Chapter One

Chapter One

Cursing his fate, the drifter slipped into a love hotel behind the station. He didn’t have any cash, but as luck would have it, three days ago he’d found a fifty-thousand yen all-purpose gift card near a pachinko parlor in Okubo. He couldn’t get any cash out of it, but the credit was good at the love hotels.

He’d made it from Shinjuku to Takada no Baba thanks to it. Though it might well prove the last good luck of his life.

When he’d first seen what he had in the package, he knew her day had come. That’s why he killed those yakuza and got himself into this fix in the first place—and didn’t regret it for a minute.

He’d heard of the witch a long time ago, and found her name in the Shinjuku yellow pages under the “odd and miscellaneous occupations” listings. No sooner was he sure he had it made when this happened. Though showing up at Nuvenberg’s front door wouldn’t have been a problem, all the yakuza and cops left him in such a tizzy that the simple and the obvious solutions didn’t occur.

The robot receptionist checked the validity of the card and then led him to his room. From the “Date Club Guide” (that came with the room), he made a call. A girl showed up ten minutes later.

She didn’t bother to shower first, but stripped down to a bikini top and thong, got down on her hands and knees, and raised her ass into the air. A nympho prostitute.

The drifter sidled up to her and pressed his lips and tongue against her soft flesh. “Ah,” the nympho said, her body quivering. It wasn’t an act. The drifter’s ardor burned all the brighter.

He licked her all over, pausing only to bare his teeth. Somewhere in his heart the dark flames smoldered. He wanted to tear her apart.

“Bite me, bite me,” she moaned, shoving her butt in his face. This wasn’t an act either. “A little nip’s not going to hurt anybody.”

“No shit?”

“You asked for a M-type woman, didn’t you? My brain’s been engineered that way.”

If he’d actually bothered to read the instructions that came with the book, these “enhancements” were spelled out in explicit and illustrated detail—girls into cutting; girl into burning; girls who could only come after getting shocked with electricity; girls who got off on getting bitten. A girl for every fetish.

“Hot damn,” he groaned.

Wiping the drool from his mouth, he attacked the most luscious white meat. The girl’s screams trailed off to ragged pants as she plumbed the depths of her desires.

“More. More. More.” The vagrant’s jaws worked the soft flesh. She shook her blood-smeared buttocks. “More. More. More.”

And then she said, as if abruptly coming to her senses, “Huh? What’s that?”

“What?”

“That—what’s that thing?”

Still crouched there doggie style, the girl fixed her eyes on the package sitting on the sofa.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Really? Looks like something’s moving inside it.”

“No way.”

“Way. You got a black market bird or animal in there? Hey, can I see it?”

She reached out without waiting for an answer.

“Stop.”

The vagrant hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her away, just as her fingers tugged at one edge of the furoshiki, turning the package a hundred and eighty degrees, and then—

The girl and the vagrant watched dumbfounded as the package flipped back to its original position.

“What the—but I just about pulled it off the couch!”

“It’s nothing, I’m telling you.”

He took a firm hold of her ass, but the girl’s curiosity was apparently as deeply ingrained as her sexual perversions.

“Just a minute,” she said, clambering to her feet.

“Just a minute? Stupid bitch.”

Her hugged his arms around her and tore at her bikini top. There was barely enough fabric there to cover her nipples and it came away easily. He sucked vigorously on her right breast.

“C’mon, show me,” she panted and pleaded.

“Forget it.”

“Why? I bet it’s valuable.”

A greedy glow lit up her eyes. The vagrant didn’t notice as he spread her legs and buried his face between her thighs.

“Ah—yeah—bite me—bite me there—”

She grabbed his head. A thick stench rose up of sweat and dirt and dander. Suppressing the urge to retch, she was seized by a thought, a thought that grew and blackened in an instant, all rationalized by that smell.

“Man, you stink,” she shrieked, on the verge of swooning as he lapped at her most intimate parts.

“No shit.” The vagrant lifted his head. His lips glistened with her sweat and wetness. “I haven’t fucking bathed in three months.”

The girl grabbed hold of his filthy hair. What a dirty, disgusting man. Exactly the kind she liked to kill.

Thirty minutes later, the receptionist robot protesting that she couldn’t just barge in like that, a fat woman stole into the room.

“My stars,” declared Tonbeau Nuvenberg, planting herself in the doorway.

Behind her, the small golden-haired head peeked around the great mass and drew her brows in consternation.

A man lay on the bloody floor. His head was turned in their direction. The rest of him wasn’t. He was very much dead. The doll girl quickly examined the room and confirmed that the package wasn’t there.

She approached the man and looked at his trouser cuff. There she found a single strand of golden hair piercing the fabric. When he was running away from the yakuza, she’d tagged him with it, a kind of tracer. Once back at the house, Tonbeau had easily tracked him to the love hotel with her magic.

They were too late, and the peaceful love hotel had turned into a death trap.

“Getting it on with a working girl without even bothering to take off his clothes,” she clucked. “He must have been hot to trot.”

Though there seemed a spark of envy in her words as well, and her cheeks might have flushed a bit. A rather frightening sight to add to the scene.

“It’s not here,” said the doll girl, inspecting the closets. “She must have taken it with her.”

“That’s for sure. The end of the line?”

“You think so?”

“I can’t shake the feeling I got about that package. As long as the connection is still there, I ain’t calling it quits.”

“Then what should we do next?”

“We still have a few avenues left to explore. Analyze the pages of that guidebook for his fingerprints. That should tell us where she hails from. But the quicker the better is my motto. Let’s ask the man himself.”

“Yes.”

An unbelievable conversation between a thoroughly unbelievable master and servant. Dead men told no lies, and usually didn’t have much to say about anything else either.

Tonbeau squatted next to the drifter’s head. She plucked something from the rattan basket hanging from her shoulder, and forced it in between the blue lips—a gray living thing with arms and legs. The vagrant’s throat swelled up.

“Idiot. Go the left.”

She slapped him with the flat of her hand and the lump turned left, toward the heart. The left side of his chest swelled up.

A loud knock came at the door. “Please open up, ma’am.” Only one person was speaking, but the knocks came in flurries.

“The love hotel staff. What a nuisance.”

Cracking her knuckles, Tonbeau got to her feet. She considered stomping her feet and bellowing like a sumo wrestler, but the fat witch only pointed her finger at the door.

The lock puffed fire. People poured into the room and ran toward them. But didn’t go anywhere. They pumped their arms and legs as if riding a fleet of stationary bicycles. All the power they were pouring into their horizontal movements was actually being directed vertically into the floor. They were doing nothing more than stamping their feet, except they didn’t notice.

“Fools.”

Tonbeau folded her arms and stared at them with undisguised contempt, then returned her attention to the dead man. She seemed to have absorbed a good deal of Japanese culture in a short time. Fat but highly adaptable.

When she dropped her voice to a whisper and began to speak, even the doll girl felt a chill down her back and shivered.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” answered the dead man.

This was definitely the voice of the vagrant, but his lips hadn’t moved. That was the way the creature burrowing into his heart worked. It did the talking for him.

“What is your name?” Tonbeau continued.

“I—forgot—I have had—so many—”

“What was your business with us?”

“Something—I wanted you—to see—found it—beneath a building—in Shinjuku—”

“And what is inside the package?”

“The—box—?”

“A box? An ordinary box?”

“No—a very old—box—very valuable—dragons and snakes and whirlpools—the picture of a tiger—it eats—people—”

“Hoh.”

“My—partner—brought the yakuza—tried to steal it—but I hit them—with it—and they disappeared—the dragon and snake and tiger—swallowed them—but it is—too much for me—to handle—”

“So you sought us out. Good boy.” Tonbeau nodded gravely. “Leave the rest to us. We’ll send you off to a better place. No need to linger here harboring regrets. By the way, did that rent-a-tart kill you?”

“Yes—”

“Who does she work for?”

“Place called Trendy Miss—name is Yuriko—”

Tonbeau glanced at the Guide Book. “I’ve got it memorized,” the doll girl said.

“Good. Well, good night to you.”

Her caterpillar-like fingers struck his heart like a bongo drum. The swelling shifted. “Idiot,” she said with an exasperated huff, observing the squirming lump wriggling down the inside of the man’s pant leg. “Damned thing came out his ass.”

Takako had “awakened” four hours after that. Though in this world of an eternal noon, a person’s internal clock was the only timepiece that mattered.

As soon as she’d been put to bed under Yakou’s watchful eyes, Setsura lashed into Mephisto. “What the hell kind of treatment would put her in that state?”

“That required to achieve the necessary results,” Mephisto answered coolly. “There has been as yet no example of a vampire returning to human form. In order to accomplish such a goal, the ordinary methods would not suffice. You should understand that much. In which case, the physiology of an ordinary human should be the last thing you would expect.”

“You’d make a better lawyer.”

“This is the kind of quarrelsome mood I expect from the ordinary you.”

“I’m keeping an eye on these treatments of yours from now on. No more funny business.”

“Oh, there is no need to play the bad cop here. What can you do in this world? I would ask you to take the time to consider the literal meaning of being surrounded by enemies on all sides.”

“Yeah? We’ll see about that.” He struck a tough-guy pose. “In the meantime, maybe I’ll take the time to stake you and that wily woman. How about we look to Mozart as the inspiration and leave the graves unmarked?”

“That would hardly be the tragedy you imagine it to be.” Mephisto looked down at Takako lying on the bed. “That a creative genius as great as Mozart was buried in an unmarked, common grave without fanfare—this is the misconception of people who know nothing of history or times past. The style of Mozart’s burial was common among the Viennese middle class. Those attending the funeral would have passed through Stuben Gate, one of the gates in the fortress walls surrounding the city. The horse-drawn hearse and the common trench grave were in accordance with the custom of the day. It was only later that the true greatness of Mozart became apparent to so many. In his own time, he was a master among many other masters. Besides, I need no gravestone. There will be nothing left to mark.”

“What do you plan on doing with Kanan-san when she wakes up?”

“Her treatments will continue, though not even I can predict how the situation will evolve.”

“When it comes to doctoring, I guess there’s old school and then there’s just plain old,” Setsura said with a singsong sourness. Then he lowered his voice and said, “But you are going to cure her?”

“I cannot say.”

“Plus there’s that Yakou business to take care of.”

“I am entrusting that to the moon lily. His treatments begin henceforth.”

“You’re doing this in secret?”

“Everybody knows about the situation with Kanan-san, including Princess and Kikiou. And probably the same goes for Yakou. Rest easy. No one shall interfere with the ministrations of Doctor Mephisto, including Princess.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“As do I.” Mephisto fixed Setsura with a look he hadn’t seen before. “They are oblivious, or knowing, choose not to find out. However normal your normal you may be, you cannot be that slow on the draw.”

“Hey, don’t hold back, man. Don’t hold back.”

Mephisto was about to say something when the door opened and three people entered the room.

“They wanted to see what you two were up to,” Princess said with a flippant nod of her head at the two behind her.

“I see,” said Mephisto. “And?”

“Don’t ask me. I have better ways to spend my time. I’ll kill you if you bore me. Otherwise, live and let live.”

Kikiou was the only one who smiled wryly at this open expression of her demonic thoughts. The rest simply looked on impassively, including the one who seemed like he was about to snap his gum and ask if she wanted fries with that.

“Yeah, so what have you decided?” he said.

Princess only smiled. A vein throbbed in Kikiou’s forehead as he intoned in a low voice, “Setsura Aki, you will be housed in the Demon Pavilion and schooled to become one of Princess’s servants. Doctor Mephisto’s laboratory will be moved to the Crystal Pavilion. You will perform all of your research there. However, you will be permitted to leave, and your access to Takako Kanan will not be obstructed.”

A loud clap of the hands. Everybody there turned to Setsura with puzzled expressions. They all suspected he was an odd chap, and here was all the proof they needed.

“Good show, Kikiou! Mephisto, hang in there, guy.”

“Under normal circumstances, you and Doctor Mephisto would have been drawn and quartered on the spot.”

The great warlock seemed almost in tears. In fact, tears welled up in his eyes and fell to the floor. No one would have been surprised if his tears of loathing had exploded on contact in tiny puffs of flame and smoke.

“Except that a certain someone would certainly intervene, someone I lack the power to oppose. But remember this, Setsura. No matter what world you may find yourself in, accidents will happen.”

Setsura rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Kikiou. You’re getting stale after four thousand years on the job. Put some attitude into it! Something like: Watch your back, buddy, ’cause one of these days you’re gonna wake up sleeping with the fishes. That kind of thing.”

Princess burst out laughing. “Touché, Kikiou. Now don’t you think he’d make such a good underling?”

“Princess, I—” Kikiou started to say, but thought better of it. Making too big a display of his animosity towards Setsura put himself in danger. “I beg your leave, Princess.”

“Yakou, Mephisto, you may go as well,” Princess commanded.

Yakou’s mouth creased in a frown. His violent thoughts radiated from his being in colors of pure jealousy.