But as soon as he recognized the figure with heavy-lidded eyes and dressed in torn clothing as a woman, the driver felt an indescribable chill on the back of his neck, and began to question his instinctual decision to nab one last fare.
Before he could shut the door, the woman was in the cab. The numerous dark stains on her white cheongsam only heightened his anxieties.
“Where to, ma’am?”
The cheer in his voice was the result of working this street for over twenty years now.
“My head hurts.”
She had a light foreign accent and a voice as sweet as honey. The driver was instantly enraptured.
“You sick?”
“I was burned.”
“That’s terrible.”
But hardly unusual in this city. Unless the cops were standing right there with their guns drawn, a Shinjuku taxi couldn’t deny a ride even to a wanted serial killer. This driver had once picked up a cyborg cradling its own head in its arms and hauled it off to a repair shop.
“Is it bad? Want me to take a look?”
“That’s all right.”
“I understand. Mephisto Hospital is your best bet.”
She didn’t reply.
“He could probably fix you up while you’re sitting in the waiting room. He’s the Demon Physician, after all.”
“Take me there, please.”
The woman’s voice until now had struck him as high-handed and aloof. Now the taxi driver zealously and happily complied. Not to mention that the side of her face he could see was so damned attractive.
“Hold on tight! Be there in a flash!”
He pressed the accelerator to the floor. Despite its humble fuel source, the liquid propane engine had remarkable acceleration.
Chapter Two
In his study, Naokichi Kumagaki scanned his thick volume of A History of Crime in Western Europe. Hearing his wife announce the arrival of a guest, his face clouded over. Even though his home in Yochou was in an established “safety zone,” a guest calling after nine o’clock was always cause for alarm.
He’d heard about the attack on the mayor’s office that afternoon, and had received a personal communiqué from the mayor himself. Elite bodyguards were posted at the residences of all the movers and shakers in Shinjuku.
Naokichi Kumagaki was the Shinjuku Chief of Police.
When he asked, his wife said it was Hiromi Oribe, the mayor’s private secretary. The Chief briefly wondered why the mayor’s missing secretary would show up here, but decided to see her and find out.
Following the mayor’s orders, four tough-looking guards had been posted at his home as well. All came from a private security company. Kumagaki didn’t trust his own subordinates.
His cell phone doubled as an intercom, and he again considered calling the mayor, but didn’t. Four or five days before, they’d practically come to blows over increasing the patrols. He had nothing against the man personally, but on that subject, it was like talking to a brick wall.
And he was still in the dark about the vampire connection to the aforementioned incident.
Hiromi Oribe walked into the living room and quietly sat down on the sofa next to the window. Other than looking a bit pale, nothing about her seemed out of the ordinary.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. I heard you were kidnapped. It’s a relief to see you’ve made it here in one piece.”
He spoke with an authoritative masculinity. Hiromi smiled her always charming, feminine smile. She explained that she’d found herself wrapped in an impenetrable darkness and lost track of space and time. When she came to, she was in an alley just up the street.
Fortunately, she remembered the Kumagaki residence from the last time she’d been there with the mayor. So after contacting the mayor’s office, she’d headed straight here, the closest safe place she could think of.
She had no idea what had gone on during those missing hours, and her concern for the mayor’s welfare after she’d disappeared led Kumagaki to believe he could trust her.
“In any case, you need to rest. I’ll get you a sedative. Later we’ll go to see the mayor. Tomorrow I’d like you to come down to police headquarters.”
“That’d be fine.”
“If you’d just hold on for a while. I’ll have somebody come from headquarters.”
Kumagaki got up and went over to the videophone on one side of the living room. He had picked up the receiver and was dialing the number when a cold breath tickled the back of his neck.
“What—?”
As he turned his head, he felt a strong pressure against his thigh. The secretary’s voluptuous, provocative face filled his field of vision. She brazenly slipped her hand inside his robe and down the front of his pajama bottoms, and grabbed hold of his manhood.
That was enough for the Chief to lose a grip on his higher reasoning abilities. The waves of red-hot desire broadcasted themselves at her through his cock. Her hands—as pliant as streams of water—invaded his pajama bottoms and drew him out and stroked him.
“How’s that, Chief?”
The purr in her voice and the lust on her face—so unlike the normally crisp and cool public servant—made her seem like a completely different person. He moaned.
Four guards were camped out in the room adjacent to the bright living room, not to mention the other members of his family.
“I see you watching me all the time, asking yourself, What’s beneath that haughty exterior? What are those breasts like? That ass, those thighs. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I-It’s the truth.”
“Right now you’re picturing the shape of my bra, the cut and color of my panties. How tight they’re cupping my breasts and squeezing my butt. Whether the fabric is sheer enough to see my nipples and my crotch? That’s right, isn’t it?”
She repeated the carnal questions, her insistent fingers stroking the middle-aged man’s invigorated erection. “It’s all right by me. I’ll show you everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Get on the intercom and tell them not to disturb you for a while.”
This heroic public servant, this man entrusted with the safety of the most dangerous and tumultuous city in the world, surrendered to a hand job. He did as he was told and hung up the phone.
“Stop dawdling,” he growled, an animal shaking in anticipation of further sexual treats.
In the living room—where anybody could walk in on them at any time—the mayor’s secretary took off her silk blouse. And then her skirt. All that tempting white skin robbed the Chief of his voice.
Though maintaining at all times the facade of a frostily intellectual college coed, reduced to only a white bra and panties, she had a fuck me look about her that stood more than a man’s hair on end.
“You’ll have to do the rest by yourself.”
“Ahh—” His eyes bugged out. Saliva foamed at the corners of his mouth. His rough hands seized her around the waist. The bra fell away. It really was a size too small. Her large breasts had been straining to be set free. The indentations from the underwires showed on her skin.
The Chief bent her back and applied his lips to her left breast and nipple. He didn’t mind the coolness of the flesh filling his mouth. While he suckled, he slipped his hand inside her panties and massaged the soft mound between her legs. How he’d wanted to fondle that softness. How he’d wanted to eat her up.
Her left breast shining and wet, he set to ravaging her right. Then he fell to his knees and slowly pulled down her panties. The abundant curve of her ass, the bold line of her thighs—all drew to a focus in her black, luxuriant bush.
The panties fell to her ankles. She stepped out of them.
The Chief kissed the inside of her right thigh, applied the surface of his damp tongue to her skin, like a cat grooming itself. When he reached her rich thicket, Hiromi Oribe uttered a low moan.
Her strong fragrance stained his hands as he searched out her hidden entranceway and plunged in with his tongue. A rumbling purr spilled from her
mouth, like that of a large, menacing cat.
After listening to him lap at her for what seemed like hours, she stepped back. “Stand up,” she ordered him. He complied. She pulled back the collar of his dressing gown and hung her arms around his neck. “And now for the one true pleasure—”
Her red lips attached themselves to his stout neck, and sucked his blood like a leech.
Ten minutes later, Kumagaki’s wife watched nervously as her husband and the mayor’s secretary got into his car and raced off on “urgent business.” She’d only asked that the secretary be entrusted to the four bodyguards instead. She wasn’t comfortable with the way he instructed her not to speak of the mayor’s secretary to anybody else.
But she knew from personal experience that the Chief was a man not above resorting to bouts of rage and even physical violence when he didn’t get his way. And so she did as she was told.
Chapter Three
A human form emerged in the headlights. A man. He looked like a bum or vagrant. He buried his face in his arms and dove behind an outcropping of rocky debris.
“Doctor—” Yakou called out.
Mephisto was a step ahead of him. “Stop the car,” he ordered.
They were in the middle of the Keio Hospital grounds. At this time of night, it was unlikely that any slumbering thing was actually human. It’d be much safer to assume that any “human” was only a creature pretending to be human.
As soon as the car door opened, Mephisto sprinted off in the direction of the mountain of rocks the “man” had disappeared behind.
Beneath the light of the almost-full moon, the ruins took on a cold glow, still as a graveyard. But with the appearance of a single man and the sweep of his pure white cape, the mood of the desolate scene suddenly shifted.
The inorganic rocky mountain seemed to absorb the moonlight. The distant whistle of the wind as well ceased to blow, and instead played a paean to his beauty. Entranced and yet grieving that it could not mingle its atoms with his, the wind sang to Doctor Mephisto.
There was beauty even in his shadow as he circled the mountain. Yakou raced up behind him. Another mountain sat in front of them. The path forked in two directions.
“What do you think?” Mephisto asked.
Yakou closed his eyes and then opened them. “I cannot say.” There was a barb in his words. “I would think these grounds would be more familiar to you than to me.”
“This doctor knows only the grounds of the human body.”
“Sorry.”
“Something on your mind?”
“No, nothing.”
“We needn’t concern ourselves with him.”
“Understood.”
“Stay on your toes.”
Yakou didn’t answer at first. He didn’t know how well Mephisto could see in the dark, but the young vampire’s cheeks burned a rosy pink.
“I’ll go right. You take the left, Doctor.”
“Got it.”
The moonlight scattered around them like silver dust as the two parted ways.
It was a strange path. Despite there being no logic to the piles of debris, in the depths of the darkness, the mountains of rubble completely blocked out the buildings further on. Or perhaps this was because they’d been dumped there without any other purpose in mind.
In any case, the winding paths twisted and turned and combined together again, taking one detour after the other, until all sense of direction was lost.
After walking for five minutes, Mephisto stopped in his tracks. “This feels like the meandering back alleyways of Kabuki-cho. But it looks like the end is in sight.”
The meaning of the “end” soon became apparent. A dozen or so feet in front of him stood a girl. The word “girl,” though, would only describe her face. The fragrance entwined about her sumptuous body radiated with all the ripeness and vigor of a woman in the prime of her youth.
She was wearing a dark green tunic and Chinese trousers. Her black hair was drawn up into buns behind each ear. Setsura would have recognized her on the spot. She was the enchantress Shuuran, one of the gang of four.
She stared back at Mephisto with a dumbfounded look on her face. Perhaps not even an enchantress was immune to the Demon Physician’s physical beauty.
“I don’t believe it’s been our pleasure to meet,” Doctor Mephisto said in Chinese. He bowed. “My dialect is Song Dynasty. I hope you understand me.”
“You speak well,” she said with a dainty toss of her head. “A pretty man in white. Would you introduce yourself? I am Shuuran.”
“I am Doctor Mephisto.”
“How about that!” She did a good job of containing her uncontained surprise. The tension created by her raw physicality shattered. The moonlight congealed into a raw bloodlust.
“But of course. That strange feeling in the air. You must have brought the copper around and milked the information out of him. A good thing I came back to make sure that vagrant was good and dead. It’s up to Princess and me to clean up after Sir Kikiou’s messes.”
“I see. So, the other one is here as well?”
“No, not here.”
“Then where?” Mephisto asked softly. No matter how strange a being he was confronted with, he always proceeded as calmly as if he was filling out a medical chart. The creature did not exist that could throw him off his stride.
Until now—
“She’s gone to see the Elder of the Toyama housing project. I’m sure she’ll stop by later for tea with you and Setsura Aki.”
At the sound of those names, for the first time, a mixture of emotions colored the Doctor’s eyes like a light mist. It too soon vanished. He said, “It was I who discerned your whereabouts first. Remind me to give that useless P.I. a piece of my mind.”
“If you are referring to our kingdom, it is far too early for you to declare victory.” Shuuran’s eyes glowed red. “I will inscribe the epitaph on your tombstone before you set one foot there.”
“Alas, I have already entrusted that task to someone else,” said Mephisto, a faraway look in his eyes. “It seems you are in need of medical attention as well. To cure you of your overconfidence, among other things.”
He spoke almost chattily, as if the reality of the situation was the furthest thing from his mind. But there were graver echoes in his voice as well, pointed enough to make Shuuran blanch. Her quip about the gravestone had rubbed him quite the wrong way.
She reached into the buns of hair behind each ear, plucking out a pair of silver, crescent-shaped ornaments. As he stood there, two streaks of light appeared to pierce Mephisto’s neck, traveling another half-dozen yards past him before turning like boomerangs and returning to her hands without diminishing in speed.
Shuuran said, “My combs.”
They definitely looked like ordinary silver combs. But the teeth were as sharp as fangs of cold steel, the curved handles like sharpened scythes.
“I’m impressed,” Mephisto said softly. “But digging my grave with an ordinary shovel would be easier.”
For a brief moment, Shuuran gaped at him, at his untouched neck. “True, if that had been enough to kill you, I would have branded Sir Kikiou a coward forever after. The real fight begins now.”
Shuuran raised the comb in her right hand and drew it across her left wrist. The fresh blood spouted like a fountain, beautiful in the moonlight, and splashed onto the ground.
She licked her wrist. The blood stopped flowing. She cast her eyes down at the pool of blood at her feet, then spun around and dashed off into the darkness.
What happened next would have startled anybody but Mephisto. He started after her, but stopped. A strange sound struck his ears. An exquisitely sweet melody. Mephisto’s ears alone would have detected that it came from those two silver combs meshing together. The song seemed composed to inspire the listener to chase after the moon and waste his life away listening to lonesome dirges.
The pool of blood rapidly mutated. Something squirmed in the middle of the thick, congeali
ng mass. Earth. But not the natural surface of the ground. Here and there, black dirt could be seen through cracks and fissures. Beneath the blood was asphalt, but it looked to Mephisto’s eyes like earth.
A moment later, the squirming was swallowed up by the blood. It stilled, and then in a flash rose up from the center of the black-red tide. It started out as a doll four inches high and quickly grew to eighteen inches. Eyes emerged, then a nose. The disturbed ground even fashioned itself into clothing.
Another moment later, this doll born from the pool of blood reached the same height as Shuuran. The doll’s red lips parted, revealing her white teeth.
“Hey, big guy. Do me.”
Mephisto stood rooted to the spot, as if mesmerized by the sound of her voice. Any man hearing those words would fall into the same trance. So he did as he was told and reached out his arms. Such was the magical allure of her words.
Then she was there in front of him. And then climbing up his back. How she moved was impossible to tell.
Mephisto didn’t budge.
The doll opened her mouth. A pair of fangs sprang out. She pulled at the collar of his white cape with her little hands and lowered her mouth to the almost-feminine, almost-transparent skin at the nape of his neck.
Uttering sweet, beguiling instructions and stealing away the will of her prey, she attached herself to his neck with movements too quick for the eye to follow. That by itself was fearsome enough magic. Except that the doll’s mouth paused.
Her coquettish face trembled. She blinked.
“Go ahead and drink your fill,” Mephisto said. “But can you find a well that isn’t dry?”
The doll listened for the rush of blood through the blood vessels in order to determine where to sink her fangs. And though she craned her ears and focused her gaze, she couldn’t detect the pulse of blood beneath the translucent skin.
Did blood even flow through the veins of the good doctor? The reason for its existence negated, the doll peeled off his back, dropped to the asphalt and broke into pieces.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 1 Page 18
