Mortality Bites Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Vance, Ramy

  “Milady?” Deirdre said, still watching her screen with utter fascination as Miss Elizabeth Bennet dispatched a zombie.

  “Nothing,” I muttered, really wishing my inner thoughts would stay inner.

  I rolled down my sleeve, covering the map that apparently only I could see (despite both Deirdre and Egya doing all kinds of experiments on my arm that included, but weren’t limited to: holding a magnifying glass over it, rubbing lemon and applying heat, pouring baking powder on it and an Ouija board séance.)

  No matter what they did, nothing revealed the map to my soul. It seemed I was the only one who could see it. Why? I had no idea and could only think of one other person to ask: the Raspy Man. I didn’t trust him. Hell, only weeks earlier he’d sent a hit man of sorts after me. But he was the only person who seemed to know anything about this subject.

  But that had been a total waste of time. The Raspy Man didn’t have a clue, simply wondering in that out-of-breath voice of his whether he could see it given that he, too, was missing his soul. I might have been a cute blonde (well, more an auburn than blonde blonde), but I was no fool.

  Try to kill me once, shame on you. Try to kill me twice and its shame on me.

  Regardless of who else could see the map, I could. And it clearly told me to go to Japan. More specifically, Okinawa. Seeing the outline of the tiny Pacific island appear on my arm had caused me to breathe both a sigh of relief and let a groan of despair. Oddly enough, both were for the exact same reason: I’d been there before.

  I’d felt relieved that I would be searching in a familiar place. The groan had been because I had gone to Okinawa during World War II to … well … hunt. War zones were perfect hunting grounds for a vampire. Lots of blood and destruction, and when people went missing it was generally assumed they had been captured or killed by the enemy. You know, the kind of stuff vamps look for when shopping around for their next meal.

  Going there would dredge up some terrible memories. Memories I’d have relished as a vampire, but as a human would only churn my stomach with disgust and shame.

  I know, I know. I was a vampire then, just doing what vampires do. And I wasn’t that person anymore—after all, I was human again. But still, I did a lot of messed up things there, even for a vampire.

  I wasn’t proud of my time in Okinawa. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was proud of one thing I did there—maybe the only good thing I ever did as an evil, blood-drinking vampire.

  That was a long time ago, I thought (in my head) and chased away the memories. Okinawa would be a different place and I briefly considered scouring a map of the island for clues, or reading up on the history and mythology, but I decided not to do any of that. I wanted to relax and enjoy this trip as best I could.

  I wanted to try and find what little joy I could as I rode this metal dragon to Japan.

  Just relax, I thought, grabbing my sleep mask.

  If only I had closed my eyes before leaning back, then I wouldn’t have seen the only other person in first class staring at me. The strange woman stood near an unoccupied toilet (as evidenced by the green sign to prevent us first-classers from making the long trip to a locked bathroom). She held a telephone receiver and scowled at me like I had just stolen the life vest from under my seat.

  Again, I might have ignored her if it wasn’t for the floating eyeballs hovering right next to her head.

  Please Fasten Your Seatbelt, You’re About to Get Punched

  Japan is different from Montreal (and Scotland, for that matter) in so many ways it’s virtually impossible to list them all. That said, when I spent a few years there, I divided those differences into what I called The Three Ds: dinner, dress and demons.

  Dinner and dress boiled down to sushi and kimonos. But demons … well, the differences between Japanese demons and Western ones were staggering.

  For one thing, the Japanese had way more demons than any other culture I knew. And although their demons were malevolent, they weren’t necessarily evil, with many of them only existing to fulfill some esoteric purpose (like in the case of the azuki arai demon, who—I kid you not—exists solely to wash azuki beans), or they were the result of some flaw like greed, lust or gluttony.

  In other words, they were strange. And few were stranger to me than the futakuchi-onna. From the front, they looked like perfectly normal women—it was seeing them from behind that made things weird.

  For one thing, their hair behaved more like tentacles than normal, dead cells growing out of your head should behave. For another, each had a large, almost human-looking mouth right on the back of their head. Despite all that, I found them relatively harmless except for their insatiable appetites. Invite them over for dinner and they were likely to eat anything and everything edible in your house, including your pet gerbil.

  This futakuchi-onna wore a red headscarf that complemented her black shirt and skirt. The scarf covered up her demon-ness, presumably so as not to scare the human Nippon Airlines passengers. That in and of itself was odd, because Japanese folklore and myths were such a part of everyday life that when the gods left, the Japanese took a far healthier path to dealing with Others than the rest of the world: they adopted them as citizens almost immediately.

  They even had their own name for Others: Kakureta no Kokujin, or Hidden Citizens. So this first-class passenger being a Japanese demon wasn’t all that surprising.

  But her hiding it? That was.

  I would never have known she was an Other if it wasn’t for her hair-tentacles wiggling out from under the scarf. Well, that and her two floating eyeballs that popped up like a pair of high-tech drones. The eyes were mokumokuren—spirits who usually live in torn shoji (paper sliding doors common in Japan)—but these two were just floating around like bees. (And like bees, I wondered if they knew that they weren’t aerodynamic enough to fly.)

  The floating eyeballs stared at my now covered arm like they had x-ray vision (which, for all I knew, they did). The way they fixated on my arm scared me. What’s more, the futakuchi-onna dropped the phone as her hair slithered up to open the overhead compartment and retrieve a long cloth satchel.

  She dropped the cloth to the ground, revealing what looked like the head of a spear that wasn’t attached to any shaft. Shaftless spearhead or not, I didn’t hesitate, rushing up to the front of the first class cabin and pushing her into the bathroom—minus her floating eyes.

  ↔

  We tumbled into the unoccupied bathroom, where she fell on the toilet with a crash, the momentum of my tackle causing the door to slam behind us. Because it was first class, the bathroom was large enough for us both to be inside and have a wee bit of room between us. Not that I wanted any space between us for her to swing her spearhead.

  I kneed her in the chest and slapped hard at her spear-holding wrist. She dropped her the spearhead as she crashed—at least one thing was working in my favor—and I used my knee and hands to pin her body down on the metal toilet.

  “Gaijin, what are you doing?” she said, her Japanese accent attaching an uh to the g in “doing.”

  “ ‘Gaijin?’ Seriously? We’re over international waters, so you’re just as much a foreigner here as I am. And as for what I’m doing, I could ask you the same thing. Last I checked it’s impolite to attack fellow travelers with sharp things.”

  The two eyes now hovered near me—either they had found another way into the bathroom or they ghosted through the door. However they got in, they eerily examined my arm like undersea drones did a wreckage. Apparently they were completely unconcerned that I was in the middle of a fight. I swatted one away like a fly at a picnic.

  “The mokumokuren …”—the futakuchi-onna was also staring at my covered arm—“they see your map. You have a path to the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan.”

  “My Kami Subete Hakubutsukan?” I said, pulling back my sleeve. “You mean this?” I showed her my forearm. Her eyes widened as she looked at my exposed flesh. The two eyes floated in for a closer look. They reminded me of un
derwater videos where remote-controlled submarines examine sunken ships with spotlights. “You can see this?”

  The futakuchi-onna nodded. “So it is true what he said. There is a seeker.” One of the eyeballs floated closer to her. If they were communicating I couldn’t hear it, but from the way her own eyes registered surprise, there was no doubt that the eyeball had told her something. “You—you are the one who donated her soul.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a ‘donation.’ More like a forced deposit, or—”

  There was a knock on the door. “Milady, is all well?”

  “Yeah, girl,” called Egya. “That was kind of a rushed dash to the bathroom. You eat something funny?”

  Apparently they hadn’t seen me tackle the futakuchi-onna—not that I cared. This futakuchi-onna knew something I didn’t.

  “He told me that you would come, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “Who?” I repeated. “Who are you talking about?”

  There was another knock on the door, this time the stewardess. “Excuse me, Ms. Darling. Your friends here tell me you are having trouble. I could ask for a doctor—”

  “No doctor. I’m fine. I just need a minute to—”

  But before I could say the last word, she pulled the spearhead into her hand with such speed that I barely had a second to push myself back and out of the bathroom. Stupid me … I was so fixated on her that I forgot about her tentacle hair. Never, ever forget about the tentacles. That’s Monster Fighting 101.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  She pushed the spearhead through my abdomen and I screamed in pain. “Please,” she said, “accept this gift.”

  “Gift,” I huffed as I stared at the dangling spearhead in my chest. “Hell … of … a … gift.”

  The head went right through me. I’d stabbed enough people in my time to know that this was a wound I wasn’t recovering from. There wasn’t a doctor in the world that could get this thing out of me and keep me breathing. “Stupid,” I muttered to myself again.

  “I—I didn’t think he spoke the truth,” she said, a tear falling from her eye as she turned around as if ashamed to look at me. Then, as if reciting a passage from some ancient tome, she uttered, “Dawn shall come when the sun sets on this world.”

  It seemed only her front face was ashamed, because her other mouth—the one on the back of her head—spat out venomously, “They want the map, but you cannot give it to them. You must come and claim your soul before it is too late. Failure will bring ruin to this world and the next.”

  “ ‘They’ want the map, but ‘he’ doesn’t want ‘they’ to have it, huh? How very specific of you,” I said, my hands still cupping my bloody wound. “If you’re so desperate for me to go get my soul, maybe you shouldn’t have stabbed me.”

  “But we did not,” the futakuchi-onna answered. “We only—” But before she could finish, the bathroom opened. Evidently the stewardess had used some sort of key or latch to get in.

  I fell flat on my back, and looking straight up at the stewardess, I waited for the requisite scream as I bloodied the first-class carpet. But she didn’t scream; she just looked at me with disdain before glancing into the bathroom with equal disgust.

  I reached for where the spearhead should have been sticking out of me, but my hands passed through empty air. I lifted my head; no metal tip in me. I looked in the bathroom. No futakuchi-onna, no mokumokure.

  “Are you alright, Ms. Darling?” the stewardess said, no longer hiding her disdain.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And?” the stewardess said, her arms akimbo.

  “Umm, sorry for the trouble?” I offered from my horizontal position on the floor.

  How embarrassing.

  Resurrecting the Dead—Goddamn Style

  The stewardess looked at the mess in the bathroom and shook her head. “Is there anything I can help you with, Ms. Darling?”

  Yes, I thought, I’ve just been stabbed in the chest by a magically disappearing futakuchi-onna and her floating eyeballs. Best first-class gift I’ve ever gotten.

  Thankfully I hadn’t thought that out loud; I’d probably end up strapped into my fancy pod for the rest of the flight.

  I shook my head, still looking in the empty bathroom stall. “No,” I said. “Just a nervous traveler, that’s all.”

  The stewardess gave me an unsurprised look. “You’d be surprised how many of our first-class customers are nervous flyers.” I could sense that she was using every ounce of her rapidly depleting willpower to avoid yelling at me.

  I guess dealing with first-class brats must be factored into the ticket price.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Very well, Ms. Darling. If there is anything you need, please do not hesitate to ask. Perhaps with my aid we can avoid further messes,” she said with a curt bow before walking away.

  She still wasn’t out of earshot when Egya burst into laughter. “Girl, you are a strange one,” he said between cackles. “A very strange one indeed.”

  Deirdre, on the other hand, did not laugh, presumably because she was worried about me. The changeling was always worried about me—in an endearing way (most of the time).

  Now wasn’t one of those times.

  Before I could tell the overprotective changeling warrior that I was OK, she pushed past me into the bathroom and picked something off the floor.

  She turned around, revealing a tiny seashell in her palm. She stared at it with awe and something that I rarely saw in the fae: Fear.

  “Was this always here?”

  ↔

  We returned to our pods, and in a hushed whisper I told them my story. Neither of them had seen the futakuchi-onna or the floating eyeballs. From their perspective, I was sitting perfectly calm in my seat and then I was charging to the bathroom like I had a fire in my pants.

  Given that Egya thought I was having stomach issues, that description was quite literal—from the Ghanaian’s perspective, at least.

  Still, despite not seeing the creature themselves, they had been around the supernatural block enough times to believe me.

  “So,” Egya said, “you were attacked by a ghost. Mid-flight. In first class.”

  “Well, ‘attacked’ may not be the right word. I kind of tackled her before she got a chance,” I said before shaking my head. Something was very wrong about all this. “And I’m not sure ‘ghost’ is the right word, either. I mean, she was an Other, and Others aren’t ghosts.”

  “Ghosts are real,” Egya said.

  “They are, but the rules have changed. For one thing, since the gods left and took their magic, all ghosts have manifested and they are unable to use their magic to stay hidden anymore.”

  Egya shook his head. “That’s not true. They can still use their magic, but it costs them time. They’d burn out pretty quick.”

  I nodded. Since the gods left, magic was in limited supply and any creature able to cast a spell could only do so by sacrificing life in exchange. They would have to burn their life away, shortening the time they had left on Earth by hours, days—sometimes even months—in exchange for the spell’s effects.

  And ghosts were particularly penalized for doing their typical now-I’m-here, now-I’m-not trick. No ghost in her right mind would burn so much time just to be invisible.

  As if reading my mind (or maybe I was thinking out loud again), Egya asked, “Was she burning time? As you fought, did she show any signs of aging?”

  I thought back to the skinny futakuchi-onna. Her face had been pale and she looked like she’d seen better days, but there were no visible signs that she was aging. “No,” I said, and then I looked at my ridiculously expensive Jaeger-LeCoultre wrist watch checking if it had sped up. “What time do you have?”

  Egya showed me his watch; our times matched. That was another thing about burning time: clocks sped up when near burnt time. “That confirms it—no magic,” I said. “And even if there was, something’s not right. A futakuchi-onna is a demon. An Other. But this
one acted more like a ghost than a demon. Unless I’m mistaken, ghosts are the manifested representation of a human’s soul. Others don’t have souls, so they can’t be ghosts.”

  “That is not entirely true,” Deirdre said, speaking for the first time since we’d sat down. She moved the shell with her finger, turning it over and over. “Others might not have souls, but there are still ways for us to return to a living plane of existence. But I didn’t think this kind of magic existed anymore.” She paused before correcting herself. “Could exist anymore.”

  “You mean since the gods left?”

  Deirdre shook her head. “No. This kind of magic was destroyed by the gods long before they left.”

  ↔

  “What kind of magic are we talking about? And what’s up with you and that shell?”

  Deirdre turned it over again, using her pinky finger to point out a tiny carving on the inside of the shell’s concave surface before handing it to me. The carving looked like Celtic runes.

  “Middle and raise,” Deirdre said pointing to each symbol. “It refers to an ancient magic where a dead Other would be resurrected, but not fully. Half of their essence would remain in the Land of the Dead.”

  And she wasn’t talking about the George Romero movie. The Land of the Dead was a place that so many ancient cultures included in their mythologies and legends. This was a physical realm mortals could visit, a la Orpheus when he was trying to rescue his wife, Eurydice.

  “So she was partially brought back to life,” I said. “What’s the big deal about that?” In a world of angels and demons, dragons and yokai, ex-vamps and ex-weres, resurrection wasn’t a big deal.

  Sheesh, I thought, talk about desensitization.

  “Only that the magic necessary to resurrect an Other, even partly, was closed away long ago.” She twisted her hand like she was bolting a door. “Locked away long ago, when the gods negotiated the dominion of Death with the Thrones of Heaven.”