“Hi there,” Setsura smiled with tired eyes.
“Guu—” croaked the toad.
“Perhaps you already know, but this knowledge can only be found today in legends passed down by the Ottoman sultans. The toad is said to be the most effective creature for revealing a vampire’s true nature. Do you think that an outrageous idea?”
Setsura didn’t have an opinion.
Vampire legends typically concerned their supernatural powers and terrifying aspects, as well as their weaknesses and ways of detecting them. For example, that when a casket was opened the skin of a vampire would be as vivacious as when it was truly alive. That caskets were buried filled with blood. That vampires feared running water. That they abhorred crucifixes.
These latter two were widely considered revealing vulnerabilities.
In Hungary, a vampire couldn’t walk down a road lined with briars. In Bulgaria, the milk of a cow milked by a vampire turned red. It was something of a historical irony that among the countless legends arising in the countries of Eastern Europe conquered by the Ottomans, the one describing the toad as the most effective means of detection should find a place in the sultan’s palaces.
Newly spawned toads were fed insects raised on sugar and copious amounts of pure water. After thirty days, the amphibious tissues grew particularly sensitive to the presence of vampires. Right now, the toad inside the cylinder’s terrarium-like environment was quite different from the ordinary representative of the species.
“Look.”
The girl deposited the lumpy toad beneath a glass cone. Inside the cone were three colors of dots. Three different kinds of red, blue and white mosquitoes. The bugs sensed that something was wrong and flitted around inside the cone. The gray lump stared at them coldly, and then suddenly opened its mouth.
The pink tongue shot out and plucked an insect out of the air and drew back inside its mouth. All in a split second. The toad’s eyelids closed. And sat there still as a rock.
“We have the results.” Her voice was a tad livelier than usual.
“What?”
“It ate the red mosquito. Each of them is engineered to give off the smell of blood, increasing in strength from red to blue and white. The toad chose the mosquito that carried your blood—the one with the weakest odor. That means the transformation is proceeding at a slow rate.”
“Meaning you don’t have to worry about me pouncing on you.”
“That is a meaningless observation as far as I am concerned.”
“Sorry.”
“No reason to be.” She closed her eyes and soon opened them again. The gesture suggested processing the statement and then purging the thought.
“How should we proceed?”
“You have nothing to worry about. As long as you are not compelled to drink blood, the status quo should continue for thirty years or so.”
“Will I acquire the knowledge of the vampires?”
“Unfortunately, no. I should count myself lucky and abandon the idea.”
“Understood.” Setsura nodded his appreciation, and got to his feet. “Give my thanks to Miss Nuvenberg and the toad.”
“Um—” the girl said. “Could I have a kiss as thanks?”
“As thanks?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry. It slipped my mind.” Setsura leaned over and kissed the girl on her right cheek. The “skin” was hard and cool. Climbing the stairs, Setsura looked for the raven but couldn’t see it anywhere.
“Too bad. Tell her next time I’ll stick around for tea.”
After Setsura left, a voice called down to the girl, who was still standing there as if frozen in place. “So, made your day, huh?” The black wings came to a halt on the ceiling lamp.
Without answering, the girl raised her right hand. With a creak, a skylight opened that hadn’t been there before. “Go,” she said.
“You’re quite the slave driver,” the raven grumbled as it flew out the window.
The flapping of wings faded into the distance. The girl closed the skylight. She touched her right cheek. Her face softened into a smile, and then soon hardened again. She tried several more times, but gave up.
“I wasn’t made to smile,” she said to herself, as if recognizing the fact for the first time.
She raised her left hand to her cheek and slowly massaged the surface, as if to return some human warmth and tenderness to the artificial flesh.
Part Five: Monkey Cage Ambush
Chapter One
Setsura stopped at the first phone booth he spotted after leaving Magic Town. He made two calls in ten minutes. The third number he dialed was the direct line to the mayor’s office.
“Kajiwara speaking.” The mayor answered the phone promptly and warmly.
“This is Aki.”
“Hey, what’s up?” the mayor boomed genuinely. He must be doing well, avoiding any inconvenient cabinet coups and the odd assassination attempt.
“Oh, same-old, same-old,” Setsura lied. “I wanted to ask you the same thing. But first, I need to get in touch with Chief Kumagaki. Make it your top priority. If that’s not possible, then you need to strip him of his authority and take steps to revoke any orders he’s issued.”
“What, did they get to him?” The warmth disappeared from his voice.
“That’s what it looks like,” Setsura calmly replied. “Mayor, when you were first attacked, your secretary was physically abducted. Why weren’t we informed about this earlier?”
The mayor fumbled for a reply. “Well—ah—it must have slipped my mind at the time. I ordered the Chief to launch a search right away. I thought that should suffice.”
“Complacency is our greatest enemy. And by now we may only be shutting the barn doors. I contacted the police and the Chief’s residence. No one knows where he’s been the last two days. Or rather—and this is only a hypothesis—he set off for work the next day and also came home. But at night.”
The mayor mulled this over.
“At night, anybody who saw him wouldn’t have thought there was anything amiss. Last night as well, he would have awoken after sunset, said he was going to the office, and left.”
“Then where is he now?”
“He hasn’t returned home. He must have a retreat somewhere out of the bright light of day.”
“I find all this hard to believe. Do you have any other evidence?”
“Isn’t what I just told you enough?”
“No—it’s sufficient.”
“However, there’s something else I need to ask you.”
“What’s that?”
“Contact all the important players in the ward and find out who among them is sleeping during the day, and where.”
“So you suspect others?” the mayor asked coldly.
“I don’t know. We must avoid harboring unnecessary expectations and unjustified suspicions. If worst comes to worst, they must be treated the same as the Chief. Any encountered while asleep should be wrapped in something opaque and taken to Mephisto Hospital without exposing their bodies to the sun. There are doctors there who know how to handle them.”
“Doctor Mephisto—surely no one else would know better.” The mayor let out a long sigh. “How do I get hold of you?”
“I’ll be in touch.”
“Understood. What are you doing after this?”
“There are some things I need to take care of.”
“I understand. Aki—Setsura-kun—” Warmth returned to the mayor’s voice.
“Yes.”
“I trust you. I know you’ll have my back.”
“I’d appreciate it if you could have a dossier on your secretary—name and photo and personal details—sent over to my place.”
“Will do. It’ll be there ASAP.”
Setsura said goodbye and hung up. From the telephone box he turned onto Waseda Boulevard. It was a relatively safe street, packed with people and cars. And more than anything else, the hustle and bustle of life filled with light.
&nb
sp; Setsura stopped in his tracks, as if stunned by the sheer volume of light. Several seconds later, a shadow of discomfort passed across his comely face, gleaming there in the middle of the day. But then he set off down the street as if nothing was amiss.
During the day, this city was at rest. From a window somewhere came the cry of a bird.
He came to the end of the sidewalk and raised a hand, intending to take a taxi to Mephisto Hospital.
“Hey, you there,” said a hard voice behind him.
Setsura smiled—half grimaced—as he turned around. The bad vibe striking him on the back contained a strong element of fear.
Two uniformed police officers. They looked at him as they might a wanted outlaw. Their right hands rested on the grips of their guns. There wasn’t a police box in sight. They must have chanced upon him during a beat patrol.
“What the problem, officers?” Setsura asked quietly. Things were coming to a boil.
“Are you Setsura Aki?” asked the fifty-something cop.
“Yeah.”
“You’re under arrest. Come with us please.”
“Fine with me. But what’s the charge?”
“You’re on the wanted list. Don’t know the reason.”
“And if I refuse?”
The faces of the two grew hard. Setsura didn’t think he had that kind of a reputation. The all-points bulletin must have made him out to be a real bad guy. They pulled out their Magnum revolvers and flipped off the safeties. Their trigger fingers twitched. The trigger fingers of Shinjuku cops itched a lot more than those in the outside world.
These Magnums had a double-action trigger pull of seven pounds, with four pounds in single action. Like the cops who carried them, it didn’t take much to send the bullets flying.
Running away would be simple enough. And in another five minutes or so, they’d get the mayor’s orders to countermand the Chief of Police. More than that, though, Setsura was curious.
He held up his hands. “Don’t worry. I’ll come along quietly.”
The cops relaxed considerably. The younger of the two thumbed his mike and called for a patrol car. They didn’t search him. Police procedures went differently in this city. Weapons could be hidden inside of bones and hair could turn into knives. Patting down a suspect was the height of stupidity. Claws and fangs might be bared, and clothes and skin could spout poison.
The citizens of Shinjuku streamed past, emotionless, without rubbernecking. On top of it being an everyday occurrence, there was the added wisdom of minding one’s own business. Sightseers who stopped and gawked were caught up in the flow. And what they were staring at, of course, were Setsura’s good looks.
The patrol car arrived in five minutes. It wasn’t an ordinary street vehicle, but a mobile police armored personnel carrier. Flanked by two cops, Setsura sat down in the back.
As the vehicle raced down Waseda Boulevard, Setsura asked, “So what was in that APB?”
“No talking,” the young cop said in a brusque voice.
“Ah, give it a break,” interjected the commando cop next to him. “You won’t make any friends in this town being such a hardass. If you don’t lighten up, a greenie like you won’t make it through the first weekend. Don’t you think, Aki-san?”
The older man furrowed his brows. “You know each other?”
“I heard about him from my old squad leader. Found him this morning in Kabuki-cho, his head clean cut off. Even though he was decapitated at night, the medical examiner put the time of death at three hours later. It may have been some new species of monster, but he was still a colleague. I’m Endou. Kusama-san was the one who showed me the ropes. Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
“As for the charges. Pretty serious stuff. Comes down to bumping off five brokers in Arakimachi and bombing a daycare center in Kamiochiai.”
“That is pretty serious stuff,” Setsura conceded, staring up at the ceiling of the car.
Six months before, a certain “Mr. T,” a currency broker, was gunned down in Arakimachi along with four of his associates. It seemed cult-related. Their bodies were riddled with 9 mm parabellum rounds and then devoured—except for the heads. The corpses—or rather, the leftovers—were scattered across the interior of the business like a carpet of red roses.
The wise guys in Shinjuku’s Nichome—”crime central”—offered up a healthy reward for the thugs who’d bombed the daycare center. If word got out that Setsura had voluntarily turned himself in, even as a suspect, the hundreds of bounty hunters on the case would be mad enough to spit fire.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be a homicidal maniac,” Setsura observed blandly.
Endou laughed in a hoarse voice. “Yeah, you keep your nose clean. Threw me for a loop too. And yet you climbed in here without a fuss. But I figured that’s because you and the squad leader go way back.”
“Thanks.”
Endou addressed his fellow officers. “I hate to keep harping on this, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“The idea didn’t just pop into our heads,” the younger of the uniformed cops said. “The Chief authorized the APB himself. Just following orders.”
“It’s not like it’s our job to go around picking up innocent people.” Endou patted him on the shoulder with his club-like fist, hard enough to wrinkle the cop’s body armor.
“Yeah, that’s enough,” said the driver, who’d been quiet until now. “We’re almost there. But I’ve never heard the Chief give a direct order like that, not in the last ten years. Still, strange things have been going on lately.”
“What kind of strange things?” Setsura leaned forward.
The driver glanced up at the rearview mirror and coughed. He did his best to mask his state of mind when looking at Setsura’s face. “Oh, this and that.”
“What kind of this and that?” Setsura asked again, looking at the driver in the rearview mirror.
“Hey!”
Endou reached over and grabbed the steering wheel. The vehicle was riding up on the shoulder of the road. The driver tore his eyes away from the rearview mirror.
“Sorry.”
“No problem. I’m not surprised, what with this lady-killer in the back.”
“Yeah.”
These two were rugged and battle-tested. The two in the back, holding onto their seats for dear life, looked like they were about to lose their lunches. That kind of lily-livered reaction disqualified them as candidates for the mobile police. They had to have the nerves to blow away a water demon passing as an exact replica of a human, based only on gut instincts only. The kind of savoir faire to take a smoking break in a room full of dynamite and casually flick away the burning match.
Before Setsura could resume his questioning, the shadow of a rectangular building eclipsed them on the right. The closest police station, Totsuka Station.
Chapter Two
Setsura walked willingly into the holding cell on the first floor. Along with the X-ray machines and metal detectors, prisoners were administered special drugs to exorcise any demonic beings lurking inside them.
The monkey cages were at the very back of the station, located behind three heavy steel doors. The isolation cells were reserved for the most violent criminals. The bars were made from high-tensile alloy steel, each over an inch in diameter. The foundations consisted of hardened concrete as resilient as a Cold War era atomic bomb shelter.
Setsura had gone along with the charade this far in order to smoke out his enemy and force them to make the first move. What the raven told him at Nuvenberg’s house and the behavior of the police right now fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The mayor’s secretary had turned the Chief of Police, but for some reason he hadn’t ordered Setsura killed on sight. Perhaps because that was an order few cops would obey. In any case, now that he’d been confined here, he intended to wait out the assassins sure to come when night fell.
There were plenty of other things to think through in the me
antime. Takako’s condition. Her mother’s. What Yakou and his gang were up to. What Mephisto was up to. Mephisto had always been an unknowable quality. When he got like this, it was hard not to think he was a lot closer to them than he was to us.
Setsura hadn’t told him about being bit, but he couldn’t count on Ryuuki or Shuuran not to spill the beans. When that happened, there was no telling how Mephisto would react. He sensed it wouldn’t be pleasant. So he kept mum. But his current situation meant he had to leave everything else to Mephisto’s discretion.
The only step he’d taken was to ask Endou what time he got off work, and ask him to stop by with a care package. Endou was agreeable to the proposition.
The next few hours passed without incident. Then Endou appeared, accompanied by a guard carrying a shotgun. “Long time, no see,” he joked in a strangely formal tone of voice. He stood in front of the cell, pretty much blocking the view.
Including the isolation cells, shared cells and the holding pens, there were fifty monkey cages in the Totsuka Station lockup. Thirty were single-occupancy. There weren’t many concerns about housing petty thieves and purse snatchers together. The reason for the disparity was the large number of criminals who would just as soon kill their bunkmates as say hello.
Setsura’s first-class cell was one of ten, five on either side of a narrow corridor. Oddly enough, he was the only one there.
“Here you go,” Endou said, holding out a paper bag.
Setsura looked inside and smiled wryly. Thick, baked senbei. Tea in a styrofoam cup, the kind sold at fast-food joints.
“The squad leader told me once that senbei was a specialty of yours. The driver got the tea. He says it’s good for you. He added to give him a call if you’re in the mood for a jailbreak.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Setsura said with a nod.
In another context, the gesture might have been taken for that of a spoiled scion who’d never broken a sweat in his life. Even the jail clerk was a bit taken aback.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 2 Page 14
