Chapter Two

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?”

“Perhaps.”

The two crossed the compound to the gates. The road continued onto Meiji Dori, where they could catch a taxi. The ruins surrounded them. The sun blazed overhead. It was the kind of place where a person without an umbrella wished for rain.

Setsura stopped. From the top of the gentle hill rising to meet Meiji Dori, an old man dressed in white tottered towards them.

The thick wooden staff clutched in his right hand made him look like an old-time warlock. Setsura recognized him. Did the old man know who he was? He was close enough to make out Setsura’s features, but his comical gait didn’t change. The eyes centered in his creased face beneath snowy brows narrowed to slits.

A dozen feet away.

Setsura and Mephisto didn’t move. Not the slightest touch of stress colored the air. The scene resembled two polite young men on a narrow street yielding the right-of-way to a senior citizen.

Six feet away.

Glancing curiously at the desolation around him, the old man passed by without the slightest reaction, his face completely at peace. As he did, the staff and his right hand waved and vanished in a blur. The crack in the wind came only as the staff stopped moving and returned to its original position.

“Youngsters these days are a violent lot,” the old man lamented. “They’d think nothing of cutting a little old man to pieces. The world is surely coming to an end.”

And calmly continued on his way. Setsura softly asked, “You have business more urgent to tend to than me?”

The old man stopped. “I am already late for my next appointment. But I take it you will not let me proceed in peace.”

“As soon as you’ve cut through my threads.”

“Today has just been one thing after the next. I really must put my affairs in order. You, man in white, will you be getting involved as well?”

“If you wish,” Mephisto said with a bow.

“And seeing from whence you came, then you must know who I am?”

Setsura replied, “Yes. Sir Kikiou.”

“Well. You do have the jump on me there. This new city is not so welcoming after all.”

Mephisto smiled. “Do you find that terribly surprising?” His teeth glittered. He was not a man who smiled broadly for no reason at all.

“How much do you know about us?”

“Enough,” said Setsura. “You are a Hsia Dynasty warlock and alchemist. Daji, your mistress, is that woman of such malicious beauty. I am less certain about the other two.”

“I see.”

The old man’s staff kicked out like a rearing stallion. Taking into consideration the amazing speed and heft of the wooden staff, it could have crushed a man’s ribs like matchsticks.

Except that this man was Setsura Aki. Except that his opponent was Kikiou. He dodged right, a racing black shadow. But then came a dull thud as if his chest were the skin of a bass drum. Setsura flew backwards a good five yards and hit the road hard enough to dent the surface.

The paved surface of the road. Like it was wet sand.

Kikiou spun around. He furrowed his brows in a glancing expression of admiration. He could tell from the reverberations in his hands. Plastered against the outlines of the human impression in the road was a long black duster.

A whirlwind swept down the street. Kikiou rode it like a kite, spinning into the air and touching down a dozen feet away on the ruins hugging the right side of the street. He perched on the remnants of a rock wall as delicately as a bird, holding on only with his toes. The wall appeared ready to collapse at any second.

He slowly opened his eyes and focused his blazing gaze on his left shoulder, where a large slash divided the fabric. “You cut me,” the old man said, impressed. “You cut the robes of Kikiou. What manner of man are you? What manner of city is this?”

“This is Shinjuku.” Setsura stood next to the indentation in the pavement. He touched one hand to his chest. “I’m not one for making citizen arrests. Sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you.”

That hand didn’t require more than a hundredth of a second to shoot out the devil wire. But in that hundredth of a second, his finger froze. A qi Setsura had never experienced before erupted from Kikiou’s cuffs and from beneath the hems of his robe.

“Come,” the old man said, beckoning to him with a hand that looked like a piece of weathered wood. “Come into my fold, where my lovely sheep are waiting for you.”

A shadow fell across the sun. The dense, eerie vibe excited even the atoms in the air. Setsura and Mephisto couldn’t easily break through it.

“Oh, you’re not coming? If you do not, I shall take my leave. To a place that you will never find.”

He smiled invitingly, the way a spider smiles at a fly. Setsura stepped forward. He didn’t look at Mephisto. Mephisto wasn’t playing follow the leader. That wasn’t the way the two of them worked.

The psychic field enveloped him. Setsura heard a strange sound. The sound of a heavy revolving thing. A number of them. The sound came from beneath Kikiou’s clothing.

The pile of bricks swayed. Something pushed up at them from below. In the next moment, it reached maximum force and struck in a surging blow.

The bricks went flying. And that something rained down. Each twenty inches long and weighing six or seven pounds. Setsura quickly recognized them. Dozens of pink, naked babies.

“Can you kill them?” Kikiou asked. His unearthly qi smoldered like heat waves. “Kill something with a baby’s face and body? I’m sure you can.”

He pointed at Setsura. The message was clear. Setsura’s devil wire would cut their throats like a hot knife through soft butter. The babies scrambled toward him at an inhuman speed. For some perverse reason, the tottering figures retained all of an infant’s cherubic innocence.

Setsura spun the devil wire as he backed up, ensnaring the soft, pink skin. Given his abilities, that should have been sufficient to check their forward progress. But their hands and necks spouted blood.

Heartrending wails burst forth. A slight agitation arose in Setsura’s actions. The pink blobs fastened themselves to his shoulders and ankles and sank their teeth into his flesh.

The skull-piercing pain was enough to drive the bravest man momentarily insane. It diminished and then vanished. The ghastly children clutched their hands to their severed faces as they tumbled to the ground. They hadn’t seen the web of steel the senbei shop owner had wound around himself.

The babies stopped springing upon him, and looked up at him. The angelic countenances flickered only momentarily, revealing their true demonic forms. It was a monumental error on their part.

Before they could again put on their childlike masks, their little heads went flying. And what gushed out of their necks was not blood but dark blue fluid.

Setsura retreated. He could already sense Kikiou on the move. He glanced back. The murderous qi exploded around them. Setsura spotted Mephisto’s white-clad form on the road ahead.

The demon children dissolved into blue-black pools. In a few seconds the wind would sweep away the toxic miasma.

“What?” Setsura asked.

Mephisto held up his right hand. The thick shard of a needle jutted out from between his thumb and forefinger. One edge glittered like it had been severed with a knife. Setsura’s eyes brimmed with curiosity, wondering what fighting style it revealed.

“So you’re letting him get away?” he asked, a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

“Whatever cutting I intended to do, I ended up being cut instead. He’s not flesh and blood.” Mephisto looked at the street and then at Setsura’s shoulder. “You don’t want that poison circulating through your veins. We should open it up and burn it out.”

“I’ll take care of that myself, if you don’t mind.”

Setsura coughed. The result of the first blow Kikiou had delivered with his staff.

“That is some qi,” Mephisto diagnosed. “It messed up my aim as well. I haven’t seen skills like that in a long time.”

“China’s a big place. And we’re talking about them.”

Mephisto nodded. “I sensed a touch of fatigue. He wasn’t at full strength.”

Which meant that this old man at half his powers had escaped death or capture at the hands of Doctor Mephisto and Setsura Aki. The Demon Physician and this demon-haunted senbei shop owner looked back at the place they’d come from. Kikiou was headed in that direction.

Setsura mused, “I wonder if he was going to see the Elder.”

Mephisto didn’t disagree. “I thought they might lay low until they got acclimated to the environment. That doesn’t seem to be the case. They’re quick studies. They must have put their time in exile to good use learning the ways of the modern world.”

“We should make sure the Elder has got the protection he needs. Our strongest ally right now is his gray matter. We wouldn’t want anything funny happening to it.”

“What kind of protection would actually do any good?”

“How about a bunch of four-leaf clovers?”

“Besides that.” A strange light burned in Mephisto’s eyes.

They silently gazed at the corner on Meiji Dori. The Elder had a good deal on his plate. And if they could sniff out the Elder’s home turf in only a few days, they’d have no trouble finding a certain hospital and senbei shop.

As for Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto—who in this city would be willing to sign up to bodyguard them?