Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The rain poured down like a roaring waterfall, the raindrops all but carving holes in the concrete and asphalt, and painting Demon City in the chiaroscuro shades of an India ink landscape.

A man stopped next to the high wall adjacent to the west entrance of Chuo Park. In the morning light—so subdued that a drunk would wake up after a bender thinking it was dusk and go back to sleep—a human figure drifted toward him like a gray ghost.

The man considered the time and the place and looked for somewhere to hide. The pelting rain raised a white mist on the hood of his vinyl raincoat and the pack on his back. His face and frame resembled a sturdy concrete block.

He remembered a pile of actual concrete blocks a dozen feet behind him. He spun around and circled behind it. He got a cattle prod out of the pack. It wasn’t electric, but a five-foot polymer model that used ultrasonic waves, effective in wet weather for collecting sprites and the smaller monsters and demons.

Creatures flocked to the DMZ that were out of the ordinary even for Shinjuku. Their numbers swelled particularly at dawn and at dusk. The man’s job was trapping and capturing certain species from among them. The bag was already squirming with a good twenty.

The tottering shadow passed by six feet or so in front of him. The man jumped up and cried out in a schoolgirlish voice totally at odds with his physiognomy, “Aki-chan! Setsura-kun, is that you?”

The comely silhouette didn’t turn to face him. But the man fearlessly ran up to him and spun him around. “Hey, it’s me! Hamada from the Mad Men Society. You found Haruko when she ran away from home. I’ve so been wanting to see you again!”

Even shaken by the shoulders, Setsura did not focus his attention on the square, flushed face. Far from it, the lanky young man kept on going, dragging the two-hundred-pound Hamada along with him.

His eyes were vacant. He’d been sucked through a wormhole in the spacetime that separated the world of the Demon Princess from here, unharmed except for the apparent loss of his consciousness. But that seemed to have released the shackles imposed on his physical self by his mental state—an odd byproduct that allowed his muscles and sinews to function under their own power.

“Hey, what’s up with you? Somebody hypnotize you? You hook up with those night crawlers? That can’t be, wandering around at this time in the morning. No matter. Let me take you home.” He said, as if he’d just come up with a great idea, his voice as cloyingly sweet as honey on jam, “No, you must come to my home.”

Then he remembered that when he’d shaken Setsura, he seemed to be carrying something on his left side. Hamada looked down and squealed, “What—what’s that? The head of an old woman? Baby, when did you turn into a head hunter?”

“Head hunter” was the occupation of an infamous band of psychopaths who wandered the Shinjuku nights in search of fresh skulls.

“Oh, ick!” he shrieked in a feminine manner. “Throw that thing away!”

He tried to take it from him, but Setsura had a grip on the silver hair he couldn’t budge. His right hand swung up and delivered a karate chop to Hamada’s neck.

He staggered, collected himself, and let out a long breath and smiled. Rubbing the bruise he said sweetly, “Nice one. Right where it counts. Aw, such talents wasted on a mere P.I.” Watching Setsura hug the skull to his chest he said, “I get it. She must be a real important old lady. Well, that’s okay too. You and the head, rest easy and leave everything to me!”

He nodded at the dripping-wet handsome man. Moving him by the shoulders, he guided him along like an overbearing mother in charge of a toddler. “This way. No, not that way. This way.”

Perhaps detecting no danger in him, Setsura didn’t resist and did as he was told. Like a pair of lovers out for a stroll on a stormy day, the two disappeared into the rain.

Less than an hour later, four figures appeared in the exact same spot where Hamada had run into Setsura.

“Here?” said Yakou, his wings folded across his back.

“No doubt about it,” answered Kikiou. “We’ll run into each other soon enough.”

He was carrying a square metal case two feet by two feet. He lifted up the staff in his other hand, waved it through the air, and then planted it on the ground. “This way. I can feel it, the remnants of Ryuuki’s demon qi. He can run but he can’t hide from me.”

“Good,” said Yakou. He turned to the two behind him, General Bey and Takako. “Your turn is coming up. General Bey is General Bey, but the girl is rather pitiful.”

A small, pained look came to his face. Pitiful hardly described it. This was Takako, whom he’d once sworn to protect. Princess had turned his heart to stone, but either she’d done a half-assed job of it or the force of Yakou’s personality was reasserting itself. Either way, he’d been raised to be a good English gentleman and some gentlemanly aspect of that upbringing must still persist.

Kikiou looked at him and said, a critical note in his voice, “Exactly.”

“What is?”

“That girl—making her the vanguard in capturing Setsura is pitiful, don’t you think? Mephisto and Princess are calculating that he’ll keep his hands off her. But that man is not only a citizen of Demon City, but something even more terrifying than that. Not a person easily understood. Succeed or fail, General Bey is supposed to pick up the pieces. But that as well is a wager I would not make. And can you be sure that, should the girl be killed, Setsura would not turn on us in a fury?”

“I don’t disagree,” Yakou said with a thin smile. His wet hair was plastered against his forehead. The drumming rain posed no great obstacle to these four. “So, what should we do next?”

“Nothing. As Princess ordered.”

Kikiou flashed a perfunctory smile and glanced at the general and girl behind him. These two were a perfect fit for the Demon City rain. Two points of red light shone from the face shrouded in the dim and smoky darkness. General Bey’s eyes.

And the pale face of Takako Kanan projecting from the transparent gray curtain of rain, wrapped in the ghostly white shroud.

Kikiou shifted his gaze to Yakou, and then to the eastern sky. “We should be on our way, but it is already morning. These two must rest. I have prepared a shadow box, but in this city opportunistic thieves abound. We need to find a safe place. Tell me, Yakou, how shall we while away the time until the night falls?”

“Confirm Setsura’s location and make sure he cannot flee elsewhere. I’m sure we can handle that by ourselves.”

“Happily,” said Kikiou, tenting his fingers together. “Well, Doctor Mephisto, you are turning out as I expected. Very smartly done. I intend to test the limits of just how useful you will turn out to be.”