo, his head freshly shaved and his Brand freshly tattooed across his scalp, with only his wits, street smarts, and newly discovered but still rudimentary magical powers to keep him fed.

  A lot had happened in that time.

  Four years ago, he’d unexpectedly graduated his apprenticeship as a Hunter-Seeker when his mentor, Toshirō, had disappeared without a trace. Since then, Django had hunted yokai across the sprawling Tokyo area, both above and below ground, cultivating his martial arts skills and harvesting their mahō essence to build his magical abilities. Or at least, that’s what he let the Council think. Sure, he did some yokai-hunting. Sure, he did some studying in the Council’s Library. But he enjoyed a more lackadaisical pace. Power and prestige did not interest him, either in the mortal world or the mahō world. A stiff drink, a lovely and willing Miss Right Now—what else could his heart desire?

  Tonight, his Brand thrummed with fresh power, ripples of aftershock from the Awakening of his Celestial pool sending electrical tingles through his body, especially to areas that hadn’t seen much companionship in a while.

  It was indeed a target-rich environment, and it was only three a.m. Plenty of time to find Miss Immediate Gratification. The music throbbed in his limbs and kicked his heart into a faster rhythm. Some lucky girl was going home with him tonight.

  A few backflips ought to create enough attention to get him through someone’s door, so he busted out a couple, bookended by his favorite dance moves, turning his ninjutsu training toward purposes the ancient shinobi of Koga and Iga had probably not intended. Ninjutsu was all about avoiding notice, after all. Mom would be faux-shocked. Dad would bust into a Monkey-style kung-fu Moonwalk.

  As predicted, his entry to the dance floor garnered three lovely new dance partners. Being easy on the female eye, as he’d discovered as a teenager, certainly helped in that regard.

  Within half an hour, he’d snagged the wrist of one of them—was her name Hiroko?—tugged her into a suitable dark corner, and moved in for the kiss. She met his kiss with her own soft warmth. She tasted of peach chūhai and smelled of cherries and pressed herself against him with a hunger that mirrored his. They pressed against each other, grinding with heat. The way she straddled his thigh naturally hiked up her leather miniskirt.

  He snaked his arm around her thin waist, pulling her tight against him, and she responded with a gasping rush of heat and a luscious bite against his neck.

  He was opening his mouth to say, It’s a five-minute walk to my apartment, when a body slammed into him, sloshing fruity cocktail all over both him and his prospective sex partner. It was a girl, inadvertently shoved into them by the cascade effect of a drunkard in the crowd. Django glared at her, but she apologized profusely, all three of them dripping with sugary booze. It was when she glanced up at him that his heart stopped.

  A choked expostulation escaped him. “Yuka!”

  Both wome
n stared at him, one quizzically, one angrily.

  She was exactly as he remembered, even though he hadn’t seen her in...longer than he cared to consider. A heart-shaped face, plump lips, enormous dark eyes—sweet, kind, hopeful, inquisitive—that made a man want to fall into them forever. Dressed in skin-tight white jeans that hugged her narrow hips and a yellow tube top that accentuated her high, firm breasts, with sparkles around her eyes and satiny cheeks. He blinked twice.

  “What?” she stammered.

  Hiromi(?) instantly forgotten, he reached for Yuka’s arm, speaking her name.

  She shook her head in confusion and backed away.

  The illusion collapsed. This girl wasn’t Yuka. She was too young. Yuka would be twenty-six now, if she were still alive, if the Black Lotus Clan hadn’t already destroyed her inside and out.

  This girl backed away from him in fright.

  His cheeks and ears heated, arm still outstretched, but she edged away and disappeared into the crowd.

  The music thumped. The crowd surged.

  “Hey!” snapped the girl who still half entangled him.

  He blinked and shook away the memories.

  An icy peach chūhai dashed his face. “Asshole!”

  The girl who moments ago had been humping his leg shoved him away and stormed off.

  He stared after the girl who looked just like Yuka. The uncanny resemblance ripped open the old hole in his heart that had never truly healed.

  He didn’t remember leaving the club, but he was staggering down a puddled, neon-dazzled street, staggering not from alcohol but from the empty ache in his torso. Hammering his fist into walls distracted him and pounded the pain back into a deep, deep hole. He thought he had come to terms with the pain, with wanting to know what happened to her. He blinked away a tear. His breath came in ragged bursts. He steadied himself finally with several deep breaths and sheer force of will.

  But the memories would not be squelched.

  The smell of her. The taste of her. The feel of her touch. The exquisite sensation of their first night together. The sound of her cries of pleasure. The feel of her sweat and heat against his skin. The way they had held each other afterward, desperate and certain that it was the two of them against the world, two teenagers with hardship on every side.

  In his days with the Red Dragons in Honolulu, there had been girls aplenty, but they were just hangers-on, riddled with narcotics and STDs that he’d been smart enough to avoid. They didn’t even feel real, more like ghosts of his thrashing, directionless want.

  Yuka was the first and last girl he had ever loved. She had set his body, mind, and spirit aflame. And then she was gone.

  He had gone to meet her at the Kabuki-chō apartment she shared with her mother. Her mother came to the door in a silk bathrobe, still a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties but beleaguered by years as a hostess in a bar frequented by the underbosses of various yakuza clans.

  She looked at the sixteen-year-old gaijin boy as if he were a fish left a week in the sun. “Don’t come around here anymore, punk.”

  “Where’s Yuka?” he asked in English. His Japanese was only barely useful.

  “What do you care?” She smelled of cigarette smoke and saké.

  He didn’t say I love her! because in that moment he knew that Yuka’s mother, who had been used and abused by every single man she’d ever met, would have laughed in his face. He said, “Just tell me where she is.”

  She lit a cigarette and pursed her lips around it. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Why?”

  “Black Lotus Clan. They took her.” She blew out a cloud of blue smoke.

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “She’s a woman now. It’s time she started earning her keep.”

  The words struck him like a kick to the belly. He bent half over.

  Yuka’s mother sneered at him. “You think she belongs to you? You fucking little sewer rat!”

  “No! I—”

  “Get out of here!” she shrieked. Her eyes were a lizard’s eyes, a shark’s eyes. She slammed the door in his face.

  For months afterward, he scanned phone directories, escort websites, internet forums, public records, anything he could think of, for the name Yuka Nishihara. He had even tried to learn how to scry for her, but his skills with his Third Eye were still nonexistent. The Council’s caretaker of magical knowledge, the Librarian, had laughed at him when he asked to learn how to scry. The Librarian had said, That level of power is beyond you, monkey-boy. Ask me again in forty years.

  It would be four years before Django’s Third Eye Awakened, and by then he was sure she was dead or sold out of the country. The Kokuren-ikka, the Black Lotus Clan, was notorious for human trafficking and prostitution, which meant she could have brought a handsome price from some Russian oligarch or American billionaire, or she’d been used up in the sex trade and killed herself to escape.

  He had no photos of her, only the memories burned into his brain. A few times a year, when he wasn’t in the Council’s Library studying new abilities, or training with ninjutsu or Monkey kung-fu, he sat down at a computer in some twenty-four-hour internet cafe and searched for her. When his efforts with search engines failed, he would meditate, open his Third Eye, and search for her face in the void of the great, wide world. All in vain.

  Unbidden, his feet returned him to his apartment. He leaned his forehead against the rusted aquamarine of his front door and closed his eyes. The night had faded to gray. The trains would start running soon. All that was left now was exhaustion and despair. He opened his door, threw himself, still fully clothed, onto the bed next to the cat, closed his eyes, and let the blackness wash over him.

  Chapter Four

  BUT DJANGO COULDN’T escape Yuka’s memory, even in his dreams, and he awoke midafternoon feeling lonely and ill-tempered.

  Nevertheless, he had an important task, drummed into him by his mentor, Toshirō—every time his level advanced, he was supposed to head straight for the training hall and practice with his new pools. A newly Awakened pool multiplied one’s existing capabilities, not only with new abilities, but also with how many times a given spell could be cast before a pool needed replenishment. Variations for individual talent meant that until mahō users tested their limits, they wouldn’t know how many castings they might achieve on a full recharge. And one of the Top Three Rules for Hunter-Seekers was: always know how many spells you have left.

  "Practice! Cultivate your powers!” Toshirō had admonished him from the day Django had received his Brand.

  But Toshirō was gone, probably dead somewhere, and Django couldn’t bring himself to go to the Council’s training hall, where he could practice his abilities without fear of being spotted by any non-magical humans. The Council expected its Hunter-Seekers to cultivate their pools, keep the mahō flowing through the universe. It was rare, but some warlocks and witches experienced the Awakening of a new pool through dedicated practice. But this was an edict Django mostly ignored because there was something about hanging around the Council complex that put him ill at ease for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, almost as if it were a haunted house that sensitive people subconsciously avoided.

  Gaining a level should have caused more celebration, but a funk settled over him. There was no one to celebrate with. Most days, he had gotten used to moving through the human world unseen, friendless, an outsider in several ways to Japanese society. But not now.

  Japan was a safe, friendly place for most foreign tourists—unless it was clear one had decided not to leave, in which case all sorts of institutional and social barriers swung down like railroad crossing arms. As evidenced by his surname, he was half-Chinese, half-Japanese, which meant his blood was impure. China, Japan, and Korea hated each other by cultural tradition for wrongs and atrocities that went back centuries, most recently by what Japan had done in World War II. Django was an ex-patriate American citizen, so he was gaijin, a foreigner. His spoken Japanese still had an America
n accent, which also marked him as a foreigner and often caused confusion when someone expected him, based on his appearance, to be a native-born Japanese.

  Plus, he was a warlock, which created an invisible gulf between him and non-magical humans.

  Mahō users were such a secretive lot—they had to be, with the powers and dangerous enemies that lurked in the shadows of the human world—that making friends among them was extremely difficult.

  In short, Django Wong was one poor, lonely son of a bitch.

  He spent several days trying to shake the fresh yearning for Yuka by immersing himself in meditation and martial arts training. The only way to replenish the essence in his pools was to still his spirit and mind like a pool of water, until its surface was flawless, without ripples. Only then could he open himself to let the essence of the cosmos flow into him through his Crown and replenish his pools. He should have been in the Council’s occult library, studying potential new abilities that might be unlocked by his advancement in level, but even that held little interest.

  His melancholy would not let his mind and spirit grow still. It dogged him even in the dojo, which he rented by arrangement with a nearby kenjutsu school. He was welcome to train anytime the kendo and iaido students were absent.

  Ninjutsu training was supposed to clear his mind, be a kind of moving meditation where he cast off the detritus of daily life and quelled the “monkey mind,” but it wasn’t working. His movements were off, haphazardly disjointed. His stances felt out of place. His strokes with the bokken felt clumsy. His rolls and breakfalls felt ungainly and off-balance. His shuriken throws were off target. At one moment, memories of the touch and scent of Yuka’s skin so distracted him he broke the wooden blade of his bokken against a striking post.

  All these missteps reminded him of his childhood ninjutsu lessons under his mother’s sharp eye and sharp tongue. There were other students in the dojo—teaching ninjutsu and kung-fu classes was how his family made their living in Honolulu—but she was always hardest on him. Even his younger brother, Kuan-yin, had gotten off easy, perhaps because he was so kind-hearted and peace-minded that martial arts felt repugnant to him, and their parents accepted that their younger son would not be a fighter.