The slender hand pierced the right side of Ryuuki’s chest with no more difficulty than plunging it into warm water. In light of the relationship between them, and taking into consideration his own long years, the impression this scene left upon him could not be any more profound.
Gazing at Ryuuki’s tortured mien, Princess inserted her right hand to the wrist and slowly churned it back and forth, massaging the flesh. Blood brimmed up. Not a drop fell to the ground.
“What do you say, Ryuuki? No matter how difficult, I will chase him down and bring him back.” The sound of her voice grew muffled. Her lips pressed against Ryuuki’s chest, sucking up the trickle of blood. “I changed my mind. You need to live a little bit longer. Doctor Mephisto is in his hospital, you see. He is the man whose blood you drank. I am your sire, and he should obey my commands, though he is a most unreliable servant. Live your limited life for a while longer. When you have used him to deliver Setsura into my hands, these arms of mine will pluck out your true heart.”
“No.” He spoke with the low voice of a dead man, though the word was laced with shining steel.
“No?”
“That young man will never become your servant. In this corrupt and fallen city, he is the manifestation of the freedom of a soaring cloud, the unrestraint of a whispering wind. I wish to be like that as well.”
“Hoh. Then what will you do?” Her hand still connected her to Ryuuki’s chest.
“To turn such a man over to you would be the same as prostrating myself at your feet.” Ryuuki’s face was exceedingly calm. “You mean, will I once again choose to live out the endless days at your side? No. And neither will I help you capture Setsura Aki.”
“Then I will go after them myself.”
“Suit yourself. As for me—”
In that moment, Ryuuki’s body unsheathed itself from Princess’s hand and flew backwards a dozen feet.
“Will you betray me, Ryuuki?”
A quiet power suffused Princess’s voice, became a luminous point of golden light that was drawn into the valley between her breasts. Trailing a rainbow behind her, she flitted over the general’s head.
Just as a mask of gray dust blew against her face. “Shuuran!” Princess growled. “You are here too!”
The rending sound of flesh silenced that cry. All motion stopped. In the center of the world, the two of them stood close enough to be locked in an embrace.
Princess’s right hand had plunged through Ryuuki’s chest.
There was no telling how much time passed until the world jerked back into motion. The mighty man fell to his knees and collapsed to the ground, rugged as the side of a mountain to the very end.
The strings of the koto hummed. The sad note stirred the air. The Demon Princess didn’t move until it faded away.
She looked down at her bloody right hand and then at the body at her feet. “What a strange man,” she said to Ryuuki. Her eyes obstructed by the dust that was Shuuran, he had taken the blow straight to the heart. Silent Night had given him sufficient opportunity to react.
The dust covering him like a protective blanket remained motionless as well. A gentle night wind swept them up and carried them together toward the west, to the land of the setting sun.
“What are we going to do, Princess?” said Kikiou.
“You would do well to ask that question of yourself.”
Princess flicked her hands. Ryuuki’s blood scattered onto the ground. Her hands gleamed white in the moonlight, as befitted their owner.
“I know what I am going to do. I am going to take possession of Setsura and grind him into the mud and make him my servant.”
“And then?”
“Whatever. You got any good ideas?” she said with a dazzling smile. “Make your dreams come true. Stay here and bury the world with our minions. Travel off to some unknown country. Or sleep for an eternity in the casket in that ship. Take your pick.”
“Whichever you choose, you intend to bring Setsura along with you?”
“You think not?”
“No,” said Kikiou. Did the Demon Princess notice that when it came to Setsura, he answered the same as Ryuuki? “My divination has proved accurate. Setsura is our most unlucky star. Consider the proof. You killed Ryuuki and extinguished Shuuran. Will you destroy the world, leaving behind but a single boat? Make him your servant and the fate of that unlucky star changes not one whit. As long as he is by your side, none of our ambitions will come to fruition.”
“Those ambitions you speak of are all yours.”
Kikiou started at the cold edge to her words. “What—What are you saying? For the past four thousand years, our agreed-upon goal has been to fill the world with your kin, beginning with the accursed city as the cornerstone.”
“Really? We agreed on that? It slipped my mind.” Kikiou glared back at the moonlight-dappled face with the look of a man whose soul was dead. Princess paid it no mind and continued, “Our world or this world, whatever will be will be. As long as I can spend the endless days doing whatever I want, I have no complaints. Who knows when it will end? That matters now only to the two of us.”
“Then—Then as for my goals and desires?”
“You might want to give them a rest.”
Kikiou froze. This was how the woman he’d spent four thousand years with bid the great warlock goodbye. He finally said, “How can you—this city will soon fall into the hands of your servants. The rest of the world will follow not long after. You will become their absolute monarch. Without you there to guide them, they will be reduced to nothing more than a disorganized rabble. What have we been working for all this time? Are you so willing to render it a meaningless waste?”
“I am absolutely willing. Shall we call it a day and go our separate ways? Kikiou, you can walk down whatever road and toward any horizon that meets your fancy.”
Princess looked at the bend in the road in front of her, the intersection where Setsura turned off Yasukuni Avenue and was heading to the hospital where the white doctor ruled.
“I am not letting you get away, Setsura.”
With four thousand years of her previous existence weighing upon those words, Princess set off without another look back.
That day, Mephisto Hospital had been visited by one unexpected patient after the next. First was Takako Kanan, borne there by Yakou’s subordinates. An hour later came Yakou himself, carried in by Setsura. They were quickly admitted and taken to the director’s special examination room.
There to meet them were Doctor Mephisto and Tonbeau Nuvenberg.
Tonbeau had been raring to go as soon as she’d learned that an ancient Chinese ship had shown up at the Keio Plaza Hotel. Mephisto urged a wait and see attitude. She was certainly conspiring to use Mephisto’s offices to wheedle more reward money from the mayor. The doctor didn’t leap into action at once, pointing out that others had been engaged to investigate and they should await the enemy’s next move.
A prudence, very much like him, that had perhaps been additionally affected by the blood of those interfering creatures of the night.
“You seem to be in one piece,” he said to Setsura, lying on the bed. There was a different timbre to his voice as well, though only he and Setsura would ever have noticed.
“What about Kanan-san and Yakou?” Setsura asked, his face waxy and pale.
“They are in the next room. Miss Tonbeau is watching over Kanan-san. There’s no need to worry.”
“The enemy is those two,” Setsura said coldly. “Bedding us down together like this, the security around here is going to the dogs.” He looked up at Mephisto. “To make matters worse, you and they are probably still buds.”
“Bridle such thoughts.” Mephisto pulled over a chair, sat down, and examined Setsura’s neck. “You haven’t used the bottle you were given?”
The bottle given him in Galeen Nuvenberg’s house, back when she was still alive. Setsura had treated himself with it.
“I will drink it afterwards.”
“How many times have you been bitten?”
Setsura held up three fingers.
“It might not be in time, then. You are a miser when it comes to deploying available resources.”
“You don’t have anything newer?”
“My knowledge reaches no further.”
“Well, run a few trials to see whether it is still effective now that I have become that woman’s slave.”
“I am not compounding that medicine again. Drink up.”
“Supposing I do, what about destroying that woman?”
“Such as driving a stake through her heart?”
“Do you think that would work?”
“No. Destroying Princess is impossible.”
“Then what?”
“Hold off going anywhere and don’t go anywhere by yourself. That woman is obsessed with you. Or to put it another way, refuse her and she might well wreck the world for spite.” Mephisto waited for a reaction from Setsura. When none was forthcoming, he said, “That woman is antimatter facing off against matter, a nihility facing off against existence itself. Any life that touches her ceases to be. There is no way to lay hands on her. Moreover—”
Sensing something in his voice, Setsura closed his eyes. “Don’t carry on just like her, Mephisto. You are strangely like me. You have a grasp of the situation.”
“Not at all.” Mephisto’s white face came within a hand’s breadth of Setsura’s nose.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought it time for a face-to-face talk.”
“About treating me?”
“About treating my troubled heart.”
“Get a freaking grip,” Setsura said in a weary voice.
“Somebody commands me to.”
A tense air, as lurid as it was sublime, filled the space between the two comely countenances. Mephisto suddenly pulled his face away. His hands flashed through the air, revealing a bespectacled man in a white lab coat, looking as long in the face as a man could.
“What is it, Takahashi-kun?”
“The patient has disappeared from the examination room.”
“Takako Kanan?”
“Yes.”
“What about her attendant?”
A black shadow slipped by Mephisto and headed to the door. With Mephisto at his heels, he sprinted to the next room.
The only person there was Tonbeau stretched out on the floor, snoring like a content hippo. She was sound asleep.
“Silent Night,” Setsura said, thinking of Ryuuki’s koto. “Does that mean Ryuuki’s shown up here?”
Doctor Takahashi soon ran in and dispelled that notion. A short time before, he’d ducked out to the back courtyard to take a breather, and spied there what he could only describe as the Goddess of the Moon. As soon as their eyes met, he lost consciousness. The woman had what looked like a koto in her hands.
He was only out for a moment, though when he checked his watch, ten minutes had passed. Recalling the beauty of the ghostly girl who had devastated the hospital previously, still in a mostly dazed state he had hurried to check Takako Kanan’s room.
“If that woman was playing the koto,” Setsura surmised, “then Ryuuki no longer lives.”
Mephisto didn’t contradict him, meaning he agreed. Setsura took a long breath and glared at Mephisto. “You would have known that Ryuuki was gone. Somebody commands you to, eh?”
“Let’s not bicker about who said what to whom,” said Mephisto, feigning utter innocence.
Setsura dropped the matter. He had other things to worry about. No matter where Princess was, Takako would go to her when beckoned. And no matter where Takako was, Princess would know where to find her. She must have used Silent Night to keep interfering busybodies out of the way.
The video cameras observing Takako’s room twenty-four seven were working normally. But none of them recorded Takako leaving the room. The dulcet tones of the ghost koto Silent Night had powerful directional abilities, or they would have put Setsura to sleep as well.
But why hadn’t Princess summoned Setsura while she was at it? Because she wanted Setsura to come to her by his own choice, of his own free will. She was trying to arouse his concern for Takako and make him suffer—by stealing back the girl he’d only managed to rescue a few hours before.
He should not have experienced such levels of existential despair, like the condemned criminal who receives a last-minute reprieve as he sits in the electric chair, only to be ordered back as soon as he exits the execution room.
“Did you tie one of your threads to Kanan-san?”
“It broke. Did you inject her with a GPS device?”
“Settle down.”
“You did? Where is she? That boat?”
“I did inject a tracer agent into her blood. But there’s been no response.”
Setsura was about to tear him a new one, but checked himself. A demonic aura emanated from the white doctor’s being. Princess had spirited Takako away from his hospital.
“My commission hasn’t ended. No, I shall give you a new one. Setsura, find out where Princess is.”
“And in exchange, are you going to clean up the pieces when it’s all over?”
“That is not my job,” Mephisto said bluntly. “But the bill for violating the sanctity of my hospital on three separate occasions shall be paid. See that she falls from the heights of bliss to the depths of hell. All I desire is confirmation that it happened. And you need a blood transfusion.”
“Promise that you don’t spike it with anything funny.”
“Your own blood. Synthetic, of course, but no different down to the DNA.”
“Manufactured how?” asked Setsura. He watched as an automated gurney rolled up next to him.
“Utilizing their knowledge. They’ve succeeded in a number of other areas also. Let’s go.”
“If something turns up about that woman during the transfusion—”
“Nothing to worry about. It’ll be over in thirty seconds.”
Mephisto wasn’t exaggerating on that score.
Chapter Three
Setsura spent the next three days spinning his wheels and getting nowhere.
The mayor and the chief of police urged that the boat in front of the Keio Plaza Hotel be incinerated. Doctor Mephisto managed to exert enough caution and warning for them to call it off.
The chief dispatched scouting parties to investigate the boat. Carrying stakes and peaches, heavily armed officers crept inside but found only what any sailor would expect to see in an old and decrepit vessel.
Where had Kikiou and the Demon Princess gone? And Takako?
Impatient concern darkened Setsura’s fine features. During that time, rumors of a woman fitting Princess’s description reached his ears only once.
A vagrant looking for a place to bed down near the Keio Plaza Hotel one night had seen the shining outlines of a beautiful woman on the roof, her long black hair and the hem of her shimmering gown fluttering in the wind. She was shedding flower petals of light. The vagrant couldn’t take his eyes off of her.
What was she up to?
She was gazing down at the city, the vagrant said. That was all. No emotion of any sort rose to her beautiful face.
“Ain’t making any of this up,” the vagrant insisted. “The only thing I got going for me is these eyes. I can see anything in the dark. I didn’t see no anger or sadness or resentment or nothing. An expression like that, the exact opposite of beauty. Never seen anything like her in my life, but I got it, you know? Staring down at the city like an angel sitting up there in Heaven checking out us mortals. Feeling nothing. Just looking, like she ain’t felt no happiness and no grief since the day she was born.”
Princess got back in touch the night of the third day.
Setsura was lying on his bed when the call came from Mephisto over the hospital’s internal line, directing him to the front hallway. It was three in the morning.
Seeing the line of pale faces covered with the glass from the lobby
doors, Setsura stopped in his tracks. Faces that must have been shoved through the glass until it shattered, more faces torn by the shards, other faces unscathed—and the eyes of all of them burning with a red flame, tongues licking over chattering fangs.
The same creatures of the night as the Toyama vampires, but a completely different species.
Spotting the hospital director standing in the center of the hallway, Setsura said, “What’s up, Doc?”
“They say they have something to say to you.”
“Listen to me.”
Setsura whirled around.
“Takako and everything else I leave to you.”
Setsura turned and saw. Pressed against the windows, their lips moving, they were speaking Princess’s words.
“Tonight, soon, come alone to the roof of the Keio Plaza Hotel. You and nobody else.”
“I figured as much,” Setsura said to Mephisto. “I’ll be going then. Send me the bill.”
“You think you can pull this off by yourself?”
The silver platter of the moon hovered above the heads of these creatures of the night.
“I’ll think of something,” Setsura answered airily.
“I figured you would say that.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that even you respond to a vampiric transformation no differently than any other normal human being.”
Mephisto raised his hand and brushed it across his forehead and thrust his finger toward Setsura. Perched on the ball of his finger was a single drop of blood pierced by a single strand of hair.
The expression on Setsura’s face abruptly changed. A dark shadow crossed his face, the product of an insatiable hunger.
“Close your mouth.”
Responding to Mephisto’s command, Setsura covered his mouth with his left hand. He couldn’t hide the red light pouring from his eyes.
“It figures,” Mephisto said, like a mathematician demonstrating the proof for a difficult equation. He pointed towards the lobby. “Get going. The darkness tonight is particularly deep. The night is your world now.”
Setsura headed for the door. As he left the building, the creatures waiting outside parted to the left and right, forming a clear path before him. Not just because Princess willed. There was in their eyes a strange kind of affection.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 37
