The girl’s face was right before his eyes. Shuuran had twisted the upper half of her torso a full ninety degrees. But his mind simply could not seize on the physical incongruity.
She plastered her mouth against his. She really seemed to enjoy it. Her round, wet tongue pushed into his mouth. He sucked on it in a trance. Shuuran pulled her mouth away and bit down on the lobe of his ear. She jabbed her tongue into his grimy ear and puffed hot breaths. Long Hair’s body swelled with delight.
Her lips trailed down his neck. There was a short stab of pain and he felt something hard entering him. And then a moment later, something flowing out of him.
“I’ve seen enough,” came Biki’s voice. “Finish him off and toss him out with the others. That was a fine show-and-tell.”
The voice that echoed in this vagrant’s ears meant nothing to him.
Part 5: Bad Seed
Chapter One
Yasukuni Avenue was always thronged with crowds of people shortly before noon.
A tourist might curiously trail after them wondering what the big deal was. Spying the sign on the building drawing them in, “My word,” he would exclaim, and then smile knowingly.
The building itself preserved something of an aura from the old days. But that really amounted to nothing more than several aspects of the prior structure being adopted during the reconstruction. The original had been torn down to the foundations.
Employees who’d worked there before claimed that not much had changed about their jobs. The bold calligraphy gracing the large oak sign at the entranceway to the former headquarters of the Pension Fund Association clearly identified its current function:
Shinjuku Ward Government Offices
These days, practically nobody knew why it’d been moved from what had become the grounds of a private hospital to this location.
The staff had been reduced by a third since the Devil Quake. Procedures and paperwork had increased fifty times, but they had three times as many computer installations at their disposal. Thanks to technologies unmatched in the outside world, state-of-the-art biocomputers and light fiber networks had vastly lessened the workload.
In Shinjuku, the words “government work” had ceased to be an object of scorn. But no matter how well they were prepared for the noon break rush, the reception area in the ward office building was packed this day too.
The strangeness began the moment a woman sitting on the sofa next to the window—apparently prompted by the screech of brakes—got up and turned to look at the building directory.
A black curtain enveloped the world.
Backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies were programmed to automatically switch on when power failures interfered with normal work duties.
That didn’t happen. Afterward, it was determined that this was because the computers had not interpreted the overwhelming psychic force as “darkness.” However, at the time, the people in the reception area let their disapproval be heard.
The darkness that surrounded them was total. It was the same darkness experienced inside a coffin or vault, sealed and secured and buried deep within the earth.
The reception area didn’t erupt in panic. These were citizens of Shinjuku. A solution or explanation would quickly be forthcoming. As soon as surprise was about to give way to real fear, the darkness vanished, leaving not a single trace behind. As if whatever task had needed doing had been done.
The computers hummed merrily on as they had before. The employees simply picked up where they had left off. None of the usual hitches occurred, such as the date of birth on a birth certificate slipping a day and screwing up the issuance order for insurance cards.
The aforementioned woman—the wife of a respected general contractor who’d been impatiently waiting with a very put-out air—cradled a Persian cat in her arms with greater care than she would ever give her own child. Not a single whisker was out of place.
According to the building directory, the ward mayor’s office was on the fourth floor.
The small waiting room off the main hallway was furnished with a desk for his secretary, a plain sofa, and a coffee table.
Mayor Yoshitake Kajiwara was consulting with an old woman. As a personal favor, she wanted first dibs on a shipment of salt from the outside world. When he hesitated, she offered him a sweetener. His big, smug eyes widened even further.
The old woman raised her head. The fierce look on the deeply-wrinkled face—that had otherwise lent her the appearance of a kindly old grandmother—made Kajiwara’s whole body stiffen.
“W-What—?”
“We’ve got guests,” said the old woman, her eyes glittering. “And it looks like they’re here to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
The mayor stood up and started to return to his luxurious desk. All the lights flickered out. A sudden shadow descended upon them. He tried to speak but only babbled in a panic.
“Don’t move,” the old woman said. The tension in her voice was fused with rapt curiosity.
The mayor couldn’t see a thing. He couldn’t feel the floor beneath his feet. A primordial sense of unease pressed in on him from the eternal emptiness in all directions. The woman on the sofa a yard away sounded like she was miles off in the distance.
Another voice invaded the darkness; a voice deep, heavy and of an indeterminate age. “I sensed your presence before we arrived. I suspected you would prove troublesome. Nonetheless, I thought it better to seek an audience now. What’s your name, decrepit witch?”
The old woman replied, “Don’t they teach you manners where you come from, grandpa? This decrepit witch has been walking the earth since there was but one kingdom in the entire world. She will give your memories a good shaking.”
Despite the sheer denseness of the blackness, Mayor Kajiwara realized that these other people could see. The hair rose on the back of his neck.
It was silent for several long seconds. Then, “Oh, so the rough work is left to the young?” the old woman said. “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes either. You think this decrepit witch’s blood will reward you with a long-awaited stroll in the sun? I don’t happen to be in a giving mood.”
“Our business wasn’t with you in the first place.”
The young man’s voice pushed the mayor’s shock to the limits. The darkness was unsettling enough. These two intruders conversing casually with the old woman only compounded his confusion. The name of his secretary in the next room popped into the mayor’s mind.
“Are you there, Oribe? Oribe? Raise the alarm!”
He couldn’t tell if he’d gotten through to his secretary, but an abnormality in any of the five basic sensor groups should trigger the automatic warning system. Surely the photovoltaic sensors would be reading off the scale.
“That won’t do any good,” the old man said.
For the first time, Kajiwara realized that though he spoke Japanese fluently, he had an accent, Chinese or some other Asian tongue.
“Nothing can escape this shadow, neither sound nor light. Nothing that enters leaves. The same holds true for any wired or wireless communication. Mr. Mayor, your secretary is taking a nap. Our business is with you.”
“Show me your faces first. Tell me your names.”
“You will understand soon. Once you give to us a little bit of what is yours.”
“And what would that be?”
“That would be your blood,” the old man replied. “However, we must rid ourselves of this annoying woman. We could ignore her and start over from scratch, but I expect she will arouse more of our enemies. We certainly don’t need the likes of her as a servant. Only as a sacrifice to our celebration of blood.”
Kajiwara still could see nothing. Beyond a few remedial lessons, he’d never been much for sports, let alone the martial arts, and yet even he could feel the bloodlust staining every molecule of the pitch dark. A war was going on right in front of him.
“Stop!” he shouted. He groped in the empty air in front of him. “S
top it!”
Violent psychic waves beat against his face. Sputtering senseless words, he spun around like a top, his body and muscles battling for equilibrium. Other forces controlled him.
Terrifying powers assaulted him, ejecting him from the black pit. His head struck something hard. He felt like his skull had caved in. He realized he’d landed on the sofa. Either the cushions had turned to stone or his senses were completely scrambled.
The old woman laughed. “Well done for a youngster.” This wasn’t sarcasm, but the bemused laughter of a warrior who’d found a worthy opponent whose abilities matched her own. “Your qi is impressive. But how much have you truly learned in all your young years?”
A bright spot appeared in Kajiwara’s ink-stained sight, like a magnifying glass focusing light on a sheet of black paper. The light spread toward the edges of the sheet and the darkness began to crumble.
“Splendid,” the younger voice said, clearly impressed.
“You spoke of my country,” the older voice said. “Fearful of invaders, my country built walls along the frontiers of the wastelands. In keeping with that tradition, this day we shall withdraw. We have places to go and things to do. But we will return. Witch, I should like to know what you call yourself.”
“You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
“I am Kikiou.”
“I am Ryuuki.”
“My name is hardly worth mentioning, but you would do well to remember Galeen Nuvenberg.”
The fissures in the darkness widened. The heaven-kissed light poured down, burning lines in the air. The light struck the mayor’s face and scattered like a swarm of fireflies.
The artificial night quickly evaporated. It appeared to Kajiwara’s eyes like the last vestiges of the blackness rushed out through the open door.
“My, my,” said the old woman, hugging her arms around her shoulders and drawing a long breath. She turned to Kajiwara. “Are you all right? They didn’t come into contact with you anywhere? Your neck in particular?”
“I’m—that’s—”
“You’re fine.” The old woman slowly sank to her knees. “I’m beat. Chilled down to the bones. Here it is the middle of summer and me knocking heads with an unholy crew like that. Incidentally, they nabbed that pretty young secretary of yours on the way out. Listen to me—”
She paused to take a breath, and continued in a steady voice that belied her condition. “Call Doctor Mephisto and Setsura Aki immediately. After that—”
The old woman, Galeen Nuvenberg, the most powerful wizardess in Demon City, suddenly pitched forward with a thump like a withered old tree blown over by a strong gust of wind.
Mayor Kajiwara had crawled back to his desk at about the same time a team of security guards burst in, automatic weapons locked and loaded. For the next ten minutes, the mayor’s office looked like a football game crammed into a tennis court.
But even for the mayor of Demon City, Kajiwara kept his wits about him to a remarkable degree.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Contact Mephisto Hospital and get hold of Setsura Aki. No. Transport this woman there. That’s your top priority! On the double!”
He snapped out the orders without a hint of self-doubt. “Ms. Oribe has been kidnapped. Find her!”
That was a grave error.
“After that—” the old wizardess had said before losing consciousness. If she’d been able to complete the thought, she would have added, “When you find Ms. Oribe, detain her on the spot. You absolutely cannot allow her to come into contact with anybody of any importance in Shinjuku.”
Neither did Mayor Kajiwara bring up the matter of his secretary when he finally met with Doctor Mephisto and Setsura Aki. If he could have foreseen the consequences of this mistake, he might well have cursed the day he was born.
In a city already crawling with evil sprites, spirits and demons and all their corrupting vices, the scarlet seeds of a poisonous new weed were implanting themselves throughout its very bloodstream.
Chapter Two
Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto politely excused themselves, and left the building manager’s office.
A brisk summer breeze seemed to be trying to sweep away the patches of sunlight and shadow. As though shamed by the sight of so much beauty in one place, it could be that the self-conscious wind was simply scurrying to get out of the way.
Such was the striking figure each of these two men cut. The wind furrowed its brows and frowned and turned around and headed in the opposite direction. But the comely countenances of the two men were also tinted by shades of worry that passersby never paused to notice.
Passing through a plaza watched over by a wary armored personnel carrier, Setsura said, “I’m not sure what I was doing there.”
Mephisto didn’t answer. Not so much because he disagreed, but because he wasn’t in an agreeable mood at the moment.
“I’m cancelling our deal from the other night.”
“You were the one who brought it up.” Mephisto said at length.
“Maybe I did, but that wasn’t me.”
Setsura stared up at a summer sky bright and brimming with life. The only darkness was in the expression on his face.
“Yoshiko Toya is going to tear you a new one.”
“Like I care.”
They walked on for another few minutes.
“Just kidding,” Setsura said.
“I know.”
It was an odd conversation, like two friends talking to each other and past each other at the same time.
A burst from an automatic rifle came from their left.
Setsura spun around. A window shattered on the first floor of one of the soaring buildings. A ghoul leapt out, staggered several steps and then collapsed. Blue smoke curled up from the holes in its lumpy, hunched back.
Intrigued, Setsura approached the shattered window. Behind the glass, heavy curtains blocked out the rest of the light. He pushed them aside. There wasn’t a small apartment behind the curtains, but a large gray room with the dividing walls knocked down.
Stripped of ornamentation, the bare concrete ceiling and floor made him think of a large hotel lobby after a visit from the wrecking ball.
This was where the Toyama vampires slept the day away.
Cool air nipped at his face and hands. It wasn’t air-conditioning. It was the unbreathing presence of the room’s inhabitants. The blue faces of the innumerable bodies stacked up in even columns and rows. A few white-haired oldsters. Youngsters in sweats. Golden-haired grannies. Age, sex, nationality—the one thing they all shared was their dental work.
Their fangs.
As soon as the sun set, they would open their lifeless eyes and arise. Quietly exchange greetings, and discuss “breakfast.”
“So, how do you think it’ll taste today?”
“So, what brand do you think it’ll be today?”
Forever discontent with not being able to drink blood the “old-fashioned way,” but a civilized vampire had to suck it up and soldier on. That was the bottom line for maintaining this safe place of refuge. There were the girls who showed up at the gates, freely offering to share their blood. But the security guards always gave them the boot.
The Toyama residents sat at the tables in the dining hall and drank from the same tank together. Their own accursed food. The substances that promised them eternal life. The human blood shipped via bloodmobile from the blood bank.
Occasionally a child might offer his throat to his frustrated mother. Or a husband might sink his fangs into his wife’s neck. After drinking their fill, some might enjoy each other’s company in the upstairs lobby. Others might go for a stroll in the moonlit “dawn” of the night.
Presently, the two hundred or so residents of the Toyama municipal housing project were those full-blooded, legendary creatures of the night. Vampires.
They lived ordinary lives. They worked security at night depositories and twenty-four hour markets, and engaged in other occupations appropriate to their
particular talents, and received a fair wage in return. Someone at some point had taken to calling this place a “mausoleum for the sunny at heart.”
Setsura let the curtain fall back into place. Even the few faint rays of sunlight had prompted low moans from several of the sleepers in the murky depths of the hall.
“Two hundred, huh?” he muttered to himself.
The fire in the Elder’s belly toward their new enemy was because of them.
It made sense that the otherworldly atmosphere of Shinjuku attracted vampires like a magnet. Most were refugees and exiles driven out of their home countries by the religious and self-righteous. Like the ancient Jews driven out of Egypt, they had sought for themselves a “promised land.”
Still, not to put too fine a point on it, but Shinjuku—where monsters and demons ran rampant—wasn’t Shangri-La.
In the beginning, when the whole vampire “issue” first arose, a petition was delivered to the ward government by two thousand signers. It read: “We defend the right of every kind of being (including the supernatural) to live in this city to the best of his or her abilities.”
The decisive judgment of the ward authorities to let them in, and sell this abandoned city block to the vampires as a “special housing project” would long be remembered by its inhabitants.
But if the vampires ever came to threaten the “normal” lives of the city’s other residents, they were also allowed to take retaliatory measures “to the best of their abilities.” If the truce was ever broken, two hundred wooden stakes pounded into two hundred chests at noon would ring down the curtain in half an hour.
A city where life was lived and death was dealt without regrets—that was Demon City.
If that gang of four were “ordinary” vampires, Setsura and Mephisto could sleep soundly at night as well. But the Elder had filled them in on their true natures.
Coldly observing the guards surrounding the ghoul, with automatic weapons leveled, Setsura asked, “Vampires or ghouls, which is the stronger?”
“Why would anybody need to know?” Mephisto countered. “There seems to be a one-to-one relationship between the two. One of those balance of nature things, perhaps?”
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 1 Page 12
