by Nisioisin
She wore a pleased expression on her face as we sat across from each other. She was on cloud nine.
“I had been keeping this privy, but in my five hundred years, the truth is that several times I have contemplated snuffing out the human race. But in surety, allow me now to make an oath! So long as Mister Donut exists, never shall I attempt to crush the humans!”
“That’s some large-scale smallness. Those five hundred years must have felt very long for you.”
Of course, I imagined a lot happened in that time.
Five hundred years.
While we’d formed an unseverable bond, Shinobu and I had only known each other for less than half a year─there was much about her that I still didn’t know.
But I figured that was fine.
Shinobu─was an aberration.
I─was a human.
Operative word: was.
“By the way, Shinobu, there’s something I wanted to ask you.” Having waited for the right moment (until about five of the donuts vanished from the table, in other words), I brought up my topic. “Today, while I was on my way to Kanbaru’s house, and then later on my way back? Those two people who asked me for directions─the lady who spoke in Kyoto dialect and the kid with the dashing look. In your view─how were they?”
Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki. I had my own grand ulterior motive for laying out this great feast of donuts. I was hoping to pick Shinobu’s mind about those two.
“Hmph.”
Perhaps she’d come down a bit from her donut high. Shinobu flashed me a dauntless grin─maybe a little less dauntless than intended thanks to the white powder smattered around her lips from an angel cream donut.
“My lord, what now? I misdoubt this bears mentioning… I, at least, consider it a matter of tacit accord. But since the opportunity presents itself, I will unkennel my thoughts.”
“Hmm?”
“Sealed within thy shadow─and through the immutable fetters of that seal, I ever drain thy energy without unsheathing my fangs, without sucking thy blood. I am quickened by thee─and saved.”
“Quickened…and saved.”
“But apart from such tender circumstances, under our current arrangement I am thy vassal. Loathe and despise thee, as I surely do, much did transpire between us─so to be brief, I have taken an interest in thee.”
“An interest…”
In thee, I haplessly repeated Shinobu’s words back to her.
“In thee, or perhaps in thy life. Not an aberration’s, but that of a mere human who has lost the vampiric power he once possessed─not an immense interest, but I am fair-curious.”
And I also get to eat donuts, she added, transporting my half-eaten sugar-glazed out of my hand and into her mouth.
It was an indirect kiss. Not that I was so naive that it made me blush.
“However, my lord and master, and this is the crowning point─though I may be thy ally, do not for a moment mistake, therefore, that I am an ally to humankind.”
“……”
“Of course, I am no ally to aberrations, either─at gross best they are feed and fodder. A meal, chow. Yet, though I lose my powers─though neither shadow nor form remain, it brooks not that I have therefore become human. Imagine that we come upon a human in distress. Likely ye’d lend aid to that human. I, however, would not,” Shinobu declared as if she were giving an oath at the Olympics. “I will not crush humankind─but nor will I aid them. That is the rule by which I have chosen to abide.”
“You mean it’s not a vampire rule, but your own? A line you’ve drawn, for your own sake?”
“Verily. To wit, if somewhere or other this person or that person were in distress, I would not bother to inform thee─and there is no vouching that I would answer any questions with the truth. That, then, is where things stand.” Through a mouthful of donut, she mumbled, I went to great travails during the recent incident with the bee aberration, but that was to aid my master, not thy kin.
For someone eating something sweet, her expression was quite stern─she wasn’t saying any of this just to tease me or to be coy.
Well, I guess that made sense. Having been bestowed a tiny measure of vampirism, Koyomi Araragi’s position was fairly complicated, but Shinobu Oshino’s position after she was deprived of the greatest portion of her vampirism, and her true name in addition to her shape and form, went beyond mere complication into the realm of the inscrutably bizarre.
Shinobu Oshino.
An ironblooded, hotblooded, yet coldblooded vampire.
Whatever tremendous bargains she made with herself─were beyond my comprehension.
The legendary vampire had shut me out, giving me the complete and utter cold shoulder. It took four months for her to open those lips and speak to me again at last.
Four months. Compared to the five hundred years she’d been alive, perhaps it was a short period of time.
For Shinobu, however, those four months─must have felt longer than five hundred years.
Turmoil, day in and day out. Uncertainty. Despair.
If my spring break had been hell─then Shinobu’s hell had dragged on ever after spring break.
In which case, whatever conclusions she came to, whatever bargains she struck with herself, weren’t for me to criticize.
If she wanted to vanquish the sun, or crush the human race─I wasn’t going to try to talk her out of anything anymore. I could only offer up the sad little remains of my life, which should have ended long ago, and beg for her forgiveness.
If you repeat something too often, the words can begin to lose meaning, but this, I will say over and over again: if Shinobu Oshino were to die tomorrow, then Koyomi Araragi’s life could end tomorrow as well─because it was only Shinobu Oshino’s presence that allowed me to live on.
“Well, yeah… We do have a tacit agreement, as you say. Even I get that, there’s no need to spell it out now. So, what? Are you saying─you’d rather not tell me about those two?”
“Even that question is difficult. If I tell thee I don’t wish to answer, that will communicate to thee that they are, at the very least, somebody.”
“You mean you refuse to even entertain the question? Hm, that’s an austere rule.”
“Well, I don’t know for austere…”
Shinobu reached for her coffee as if the sweetness in her mouth had become too much. As befit her nationality, she preferred black tea, but that didn’t mean she shunned coffee. Watching a little girl take a sip of coffee was a sublime sight, by the way.
“But strictly speaking,” she resumed. “Perhaps I’d not mind telling thee about the little girl with the dashing look.”
“What…does that mean?”
“She is not a human. She is an aberration,” Shinobu replied bluntly. Still, it must have been a gray zone in terms of her rule─her tone was flat, indifferent, and business-like. “The human shape is a counterfeit. Like myself, her appearance does not befit her true age─and her name, Yotsugi Ononoki, is likely false as well.”
─He said with a dashing look, Shinobu appended in a business-like tone.
Joking in that way was her dry obstinacy showing through.
Or perhaps it was her unmanageable combativeness.
Maybe it was her unconquerable sense of humor.
In any case─that was her character.
“Parsing her last name, Ononoki,” she continued, “gives me a general notion of her nature─but this begins to edge on the creature’s privacy. More than any rule, as a matter of etiquette I would rather not speak on it. Ye’d not want me to announce thy sexual proclivities, either.”
“Well, no.” Well, not at all. Why would I want them announced? “But putting her last name aside─something about her first name, Yotsugi, seems weird to me. When you compare it to that Kagenui lady’s first name, they almost sound like a pair.”
“Ha, the name likely binds her, I’d wager.” Shinobu shrugged her shoulders emphatically. Usually a shoulder shrug isn’t so over-the-
top, but it did accentuate Shinobu’s pent-up frustration. “Just as I am bound by that shallow brat’s name. In short─Yotsugi Ononoki is like a familiar to Yozuru Kagenui.”
“A familiar…”
An aberration─bound like Shinobu.
The shallow brat that Shinobu spoke of was someone I, and Hanekawa, and Senjogahara, and even Hachikuji, Kanbaru, and Sengoku, considered our savior.
Mèmè Oshino.
A counter-aberration expert─an authority on sending away yokai.
In more mundane terms, the dude in the Hawaiian shirt.
For Shinobu, he was the human she bore the deepest grudge against, apart from me─but during the time Oshino resided in this town, they lived together in that abandoned building…Eikow Cram School.
So while Shinobu spoke of him disparagingly, resentment probably wasn’t all that she felt for him.
What she felt, however, was beyond my comprehension. I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
To be bound─by a name.
One thing that seemed certain was that Shinobu didn’t want to discuss Oshino.
“A familiar. The term,” she hurried on to her next sentence, “makes her sound like a page of some sort, so perhaps it is not accurate. Hmm… To liken her to something from this country’s own lore, she is akin to a shikigami.”
“A shikigami…”
A familiar…or a shikigami. I hadn’t noticed anything to make me think that. She looked human as far as I could tell.
But now that Shinobu said so, Ononoki’s lack of facial expressions, her inscrutability, her elusiveness─were enough to make you think that she wasn’t altogether human.
Zero or even negative in quantity.
And more than anything, placed side by side with some of the other materially, physically existing aberrations that I’d faced off against─there were similarities, to be sure.
For instance, Tsubasa Hanekawa, when she was bewitched by the cat, and Suruga Kanbaru, when she wished upon the monkey.
They clearly had something in common.
“Hrrm…”
Still, though. Were aberrations allowed to go around existing in such an unceremonious, everyday sort of way?
I couldn’t tell at all. I was suspicious about her, which is precisely why I’d asked Shinobu, but I’d never have guessed that the little girl was a honest-to-goodness aberration.
That said…I shouldn’t be so baffled, objectively speaking. One of those “materially, physically existing” aberrations was sitting right in front of my eyes and stuffing her cheeks full of tasty, tasty donuts in the most unceremonious, everyday manner.
Not to mention me, myself. In some ways─I was a kind of aberration, too.
“So, a shikigami…”
Maybe this association was a little too on the nose─but the first thing I thought of when I heard the word was an onmyoji, our native sorcerer. She’d spoken in Kyoto dialect, after all…
So if Ononoki was an aberration, Kagenui─
“That explains why they called me names. ‘Fiendish young man,’ ‘kind monster sir.’ I see. Those two─well, Kagenui at least, is some kind of expert.”
An expert, an authority.
In other words, she was in the same business as Mèmè Oshino.
“Ononoki perhaps, but as for Kagenui, had she not simply espied thee mounting thy kinswoman like a post-horse and judged accordingly? Anyone who witnessed such a sight could be forgiven for thinking thee fiendish.”
I couldn’t tell if Shinobu was chiding me or really meant it…until she clicked her tongue and muttered, I spoke too much─so I guess she meant it.
How rude.
Hrmm…but I didn’t get it. So Kagenui wasn’t an onmyoji?
Since she’d been spot-on about Karen getting stung by a bee aberration, she couldn’t be a total amateur─unless she just meant it adjectively as well, as in “fierce as a hornet.” According to Karen, Kagenui posed an automotive level of danger─it wouldn’t be odd if Kagenui, in turn, had picked up on my sister’s fearsome combat skills.
In fact, Kagenui must have realized that no ordinary girl carried her brother around on her shoulders.
Maybe that was what “hornet” meant.
But maybe not.
“I shan’t spill any information regarding proper humans. I limit myself to aberrations, or at the most, experts on them,” Shinobu forestalled me before I could speak. A look of anticipation must have crossed my face. “Did thou think to avail thyself of me so readily? I am not such a cheap woman that a few donuts would loosen my lips. I am neither thy familiar nor thy shikigami. I am simply a vassal. If ye insist on answers, resort to thy authority to command me.”
“I’m not insisting on anything…”
Nor did I think I could avail myself of her readily.
I didn’t intend to buy favors, either.
Well, sure, it had been quite a wishful ulterior motive─she was right to nail me on that.
So long as I wasn’t pinned through the heart with a wooden stake.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Shinobu said, taking another sip of her coffee.
Copying her motion absentmindedly, I took my own cup in hand.
As if she’d been waiting shrewdly, with malice aforethought, for the black liquid to enter my mouth, she said, “But if thou do insist, my lord─why not inquire with the man sitting in the corner?”
“?”
I turned to look behind me, whereupon I promptly spewed the coffee from my mouth.
Sitting there, his tray piled high with nothing but muffins and pies that he was easing down with a double espresso─was none other than a fraudulent practitioner of Mèmè Oshino’s trade.
Deishu Kaiki.
008
Hitagi Senjogahara, who encountered a certain crab in between middle school and high school, was conned by five frauds during those two years before Mèmè Oshino finally resolved her physical problem─to some degree, she must have wanted to be fooled, but in any case, the first of that quintet was Deishu Kaiki.
The man who was the beginning and the end.
The first and last man.
Called the ghostbuster.
That was Deishu Kaiki.
A late middle-aged man dressed in a sable-black suit finished with a deep black tie, like he’d just come back from a funeral and was in mourning, he was visibly ominous.
A Fire Sisters act of justice had recently targeted this ominous man.
He was positioned as the villain.
I’ll leave out the finer details, but he’d been circulating charms that utilized aberrations, mainly among local middle-school students. When you thought about it, it was a pretty large-scale con, developed systematically over several months─he was stopped before the damage could grow too severe, which I guess was a silver lining.
But that didn’t mean we came out of it unharmed. Karen was stung by a bee─and all the follow-up was a real pain. I would in no way say that things went smoothly.
Still, it did give Hitagi Senjogahara the opportunity to face Deishu Kaiki directly and deal with her past trauma─for a closure of sorts.
She expelled all the venom from her system.
Deishu Kaiki promised never to show his face to us again and left our town for good─and yet.
And yet.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Don’t be foolish. You thought I’d honor our promise? If so you are a dolt. The lesson for you to take home from this is that promises are made to be broken,” Kaiki answered ominously while stuffing his face with a blueberry muffin.
He could seem ominous even at a Mister Donut.
You’d think his image would improve at least a bit, but it didn’t make him one iota cuter.
I’d made a lot of tough-sounding claims at the time, like I should never meet Deishu Kaiki again for the rest of my life and If we meet again, it will probably be to kill each other… And now here I was bumping into him at the neighborhood donut s
hop.
You gotta be kidding me. All that tough talk, gone to waste.
Even after I (and Shinobu) walked over and sat down across from him without asking, he simply continued to eat, betraying not even the slightest hint of surprise─one thing Kaiki wasn’t, was ordinary.
