Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Yakou gazed thoughtfully at the man sitting next to him. Reflected in the window opposite, the faces looked back at him. The two of them. So much beauty multiplied by two seemed only to deepen its incomprehensible depths.

With the long black hair spilling down like an ocean wave, the white cape cloaking his whole body seemed to glow with a light from within. Such was the nature of his striking features.

They were speeding through the Shinjuku night in a limousine. Yakou couldn’t shake from his thoughts the incredible sight he’d witnessed in the hospital examination room only thirty minutes before. The object of his admiration had restored the sanity of the mad vampire policeman who’d previously appeared beyond all hope.

It’d only taken him an hour. Even more remarkably, the cure hadn’t required any medical instruments. He’d restored the light of reason in the policeman’s eyes using only his hands and the soft sound of his voice.

Touching the forehead of the patient, these fingers that Yakou could imagine pressing against the fingerboard of a Stradivarius deftly sank through the flesh.

And when he withdrew them, no mark was left behind on the skin, not one drop of blood left on the fingers. This doctor who lived outside the world of normal human morality then whispered enticingly into the ear of the prone policeman, in a manner utterly appropriate to the name Mephisto.

The old philosopher kings would have happily sold their souls to hear the words he spoke.

At length, the white-clad doctor turned to his companion and said, “The treatment is complete. Proceed with sire expropriation.”

“Understood.”

Like a student taking direction from the professor, Yakou nodded. He tilted his head slightly back. When he straightened again, a white pair of fangs jutted modestly from the corners of his mouth.

Without any dramatic gestures, the young man approached the gurney and leaned over the exposed throat. Several seconds later, he lifted his head.

“You may wake him up,” he said to Mephisto, hiding his mouth behind his hand.

“He is awake.”

Yakou turned around. The police officer was sitting up, his eyes vacant. So vacant that he could believe that if poked in the eye, the finger would sink to the back of the eye socket. Empty caverns whistling with a cold wind.

“How are you feeling?” Mephisto asked the haggard-looking Yakou.

“Not well. But I’ll manage. This man’s sire is a species apart. It took a lot out of me as well.”

His use of the personal pronoun boku prompted a double-take from Mephisto. “Do you usually refer to yourself as boku?”

“On more formal occasions.”

“And other than that?”

“I tend to use ore,” he said, citing the “tougher,” more “masculine” first person pronoun.

“Weren’t you raised in London?”

“Yes, but I get the feeling people don’t take boku seriously. Not for somebody my actual age.”

“Then you should stick to ore. It’s always better for people to be at home in their own skins.”

“Understood,” said Yakou without reservation.

Mephisto pointed at the police officer. “Let’s begin the questioning.”

Yakou nodded. “Who is your sire?”

A long silence. Then the cop’s voice tore at the quiet, as if born from a netherworld where the damned writhed in the fires of hell. “Y-You—are—”

Two pairs of crimson lines trickled from both sides of his neck. When the vampire’s prey transformed into the blood-craving beast, the abominable scars in his neck disappeared. They had appeared again, contending with the new wounds and with the new sire.

During sire expropriation—when another vampire took the blood of a victim already transformed—the manifestation of an anemic state in the prey was not by itself enough to cement a new master/servant relationship.

Rather, the new vampire wishing to expropriate the old sire could only do so if his power and authority could compete with that of the first vampire.

In any case, a showdown between the two forces was unavoidable. The struggle within the victim could be just as damaging to the body and mind of his new sire. Consequently, sire expropriation posed a grave risk even to vampires with eternal lives.

Nevertheless, by taking the blood of a vampire’s victim, otherwise unknowable details about the sire’s character and circumstances would come to light. That was why Yakou, and before him the Elder, were willing to undergo the ordeal. It was not clear how deeply implanted this instinctual loyalty was, but it prevented knowledge from being lightly revealed to another person.

Only a powerful new sire could demand a similar degree of fealty and uncover that information.

As if arriving at a sufficiently satisfactory breakthrough, Yakou clung to the railing of the gurney, steadied his breath, and cleared his throat.

“Where is the abode of your former sire located?”

And that was how they had come to be in the limousine, racing through the Demon City night.

Under “normal” circumstances, they would have waited until morning. But because of the internal struggle aroused at the moment of “sire expropriation,” the vampire who’d originally taken the police officer’s blood might sense his own defeat and go on the lam. Hence the decision to strike at once.

There should be nothing in the Shinjuku darkness that could equal the combined forces of the Elder’s grandson and Doctor Mephisto.

Mephisto turned to him. Yakou averted his eyes. More than his beauty, the Doctor’s gaze left him feeling unsettled and abashed, an emotion he had difficulty explaining to himself. The Doctor didn’t seem to notice, and Yakou presently returned the look. Then—

“Stop the car.”

Before the command died away, the car lurched forward and back. Mephisto opened the door himself and stepped into the black world.

His white cape fluttered like a delicate flower in the breeze, like the ghostly moonflower that bloomed only at night. The wind played plaintively at his black hair. The mountains of rubble lining the shoulders of the road were a vast, white wasteland beneath the street lights.

Yakou ran over to him. They had detected something from the inside of a car going sixty miles per hour. The two of them stared into the blackness.

“You see it?” Mephisto eventually asked, apparently giving up on getting a closer look.

“Yes. A white shadow skipping along the rubble.”

“A woman.”

“I couldn’t tell. Was it?”

“Do you feel the cold?”

“Now that you mention it.” Yakou’s eyes gleamed. “And undoubtedly because of her.”

“I would dearly like to believe otherwise, but that does seem to be the case. However—”

“However?”

Under Yakou’s doubtful gaze, Mephisto said reluctantly, “A beautiful woman.”

This young man had still not plumbed all the depths of this doctor’s disposition. “You don’t say,” he replied shortly. He casually made note of the obvious. “One of them.”

“Probably. This is their time.”

“So there’d be no point in continuing the pursuit at this juncture.”

“We need to know where she is going. That should soon become clear. One way or another.”

Yakou was at a loss for words.

“Let us believe that the Elder and Setsura Aki have got our backs. Think of the night as their friend and our enemy.”

“I understand.”

“We should be on our way.”

Mephisto turned and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye he saw the woman atop the mountains of wreckage running off into the distance. Her white dress was like a flower left behind by a fleeing lover. More than her unmarred expression of joy as she danced through the night, it was her unequaled beauty that put his own to shame.

He was not unconscious of the fact.

The car stopped ten minutes later. The rolling hills of rubble looked even more insurmountable than before. Shinanomachi Station, the place Officer Hyuuga had revealed to them. They were in front of the gates to the former Keio University Hospital campus.

The driver reported, “The infrared scanners show no signs of human activity within a half-mile radius.”

“Human activity, eh?” Mephisto muttered. “Let’s go.”

The limo silently bore these two soldiers in an army of darkness into the great expanse of the debris field. A midnight battle was about to begin.