Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1)

by Travis Heermann

  The photographer’s voice came up from directly below. “Finished with victim number three. You can bag this one. Bastard looks like he was trying to jump off the balcony.”

  Django found his balcony door locked, but he made short work of it with the lock pick gun he carried with him for such occasions. He ghosted into a spacious, darkened office that smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap cologne, and beyond into a dimly lit hallway. The hallway opened into a half-dozen office doors on either side. An exit sign at the far end, past the elevator, pointed toward a stairwell. The moment he reached the narrow stairwell, male voices filtered up from below.

  A close-by voice came through clearly. “Shit, do you know who this is?”

  A pause, then another voice. “Oh, wow, that’s Katsushi Shimoda.”

  “Yeah, a lieutenant for the Sumiyoshi-kai.”

  “What would make his face look like that? Some kind of poison?”

  Was this building a yakuza headquarters? It stood to reason, here in the heart of Kabuki-chō.

  “Maybe. All I know is that this isn’t like any yakuza hit I’ve ever heard of. The syndicates haven’t had a war in over a decade.”

  Django felt the urgent desire to see the face in question. He needed to replenish his Third Eye essence right now.

  Fortunately, even with his Third Eye depleted, he could siphon power through his Brand. This pool of power was said to be maintained by the Council and was one of the Brand’s major benefits. But it was never pleasant. To try this during combat would be debilitating. The essence he would receive carried flavors of the creatures it had come from, not all of them human, like the onryō. Because so much of it was stolen, it came with shades of unpleasant emotion. The combination of those things could be incapacitating at the moment he needed the infusion most.

  He sat down on the steps in the cramped stairwell and meditated, opening his Celestial pool. His will reached out through his Brand, into the beyond for the reservoir of mahō essence, and when he found it, drew it into him like a breath of air. As the essence gushed through his Crown and settled into him, his mouth filled with a terrible taste like rotten meat, his skin tightened and stiffened like parchment, and he was struck by terrible despair. Suddenly, what he was doing felt meaningless. Let Yuka die. It didn’t matter. He should just throw himself off a building to escape the pain or walk through the door and let the police shoot him. He staggered, clutched the stair rail, and bit down against the wave of nausea from the taste in his mouth and the groan of anguish that almost escaped him. Sobs bubbled up, threatening to burst out, but he clenched them back.

  All he could do was feel these horrible things and maintain control through sheer willpower until they dissipated like nightmares. He didn’t know how long that had taken because it required all his willpower not to reveal himself to the police only a few meters away.

  Finally, the shattering grief visited upon him from some other being’s life force became manageable. His breathing slowed. He wiped the cold sweat from his face. The essence he had absorbed had been a mix of several sources, at least two of them from some sort of yokai. But the worst was over now. It was time to get to work. Focus on the now, not the emotions.

  He opened his Third Eye and sent it through the door, adding to it a component of Air mahō that would allow him to listen as well. Even though he had little experience with Air essence, housed in his Heart pool, he had learned how to coax the kami of the air to bring sound to his ears.

  Descending to the fourth-floor door, his point of awareness passed through into a hallway like a puff of ghost air. Cops were talking in the distance, too far to hear. He clung to the shadows, slipping up the wall to hover in the shadows of a fluorescent light fixture along the ceiling, just in case there were other mahō users around who might notice him.

  And it was there the horror struck him.

  He had never seen so much blood. Not even when his family had been murdered.

  Blood splashed the walls of the corridor and soaked the carpet in dark, congealing lakes. Connect-the-dot trails of bullet holes from submachine gun fire walked crazy patterns across the walls. Several doors hung ajar. Uniformed cops and plain-clothes inspectors moved through the scene, covering their mouths and noses. Paramedics were zipping bodies and pieces of bodies into body bags. All were males wearing suits.

  Django’s Third Eye crept along the ceiling, looking for Yuka among the dead. He was right on top of the last remnants of her resonance.

  A plain-clothes inspector was scribbling on a notepad. “That’s nineteen dead,” he said to another inspector. “This is a nightmare.” The same voice he’d heard from upstairs.

  “Forget NHK,” the other inspector said. “We’re going to be on CNN, BBC, and Al-Jazeera.”

  “Then you can do all the talking to reporters. It’ll be all I can handle not to be sick on television.”

  “We have IDs on all of the victims?”

  “For a couple of them we’ll need dental records.”

  At their feet, lying in an open door, was a corpse. Django hovered closer.

  When he saw the victim’s face, he would have gasped if he had lungs to do so.

  He had seen such a face before.

  Blackened, bloated, white eyes staring into death, tongue swollen and protruding.

  His dead mother’s face.

  Chapter Ten

  HE SHOOK HIMSELF TO dislodge the image of her face superimposed on this dead yakuza lieutenant. The horror of that image would never leave his memory, as if engraved with a laser. Her face had looked bruised, black, swollen, distorted, not unlike the face of an oni. So did this man’s. They had both died in agony, choking, mouth agape, struggling, in terror.

  The coroner’s report for his mother had said the cause of death was hemotoxic snake venom. Would this one say the same thing? He would have to follow up with Sergeant Tokumaru for information from the autopsy report.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to look at the face any longer. He drifted along the ceiling throughout the offices on this floor, hovering above carnage fit for a battlefield, listening to police talk about the crime, and watching paramedics package the corpses for removal. The fight had begun at the elevator, where two guards lay on the floor, having left their brains on the wall. Then it spread left and right, combing through offices, looking for every living person, and snuffing them with brutal efficiency. Bodies in every room. Every desk drawer and file cabinet was open. Papers and files strewn everywhere, soaking up blood. A huge chunk ripped from a concrete wall suggested a wall safe had once occupied that space.

  He saw two more victims exhibiting the same sort of death as hemotoxic venom. Others were shot, eviscerated, or killed in ways Django could not easily discern.

  He had seen enough and withdrew his awareness back to his body.

  Safely out of sight, he resumed human form and took several deep breaths to collect himself. The images of death he had just seen would not easily leave him. His instincts were telling him there was more to the story, and he’d learned to listen to them. With his enhanced Third Eye senses, he scanned for things in the dark that his human eyes would not see.

  Like a blood trail.

  In the hallway downstairs, there was too much blood for it to be easily discernible. But here in the stairwell, the trail stood out on the steel steps as if it were fluoresced. Leading downward.

  He followed it down, listening for cops.

  On the second-floor landing, the trail paused to form a pool of blood, then it moved on again, down to the first floor, then down into the deep, concrete shadows of the basement. The trail finally disappeared under the door of what looked like a cleaning closet. No sound came from inside. He sent his Third Eye through the door, into the pitch-black, as he drew his wakizashi. In the back corner, from behind a carpet shampooer, a pair of Italian leather loafers poked out. They belonged to a man in a tailored tan suit, whose entire midsection was soaked with blood. His haircut was bushy, anime style, and he had
several piercings through his eyebrows.

  Django went in to kneel beside the man. He felt for a pulse at the man’s neck. The gangster’s face and lips were pale from blood loss. As much as he hated the yakuza, there was too much critical information in this gangster’s brain for Django to let him die.

  But how to save him? Carrying him outside to an ambulance might kill him if he wasn’t already dead. Django’s Third Eye revealed the barest flicker of aura clinging to the man. But to reach the ambulances outside, Django had to stabilize the gangster’s condition.

  His Celestial pool had Awakened only recently; he had not yet had time to study and practice the abilities that came with it. What he knew was that the Celestial pool, situated at his Crown, formed the conduit by which he communicated with the universe, the Divine, the Collective Unconscious. It was the ruler of all the other pools. Mastering all aspects of the Celestial pool allowed a mahō user to become truly super-human. In most mahō users, it was the last to Awaken, so most never achieved it. The onryō had almost destroyed him, but in so doing, it had given him a tremendous gift. It was the Celestial pool that governed the flow of mahō essence in and out of the body. Its power could heal him and others and extend life, and that was where his thoughts turned.

  Maybe he could heal this man.

  He felt like the ability was there, but he couldn’t find it, like not quite being able to grasp the word you were looking for. But he had to try, so he let his instincts guide him, reminding himself once again that magic was much like cooking and martial arts—with enough experience and insight, experimentation could sometimes produce wondrous results.

  He laid his hand on the warm stickiness of the gangster’s abdomen. Touching it, he could now feel the lips of the cut that had almost eviscerated this man. Taking a deep breath, he stirred the positive mahō of his Celestial pool, feeling the vastness of the Universe surrounding him, engulfing him, making him feel tinier than the tiniest molecule of a grain of sand on a beach the size of Jupiter. But among that vastness was power, thought, intention. He took another deep breath, trying to draw insights into him through his Brand. With that influx came the instinctive nudge he’d been seeking, the technique passing from the collective wisdom of the Universe into him. Then he channeled that energy, that life force, into the dying man. To open the flow, he laid his other hand on the man’s pate and let the warmth of it pass through him.

  The gangster’s face flushed. He took a tiny, hitching breath.

  Django let the energy continue to flow, sending the penetrating perceptions of his Third Eye into the man’s body. Aside from the cut, he found a gunshot wound under the man’s arm, previously unseen because the man was lying on it.

  The man’s eyelids fluttered.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Django said. “I’m a friend.” He kept the energy flowing.

  The man’s body jerked feebly, and his eyes snapped open, still glazed and unfocused.

  “We’re going to get you to a hospital,” Django said. “But first I need you to tell me what happened.”

  “Who...who are you?” The man’s voice was a fading croak. His eyelids closed.

  “Stay with me, buddy,” Django said, slapping his cheek gently.

  The gangster’s eyes drifted open again. “What are you doing to me?”

  “I just gave you something to stop the bleeding. What happened upstairs? Someone broke in, came out of the elevator, out of nowhere, and then what?”

  The man licked his cracked, bloody lips and straightened himself a little. “All hell broke loose. Shooting. Motherfuckers...”

  “Who were they?” Django asked.

  “I couldn’t see. Must have been at least a dozen of them. It was all shadows and chaos. But there was this tall, thin guy, long, greasy hair. And a beautiful woman. She had tattoos up both arms. One of them had a sword...maybe more than one.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They never said. They just...came in and started killing.”

  But they had been after something.

  “What’s your name?” Django asked.

  “You can call me a dead man,” the gangster said with a moist laugh. His breath smelled of fresh blood.

  “No. Let’s get you to an ambulance.” Django took the man by the hand and used the arm to hoist him to his feet.

  The man cried out in pain but had enough strength to stumble alongside. Rather than risk alerting the police to their presence by using the elevator, Django gave the gangster a stumbling assist up the stairwell to the ground floor. The flutter of the man’s heart was still weak, wavering.

  Finally, they burst outside into the storm of red emergency lights, and he steered the man toward the nearest ambulance, yelling, “We got a live one here!”

  Paramedics dashed into action, bringing a gurney and easing the man down onto it.

  “Hey, pal,” Django said to the gangster, “you’re going to be all right now.”

  “Don’t count on it,” the gangster said.

  To the paramedics, Django said, “He’s got a severe abdominal laceration and a gunshot wound under his left arm.” But before he stepped away, he asked the gangster, “What’s your name?”

  “Shota.”

  Paramedics surrounded Shota. While one was strapping him into the gurney, another was preparing an IV.

  “Hey, who the hell are you?” a voice said.

  Time to go.

  Django didn’t look toward the man who’d spoken, but his peripheral vision told him a uniformed cop was approaching. He walked away from the ambulance, and the cop, as if he had every right to be here. Just keep walking, just keep walking.

  “Hey!” yelled the cop after him. “Hey, you!”

  Django held himself to a brisk pace as if he hadn’t heard, and when he reached the line of police tape, he ducked under it and lost himself in the crowd.

  FOR A BETTER VIEW OF the crime scene, Django assumed a perch atop a three-story building with a neon sign flashing “Excite Club” across the street.

  Cat rubbed against Django’s leg to alert him of his presence.

  “Yah!” Django jumped with surprise.

  “Not very observant for a ninja,” Cat said.

  “I was looking for Xing.”

  “She was making a circuit of questioning police officers outside.”

  From here, he could see the police still working inside the yakuza offices. They would be at it all night, collecting evidence, hauling bodies away.

  The ambulance carrying Shota had departed. Maybe Sergeant Tokumaru would be kind enough to supply the name of the hospital.

  What was the Black Lotus Clan looking for? Why spark a war with the Sumiyoshi-kai? Such a heinous act as this would bring reprisals. Killing a high-ranking lieutenant was tantamount to full-scale war. Did the Sumiyoshi-kai have information about the Yamabushi Scroll? Is that why the wall safe was stolen?

  Watching the cops process, investigate, and catalog the crime scene, he could not reconcile the image of the kind, sweet, funny Yuka he remembered from a decade ago participating in what he had just seen. It was her beauty that had caught his attention but her kindness that made him fall in love with her. She was so different from everything he knew, especially from his days in the Red Dragons. She had given him food when he was starving on the street, and like a stray cat, he kept coming back. She had taught him Japanese, at least enough that he could begin to teach himself. He still remembered her face and how she’d giggled at some of his mistakes, and he’d giggled with her.

  And now she had just taken part in the slaughter of a rival yakuza gang. Because part of the Council’s sworn purpose was to protect normal humans from rogue mahō users, the priority of finding her had just gone up. Other Hunter-Seekers might well be brought in to kill her, including Xing. Nevertheless, he had to believe that the Yuka he knew still existed. Maybe she was being coerced. Maybe she was a slave, terrified for her own life. Maybe the Black Lotus Clan was holding something over her.
>
  If he could save her from the Black Lotus and convince her to submit to a Brand, would the Council still let her live? If he could do all that and find the Yamabushi Scroll, the Council would be forced to let her live.

  He smelled Xing coming before he saw her climb the fire escape ladder from the back alley. There was no mistaking her magic-infused perfume. He pitied anyone who tried to tell her “no.”

  As she stepped over the edge of the roof and approached, she said, “This is bad.”

  “The worst,” he said.

  “It’s going to be a bloodbath.”

  “It already is,” he said.

  “Did you get inside?” she asked.

  He nodded and caught her up on everything that happened.

  As she listened, she crossed her arms and averted her eyes. When he was finished, she said, “Are you going to tell me your girlfriend wasn’t involved?”

  “No, she was there.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Keep trying to find her.” He squirmed, knowing where this conversation was headed.

  “And then what?”

  “Whatever needs to be done.”

  “You equivocating son of a bitch,” she said with a hard frown. “If she’s working with the Black Lotus on this, she’s a fucking menace!”

  “And if I can’t stop her, you can ride in and finish her off.”

  “Will this be before or after a shitload of civilians get killed? Oh, wait, we’re already there.”

  “These were all yakuza.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s only a matter of time before some pregnant woman pushing a stroller gets in the way of some seriously heinous fuckery.” She stuck a finger in his face. “And that will be on you.”

  Anger rose in him. He was tired of having her finger in his face. “Back the fuck off, Xing. I didn’t ask for any of this. I thought she was dead!” He faced her squarely and stepped closer. “I’m going to do everything in my power to bring her in alive. And then I’m going after the entire fucking Black Lotus Clan. You can either help me or get the fuck out of my way. Don’t cross me.”