Chapter One

Chapter One

“Where are you going?”

The voice was right next to him. Though he clearly understood that, it could just as well have descended from the heavens or welled up from beneath his feet—a dire and mysterious voice luring his mind into stupefaction and turmoil.

“To the manor house,” Mephisto answered shortly.

“To do what?” Walking along beside him, Princess peered at Takako’s face.

“I promised Setsura I would restore this girl to human form.”

“Can you do such a thing?”

Princess shifted her gaze, filled with curiosity, to Mephisto. Since her reign as vampire queen began—or perhaps because of it—no vampire had, by itself, reassumed human form. Hence her great intrigue.

“I cannot say for now,” said Mephisto, as a doctor—as the Demon Physician—a decidedly qualified answer.

“You cannot,” said Princess, her eyes brimming with an indescribable light. “Don’t you think that tens of thousands have also attempted it in the past? Some have succeeded, but not through the healing arts. A stake through the heart of the vampire who sucked their blood, the head cut off. Ha! Can you kill me, Demon Physician?”

“That is something a doctor cannot say.”

Mephisto looked down at Takako. With a jerk, she wrapped her arms around his neck. A moment later, they snapped off cleanly at the elbows and dropped to the ground.

Blood sprayed across his white cape. Takako screamed. Raising her hands against her will, Setsura’s invisible threads had sliced off her arms. Without so much as a blink, Mephisto placed his hands over the severed limbs. The fountains of blood ceased. So did Takako’s screams.

With a simple touch, he had staunched the blood and quelled the pain.

“Oh, so you care enough to also make use of your qi?”

“Not to the same degree as Kikiou. But it is within a doctor’s province. We must, however, remain cruelly unbowed by sentiment.”

“Hoh. It seems that making this girl human again will hardly tax your talents. Then neither should replacing an arm or two. But if you like, I will happily lend a hand.”

“Then why don’t you?” Mephisto said.

He stepped forward and seized Princess’s right arm. The way she pulled back reflexively, she must have felt something—with a single twist of his wrist, her arm broke like a branch.

“Nice one.” Cradling the broken limb, Princess smiled.

“This is not to say what is in your heart is any great mystery to me, but I promised Setsura that not a finger would be laid upon my patient. Having broken that promise, the price must be paid. It is you towards whom I must remain cruelly unbowed by sentiment.”

Princess’s hand slipped out of Mephisto’s grip. Not because he released it, but with a simple flick of her wrist. She touched the elbow with her free hand. With an audible pop, the fracture healed.

“No matter how great the Demon Physician may be, he cannot overcome my powers of regeneration. Is this the price you spoke of?”

“Think of that as a passing hello.” Mephisto nodded gracefully and strode off.

For the woman left behind, no experience could have been more ominous. What possible price might the Demon Physician exact? As she watched the man in the white cape walk away, the face of the beautiful vampire queen broke into a broad smile.

“Demon Physician’s revenge. How dreadful it must be. But I remain indestructible.”

The most important thing to this woman was life itself. A vampire was already dead. Was such a life the life of the living dead, or could it be called the personification of death itself?

“Damn it, Setsura, you’ve made your way through. Now the real show begins. I prepared that village especially for you. Make the most of the delights awaiting you. I’m sure you’ll be the life of the party.”

There in the midst of the deep green world, Princess threw back her head and laughed. The contours of her face bathed in light, this seemed the pure laughter of an innocent child.

That night, a great commotion filled the skies above Shinjuku. The police and ward helicopter patrols all scanned the earth with one particular objective in mind.

Among them was a Shinjuku police patrol jet helicopter called “Night Moon.” It was flying from West Waseda to Kikuicho and Bentencho. Passing through the air above Haramachi, a strange sight appeared in the pilot’s night scope.

Here and there in Shinjuku remained scattered blocks of ruins. In one corner of one of them, in a field twenty yards in diameter, burned a bright flame. What caught the pilot’s attention was the nature of the fire. The people lying there had beer bottles in their hands, and more were scattered about.

A bunch of ordinary drunks, obviously. But this fire—a bonfire? It was a sweltering night in August.

The pilot hovered a hundred feet above the ground and zoomed in with the undercarriage camera. The image on the screen magnified. A second later, the detail sharpened and filled in.

He knew at once what this “fire” was: a nuclear reactor. The automatic safeties should have kicked in once an out-of-plumb condition was detected, but this must be an aftermarket model, with crap specs to match.

“Shit, these drunks are really getting out of control. I can’t believe they busted up a nuke. What do you want to do?”

The gunner in the back seat tapped the pilot on the shoulder.

“What?”

“Those aren’t shadows beneath them. That’s blood.”

“No way.”

“Definitely blood.”

“Now what?” asked the pilot. In two-man situations like this, the gunner had command authority.

“Call it into the ground troops. Until they arrive, let’s maintain this position. Hail ’em on the speakers.”

“Roger.”

The helicopter’s external speakers blared out: “This is Shinjuku police helicopter Night Moon. We’re observing you from above. If anybody’s alive down there, wave a hand or something. Our cameras will pick up any movement.”

By that point, the specifics of the slaughter were showing up on the screen. From their clothing, they seemed to be vagrants. There were eleven of them. Four were women. Three were children. Dead as nails.

“That kid is face up. Throat’s been cut.”

“What the hell went on here?” asked the pilot, having radioed the situation into headquarters. He swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He took note of an oddity. “Hey, not much blood on the women.”

All the rest were lying in pools of blood large enough to be mistaken for shadows.

“Vampires—those Toyama bastards.”

“Naw. They all got blown to kingdom come. Vampire or nutball, what we got here is serial killer stuff. The other seven weren’t killed for their blood, but after the fact.”

“Hells bells.”

“I’m turning her around.” The pilot regripped the joystick. “Let’s widen the search. Look at the kid. Blood’s still flowing. The perp’s got to be in the vicinity.”

“Okay.”

“We catch up with him, you’d better arrest him on the spot. Or I may just blow him away.”

“Roger that.” The gunner nodded, not letting go of the firing controls.

The tightly-contained roar of the engine slanted down against the asphalt as the pilot initiated a widening right turn.

“Got him!” he called out.

A naked man was walking north on one of the streets leading out of the ruins. He was carrying a musical instrument that looked like a koto in one hand. Not all that unusual a sight for Shinjuku. But based on the situation and the circumstances, the pilot knew in his gut it was him.

A searchlight shot out from the undercarriage of the helicopter and enveloped the man. “Hey, naked guy, stop right there and raise your hands!”

According to regulations, the pilot made the command in measured tones. The man came to a halt. His skin glowed white within the ring of light. Not a blemish marred his skin. Only his hair was singed, but in a way that suggested the stylings of some avant-garde fashion model.

He didn’t plant his arms against the wall on the right as ordered, but lifted his face toward the helicopter.

“Fucking A—” the gunner groaned.

The pilot had the same reaction. Though the man’s mouth was painted with black blood, his symmetrical face—a match to his equally proportioned body—managed a balance of grace and ruggedness. The black stain from his throat to his chest, however, created a sight that was anything but refined.

Like a man who had just indulged himself beyond his own ability to believe, the eyes looking up at the helicopter were empty voids.

“Son of a bitch looks like he just stuffed himself to the gills.” The gunner growled like a tiger. “After what he did to that kid, he deserves what’s coming to him.”

“A chameleon’s gonna be here in another minute, and a patrol car’s on the way. Hold it together. Let’s not add to the body count.”

The eyes of the pilot gazing down through the polarized glass were no less filled with loathing. A deep and abiding hatred of crime and criminals—that was the “first principle” drilled into the heads of the Shinjuku Police Force, the “Demon City Cops.” The kind of take-it-easy attitude towards lawlessness tolerable outside this city was impossible inside it.

Gangs with guns buried in their guts wired to their autonomic reflexes that would unload on a cordon of cops when they raised their hands to surrender—

Mad bombers who’d wire the scene of the crime to explode when law enforcement arrived, taking out the evidence and the cops in one fell swoop—

Assassins who targeted cops as a specialty, the hairs on their bodies turning into needles that could kill with a hug, passing themselves off as dancers in strip clubs and aphrodisiac bars—

Serving alongside a veteran for a week turned the sweetest greenhorn into an ogre when it came to the criminal element. Either that or end up in the morgue or in a padded cell. That’s what it meant to work the Shinjuku beat. No exceptions.

To live or die—for any cop, that was what it always came down to in the end—but inside and outside the ward, the results could be a world apart. Outside the ward, a cop had his life to lose at worst. In Shinjuku, his soul was on the line.

This time, though, whatever the men in the sky wanted, it would have to yield to the suits getting out of the Pulsar parked across the street from the suspect.

A chameleon—back in the day, a “police car in disguise”—was a stock model used by plainclothes detectives to patrol the streets camouflaged. The name came from the infamous Demon City Chameleon that could slip among the populace, a wolf among the sheep, taking on the appearance of its surroundings, then discarding them in a flash to reveal its ravenous nature.

“Hands against the wall!”

The detectives were wearing night vision goggles and holding AP-9 model 90 submachine guns against their hips. Barely fifteen inches long, the guns held thirty-round magazines and could be easily hidden out of sight behind the back.

The suspect merely shifted his gaze from the helicopter to the patrol car.

“You got eyes on you from above too. If you don’t do as you’re told before the count of three, we open fire.”

The steely-cold directive was no bluff. Normal operating procedure in this city. There was no telling what even a naked man might do—vomit up beer or acid that could melt glass. His intestines might snake out of his ass and crush a cop’s chest like a python.

“Stand back!” the man said, in a low tenor voice that would have made any woman passing by stop and ask for his number.

“One,” the detective said.

Shutters beneath the headlights of the chameleon louvered open. The nose of a nine-round, 70 mm rocket launcher jutted out. At the same time, a 20 mm laser cannon slipped out from the left fender and turned to fix the man in its sights. The driver was at the controls, but the weapons could be operated remotely as well.

No matter how fearless the man appeared, the detective didn’t doubt his own abilities. “Two,” he said.

“I will deal with myself by myself. I will never be so humble as to submit to the orders of another.”

The man turned around. He hadn’t a stitch on him, but the cool, calm and collected manner in which he did it made the cop’s heart skip a beat. Nevertheless—

“Three.”

In the blossoming white flower created by the lights from the car and helicopter, the man went to turn left at the corner of the street.

“Freeze!”

The words had barely left his mouth when the detective pressed the trigger on the AP-9. This wasn’t a city where a cop firing on full-automatic was cruel or unusual. He was a good shot too, putting five rounds in a row into the man’s side in a six-inch radius.

The impact threw the man against the wall. The koto in his left hand raised a clear echoing sound. A pleasant shock ran through the detective’s brain. He staggered, in a flash going from killer determination to looking placidly at the naked man standing in front of him.

He was holding the koto in his mouth. Red lines of light slashed across his chest, the laser beams piercing bone and muscle and fat and scorching the wall behind him.

The man lifted his left arm. To the helicopter crew, some invisible thread bound the man and the detective together. No sooner had the detective crumpled to the ground holding his side, but the driver inside the car pressed the trigger on the rocket launcher.

The 70 mm rockets slipped almost languidly out of the tubes just as something touched the two pods. The fire erupted like a red flower spreading its poisonous petals. As if beseeched by the city for a more appropriate display of destruction, the petals of black smoke and flames painted the ground and sky with mad and garish colors.

The naked man was Ryuuki.

A faint look of sadness rose to a countenance that seemed the blessed combination of a wild man and a man of letters. In times past, amidst the bodies of the dead, he had worn a similar expression on the battlefields after yet again pushing his enemies back from the borderlands.

The gunner in the helicopter armed the fire control computers and then froze. Even a laser cannon didn’t make a dent on the guy. It was hard to see how adding more fuel would help. Pyrrhic victories weren’t his thing.

Then came the wail of police sirens. The pilot had contacted headquarters about the scope and nature of the conflict. Surrounding the enemy at a distance, the officers piled out of the vehicles and took cover immediately, showing no inclination to inch closer.

“You there, in the middle of the street, come out!”

Trying to talk him down—while an intense animosity and thirst for blood filled the narrow street. These were hardened fighters who’d battled the worst of Shinjuku’s monsters, using the vehicle as a shield precisely because they knew the chances of surrender were thin.

In the moonlight, the multi-barrel laser guns and long-barreled hand cannons that could turn an armored vehicle into Swiss cheese cast off a dangerous glow. The lights of the helicopter overhead steadily drew nearer, until the quarry was directly beneath it.

“He’s coming!” somebody called out, a bit too eagerly.

Light filled the narrow alley, washing out the shadows. Eight patrol cars and sixteen weapons drew a bead on the solitary figure.

A moment later, the helicopter pilot saw something even stranger.