Cold sweat soaked his trembling body. Straining to keep pumping even as his blood turned toxic, the great muscle of his heart began to blacken like the flesh of his arm.
Maintaining two powerful abilities at once required his complete concentration. Part of him knew the giant skeleton was still there, but it became as a fly buzzing in an adjacent room. Eyes squeezed shut, breath rasping, his awareness swept through the cells and pathways of his body, circulating, concentrating on the flow of venom.
Celestial essence flowed through his spirit, deep violet sparks and waves throbbing through him, destroying the foreign toxin at the same time it attempted to rejuvenate the flesh it had poisoned.
The Universe sang through him.
Every particle of his body joined the chorus. Dissonances were drowned out and destroyed, letting natural harmonies reassert themselves, until all the venom had been transmuted.
With the toxin destroyed, the Celestial music revitalized the dying cells, restoring their harmonies, their function, their adherence to the whole.
He could feel his right arm again.
Could he flex his fingers?
Yes...
Could he bend his elbow?
Yes.
His shoulder and wrist?
Yes.
Gratefulness gushed through him and brought tears to his eyes. He thanked the kami of the Earth and Celestial spheres.
Then he opened his eyes.
The gashadokuro was still beating on him, mindless in its rage and hunger. The blood of the yakuza goons stained the huge, chisel-like teeth and bleached bones. Bathed in the glow of the monster’s eyes, the Sword of Divinity lay at his feet. He took it up in his right hand, which still felt weak. The skin was still dark, as if stained by India ink.
Where was Cat? How badly had Habu’s flames injured him?
Habu and Yuka had left with the Scroll.
If he chased them, or if he fled, this abomination would follow him into a heavily populated area, killing and devouring and growing. He had probably one Blink left in his Third Eye pool. He could Blink away from the monster for a momentary respite, but he still had no idea how to destroy it. It was fueled by centuries of accumulated rage and hunger still living in its bones. Any semblance of human reason or motivation had long since been stripped away. That the kami of the Yamabushi Scroll would summon such a thing did not speak well of its character. Most such yokai were destroyed by a sunrise, but he doubted he could hold out that long. Worse still, the police were certainly on their way, which meant a whole lot of cops were about to die. He couldn’t have that.
He tried to squelch the bitterness that Yuka had set him up, but he couldn’t. If he saw her with Habu again, he would not hesitate. And he couldn’t let them get back to Tokyo with the Scroll.
The boundless resilience of a mountain flowed up through him, rock steady. He could hold this for a little while longer, but eventually, he would have to act.
Maybe if he sent a message to the Council that the Yamabushi Scroll had been found and was on its way to Tokyo with Habu, they would have to act on their own behalf. As far as he knew, none of the Council were ever seen in public. And if they killed Yuka in the process, at least he wouldn’t have to do it himself.
They already know, Xuan Yuan said. The sword felt strangely heavy in his grasp now.
“What?”
They have been watching.
“How do you know that?”
Your Brand is a conduit. It works in both directions.
He gritted his teeth, knowing they would hear, and growled, “Then why in the fuck are they not here? Come and get it yourselves!” Who knew what godlike powers a pack of Level Sevens possessed? Many scrolls of mahō lore existed in the Library, untouchable, unknowable, until a practitioner reached certain levels of power. The mysterious Librarian kept a watchful eye. He yelled at the sky again, “This thing is about to tear across the countryside! What about your precious secrecy?”
But no reply came through the cosmic void.
A flash of white caught the corner of his eye.
“Cat!” he shouted.
But it was a female shape in a white jacket that gleamed in the light of the moon and stars. Yuka moved through the forest along the top of the twenty-foot retaining wall overlooking the courtyard.
“Oh, shit,” he said. That meant Habu was back.
He cast around for any sign.
But they had the Scroll. Why come back?
To make sure he was dead. To finish the job.
He raised the Sword of Divinity, reignited its fiery Sunblade, and looked for Habu. He’d almost cut through the bastard’s defenses, and he wouldn’t have had time to replenish them, not without a Brand.
The gashadokuro knelt and bent down to try to bite Django, to gnaw on him, and he shuddered at the closeness of those terrible jaws as they snapped around him harmlessly, stymied. From a range of inches, he could see the hundreds of human-sized skulls comprising the giant one. Its ravenous hunger was like a living entity, emanating from it like heat. He could cut this creature to pieces a hundred times, but it would always reconstitute itself. How to destroy it, he hadn’t the slightest clue.
“Cat! A little help!” he called, hoping for a dose of unexplained ancient wisdom.
Yuka stood atop the retaining wall, behind the stone fence, twenty feet above, looking down at him, her face unreadable in the dim light. He couldn’t bear to look at her anyway. In a flash of bitter anger, he slashed an arc of Sunblade fire toward her.
Her eyes bulged.
His attack seared through the stone rail like a plasma cutter but splashed ineffectually across a powerful Fortress.
He stared in shock.
“Kenji, no!” she cried, palms out in entreaty. “I’m here to help you!”
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he yelled back.
Her expression darkened. “I...I killed him.”
The gashadokuro looked from Django to her, perhaps sensing less troublesome quarry.
Django’s Third Eye revealed the truth. Shredded arcs of multicolored essence flickered across her skin and through her eyes. Her aura flared with bursts of red and yellow, like eruptions from sunspots. She had killed Habu and taken his essence.
Three Awakened pools gleamed inside her. Three! The power crackled around her now, bending the fabric of reality around her as the mahō pulsing through her expanded pools reconfigured the nature of her existence.
He had never heard of anyone gaining two levels at once, but Habu had been a Level Five with power to burn. She was lucky to have survived the infusion. But there was something wrong, something missing, something he couldn’t put his finger on.
“I think I know what to do!” she said. “Your friend gave me an idea!”
Cat jumped up on the stone rail, patches of fur burned away, but his eyes still gleamed with vigor.
Django felt an unexpected gush of relief. The strange animal was growing on him, it seemed.
She scooped up Cat and Blinked out of sight, just as the skeleton’s bony fingers crashed down onto the spot where they had stood, destroying a chunk of the stone wall.
With its attention elsewhere, Django took the opportunity to Blink away. The imperviousness disappeared, and he emerged from the shadows behind the ornate gate of the shrine—the home of the two golden shishi statues—about fifty yards from the monster.
It drew back, eyes blazing in frustration, and stood to its full forty feet, casting about for nibbles.
FROM ATOP THE ROOF of the museum, through a few intervening branches, Yuka spotted Kenji Blink into existence behind the two-story gate to the shrine complex. Clutching a huge, purring kitty to her chest, she Blinked down beside him. Her emotions were such a tumult that all she could do was focus on the task at hand.
He tensed, but his sword hand didn’t move.
She didn’t dare try to touch him, no matter how much she wanted to. His attack before had all but depleted her Earth essence, and in his mi
nd, she might still be a hostile. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to kill her after everything she had done. Could she ever wash the blood from her hands? “I’m sorry, Kenji! I’m so sorry!”
He turned instead toward the monster, which was stalking toward the shrine. The building’s sloping, gilded roof came to about the skeleton’s waist. “What’s your idea?”
Cat sniffed. “No greeting for the faithful companion?”
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Kenji said. “And thanks for saving my life. Again.”
“It is becoming a habit of unwelcome frequency,” said the cat, squirming out of her arms to jump down.
“Okay! Plan!” Kenji said.
Yuka said, “The cat told me that thing is made of the bones of people who died in battle or the starvation of war and were never given a proper funeral. Their grudges settled into their bones. Do I have that right?”
Cat said, “Yes.”
“Then let’s give them a funeral.”
“What?” Kenji said.
“We cremate it,” she said. “I’m talking about reducing every bone to ash.”
He considered this. “I don’t have that kind of Fire pool. Neither do you.”
“Together we might. We could pool our...pools.”
The gashadokuro’s footsteps pounded through the earth itself. Over the noise, police sirens echoed up the mountainside.
Kenji nodded. “It’s more ideas than I have. I’ve never joined my essence with another person’s before, but it’s theoretically possible. Several stories in The Annals of early heroes hint at it. So, we blast it with all the Fire we have, burn it like we’re a crematorium.”
She nodded.
“I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it!” he said in English with false levity. Then he turned to the cat, “Cat, stay back or you’ll lose the rest of your fur.”
“Fear not,” Cat said. “I shall witness your magnificence from a minimum safe distance.”
Yuka giggled. “Good kitty.” She reached out to pet him, and he arched his back and leaned into it.
“And if we don’t make it,” Kenji said, “call the president.”
“Japan doesn’t have a president,” she said.
“Do you mean prime minister?” Cat asked.
“Whatever. Let’s go before that thing flattens a national treasure.”
Chapter Thirty-One
DJANGO HESITATED ONLY a second before reaching for her hand. She had a fresh cut across the tattoos of her left forearm, a recent cut, crudely bandaged with a strip from her shirt.
She hesitated only a second before taking it.
The magnitude of her power, still fresh from Awakening, shot through their grip and up his arm like lightning, vibrating through his pools, resonating.
They ducked out of cover and ran toward the skeleton, which was about to rip the roof off the shrine to hunt for morsels inside. Its feet had already flattened a thirty-foot span of the ornate vermilion wall surrounding the shrine.
Police sirens turned onto the narrow street leading to the torii arch at the entrance.
“Hey, skinny!” Django shouted. “We’re right here!”
The skull turned toward the noise. The cavernous eye sockets flared with hunger. It heaved up and came toward them.
He gripped Xuan Juan in his right hand and Yuka’s hand in his left. How natural it felt, just as it always had.
In one step, the skeleton halved the distance toward them. It began to reach down.
Django leveled the sword at the creature and flung open his Hara pool, channeling its essence through the Sword of Divinity. He felt Yuka’s Fire ignite like a furnace. She took hold of his sword hand, and together they formed a triangle with Xuan Yuan trained upon the monster.
A gout of flame erupted from the sword’s point, growing with each passing moment.
An enormous hand swept toward them.
The gout of flame became a jet blast.
Caught in the blast, the hand paused in the full force of the flame. Calcified bone began to flake away and fall like snow.
But they needed more. The retort of a crematorium required a temperature of twelve to eighteen hundred degrees, but even that kind of heat required two to three hours to reduce bone to ash. They needed more. They needed the heat of lava or molten iron, which was almost double that hot.
“Hotter!” he yelled.
If the police got up here before that thing was dead for good, it was all over. He and Yuka might very well get themselves shot. Uniformed cops and some inspectors carried Nambu M60 revolvers, snub-nose .38s. SWAT teams could bring a whole lot more firepower, but none of it would matter against this thing, and Django didn’t have enough Earth essence left for a Fortress that would block gunfire. His duster couldn’t shield Yuka.
As he felt her mahō join his, their flows of essence began to resonate, growing swiftly, becoming more than either of them could muster separately. The cone of flame expanded to engulf the giant skeleton.
Flashes of her memories, tastes of her emotions, rode along with her magic essence.
Abuse.
Pain.
Degradation.
Misery.
Suffering.
Starvation.
Manipulation.
Despair.
Loneliness.
Bitterness.
Trauma stacked upon trauma stacked upon trauma stacked upon...
As he sensed these things written upon her very bones, his anger grew at those who’d perpetrated it. The Black Lotus Clan. Habu.
From her fractured soul poured the heat of rage and reckoning, stoking the jet blast to greater heat. The flame turned from orange to yellow.
The skeleton struggled to reach for them, only to be blown back, the flames eating away at its substance.
The wooden debris of the shrine wall disappeared in a cloud of soot, embers, and ashes.
Calcified bone blew away from the skeleton’s form, a chalky sandstorm of smoking grit sleeting the earth.
The ground beneath it softened. Stones began to glow red-hot.
The skeleton’s fingers evaporated into ash, then its carpal bones, and still it reached for them with the stubs of its arms. It reared high and raised a foot to crush them.
Django redirected the blast of heat straight up through the monster’s body.
Throughout Yuka’s memories, Habu was there with his sneers and beatings and cigarette burns, a vile, caustic presence.
And then a flash of shared insight.
At the bite of Habu’s tattoo serpents, Django’s hand had swelled and blackened and so would have his whole body as he died. Just like the victims in the massacre in Kabuki-chō.
Just like his parents.
The sudden, epiphanic connection landed on him like an anvil dropped from the stratosphere.
It had been Habu all along.
All because Django had saved the life of an unknown warlock in Jianghu.
And that younger version of Habu, thinking Django’s parents might have had information about the Yamabushi Scroll, had hunted them down, followed them all the way to Hawaii, and killed them for it. Habu had known about Django. He’d known about Yuka.
And it was all Django’s fault.
A ragged, primal howl tore from his throat, the sound of a soul ripped open.
His throat burned with the fury of it.
His hair stood on end.
Something happened within his Fire pool, the resonance with Yuka’s pain and rage, coming together like hydrogen atoms in a fusion reaction.
Xuan Yuan’s blade flared, blinding bright.
The forty-foot plume like an afterburner became the white-hot of a blast furnace, expanding and engulfing the gashadokuro. For a second longer, the stark silhouette held its shape in the blinding conflagration. And then it dissolved like sand, scattering in the wind currents created by the heat.
Yuka released the hilt of the Sword of Divinity, and the flame ceased.
But D
jango was still screaming.
Until his voice petered out, his breath gone.
The point of the sword sagged to the ground.
He and Yuka collapsed against each other, both gasping, half conscious, sinking to their knees, propping each other up.
An orange pool of molten rock bubbled and sizzled and smoked under where the skeleton had stood. A cylinder of charred emptiness bored a hole through the trees. Embers drifted and swirled. A section of stone retaining wall had been slagged and collapsed in a tumble of molten rock.
Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat.
Silence, but for the crackle of cooling stone and the lick of small flames.
Then she drew away from him.
Through the stones underfoot, he could sense the approach of feet pounding up the switchback path.
Cat was there. “Time to depart, perhaps?”
Django tried to look into her eyes, but she looked away, her face a Nō mask. There was so much he wanted to say, but all they had time for was, “Where’s the Scroll?”
“I have it,” she said.
“Then let’s go!”
“Wait, shouldn’t we say something? Over the bones?” she asked.
“You mean like an actual funeral?”
She nodded.
“Now? With the police coming?”
“Someone must remember them, that they lived, that they existed as human beings.” Her eyes teared up such that he wasn’t sure she was talking about the bones anymore. “It was callousness that turned them into a monster.”
He nodded. “Sorry, I don’t know any sutras.”
She turned toward the scattered ashes, the air still rippling with heat, and bowed.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 27
