I turned to G. “This is fucked up.”
“Now hear this,” The Chief said. “The moon is due to become silver. I am not sure when, but it is coming. It is the final stage of this curse. Yes, Akira can break it. Yes, if he fails, the moon will do harm to any werewolf caught in its rays. This is why you have seen construction of iron shelters. The wolves are trying to protect themselves until their would-be savior ends this madness. All while you remain on the streets as the mazoku begin to take their hold. Because they will. What sort of leadership is that? Well, I can tell you: Failure.”
This had sailed into deadly waters.
“But a silver moon brings with it a new hope. Why not welcome it, embrace its kiss? Why not have a new world order? This is a desire of new ways, of the wolves to be the ones hiding underground. Yes, we have a common enemy in Mama Rita, but those of us who are sick of the wolf tyranny have a chance to change the world. This is a gift, not a curse. Let us rise up and fight.” More staring, this time with mega silver fire in his eyes. “This is a call to arms. Make a stand if you want change. It does not make you a terrorist to fight for freedom—only for the opposition. Let us stand together, push our rulers underground, let them have their turn in the dark. If you see Akira, I implore you to end him. Do not hesitate. Come to the tunnels in your nearest town or city, join us. All are welcome who want to be free. Thank you for your time.”
The transmission cut off.
Holy. Shit.
Brand new elven leader and a truckload of chaos.
“Dangerous and clever,” G said. “This is awful.”
He’d just declared war on Mama Rita, Dad, me, and labelled himself as some sort of freedom fighter. Admit you’ve bombed a hotel, explain it, then stoke the fires of anarchy. Because there were so many embers waiting to be stirred. Fuck! This was insane!
I was a target like never before.
“How the hell are the elves gonna protect the world?” I said. “They don’t have the means to take on the mazoku. No anti-magic, no army like my dad’s. And they can’t break the curse.”
“He’ll have the silver moon.” G sighed. “I hope your dad’s counterattack is soon. I wonder what happened to his predecessor. She wouldn’t have wanted this.”
I stood up, pacing the room. “I’m not so sure.”
The door opened. “Apologies, sir,” Fumito said, striding purposefully into the room. “We have to move you to a safe house immediately. By order of High Alpha.”
“But the hospital’s protected,” I protested.
“Not enough, sir.”
“Why is The Chief a guy?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know. She has disappeared.”
“Explains the new policy direction, then.” I still had Fumito’s phone. It rang. I answered. “Dad?”
“Listen to what you’re being told, son.” He hung up.
Freaky. Was there a damn camera in this room?
“There’s a unit waiting for you downstairs,” Fumito said.
Two male porters came into the room, getting G ready to be moved in his bed.
Shit. Whirlwind. Too quick. Needed to… What? Think in this room and possibly get blown up again? Compromise G’s safety? Be a general dickhead?
“Let’s g—”
Wham! My babies found something. I doubled over from the force of their excitement, how Uncle Ryoka’s image hit me, flashing before my eyes.
They’d found him!
He was alive.
Chapter Three
Uncle Ryoka was at Imperial Palace. Real dangerous area in Chiyoda City.
I pulled on some clothes provided by the hospital—black jeans, a black T-shirt and leather jacket, even some fingerless leather gloves—and strapped the white katana holder onto my back, focusing on Bob and Rose’s exploration of the area.
It was fuzzy, my uncle a blur. Strapped to a chair? There was magic on the air pushing against my babies. Hiding him. What type of magic was that? It was proper powerful, whatever it was, but fuzzy too.
People lurking around…
“Come back,” I said to the wolves. The blurriness wasn’t going away.
Who was hiding my uncle? Elves? Mama Rita? She had her own crew of witches, warlocks, and banshees.
Balls! I needed to get over there. Problem was, I wasn’t going anywhere but to a safehouse and then back to London. Too dangerous, too risky. I was the last hope for the world. Literally. The tenshi had told me.
No pressure at all.
For me to go running into action would be super crazy, no matter how much my feet were itching to hit the streets and get my arse over there.
“Fumito?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Before I give you back this phone, can I use it?”
“It’s yours, sir. Your father said so.”
“Oh, okay. Cool. Cheers.”
He nodded as G was wheeled out of the room.
I ran beside the bed. “I’m just calling Dad. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Can you walk and talk?” he asked.
“I’ll—”
“Sir?” Fumito cut in.
“Yeah?”
“It would be great if you could walk and talk. We really need to get you moving.”
G smirked at me.
“Fine.”
“Hello?” Dad answered as we entered the lift.
“Wait,” I said, taking the phone from my ear. “Will I get reception in here?”
The lift doors closed.
“Yes, sir,” Fumito replied.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Akira?”
I told him about Uncle Ryoka.
“I’ll have people head over there immediately.” He hung up, nothing more to say.
Okay, then. Good. Dad was on it. When he got on it, he really got on it.
I pocketed the phone, every nerve proper frayed.
Be okay, Uncle. Please…
* * *
We were led down into an underground carpark, the porters wheeling G over to an ambulance. There were two black SUVs either side of it, with werewolves in black standing beside them—three for each vehicle.
They all bowed to me.
“I guess you can’t say where we’re going?” I asked Fumito.
“No, sir. Apologies.”
“It’s fine. Just thought I’d check.”
I got in the back of the ambulance with G, insisting on it without anyone insisting otherwise. His bed was fixed down on the left side, my seat on the right. There was a small window above the back of my head, plus one above G.
“You okay?” I asked him, sitting forward in my chair.
“I’ll feel better once you’re safe.”
“Oh, G.”
“Give me a kiss.”
I obeyed, leaning in for another one of those soft ones, only for it to go a bit full-on snogging. Tongues, lips writhing together, my dick getting hard. A nice distraction.
Fumito slammed the doors closed.
End of snog.
“Hey,” I said, sitting back down. I buckled up like a good boy.
“Sir,” he said, repeating it to G and taking the seat next to me.
“Is this a Type Zero?” G asked him.
“It is, sir.”
“What’s that?” I questioned. I’d heard of Type One, Two, and Three vehicles made for transporting valuable werewolf cargo, but never Zero.
Ha! Me, valuable cargo? Didn’t quite fit with me, but tra la la.
G filled me in. “This vehicle is reinforced with bulletproof glass and coverings, as well as being fitted with anti-bomb casings and sprayed with anti-magical coating.”
Cool. There were all sorts of bullet and bomb-proof vehicles, but things had moved up a level.
The ambulance came to life, pulling out if its parking space and followed the SCU and werewolf vans.
Here we go. Man, did I feel like I was chained down. I pushed through it, ignoring the pulses of need for action, deciding to send my ba
bies back out to Imperial Palace when we got to the safehouse.
There were people on it. My dad had some proper skilled peeps all over the world who did this shit for a living—rescuing people. Uncle Ryoka would be okay. That magic would be nothing to the task force about to break him out.
Imperial Palace. What a horror show.
There was once a man, a warlock slum lord. Ouga Watanabe. Famous for being a complete cock. He’d wanted to control Chiyoda City, where the palace sat, not content with claiming Toshima Ward. The fact he’d got his hands on Imperial Palace and the surrounding gardens was proper freaky. My dad had been furious, and the risk of Ouga spreading out into the rest of Chiyoda had been high. Ouga’d taken hostages. and a major incident had kicked off.
I’d been about eight years old but remembered it well.
The palace had sat empty for years, hadn’t been used for anything imperial for a long-arse time. It’d been abandoned after a spot in the moat under Seimon Ishibashi Bridge—the main way to the Imperial Palace—had opened up, transformed into a permanent whirlpool forever sucking water down, but never actually getting rid of the water, like it was stuck on loop. I’d only seen videos of people stupid enough to go and have a look at it. It might be different now, but the bridge had been condemned. Didn’t stop peeps from seeking it out, playing on it, posting videos of themselves being, well, dickheads. If you fell in, you were fucked. No one knew what was down there. Some said it went to the mazoku realm, some said you just, well, died and went out to sea or whatever to be eaten by the fishes. And those who’d tumbled down that watery black hole, ‘cos there’d been a few, had never come back up to fill us in.
Before it became the dodgy tourist hotspot (for dickheads) it was today, Ouga had ended up plummeting into the hole himself. Pushed by his wife, Reo. They’d had a row on the bridge, she’d clearly had enough of his shit, and that was the end of him. She did a runner and became the wife to Eiken Tanaka, who now ran the Toshima slums as the gang king. It was his only territory in Tokyo—no palace for him. The geezer at least had some brains to avoid Imperial Palace, even if he was a total scumbag.
The ambulance was above ground, turning left into a street and moving away from the hospital.
My energy levels were back online. All pumped up and no one to decapitate.
Energy buzzed at my spine in a constant rhythm, reminding me of the power the katanas resting there had stored up.
Pure death.
I closed my eyes, thinking of the many ways it could be used if I didn’t have to send it to the moon. You know, the twisted fantasies of a guy with so much murder in his heart. The number one scenario was pretty simple, though. Not a gorefest, more of a reveling in the shock on Mama Rita’s face when a reaper came to stick her in the chest with its scythe, dragging her to Mount Fuji—the afterlife for bad bastards. If that’s where she’d end up. Even though she’d lost her elf power she’d been born one, so maybe she’d go over to their afterlife seeing as they had their own way of doing things.
As long as it was mega hell and she suffered every damn second of the day, I was for it.
And where had that reaper fantasy come from? Flowing black cloak with a skull in its hood, big old scythe, cackling as Mama Rita wailed for mercy.
It was a cool image. Daydreaming could be so much fun.
A noise from above.
A plane?
What the hell?
I blinked my eyes open, twisting in my seat. I peered out the ambulance window. The jet cut across the red moon, smothered in shadows.
“Oh, no…”
“What’s wrong?”
“Mazoku. They’ve intercepted the flight.”
Fumito’s phone was screaming at him.
Shadowy demons were wrapped around the private jet, smothering the white body in black spirals. And it was flying low. Too low.
“What’s happening?”
The engines burst into twin flames, licking at the shadows which had fully spread, scooping up the fire, twisting it along with their smoky coils until the plane was smothered in black and orange.
It stopped moving, turning mid-air, nose starting to point downward at the ambulance.
The driver slammed on the brakes, the vehicles ahead of us doing the same. Mirroring them further, he pulled off an emergency maneuver to get us the fuck out of the plane’s path.
Amplified laughter rang through the vehicle, outside, crackling in my ears.
“It’s her,” I said, reaching for a katana.
The ambulance went full speed, weaving through the streets. But the plane followed as if it were tracking us.
“Yes, sir,” Fumito said, finishing his call. He turned to me. “A strike has been called on the plane, sir.”
“But the people below! They can’t!”
“The order has been given.”
Werewolves were best for the world, eh? When they took out planes over heavily populated areas?
Shit.
Shit!
What other choice was there? Let it hit me, the guy with the deadly hope in his magic swords?
“I feel sick,” I said.
My stomach roiled. I leaned forward, putting my head between my legs.
I couldn’t watch this shit go down.
Yeah, bury your head in the sand.
Fuck you!
Destroy…
I grabbed my thighs, crushing hard. This brain of mine needed to shut the hell up before I drove a blade in it.
“Aki,” G said softly. “Look at me.”
My chest was tight with guilt. Looking up was out of the question. Hurt too much to meet his gaze.
I’d been a hunter most of my adult life so far, killing or stealing energy for cash, walking the thin moral line. Call me Ambiguous Aki. Yeah. Fine. But for this plane to be shot down over Tokyo for me? No. This… Man, I was fracturing all over. Another fucking dick move by Mama Rita. I wanted out, to face her in the streets, have our reunion since she didn’t manage to kill me at Mount Tate, take her down without the need to harm anyone else.
Yeah, right. ‘Cos she rolled like that. Sure.
“Akira!”
Speak of the devil.
The driver swore in Japanese, slamming on the brakes again.
I straightened, head snapping to the windscreen.
My eyes knew what they’d see there.
A huge creature, bigger now, standing at the front of our unit, wolves hanging out their van windows with guns trained on it. Two heads, limbs swollen, the blend of woman and man, bathed in mazoku, it was the stuff of nightmares. She didn’t need clothes anymore, it seemed. The shadow demons spiraled like the ones on the plane, cruel red eyes flaring.
As it was with the other times I’d seen him, Zach, my half-brother, looked completely horrified by everything. What was that on his left eye? A patch?
“Let me out,” I said.
But the unit of vehicles was already reversing, wolves and SCU agents firing shots, the ambulance driver doing the same and pulling off some more fancy moves to get us out of there.
The last I saw of Mama Rita before the vehicle roared away was her running across the road, crashing through a window of an office block, still laughing as bullets flew at her.
Zach… He could be killed…
The volcano within me rumbled. “Let me out. Let me take the bitch down. Destroy her. I want to destroy her.” My hand was on my seat belt.
“Sir, you need to stay seated. That aircraft was Type Zero. If the mazoku have broken through the anti-magic, then we need to get you away from here immediately.”
Mazoku breaking through powerful anti-magic. Great.
The ambulance was tearing through the city again, alone, really eating up the asphalt as the boom of Mama Rita’s laughter sped after us.
Want to destroy her…
Elevated pulse, mind narrowing into a tunnel of need—the need to end her, to rip her limb from limb, to drink her blood, smear it across my face and—
&nbs
p; “Aki?”
That was one soothing voice. G’s baritone suddenly pulled me from spiraling into some really dark place. Drinking blood? What the fuck?
I rolled my shoulders, rage not exactly cooling, but not ready to push me over the edge. Yet. A balancing act was going on inside me.
Easy does it on the tightrope, bruv!
My eyes met his. He looked so done in. Just wanted to curl up on that bed next to him, hug him until it was all better, and nothing hurt anymore.
“I don’t know what to do, G.”
The vehicle rattled, taking a sharp corner. The seatbelt cut into my chest, and I grabbed the edge of the seat, not breaking my gaze from the guy I loved.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.
Yeah? How the fuck was it supposed to go, then?
I lowered my eyes. Shifted from anger to defeat, one lost fucking puppy, trapped in this ambulance, hands tied.
“Another win for Mama Rita,” I said.
A roaring sound, like a missile, cut above me.
This was it. The plane was going down. I didn’t look out the window, covered my ears like a scared kid hiding under his bed from the big bad monster.
Tenshi, guide the spirits of the dead to their next life. Let them be at peace.
Prayers felt weird. I guess that’s what you get for painting your own pretty pictures of how you think things should be when it comes to the deities you worship, and it wasn’t…the same.
“It missed,” Fumito said calmly, yanking me out of my head.
Huh? I looked out the window then. The plane was still in the sky, aimed at us.
His phone wailed. “Yes, sir?”
“No!” the driver yelled.
The ambulance spun as something slammed into it. Not just one something, but several somethings.
“Mazoku!” Fumito bellowed, phone flying out of his hand at the seriously heavy stop the driver managed.
Impressive.
Dents in the ambulance, a nasty chorus of mazoku hissing. Slam, slam, slam! They pounded the sides, the windows, hissing, red eyes boring right into me, their wannabe queen laughing from somewhere in the dark.
Shadows engulfed the unit of vehicles. Screams followed as windows burst, as werewolves were cut down. Gun fire, a blast of white anti-magic.
Four Moons: The Complete Collection: (Books 1 - 4) Page 65
