Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1)

by Travis Heermann

  There was no one standing, but he caught a mahō aura gleaming and alive behind one of the sofas. He drifted about eight feet above the floor, surveying the scene, the bodies, the blood. It was impossible to tell who was on which side, as all the dead gangsters were dressed in stylish suits and sunglasses. No one would want to wear any of these suits again.

  Then the source of the aura stalked out from behind the sofa—a white tiger, muzzle and fangs stained with blood. Gore spattered its coat like leopard spots. Its gleaming eyes fixed upon Django’s Third Eye instantly. It growled again, coiling its muscles.

  Then it leaped, swatting at Django’s hovering point of view. His awareness sucked back into his body. Time to go.

  As he ran for the exit stairwell again, he was pretty sure that tiger was the product of some sort of mahō summoning, made real by the addition of blood, just like this morning’s spiders. How connected it was to the consciousness of its summoner, he did not know, but it had made short work of the heavily armed attackers.

  He hurried down the steps toward the open fire door and burst outside—just as three police cars screeched to a halt, hemming him in. All of the patrons and prostitutes had already scattered, probably having heard the police coming. Six cops jumped out of their cars and leveled their pistols. Sergeant Tokumaru was nowhere in sight.

  “Hands on your head! Get on your knees!”

  As he slowly raised his hands, he weighed his options. He wasn’t about to attack a bunch of cops. He could Shadow Blink out of there, but after all his reconnaissance he was nearly out of Third Eye essence, and it would violate the rule: never let mundanes see mahō at work, especially police, and he probably stood in the frame of several video cameras. He could summon an Earth shield and attempt to flee under a barrage of bullets, but then he would be on foot and chased by police. It was probably best to comply and hope Tokumaru could help him sort this out.

  He sank to his knees, hands on his head.

  DJANGO WAS GETTING tired of saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The longer he sat in the interrogation room, handcuffed, the hollower the words sounded, even to him, especially when they were saying things like, “Carrying swords is illegal. Owning real swords is illegal without a special permit. You’re a gaijin. Where is your Alien Registration Card? We could lock you up and have you deported, and that’s if we don’t send you to prison.”

  And those were the easy questions. The hard ones went something like, “How many people did you kill tonight?”

  Given that he was transported to Japan through magical means and spent the first year of it living on the streets, he didn’t have an Alien Registration Card, or any kind of visa, or any proof of identity at all. Toshirō had brought him to Japan in secret. On the times he’d needed such documentation, he’d used mahō to befuddle his way through.

  He told them, “The swords aren’t real. They’re just costume.” The crime lab would have to examine them very closely. That would take time.

  But still no sign of Sergeant Tokumaru. The two inspectors grilling him were almost interchangeable. They wore the same suit, the same shoes, the same haircut. One had a rounder face than the other. They loomed over him like cartoon characters.

  Then they came back and said, “Tell us about the traces of blood we found on the blade and the scabbard.”

  “I cut myself playing with it.”

  “Oh. Really.”

  “I’m clumsy.”

  “We’ll need a blood sample then.”

  One said to the other, “You give him a nice bloody nose. I’ll grab a cup to catch it in.”

  “You guys are hilarious,” Django said.

  “I do stand-up comedy down on the cell block. No, I think the blood is more likely a match for the two dead guys in the alley.”

  Django shrugged.

  “So tell us why you killed all those people.”

  “What people?”

  “The people in the club.”

  “What club?”

  “Lush.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You were apprehended coming out of the building. The only thing in that building is the club called Lush, a front for a BDSM brothel. You like the kinky stuff, do you?”

  “Sorry, I’m a straight-up missionary-style kind of guy. Your mom likes that.”

  One of them loomed forward with a raised fist and a growl, but the other held him back. “Are you Black Lotus Clan?”

  “No.”

  “Are you Sumiyoshi-kai?”

  “No.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I’m self-employed.”

  “As what?”

  “A cosplayer.”

  “I’m getting tired of your shit.”

  “Sorry, Inspector. I’m just an innocent bystander. Did something bad happen in the club? Did you catch who did it?”

  “Shut up. You’re pretty cool for someone about to be charged with mass murder.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re a foreigner. We could put you away for a very long time. Do you understand that?”

  They could put him away for weeks, maybe longer given his lack of documentation. More than enough time for more people to die, for the Council to send another Hunter-Seeker after Yuka, and for any of a number of Django’s enemies to have him murdered in jail.

  He sighed. “I get it. But yelling at me won’t make it all true.”

  “Then why were you inside the building? Seems like a simple question.”

  “Visiting my sister. She works there.”

  “Oh, so you have a sister now.”

  “She works a lot. Don’t see her much.”

  “Pretty convenient.”

  “There’s nothing about this that’s convenient. By the way, how many of the johns did you round up? They were all out there in the alley.”

  “None of your business.”

  On and on, around it went, for hours and hours. The interrogators would come and go in various combinations. They brought him coffee that tasted like the grit under a car tire. Exhaustion set in. But he didn’t use any mahō. He didn’t have any ability charm or beguile like Xing did, the kind of thing that might convince them to let him go. He needed to appear as mundane as possible. Let them think him to be a beleaguered yakuza goon. Criminal organizations sometimes hired undocumented foreigners to be low-level leg-breakers. Without his duster, he looked like an over-aged slacker in a T-shirt and tabi boots. He did not dare drop Sergeant Tokumaru’s name, or he’d risk putting an unwelcome spotlight on his only ally. Best to let Tokumaru come to him if he was inclined.

  The police weren’t about to let him go. He was their only live witness and suspect. In a country where gun violence was so rare, two massacres in a row were the kind of thing that brought the prime minister out to address the nation. For the foreseeable future, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police would be working on nothing else but this burgeoning gang war.

  It was about noon when they left him alone for the first time. He slumped his shoulders and pretended to look bored and dejected as he used the last of his Third Eye and Air essence to snoop around. Of course, he found another pair of inspectors, stamped from the same mold as his interrogators, watching him through the two-way mirror, conversing in low voices.

  “Look at this guy, cool as a cucumber.”

  “Thinks he’s hot shit.”

  “He’ll crack, the punk.”

  “Fucking Americans, think they can come here and act like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  The door to the observation room opened, and a woman with a file folder walked in, dressed in a business suit and skirt, hair screwed into a flawless bun, with wide-rimmed glasses that gave her an owlish look.

  She handed over the folder to one of the inspectors. “The blood on the sword matches the two Sumiyoshi-kai guys in the alley. We found a third blood type on the scabbard and in the fibers of his coat
that matches a body we found yesterday morning outside an apartment block in Takatanobaba, sliced up like sashimi. This third guy from yesterday was a suspected enforcer for the Black Lotus Clan, had a rap sheet fifteen pages long, reads like an aggravated assault handbook.”

  “So we got a vigilante who’s hunting gangsters? I take it all back, we should give him a medal.”

  “Not so fast. He could be working for one of the other clans. We haven’t seen anything like this for almost twenty years.”

  “We have no prints or papers on him. He’s not in the system. No ID on him.”

  “Then how did he get here? No passport? No immigration entry?”

  “Nothing. Says his name is Kenji Wong, an American, originally from Hawaii. But we have no documentation on this.”

  “Maybe he came by dugout canoe.”

  “We’re running his mugshot through the database, right?” They would find nothing, as Kenji had never been arrested, despite a couple of close shaves during his Red Dragon days.

  “Yeah, the search is still running. We called the U.S. Embassy to see if they have anything on him, but no response yet.”

  The woman cleared her throat. “Then there’s the question of how the hell he sliced an MP5 in two with a sword. A katana is not a lightsaber,” she said. Django liked her. She talked like a man, eschewing the polite phrasing Japanese women typically used. “And this isn’t even the weird stuff.”

  One of the inspectors rolled his eyes. “Oh, shit.” Perhaps he was thinking about the weird stuff from the previous night’s gang hit.

  “Witnesses reported hearing a lion or a tiger roaring. The crime scene investigators found...paw prints in the blood, and wounds on four of the Sumiyoshi-kai goons consistent with an animal attack. Claws and teeth. It was a big animal.”

  “So where is it?” an inspector asked.

  The woman shrugged.

  “So they were keeping a tiger or a lion in the building? And it got loose, or somebody let it loose, and it attacked the intruders? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” she said. “Read the report yourself.”

  The inspector rubbed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “What do we do with this guy?”

  The other one said, “Put him on ice. He knows more than he’s telling us.”

  “I think he’s in on it somehow. Playing both ends against the middle. Why else would he be there?”

  “Maybe he was a john.”

  “But then where was the hooker? They all seem to have gotten away.”

  “What about the club owners? Managers? A brothel like that has got to have a knuckle-dragger or two. Maybe they can help us bring the women in as witnesses.”

  “The name on the property appears to be a dummy corporation. Happy Amusements, Incorporated. It’ll take some time to go through the paperwork.”

  Django did not doubt that. Thirty years into the Digital Age, in a country that celebrated its breathtaking technological achievements, a great many hidebound Japanese institutions still relied on paper record-keeping.

  If he escaped—and there was little doubt he could do it whenever he chose—he would instantly become a wanted man, making his job a whole lot more difficult. So he had to play along, at least for now. Maybe Tokumaru would come through.

  Soon the two interrogators returned, and thus began another round of questioning in which all the same questions were asked but in different ways, and Django gave all the same answers but in different ways. By evening, his exhaustion had taken root, as he’d been awake for twenty-four hours. The inspectors were long past frustrated. One of them had moved in so close Django could feel his rank breath on his cheek.

  The inspector said, “You’d better come up with something real, very soon, or my partner here is going to go to work on you.”

  The other interrogator cracked his knuckles.

  “You look like you can hit pretty hard,” Django said with an effeminate lisp. “You must work out.”

  The inspector lunged across the table, yanked Django out of his chair, and punched in the eye, the mouth, the cheek, the nose, a quick succession of hammer blows that left him dazed. Then he threw Django back into the chair.

  Django spat blood onto the table, checking a loose tooth with his tongue. “See, I was right.”

  “Smart-ass punk,” the inspector said, shaking the pain out of his fist. A true martial artist would be inured to that kind of pain. His father had routinely used concrete blocks and steel posts for striking practice, at full strength no less.

  The other cop took the attacker by the arm. “Let’s go get a cup of tea.”

  The attacker grunted and allowed himself to be led out.

  Django’s awareness followed them with his Third Eye. Outside the room was a police department frenetic with activity, full of grim faces. He didn’t need to read their auras to sense the energy in the squad room. These cops were desperate. They knew what kind of bloodbath was coming and that civilians would get caught in the crossfire. Beyond the potential loss of life, their honor was at stake.

  His growling stomach brought his awareness back to his body. They hadn’t given him anything but coffee since picking him up. He swallowed a mouthful of bloody spit.

  As if on cue, a female uniformed officer entered the interrogation room carrying a tray. On the tray were a bowl of rice, chopsticks, and a paper cup of water. She set the tray down across from him and slid it toward him. With his hands cuffed to the table, he could not reach the bowl.

  He lifted his hands. “Do you mind?”

  She laughed, glancing at the two-way mirror. “Eat it with your face, like an animal.”

  “That’s not very nice,” he said.

  “Neither are you,” she said, circling to his side of the table.

  He somehow found this incredibly threatening, even though she was a diminutive woman, and edged away from her. “You got me there.”

  “Eat, pig.”

  “Thanks, but no,” he said.

  “Eat it! Aren’t you grateful, pig?”

  He looked her in the eye, saw the hatred burning there, and flipped the bowl over with his fingers. He had a vision of her whipping out a tantō and slashing his throat. “Who are you?”

  She laughed again, shriller this time.

  The rice on the table was not rice. It was moving. Squirming.

  He looked in the mirror. Was anyone watching over there? Then he saw the horns, the burning eyes, the tusks.

  He dove out of the chair away from her but was brought up short by the handcuffs cutting into his wrists, causing pain heightened by second-degree burns on the wrist that had blocked the oni’s Falling Star Fist. Her grin widened, and widened. And widened. Her teeth blackened. Her skin turned the pallor of a corpse. Her eyes sunk in and shrunk to burning red points.

  A kijo, a female oni.

  Chapter Sixteen

  DJANGO BRACED HIS HANDS on the tabletop, swung his legs up, and kicked the kijo in the face with everything he had. She staggered back. He got behind the table and drove his hips against it, shoving it across the room, slamming into her, and pinning her against the wall. Three-inch razor talons flashed toward his face, and he dodged back. She tried squirming out from behind the table, but he slammed it against her harder. He could feel her strength building like an incoming wave.

  Where the hell were the police?

  At the same moment, she reached toward the door latch with a taloned hand. The latch flared orange-hot, blackening the metal door around it. Right on cue, fists thumped on the outside of the door.

  Apparently, this creature did not abide by the rules of not revealing mahō to the mortal world. But she was a minion of evil just like the male oni had been. Kijo were just as deadly as their male counterparts, but more often had roots in the mortal world. More often they were once human women consumed by horrible deeds, grudges, or hatred, but unlike onryō, they transformed while they were still alive.

  He co
uldn’t blame her for breaking the rules, however. He’d pick survival over the rules anytime. It was time to get out of here.

  Opening his Third Eye, he focused his will on Shadow Blinking outside the building, into a bus stop he’d noticed on the way in.

  But nothing happened. It was as if a powerful, invisible fist had closed around his Third Eye, shutting off its awareness and abilities.

  The kijo’s grin widened and darkened like a storm cloud. “Oh, you’re not going anywhere. Time to die.”

  She grasped the edge of the tabletop and flipped it into the air. The handcuffs, still attached to a ring on the metal surface, yanked him painfully into the air, tearing at his wrists. The heavy table crashed upside down on top of him, smashing his head against the floor, pinning him under its weight.

  Her laugh was like a hyena from Hell.

  Dazed, he struggled to get free, but the metal edge of the tabletop had pinched the fingers of his right hand against the floor. Pain lashed up his arm.

  With preternatural speed, she grabbed his foot and yanked him out from under the table, jerking his arms taut, threatening to pull them out of their sockets.

  This was it. The kijo was going to show him his glistening entrails in less than a second.

  Except that a massive furry shape slammed into her and smashed her against the wall with the weight of a small car. The entire room quaked. Django shook the blood and pain out of his eyes in time to see a huge white tiger—a tiger that had to weigh at least a thousand pounds—burying its fangs into the kijo’s neck. Black ichor splattered the wall. The tiger’s tail lashed. Its claws shredded the kijo’s uniform and the flesh underneath.

  Then with a horrific wrench, the tiger ripped off her head. It was one of the most sickening sounds Django had ever heard.

  The body sank to the floor, spasming, reaching, clawing, as the tiger slowly turned toward Django. Its emerald eyes glistened with intelligence. It spat out the kijo’s still-living head, then tried to hawk the distasteful ichor.

  “What are you waiting for?” the tiger said in a deep, rumbling voice. “We must go.”

  Django was still busy casting about the small room for where the tiger had come from.