Chapter One

Chapter One

Setsura surveyed the scene before him. He muttered to himself, “This is the classy place these guys choose to hang out? What does that make my place?”

His voice vanished into the big hole in front of him, a symmetrical half-circle bored into a white wall. He looked down. In the direction of an uneven footpath about a yard wide was a drainage canal brimming with black water. Splotches of white light reflected off the wavering surface, fracturing the moonlight shimmering there.

According to Shinjuku’s civil engineering schematics, any such canals should have dried up long ago. It was hard to believe that the wastewater collected here from the peaceful abodes of Shinjuku had ever been discharged from the treatment plants to again quench human thirst.

The steps leading up to ground level from the walkway behind him had partly crumbled away. The walls to the left and right were rippled and folded like the bellows of an enormous accordion squeezed in the hands of some rude giant.

Looking up from where Setsura was standing, only one of the huge chemical tanks remained. The rest had fallen into the abyss. The skin of the last cylinder was scarred with rust.

This was the one place in Shinjuku where water had once flowed freely—the remains of the underground water treatment plant beneath the old Ochiai district.

It had undergone extensive renovations just before the Devil Quake struck. This prestigious public works project, utilizing the latest in cutting edge technology, had been thoroughly cannibalized by the restoration crews and now was good for little more than scrap metal.

But the water still flowed.

A splash—something that looked like a fish leapt upwards, droplets dripping off its silver scales—and plunged back into the water several yards away. Water returned to its source. Even with its human operators long gone and their dreams so many tears in the rain, life had returned to this subterranean treatment plant.

Setsura walked toward the entrance of the tunnel. The final quality control facility stretched on for several hundred yards. Chasing the vampire assassin who’d fled Totsuka Station, he’d arrived here.

The moonlit shadows cast deep, dark silhouettes on the walls, creating a terrible kind of beauty, a ravaged and worn still life. At the same time, this young man radiated back whatever beauty lay hidden in all this sickly degeneration. Those men who could transform the cruel and hideous into beauty were few and far between in Demon City Shinjuku.

What looked like a fat rope broke the surface of the water, right next to him. Setsura paid it no mind. The black torso reared up, shedding droplets of water. Its rigid stance made it look like a fence post. But the voice falling upon Setsura’s head brought to mind anything but an inanimate object.

“Hey, fashion model guy, where are you going?”

The white head floated there in the air. A small, innocent face of a child. But attached to its glistening, snake-like body, the result was frightening and grotesque. Most likely, during the Devil Quake, the soul of a young boy washed into the sewers had been abducted by evil spirits nesting in the earth, and had spawned this creature.

Setsura continued on his way. After a dozen feet or so, he again heard the voice beside him. “Hey, Mister, answer me!”

Setsura kept going. He’d taken five more steps when a black lump landed at his feet. With a heavy, sticky sound, it slapped against the concrete and rebounded. A twitching, fish-like animal, a third eaten through, the white bones sticking out. It had limbs like a person and translucent webbed fingers on its hands.

“That’s what I eat. There’s tons of them in the water—but they taste awful—a human body floated down here once—that was so good—I can still remember it—but they hardly ever come down here—but I can’t reach up there yet so I’m really happy you showed up here Mister—”

The kid’s head bobbed back and forth in front of Setsura’s face, talking in a nonstop stream, not pausing between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Then the face vanished, and there was only the black torso.

The face popped up on his right. The kid smiled. For being confined to the water, the skin was remarkable, white and glowing. The smile on its lips was almost too cute to stand. It flashed its teeth. They were all black.

The snake body wrapped around Setsura and slowly began to squeeze. The mouth opened wide and rushed towards his head. Even baring its fangs, it was an adorable face.

The face severed from its body and traced a slippery arc through the air. Right up until the moment it was sucked back into the water, the smile never left its face. Setsura ducked and wove around the writhing torso of the snake and plunged into the tunnel.

He thought he could hear a bird singing somewhere overhead. The darkness deepened. Even with the moonlight lost, Setsura could see as clearly as at midday. He stopped. A black puddle stained the concrete. Fresh blood. The blood of that police detective.

Though Setsura’s devil wire had sliced into his back, thanks to the demonic power of the vampire he had staunched the flow sufficiently to make it this far. He must have paused here to collect his wits before proceeding to whatever passed for his crypt.

Setsura had wounded the man in order to drive him directly to his hideout, wrapping only a single strand of his wire around him.

Before beginning his pursuit, Setsura called the mayor from Totsuka Station and asked him to commence a search for those who had interfered with his directives. The assumption was not easily proven, but it’d become clear that vampire blood was spreading among the upper ranks of the ward’s movers and shakers.

The mayor was already planning an aggressive, Shinjuku-wide sweep. Before that happened, Setsura wanted to get all his ducks in a row. But circumstances were getting too out of control to allow that luxury.

“The underground water treatment facility?” Setsura mused to himself. “A vampire hunter could get way in over his head in a place like this.” Too many of the pros bought too heavily into the folklore—like vampires not being able to cross running water. Setsura wouldn’t make the mistake of believing that canard.

After continuing on for some ways, the canal suddenly widened considerably. At the same time, a strange sound reached his ears. The echo of hard, metallic objects brushing against each other. Another two hundred yards or so and the source of the sound became clear.

The sewer water originally collected there to be treated. The canal broadened to form a small lake. Breaking the black surface here and there were half-submerged box-like containers. The kind of steel lockers and cabinets that every office had in abundance.

Despite the treatment facilities being long defunct, creatures like the mutated water snake still disturbed the water. Caught up in the ripples, the numerous steel boxes ground together, raising that small, scratching sound.

The scattered splotches of blood changed direction, reached the end of the walkway, and stopped.

Setsura was in their lair. His right hand twitched almost imperceptibly as he moved without hesitation toward the bobbing shapes—darker than the surrounding darkness—and toward the owner of those bloodstains.

He stepped into the water. The sole of the shoe surely would have hit the water’s surface, but no ripples spread out from the point of contact. With steps no different than if he was on land, Setsura nimbly crossed the water to the clump of lockers.

To the vampire’s habitat, the casket.

He was supported by two strands of devil wire skimming the surface. The end of one wire was wrapped around the handle of one of the lockers. And yet Setsura was confident he’d contributed no movements other than that of the casket bobbing naturally in the water.

Drawing closer to the locker, he gently waved his hand. The handle turned. The door of the locker opened with the whispering silence of the wires themselves.

It was empty. As was the one next to it, and the one after that.

“Still out on the town, huh.”

He’d seen this coming. The behavior of the vampire was ruled by the night. This night as well, all of the residents of these lockers were willfully—or under orders of one sort or another—indulging their bloodlusts.

Setsura listened closely. He didn’t have to listen hard. He heard groaning directly opposite from where he was standing. By uncovering their hiding places, he’d accomplished his primary goal. The problem was exactly who was in this nest of vampires.

He could wait here until they returned. But when he thought about what they were likely to be up to, he couldn’t turn his back on their nighttime activities.

Setsura lashed a strand of wire around a piece of construction material jutting from the ceiling. He rose into the air. Swinging like a pendulum over the bobbing lockers, he stopped about a yard over the one emitting the groans. He didn’t look like he was hanging there. His arm was perfectly relaxed.

“There’s something I’d like to ask you,” he said softly, floating in the air.

The moans ceased. The door of the locker flung open. The police detective from before sat up. His evil eyes scanned the air above him, finally focusing on Setsura.

Blank surprise filled his face. “Who the fuck are you?” It took him a bit of effort to get the words out.

“Oh, didn’t the Chief tell you?” Setsura replied nonchalantly. His attitude wasn’t so much on purpose this time as it was the product of Shuuran’s doll sucking his blood and getting blasted by Ryuuki’s qi. “I own a senbei shop in West Shinjuku. Would the Chief happen to be around?”

“What do you think?” the cop retorted, with a blood-red look in his eyes that communicated a private understanding. He planted his hands on either side of the locker. “He told me to kill you. But just looking at you, I can tell that would be a waste. Become one of us. Taste the pleasures this world can’t offer.”

“What a sweet-talker you are.” Suspended in the air, Setsura smiled. A trance came across the cop’s face. Their night visions were equally effective. “But first I’d like an answer to my question. Where’s the Chief? And what other big shots are involved?”

“You think I’m a fucking idiot?” the cop roared. He reached out, a Remington M870 pump-action shotgun in his right hand, his left on the pump. Locked and loaded. An immortal vampire didn’t have much to fear from a gun going off accidentally.

The barrel swung around. The split second before the gun roared and the fire split the darkness, Setsura vaulted over the man’s head and landed on a locker a half-dozen feet away. The cop spun around and leveled the barrel—and realized that his hands weren’t there anymore.

He looked down. The gun lay across his lap, his hands still attached to it. Blood erupted from his severed limbs.

“Bastard—!” The shout was cut off by a sharp stabbing pain cutting into the back of his neck.

“Even a vampire will die if he loses his head,” Setsura explained in his drowsy tones. The disinterested expression on his face only compounded the threat. “In any case, your little Dracula lair will be dust before sunrise. You might want to give some thought to what fate awaits you after that. Where’s the Chief?”

“H-He’s—not—here—”

“Then where?”

“K-Keio—Plaza—Hotel—”

“Well, the man certainly has taste,” Setsura said enviously. “I think I’ll crash at his place instead. Sorry, but I’ll be going by myself. Who else is there?”

“The—d-deputy—mayor.”

Setsura shook his head knowingly. “No wonder the mayor’s directives didn’t get through. Kikiou’s plan for subjugating Shinjuku seems to be proceeding right on schedule. Where else might your colleagues be?”

“I—don’t—know—”

“I understand. Sleep well.”

Setsura’s countenance briefly darkened with grief. The next moment, the detective’s head flipped into the air. The body collapsed into the locker. The head thumped onto its chest.

Setsura’s devil wire slit open the sheet metal. The locker slid beneath the surface of the black, bubbling water.

“Disposing of the casket might not be enough,” Setsura Aki observed, sounding tired and bitter. “A place sunlight never reaches—this calls for some thinking outside the box.”