He looked at her and sighed. “Why do you make me do this?” He stroked her face with the warmth of a cobra.
“I’m sorry.”
“But then it always happens again. It’s like you’re too stupid to learn.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll do better.” She didn’t dare meet his eyes, or she’d lose herself in those pits of hate.
Yes, she was stupid. She should have killed herself years ago, on the day she’d met her father for the first time, on the day he had come to the apartment Yuka shared with her mother, this slick, handsome, impeccably dressed man with the eyes of a lizard. He’d come to “claim what’s mine.” The terror on her mother’s face had been plain.
“She’s yours now, Yoshi, the ungrateful little shit,” her mother had said. “The debt is paid.”
Sixteen-year-old Yuka had looked up into the eyes of the man who claimed to be her father, seen the cold, heartless abyss yawning within them, and thought, My life is over. She had known it with utter certainty, and she had been correct. Every day since had been awash in misery and despair.
Her biological father was Yoshitaka Kanazawa, the number-three man in the Kokuren-ikka, the Black Lotus Clan.
The truth was, she had been bred to be a slave, a plaything for men. A handsome man like her father and a once-beautiful woman like her mother would have beautiful babies, and the Black Lotus Clan was always hungry for fresh, beautiful meat. The shelf life of sex slaves was short, and it was through blackmail the clan maintained much of its power. How many men of industry and government had bedded Yuka between the age of sixteen and twenty, all of those encounters covertly photographed and recorded for use as leverage? The yakuza clan supplied all its girls with enough drugs to keep them compliant and addled. But not enough to commit suicide.
She’d quietly celebrated the day her father committed seppuku in a jail cell. She was nineteen then, and she’d commemorated the day every year since.
A year later, she met Habu, and on that day, she saw something. The serpent tattoo on his arm had moved. It had looked straight at her. When he claimed her as a reward for loyalty to the clan, the first tattoo he’d given her was of the habu entwined with black lotus petals, marking her forever as not only his property but the clan’s.
A hard slap to her ear dragged her out of the dark well of memories.
“Aren’t you paying attention?” He pointed at the Mirror.
Her gaze followed his finger to a bright dot on the surface of the Mirror.
“It’s back,” she stammered.
She had tuned the Mirror to resonate with a tiny sliver of pure copper that she had jammed into Kenji’s forearm in Hair of the Kitty. After she’d reported to Habu that a Hunter-Seeker had come to her, he had ordered her to implant the tracker, without explanation except to mumble something about the Yamabushi Scroll.
Waving her hands over the Mirror, she manipulated the view until she could gain a sense of its environs. “He’s in the government district.” About a kilometer from where Yuka lived with Habu in his penthouse in Park House Shinjuku Tower.
“Look through the threads of the future. I have a suspicion.” Habu rubbed his chin.
“We already tried this and got nowhere. What should I be looking for this time?”
“I suspect he knows things now that he did not know before. That knowledge might lead us directly to the Scroll.”
It was called the Mirror of Destiny because its gaze could reach into its subject’s innumerable possible futures. The information always came as a tangled mass of possible threads, interwoven with the lives of every person the target came in contact with. A person’s future could shift from moment to moment, but with skill, time, and concentration, those threads could be woven into a cohesive tapestry of possibilities and likelihoods.
Habu circled behind her, grasped her hips, and pressed himself against her. Reflexively, she pressed back against him as she’d learned to do long ago. Pulling away would get her a beating. The only question was whether he was up for it again so soon.
It seemed not, and she suppressed her relief.
Feigning a coquettish giggle, she said, “Silly, I can’t concentrate on the threads if you’re occupying me with other ideas.”
He swatted her hard on the ass and walked away. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Have something for me by then.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
DJANGO STEPPED OUT of the polished surface of a plate window into Shinjuku, startled to find himself in the heart of the Japanese government area. The building the window belonged to was the Office Building of the House of Councilors, the upper house of Japan’s legislative body, the National Diet. It was a nice evening in Shinjuku.
Cat padded along beside him, a normal-looking domestic house cat.
They were a few hundred meters west of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, south of the sprawling, stately grounds of the Imperial Palace and near the impressive edifice of the National Diet Building with its pyramidal dome. Just north lay the sprawling complex of the National Diet Library.
Dressed in a ratty T-shirt and worn jeans—and with a sword on his back—he wasn’t exactly the typical visitor to this area, so he instantly threw up his Shadow Veil, making him easy for the nearby humans to overlook, especially the police officers and guards patrolling the area. He also placed a concealment on his sword. Who knew what sort of all-points bulletin might already be circulating about him? He was no doubt a fugitive now.
How much time had passed since he disappeared from that interrogation room? It was difficult to say without a phone or a newspaper, and he wasn’t about to stop a passerby to ask. It might still be the same Saturday evening that the kijō had attacked him, a day since he’d taken the room in the love hotel.
All his pools, from his Root to his Crown, were still thrumming with power from his absorption of the tsuchigumo’s essence. With his newly Awakened Root, he felt like he could take on anybody and anything.
But the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had almost everything he owned locked up as evidence—his swords, his shuriken, his duster, his wallet, his money, even his phone. His mother’s notebooks were still back in his love hotel room. Fortunately, he had paid for several days upfront.
As he and Cat walked the sidewalk before the National Diet, dusk deepening into night around them, he rubbed absently at a little ache in his forearm. It had been there since Yuka’s arm-snake had bitten him, not enough to trouble him, but never quite going away.
“What is our first order of business?” Cat said.
“I need to get my stuff back.”
“You have a weapon. A superior one, it seems.”
“It’s not enough. I’m not even going to think about going up against this Habu half-cocked.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Sneak into the police department and steal it.”
HIBIYA PARK WAS A BEAUTIFULLY manicured green space about two blocks west of the police headquarters. Between the park and the headquarters stood the Ministry of Justice, recognizable by its red brick construction and nineteenth-century, neo-baroque architecture, unique in a sea of gray concrete-and-glass towers. Hibiya Park was a favorite hang-out place for all kinds of Tokyo’s inhabitants, with its winding paths and meticulously manicured greenery. There were plenty of places where he might sit quietly, remain unnoticed, and begin his reconnaissance.
Off one of the concrete paths, Django and Cat found a secluded stone wall, where he sat down, settled into meditation, and sent his Third Eye two blocks away into the huge police building.
The distance strained his concentration. It was farther than he’d ever gone before and took him almost half an hour of invisible searching to find the evidence locker, a length of time that began to draw upon the reserves of his Third Eye essence. Then he required another five minutes to locate the boxes where his stuff was kept, then ten minutes more to plan and memorize his entry and exit routes. With luck, he could be in and out in less than
three minutes.
“Are you sure you wish to do this alone?” Cat asked.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I could provide a distraction. It’s not as if they would kill me, as long as I didn’t hurt anybody. And if they catch me, they certainly can’t hold me.”
“I need to meditate first. This plan requires a lot of Shadow Blinks. I hope not one too many.”
Cat snorted. “I’ll just waste my lifespan here guarding you then, shall I? I don’t live as long as a human.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Django roused himself, fully replenished, and the two of them set out for the police building. It was past three in the morning. The streets of the area were all but dead, as government offices didn’t keep the late-night hours of areas like Ginza or Kabuki-chō. But that made a lone man and a white cat grossly out of place. Nevertheless, he had to conserve his power, so no Shadow Veil. He kept the sword magically concealed, however, and hoped he didn’t have to use it in a building full of police officers. All the ways it might amplify his powers, as it had done with Sunblade, were yet to be revealed.
The area around the dock was spotted with closely parked police cars, a SWAT van, and several unmarked cars. It was well lit, surrounded by a tall fence of wrought-iron bars spiked at the top. A guard shack stood at the gate. Two guards sat inside in the glow of their computer screens.
Well away from the guard shack, Django knelt in the shadows and watched the entrance. Then he Blinked to the shadows between the SWAT van and cruiser, which gave him a full view of all the exits: two rolling steel garage doors and three fire doors. He was confident one of them would open soon, and then he’d be in.
“Carry me with you on your first Blink,” Cat said. “I might be small enough for you to manage that.”
Django scooped up Cat.
“Don’t get accustomed to this.” Cat flexed his powerful claws against Django’s forearm for emphasis. “A lap cat I am not.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
One of the fire doors ka-chunked open, and a uniformed man stepped out, lighting a cigarette.
In the moment before the door closed, Django and Cat Blinked through it.
He stepped from the shadow behind the outer door into the garage and storage bay. Dropping Cat, he stole toward the next door, which led into the corridors of the police building. This entrance lacked the tight security of the entrance where prisoners were brought in. There were cameras, but Django was banking on being in and out before anyone spotted him. He ran toward the door, Cat pacing him. He peeked through the small window of the interior door, found it unlocked and no one immediately incoming, so he and Cat slipped inside.
“Good luck,” Cat said and bounded down the hallway, looking to misbehave.
Immediately beside this door was another leading to a stairwell, which Django opened. He hurried down two floors to the bottom, to the sub-basement where the evidence locker was kept. He paused at the bottom door, which led to another hallway. In the distance, he heard steady, controlled gunfire. The firing range was down here as well. Several people were present in the hallway, talking or going about their business.
Another Blink carried him past them, stepping out of the shadows behind another door, into a branching hallway that led toward the evidence locker. He hurried toward a heavy door with a keycard entry. Fortunately, it had a window of reinforced glass for him to peer through so that he could Blink past the cage and the attendant, into the evidence stores.
He appeared in a dimly lit aisle, in a room at least fifty paces across, between closely packed shelving units, all brimming with meticulously cataloged boxes, filing cabinets, folders, and still more shelving. Banks of fluorescent lights were spaced a little too far apart to do anything but hold back most of the gloom. The place smelled old and musty, and he wondered how many mukadé and spiders were skulking behind evidence containers. At the thought of spiders, he shuddered.
Keeping a sharp eye on the attendant, whose back was turned, Django crept through the aisles until he found a shelf containing rows of newer file boxes. One was brand new, with a shiny new label printed with a case number. Earlier, he had looked inside the box with his Third Eye and found his possessions. His swords were stacked atop the box. He eased them and the box off the shelf, withdrew to the darkest corner of the room, and equipped himself.
Then he crept back toward where the box had been placed.
“What are you doing here?” a voice said. “How did you get in here?”
Django spun and clutched his chest. “Geez, don’t sneak up on somebody like that, you’ll give me a heart attack!”
“Who are you? What are you doing in here?” The attendant was dressed in a starched white shirt, white archival gloves, a bland tie, and plaid trousers belted too high above his sunken waist. His hair was slicked back, and his thick-rimmed glasses made him look like a weasel with a bandit mask.
Django said, “I’m Inspector Takeda, from Kabuki-chō precinct.” He flipped out his wallet, opened the negative aspect of his Third Eye, and with a few subtle finger movements, convinced the attendant he’d just seen a badge and proper ID. It was the same ability he’d used to befuddle the bartender in Hair of the Dog. “I’m following up on the gang massacre.”
“Which one?”
“The office building, not Club Lush.”
The attendant blinked and shuddered for a moment. “How can I help you, Inspector?”
“I’ve been looking around back here for twenty minutes, so either I have the case number wrong or something is cataloged in the wrong place.”
The attendant stiffened. “I can assure you it is not improperly cataloged. Please wait a moment.” He turned and went to his computer terminal at the cage window, while Django surreptitiously returned his evidence box to its place on the shelf. A flurry of keystrokes later, the attendant was triumphant. “I’ll show you where it is.”
Django followed him back into the warren again and stopped beside a stack of six boxes and three desktop computers.
The attendant said, “There was quite a volume of evidence taken from the scene, the victims’ possessions, plus bullet casings, paperwork, computer records, and such.”
Django lifted the lid from the top box and found it filled with plastic evidence bags. “Thank you, Ōmura-san,” Django said, checking the man’s name tag.
The man bowed and turned to walk away, then paused. “I’ve never heard of an American inspector on the force before.”
“Oh, you caught my accent!” Django laughed. “Maybe you should be an inspector.” But he sent another wave of befuddlement into the man’s mind.
“Oh, no, I could never,” Ōmura said, but he puffed up visibly. “I’m quite happy working right here.” He grinned broadly, revealing a mess of unfortunate dentition.
An awkward moment passed in which Ōmura seemed to be waiting for something, but Django turned his back on him and started shuffling through the box. The attendant turned to walk away, then Django said, “Say, did you hear there is a huge white house cat loose upstairs? It’s raising hell all over the place. They can’t catch it. I’ll bet you’re great with cats.”
“I am, actually. My mother and I have seven.” Ōmura beamed.
“I’ll bet they could use your help upstairs,” Django said with another twirl of his fingers. “I’ll let myself out.”
“I really shouldn’t—”
“Don’t worry, I won’t mess up your filing system. Promise.”
“Well, okay then, if there’s a kitty in danger...” Ōmura turned and scuttled away.
“I doubt he’s the one in danger,” Django muttered.
But he didn’t waste a second looking through the evidence boxes. Two of them were jammed with file folders. He pulled out a few random files, unsure of what he was looking for.
Several of the folders were named for various yakuza gangs working in the Tokyo area, the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Inagawa-kai, and several others. But then he came to a fat one la
beled Kokuren-ikka, “BLACK LOTUS CLAN,” and pulled it out, his heart thumping faster. In this one, he found a handwritten spiral notebook with “Black Lotus Locations” written in sharpie on the worn cover. A quick check revealed a list of bars, clubs, pachinko parlors, and massage parlors, complete with addresses. Django suddenly felt like he’d hit the mother lode. With this information, he could declare a one-man war on the Black Lotus Clan. He tucked the notebook into the pocket of his duster. He also found a stack of photographs of known Black Lotus members of various levels. He spread them out in batches and used his phone to take photos of the photos. Each had a name scribbled on the back with a few notes on suspected rank or known family members and associates.
Then he came to a photo that stopped him dead. “Holy shit.”
It was a grainy telephoto shot of a tall, lanky man with long, greasy hair wearing a black leather trench coat. He flipped it over. Scrawled on the back was a date—about six months ago—and one word: Habu.
The warlock Django had rescued from the tsuchigumo.
This man looked somewhat older than the one Django had met, but there was no mistaking those gaunt features and sharp eyes. “You motherfucker.”
He could gnash his teeth later about the deluge of temporal paradoxes and ironies. For now, he had what he needed, more than he’d intended. So he packed it all nicely back up again and got the hell out of there.
Chapter Twenty-Five
WHEN HABU RETURNED, the first light of morning brightened the penthouse windows.
Yuka’s eyes were scratchy, her mind scraped raw from the effort of intense concentration. Pain stabbed into both temples. Her muscles felt like cold soba noodles. Her arms trembled as she leaned over the Mirror. Her mouth was as parched as a summer sidewalk. She’d wanted a drink for hours but did not dare to tear herself away from her task for fear of losing her concentration and having to start over again.
She heard his heavy footsteps coming down the hallway from the front door, clomp, clomp, clomp...Maybe he had brought some food. He kept none in the house, not even tea. She was not allowed to eat anything that did not come from his hand. Since her Awakening, her clothes had grown baggy, as if the use of mahō taxed her. Or maybe she was simply losing her will to eat.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 22
