Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1)

by Travis Heermann

  Her heart turned into a cold lump as she stumbled to a halt.

  Kenji was a dead man.

  “No,” she whispered.

  Kenji dropped his sword, his face a rictus of pain. She had seen what Habu’s venom could do. Kenji’s arm would be already swelling, blackening.

  Then a yowling missile of feline hostility hurtled from out of nowhere and clamped all four claws around Habu’s head. The cat’s front claws raked bloody furrows across Habu’s cheeks and eyes. Habu roared in pain and rage, snatching at the cat.

  The cat’s claws had penetrated! Habu’s Earth essence must be all but spent.

  The beast yowled and hissed and clung and raked.

  Behind her, the giant skeleton scratched at its eye sockets to clear them of her sakura petals while the other arm reconstituted itself with fallen bones.

  Suddenly Habu’s body blazed with fire like a human torch, as if his aura itself had become flame. The cat screamed and leaped two full meters above his head. It landed behind him and peeled out, leaving a trail of smoke and the stench of burning hair. Habu wiped at his eyes, still roaring with rage, but they were so bloody Yuka couldn’t tell if he’d been blinded.

  Her eyes turned back toward the dais, where the tomb lay shattered. The giant skeleton was still trying to clear its vision.

  Running up the collapsed rubble to the top of the dais, she spotted something lying among the broken stone—the glint of gold. But that proved to be only a squashed funeral urn surrounded by ashes. Beside the ashes, however, was a shiny black cylinder about twenty centimeters in diameter and the length of her arm.

  A lacquered scroll case, looking remarkably unscarred.

  Her breath caught, and her blood surged like electricity.

  She seized the scroll case—it was surprisingly heavy, maybe twenty kilograms—cradling it in her arms, and fled back toward...what, exactly? Or rather, whom?

  She had the Yamabushi Scroll.

  She froze at the foot of the dais, stunned by a realization, clutching the ancient scroll case to her thumping chest.

  She had done this.

  She had faced a giant skeleton and lived.

  Maybe she was not a fat, retarded, ugly, useless pig. Not a dog. Not a plaything. Not a slave.

  Maybe death wasn’t her only escape.

  Maybe she was a real witch.

  Maybe she didn’t have to be anyone’s slave.

  After ten years of misery, did she know how to live any other way?

  A few paces away, the glint of steel on the ground caught her eye. A dagger.

  She glanced at Habu, who was driven back onto his heels by Kenji’s desperate kick. Kenji snatched up his sword in his left hand and severed the last two of Habu’s serpent heads. His bitten arm hung useless at his side.

  Grabbing the dagger—noting that its point was twisted and bent, but its edge was still razor-sharp—she tucked it into an inside pocket of her jacket.

  Then the light in the courtyard brightened as the skeleton’s eye sockets emerged from Yuka’s blanket of sakura petals. Its severed arm had reformed. Its gaze fixed upon her. The clatter and grate of its bones made her teeth ache, and she ran.

  Kenji’s sword slashed another arc of fire straight at Habu’s chest, but Habu was no longer there. He Shadow Blinked away.

  She didn’t know where he went, but it was time for her to run. She had the Scroll, this thing that Habu had been obsessed with for as long as she’d known him. And she had been the one who found it and yanked it from right under the nose of a giant carnivorous skeleton.

  She lugged the scroll case down the steps toward the shrine enclosure. The shrine’s profusion of gold-leaf decorations glinted in the light of Habu’s flames. Then she paused and looked back. Kenji was kneeling in place, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed in concentration. The top of his head sparkled with starlight.

  The earth seemed to shudder under her feet. A gust of mahō essence blew past her, Earth essence, and flowed into him like a typhoon drawing all moisture and wind into a swirling vortex, a gathering of power and intention.

  The giant skeleton spotted him and in one step towered above him.

  “No,” she whispered again, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  The skeleton’s hand swept down to seize him. But the fingers slid away, held at bay by some invisible force. Yuka opened her Third Eye and saw the coruscating mountaintop of scarlet mahō around him as if he had become a mountain himself. The skeleton’s hands pummeled at him fruitlessly, clutched at him vainly, as ineffectual as the wind against a cliff face. He would not be moved or even touched.

  Then Habu Blinked into existence behind her, threw his arms around her and the Scroll, and Blinked again.

  They stood now next to the limousine at the foot of the mountain. Her head swam at the sudden displacement.

  The thunderous pummeling of the skeleton’s fists echoed down the mountainside. All around her, the denizens of this neighborhood, farmers and shopkeepers, obaachans in their slippers and kimono, ojisans and little boys in their jinbei, were shuffling out into the street and looking up toward the noise. Fire glowed against the high treetops.

  Habu flung open the limo door. Before she could move, he seized the shoulder of her jacket and flung her inside. Piling in behind her, he slammed the door and yelled at the driver. “Go!”

  The limo engine roared to life. Tires squealed as the limo peeled out, throwing Yuka against the rear seat. She tried to right herself and hold on as the limo surged down the narrow street and skidded around the next corner.

  “Drive normally!” Habu yelled at the driver, still gasping from exertion. “This area is going to be swarming with police!” He chuckled. “Let them deal with that fucking thing.”

  The limo immediately slowed down to the 50 kph speed limit.

  Yuka’s mouth was a desert, her heart a trip-hammer.

  Thanks to the cat’s claws, Habu’s face was a bloody catastrophe, a patchwork of parallel and crisscrossing slashes. In a long-ago, faraway life, Kenji had taught Yuka an English phrase she thought was hilarious. Habu’s face was fubared. One eye might have been blinded, but through the blood and ruin it was difficult to tell. One ear had been shredded. Blood soaked his hair.

  She couldn’t suppress a manic giggle.

  “What the fuck are you laughing about?” he snarled, his one-eyed gaze fixing upon her.

  “We got the Scroll, baby!” she said, hoping he’d accept the lie. “We did it!”

  He let out a deep sigh and sagged against the seatback. He reached into his leather jacket, pulled out a cigarette and his golden Zippo lighter as if they weighed a hundred kilos, put the cigarette to his lips, lit it, drew on it, then exhaled.

  Outside, a siren approached from ahead, red lights flashing against the glass. A police car shot past, heading toward the shrine, then another, and another. The sirens receded.

  She joined him on the seat, hesitantly, delicately, no sudden moves. She offered him the scroll case as if it were an infant. “Do you want to open it?”

  “Give it to me.”

  She slid up next to him and eased the heavy cylinder into his lap.

  One end was fashioned into a handle, and she could see the wax seal around the seam of the cap. His hands felt around the cap and handle, uncertain but eager. Then his fingers latched around the handle, twisting and pulling. His arms trembled at the effort, but after a moment, the cap moved. The wax seal and cap broke loose with a sucking pop, releasing a hiss of ancient air.

  She gasped with feigned excitement and pressed closer to him.

  Under the cap were two smooth, wooden knobs that tipped the scroll rods and the fat, rolled-up cylinder of parchment that stretched between them, twenty centimeters in diameter, curled and cracked at the edges.

  Habu’s eye flashed with a succession of avarice, ambition, vengefulness. How many times had she heard him say he had plans for the Yamabushi Scroll, never once suggesting what they were?

>   She snuggled up close, giggling like a sycophant, slipping her hand inside her jacket.

  He dumped the heavy scroll, bound by a cord of white silk, into his lap and threw the case aside.

  She could feel his heart thumping through his entire body. Or was it hers?

  He situated the Scroll in his lap, impatiently untied the cord, and threw it aside. Then he unrolled the Scroll, little by little. The ancient script was faded with age, but the brushstrokes were precise, meticulous, elegant.

  She could hardly hear over the roaring in her ears as Habu read, “‘In the Eighth Month of the Second Year of Chorōku, herein are scribed the foundations of the science of hōjutsu, the use of magic...’” She didn’t know when the Chorōku Era fell in the nengō calendar, but it had to be many centuries ago. She was so stupid—no, not stupid, uneducated. Untangling the threads shown by the Mirror of Destiny required incredible intelligence and concentration. It was knowledge her abusers had denied to her for far too long.

  Yuka pulled the dagger out of her jacket and plunged it into Habu’s belly.

  His one eye bulged with surprise and burgeoning rage.

  She shoved it deeper, twisting.

  A strangled sound came from his throat.

  He reached for her, letting the Scroll fall to the floor.

  She ripped out the dagger and stabbed him again, this time high on the inside of the thigh.

  Fire mahō flared in his eyes. His protection of Earth had been spent, but his aura blazed with Fire, erupting around him in a whoosh, searing her hands and every part of her that still touched him. She cried out in pain, smelling her own burned flesh, and ripped out the dagger as she sprang away from the flames. Her stab had been precise, something she had once overheard discussed among the mob thugs. Straight into the femoral artery.

  Dark, hot blood gushed out behind the dagger, sizzling in the flames of Habu’s aura. But then the blood seemed to extinguish the flames as it poured out of his leg, out of his belly, snuffing them in a wave.

  His Fire essence was spent.

  He could kill her now; she didn’t care. But he was a dead man, even if he didn’t know it yet. Or maybe he did. In less than thirty seconds, he would be unconscious. In three minutes, he would be dead.

  Along with the thick, coppery scent of his blood, the rancid open-toilet stench of punctured entrails, of burning leather, and of burnt flesh filled the cabin with a choking miasma. The dagger trembled in her fingers, and she clutched the sticky hilt tighter to make it stop. The blistered flesh of her hands screamed with pain.

  He lunged at her, throwing his hands around her throat, squeezing, but there was no strength left in him. She slapped his hands away, spun, and stabbed him in the kidney, feeling the blade rasp across his lowest rib.

  Agony stole his breath from him. His face sank into the leather seat, and his body went slack.

  For a long moment, she stared, gasping. But then a calm settled over her, a resolution, slowing her heart, steadying herself, gathering her concentration. Emotions could wait. Celebration could wait.

  Laying a blistered hand upon his crown, she did as she had once seen Habu do to some hapless Hunter-Seeker a couple of years ago. She opened her Crown pool, mustered her will, and sent an invisible spear through his Crown and down through every pool.

  His mahō essence burst into her.

  Lightning exploded from her fingertips, from her eyes, from her toes, arcing through the limousine. Showers of sparks erupted all around her. Her flesh exploded from her bones in a conflagration of white-hot flame, even as she became stone, became Earth. Habu’s essence emptied into her, but it was like trying to drink from a boiling waterfall. It cascaded over her, a torrent of rage, cold charisma, cunning, agility, and secrets. She was a thousand feet tall, shrinking to the size of a dust mote, turned inside out. She felt the driver’s body seared and cooked in the lightning stroke.

  The world around her lurched and shuddered. Vaguely she heard the screech of tires. The shock of impact flung her to the front of the cabin. Vertigo. The limousine flipped and twisted. Her ears hummed, and her tailbone thrummed with the power of Habu’s Earth essence flooding through her, surrounding her instinctively in an invisible Fortress. The limo smashed onto its roof, skidded and spun across the pavement, crashing into other things, finally coming to a creaking halt.

  She didn’t know how long before her awareness stopped spinning. She lay gasping against the roof of the limousine. But the Scroll was still there, partially unfurled. The Mirror of Destiny was still in its gray backpack, just out of reach. She smelled gasoline. Habu’s body lay against the crumpled wall like a discarded doll.

  Her pools coruscated with his essence like sandpaper across raw nerves. Now that she had absorbed his mahō, she still had to cultivate it or it would cripple her—maybe even kill her. But she knew from watching Habu that it required time, meditation, and a focused will. She had none of those things right now.

  Searching his jacket pockets, she pulled out his wallet and the key to his penthouse, where her meager belongings still resided, then his golden, gem-encrusted Zippo, and stuffed everything in her pockets. She hurriedly rolled up the Scroll and slid it back into its case. She grabbed the Mirror’s backpack as well, but it felt strange, as if something were squirming inside of it.

  Her hands were shaky, her pools raking and jangling like a pile of broken bottles, as she stuffed herself through a shattered, collapsed window, but she was small and could fit. She dragged the scroll case and backpack out after her and set them down about twenty paces from the overturned limo, which had snapped off a telephone pole and come to rest against a concrete barrier protecting a row of greenhouses.

  New knowledge just outside her reach set her mind aflame. Her body was stronger and tougher than it had ever been and her awareness sharper than any time she could remember, but it was all just a swarm of hornets. Whispers of kami coalesced in her consciousness and tickled the pathways of her mind to suggest new powers awaiting her—if only she could take the time to grasp them.

  About a kilometer away, flames still blazed atop Mt. Kunō, and she caught a glimpse of a white skull among the treetops. Through the ringing in her ears, she thought she could detect rhythmic thunder like an ōdaiko drum.

  Gasoline and rippling fumes poured from the ruptured fuel tank.

  All she needed was a little flame, right there in that growing puddle.

  She concentrated on her enflamed Fire pool, her Hara, which was situated just below her solar plexus. If she didn’t get control of it soon, it would burn a hole through her belly, but she couldn’t think about that now. She let the essence flow, just a trickle, imagining a flame spontaneously coming into existence in that puddle of fuel.

  And then it did.

  The gasoline and its fumes WOOFED into a fireball of glory. Another one, WOOF-BOOM! and raging flames engulfed the entire rear half of the limousine.

  As the pressure wave of warmth washed over her, she smiled.

  Habu was dead, at long last.

  But the police would be coming soon. And how long before this churning cauldron of essence inside killed or crippled her?

  An intuition drew her gaze to the backpack. She hurriedly unzipped it and reached inside. The moment her fingers touched the polished copper, the storm of unharnessed magic quieted. The chaos of essence types froze. She pulled out the Mirror and grasped it in both hands. In a flash, the threads of her destiny exploded in her mind like a thousand multicolored threads—nearly all of them very, very short.

  If she tried simply to run away, Habu’s rampant essence would quickly rip her to pieces, one last cruelty from beyond the grave, crippling her pools and scarring her mind, leaving her disabled forever, a shell.

  Even now, she could feel it tearing through her, unbridled, gnawing at the walls of her pools like a sandstorm that scoured bones clean. She had to harness and refine it, or it would destroy her.

  She could find somewhere nearby to meditate and assim
ilate the massive surge, but Kenji would die, and the monster would still be loose. There were many threads of that skein in which she was also arrested and then later killed by the Black Lotus Clan.

  She could, still filled with wild, uncultivated essence, Blink back up to the top of the mountain to help Kenji. But the gashadokuro would kill them both and still get loose. The innumerable, gruesome ways the monster killed them in this skein made her queasy.

  But then one thread caught her mind’s eye.

  In that thread, she might Awaken two pools and go to Kenji’s aid.

  The Mirror could shape the destiny of each mote or particle or wave of mahō essence so that, quite at random, they coalesced instantly and in order. They could then be absorbed, with no time required for meditation and cultivation—in effect, jamming the essence into place.

  But only for two pools.

  There was too much of it, imbued with too much anger and hate, for her to refine and absorb. It would tear down the walls of one of her pools, stunting her power. Would she even still be fully human with only six pools?

  And the Mirror required sacrifice to make her wishes real. She had long ago sensed the existence of the Mirror’s kami, but it had never tried to communicate with her and never demanded anything of her.

  But now, it did. It was an old, hungry thing, and hadn’t had a proper sacrifice in decades, perhaps centuries. She pulled out the dagger she’d used to kill Habu. Then she looked to the distant mountaintop. Could she Blink that far? With three Awakened pools, all her essence fully replenished and resonating, she was pretty sure she could.

  The question was: did she want to?

  Chapter Thirty

  DJANGO COULD HEAR NOTHING except the music of the Celestial spheres flowing through him, bringing every molecule of his physical form into tune with it, even the dying cells of his right arm. Habu’s hemotoxic venom pulsed through Django’s veins, killing his blood cells, spreading up his arm, toward his heart. The dose of venom had been enormous and instantaneous.

  Just in time to protect him from the gashadokuro, Django had summoned every scrap of Earth mahō in him to Become the Mountain. The skeleton’s fists hammered at him but never touched. The force was dispersed into the roots of the mountain itself. The stone around him jumped and crumbled, pulverized by the force of the monster’s blows. He had become a mountaintop, unbreakable, unassailable. But just as a mountaintop could not move, neither could he. Only by retaining unmoving contact with the earth could he maintain his imperviousness. How long he could hold this, he didn’t know, as it was an ability that had only come to him tonight.