Chapter One

Chapter One

A thick fragrance bedeviled her waking sleep. Not so much a fragrance as the smell of something edible. Takako Kanan was afraid to eat it. At the core of her dread was something lovely and sweet. And that was what she feared the most.

It was all vague and disconnected, like in a dream. But what had happened to her was seared into her memories, fresh and alive. In that sterile white hospital room, her blood had been consumed.

The terror leading up to that moment was etched into her mind, vivid enough to freeze the marrow in her bones—that ghastly woman walking up to her, her eyes ripped out by her own hand, half of her face burned to a crisp—and the other, the very embodiment of bewitching beauty.

Though she was quickly given a blood transfusion and confined to her bed, she already understood that she was no longer herself. The hunger roiling forth from the heart of darkness within her made her try to make a meal of her mother. And made her despise the white-clad doctor who’d stopped her.

She’d calmed down a bit since. But the incessant hunger left a hole in the pit of her stomach. All the while, other desires penetrated her like venom, fighting for control of her soul.

On the verge of yielding to the addiction and giving herself over to such hellish pleasures, the voice of her self-control stopped her in her tracks. That voice brought with it a weapon—a young man’s face, paler and prettier than the moon. The owner of that face—that enveloped everything it perceived with a vast and serene aura—saved her.

Every time she saw that face, she hated what she’d become and sought the light that turned the eternal night into day. She called out his name and prayed for salvation.

But he never came. Instead, she sensed the presence of other visitors.

“What’s wrong?” asked one of the men-in-black. They’d been guarding her since they left the hospital.

She answered that they should expect visitors.

“Who? And from where?”

“I don’t know. They are far away.”

“When will they arrive?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many?”

“Two. Her—and somebody else.”

“That bitch, you mean?”

“Why do you address her so? It’s her. That lovely, lovely woman. And so frightening, frightening—”

“Calm down,” she was told. “We’re here. Ten men handpicked by Yakou-sama. They can hold their own against any she-demon.”

Takako was left by herself. At some point she could hear her—the sound of Princess breathing—the wintry breath flowing out of her unbeating heart.

She was coming.

She was opening the front door.

Takako’s body shook with horror, like a bucket of ice water poured down her back.

Two men flew at Princess, stakes in their hands. Then moving so fast they left white streaks in the air—her claws. A thick, black fog whirled around them. Up the stairs they came. A man was with her. Takako hated that she’d brought a man with her.

They moved into the hallway. A section of the ceiling swung down like a pendulum. It was studded with spear blades. It collided with her. She grabbed two of the blades with both hands. Not even a paper cut. That’s how magnificent she was.

Three men dropped from the ceiling. Two came from both ends of the hallway. Seven altogether. They were fast. There was no way she could defend herself against all of them.

The inky blackness again exploded around them. A chilling color. And yet beautiful. And that smell—it clung to the senses.

What happened? The woman stood there as if nothing had happened. The men lay at her feet. The blackness oozed from their chests and crawled down the hallway. Was it her strength alone?

No, that man was chuckling to himself. He held a white clay pipe between his lips. Such a pretentious pose. What garish clothing. Like something worn by an aristocrat in a European costume drama. It didn’t go with her at all. He had dispatched seven men without skipping a beat. Like an invisible whirl of wind. What looked like a scabbard hung from his waist.

One more man stood inside the door. How pitiful. Was he going to try and save her? She appreciated the thought, but was more impatient for her to appear.

Leave me. Run away.

They came.

The door opened.

Setsura Aki looked up at the towering building above him silhouetted against the starry sky. He felt something akin to respect. At forty-seven stories high and over five-hundred feet tall, the Shinjuku Keio Plaza Hotel had once been heralded as the first true skyscraper hotel in Japan.

The hotel had retained a certain degree of dignity. The area housing the new heart of the city kept its distance, just as ordinary people kept their distance from the haunted center of Shinjuku—Chuo Park—directly behind the hotel.

Setsura stepped through a hole in the chain-link fence cordoning off the hotel grounds like he’d just come here to visit. He didn’t broadcast the vibe of somebody breaking and entering.

Moonlight illuminated the scene. But the fissure slanting down the side of the building was as clear as in the middle of the day.

Casually holding his left hand against his neck, he walked into the back lobby. A darkness thick enough to cut with a knife filled the hallway. Setsura all but dissolved into the gloom.

A slash of moonlight stole in from somewhere, floating on the darkness like oil on water, and shimmering like brilliant ice where it settled on Setsura’s countenance.

If any of his acquaintances could see him now, their eyes would pop. Unlike the doctor who ruled over the grounds of the former ward government buildings, the laid-back air of the young senbei shop owner usually set at ease the people around him. Now the good doctor would find him terrifying. This was a haunting beauty that truly haunted the soul.

Because of those two fang marks in his neck.

A person whose blood was consumed by a vampire would, to varying degrees, take on the aspects of his master. In Setsura’s case—his superior force of will and physical strength and that he’d been bitten by one of Shuuran’s dolls—might seem to put him beyond her direct control.

But the assault on his free will continued unabated. The controlling relationship between the biter and the bitten, the master and the servant, was not weakened by variables like distance and space.

In The Balm of Deutschland, published in 1504 by Schenk von Limpurg, the Bishop of Bamberg, the story was told of a woman from a prominent family who’d been turned into the slave of an aristocratic vampire clan. Separated by the treacherous Eifel Hills and a distance of 250 miles, she traveled there by foot day and night. It was apparent that even when the transformation was not complete, the master still exerted his control in the full light of day.

Bishop von Limpurg was best known for his interviews of seven victims in the process of turning into vampires. Along with recording those confessions, he also made the following observations about the “predilections” of a vampire:

• A fondness for blood.

• A freezing sensation in the heart and entrails.

• A fear of, and physical aversion to, sunlight.

• A constant hunger.

• The intermittent explosion of destructive impulses.

• An almost lustful longing for darkness.

• An intense, masochistic desire to be controlled.

Those symptoms were also eating away at Setsura, along with Ryuuki’s qi festering in his gut like a bucket of mud. Under those conditions, a decorated SWAT officer from hell itself would have a hard time putting one step in front of the other.

Stepping into the main lobby, Setsura stopped to get a feel for the room. It was eleven o’clock at night, a time when the creatures of the night hungered for blood and went on the prowl.

The next morning, their victims would be discovered in their beds, in the parks, on the sides of roads, with inflamed puncture wounds on their necks and skin the color and texture of wax. They would respond to no stimuli except to exhibit a fear of sunlight. The citizens of Demon City would put two and two together quickly enough, and the excitable ones would be sharpening stakes and grabbing garlands of garlic.

Setsura thrust his right hand into the pocket of his slicker. The devil wire came alive at his fingertips. The molecule-thin titanium wires enhanced not only his sense of sight and touch, but also his hearing and smell. He was about to send his invisible tendrils around the lobby to investigate further—

Sensing something above him, he paused.

Without so much as a raised eyebrow, he headed to the elevators. He pushed the button. The doors opened with a dull hum. The electricity shouldn’t have been flowing here. Like the blue blood through the vampire’s veins, a different kind of energy flowed through the generators and wires.

Inside the elevator, Setsura pushed the button for the third basement level. His finger didn’t hesitate. He just knew where his fellow creatures were. That demon vibe enveloped him from all directions like a shower of cold rain.

“No more than ten,” he said to himself. And more in the upper floors above him, though he couldn’t tell how many.

A dim light flickered at the end of the narrow corridor. Setsura opened the door. The machinery room. In the pitch blackness, he sensed several beings carrying on in boisterous tones. They hadn’t sensed him coming.

“Who’s that?”

Setsura looked at the speaker. The ward registrar. He didn’t recognize the rest. Suit-wearing salaryman types were there. And gamblers and assorted wise guys.

“You got some good looks on you,” said a hausfrau in a blouse and jeans. Her eyes glowed blood-red. Her smoldering voice hissed past the fangs protruding from her raw, ruby lips.

Setsura gazed quietly back at her.

The machinery room had been stripped of its big equipment long ago. A line of steel lockers on the floor. The same kind of lockers Setsura had seen bobbing in the abandoned underground water treatment facility. Their purpose went without saying.

There were twenty lockers or so. With twelve of them here, half of them must be out on the town.

Setsura proceeded to the center of the room. A seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl was lying naked on the lockers. Her skin was covered with bite marks. He observed the slight rise and fall of her small breasts and the sound of her thin breaths.

“She’s brunch,” said a middle-aged salaryman wearing a short-sleeved shirt and plain necktie.

“Going out all at once would be a dead giveaway. So half of us wait here. But we get hungry, you know.” This one spoke as if pleading her cause, a true “lady of the night” in a gaudy dress. She stared at Setsura, a perverse and tenacious lust further staining her flaming eyes.

They gathered into a ring around Setsura.

“Why not kill her and be done with it? From the looks of it, you brought her here yesterday or today. With ten sucking her blood, she’d become one of you in less than a day.” Even in a place like this, Setsura spoke as dispassionately as always.

“She’s full to the brim,” said a gangbanger sporting a Mohawk. He wiped the drool from his mouth. The desire in his eyes as he looked at Setsura exceeded even that of the woman’s.

A girl in a tank top the same age as the victim girl said, “And dragging it out in dribs and drabs is so much fun. I love the way she whimpers and cries.”

Setsura listened impassively.

“But enough of her already. We’ve got a beaut here. I’m going to take my time enjoying you.”

“Suck you just a little bit every day. From that throat of yours, from your arms, your thighs.”

“I’ll go down on you for free,” said the whore. “No matter to me what else besides blood comes spurting out.”

The circle tightened like a noose. Men and women, old and young closed in on him, their blood-smeared fingers bent like talons, licking their lips in anticipation of the coming feast. They radiated an evil vibe that would shake the spirits of the bravest man and make him wish for a quick and easy death.

But they didn’t know. Their victim this time was Setsura Aki. Through the pitch black came a sound like a thinly-drawn breath.