Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Ryuuki’s reeling figure reflected in General Bey’s cold eyes. “You should know better than to doubt the power of the old magic,” he said. He didn’t try getting to his feet. He couldn’t.

He had countermeasures of his own, but the hellish torment of Ryuuki’s demon qi was enough to make even immortals long for death. Which of them would be the first to launch a second volley? And so the nighttime death struggle played out beneath the clear light of the moon.

“You will do nothing?” Mephisto whispered in Setsura’s ear.

In the shadowed darkness, Setsura made no note of the soft red glow in his eyes. “Like what?” he asked.

“The torment Ryuuki’s demon qi inflicted on you has now reduced Kazikli Bey to the suffering state of a mere mortal. I do not imagine he would put up much of a fight were a wire to wrap itself around his neck.”

Setsura sensed the presence of the white-clad doctor on the back of his neck. “You want me to kill him, Mephisto?” A question no one else but Setsura Aki would even dare ask. Does the Demon Physician desire another’s death?

“As long as General Ryuuki is General Ryuuki, he would not want such a thing, however much I do.”

Setsura’s words seemed to hang there glittering in the moonlight. But that was the wind-blown dust, trailing away from Setsura’s feet like a comet’s tail. Ryuuki fell to his knees. As if absorbing the energy from the impact, a long shadow rose up like wavering smoke.

“The night is the natural ally of those who live the life of the undead,” General Bey said as Ryuuki knelt there in agony, “I, Kazikli Bey, will now grant you your heart’s desire. Say your prayers to whatever god you worship.”

He raised his trembling right hand. The fingers spread like a spider’s web. Supremely confident, he filled his palm with the deadly energy.

“Stop!” called out Ryuuki, but not to General Bey.

The colorless, odorless energy mercilessly enveloped him.

“What!” Equally shocked voices sprang from two mouths, that of Setsura and General Bey.

There were dual reasons for Setsura’s surprise. He detected the fatal blow surging forth and was about to cast out a strand of devil wire. But Ryuuki, in all his towering pride, knew what he was doing and would not permit it.

The fresh blast of evil power ricocheted around them.

The demon qi had failed.

Ryuuki stood on his feet shrouded by a white mist—dust sparkling in the moonlight. Who could have imagined that such a thing could deflect a technique polished over two thousand years to perfection? Setsura and General Bey and Doctor Mephisto stood there gazing upon the stunning, incomprehensible sight.

A rusty, grating voice reached their ears. “Shuuran—is that you—?” General Ryuuki addressed the ghostly, swirling dust.

Grasping the truth and meaning of his words, Setsura’s face was flooded with a mixture of horror and profound emotion. Call it the love sonnet of the dead. Shuuran was in the dust. Shuuran was the dust, the same Shuuran who had tried to kill Setsura and had perished in the attempt.

Dust to dust she had become, and come to protect Ryuuki.

Demon City did not sing requiems to its dead. They would scorn Shuuran’s devotions as a ghost’s obsession. But at that moment, standing there like a comely shadow, the most befitting—and perhaps less than appropriate—eulogy to that perished life passed through the young man’s mind.

As if pressed from behind by the moonlight, he interposed himself between the two generals. “I’ll take things from here.”

“Interesting,” said General Bey, pressing his hand against his chest. “I do not mind. What does a few minutes matter either way? We shall all ascend to heaven hand in hand. But what about him?” He meant Ryuuki.

Setsura said without so much as the twitch of an eyebrow, “I’ll kill him after you.”

“What a fine young man you are. I only wish we could have crossed swords back when I rode as a mounted knight.”

The general laughed, his voice ragged from the effects of Ryuuki’s demon qi. The bloody battlefield was his home. No one found greater joy in slaughter and carnage than those Carpathian soldiers that were his kith and kin. They called out to death, beckoned to it, celebrated it, worshipped it. Their struggles to the death would never end.

But this one ended sooner than expected.

From the end of the street and around the corner marched a bold orchestra of sirens. A formation of patrol cars. Beams of artificial light focused on the moonlit creatures.

“What’s going on here?”

“Nobody move!”

The men shouted orders as they closed in on them. “How annoying,” said General Bey, facing the onrushing police, his eyes glowing with a fierce loathing. “But this is a good enough time to bid you adieu. I am wounded. You are ill. We shall meet again. Nay, we must.”

Scattering moonlight, the dazzling man retreated into the darkness. A strand of devil wire leapt out from Setsura’s right hand, and was severed by one just as sharp. Just as the cops rounded the corner in force.

As precarious as the situation was, it was resolved without incident. The real estate broker confirmed that it was all the fault of the fleeing homicidal maniac. The unimpeachable testimonies of Doctor Mephisto and Setsura Aki were all that the cops needed to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Who’s this?” The cop who seemed to be charge shot a sharp glance at Ryuuki, now being supported by Mephisto.

“A friend,” said Setsura, and his word was enough.

The cop took down a description of General Bey, nodding his head and swallowing whole the story that they had quite coincidentally run into the villain.

“It is dangerous to be up and around at this time of night,” he said to Mephisto.

“It is indeed.”

“I can’t really put my finger on it, but when the sun goes down there seems to be a chill in the air, and you start feeling down and adrift, a strange sort of melancholy—”

Mephisto listened without interruption. The moonlight cast a soft shadow at his feet. Somehow indistinct, as if the ground under his feet were less visible than that under the police officer.

“It was like that yesterday too. And the same today. I spent my shift just driving in circles. I finally got out to take a look around. There’s something off even in the red light districts. The pachinko parlors, the peep shows, the head shops are doing brisk business. The streets are filled with pedestrians and music, everything from rock to John Philip Sousa. But still, something’s off. A different kind of civilian on the streets. And they never flag off. They look like normal folk, hang like normal folk, talk like normal folk. But look closer and they’re checking you out with eyes like ice. When you pass by, you get a vibe that pricks your ears up, a good one in ten shooting daggers at you. One of them. I don’t quite understand it myself, but there’s something alive in the world that’s completely different from you and me.”

“Precisely,” said Mephisto. “When people change, so does the world. But not all at once, for which we can count our lucky stars.”

“Is luck something Doctor Mephisto ever has to count on?”

“Was there anything else you needed of us?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You’re free to go.” The cop smartly saluted.

By now the street was thronged with ambulances and CSI vans. The three walked to a playground a ten-minute stroll away. In the center of this plot of land, devoid of any other life, the three faced each other. Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto against General Ryuuki.

An alignment perfectly fitting in Demon City.

“Why rush to my aid?” asked Setsura.

“Don’t you want to see me in the grave?” Ryuuki spoke in a low voice. Kazikli Bey had attacked him with his own demon qi.

“The real reason.”

“I am no longer with Princess.”

“You have fled. Shuuran is dead—or so we presume—but presuming so, Princess is now relying on Kikiou and General Bey for her defense. This is—”

Setsura was about to say, a pleasant turn of events. He swallowed the rest of the sentence. The reality was too hard to ignore. Nobody understood General Bey’s true power better than him.

“Where is Princess?”

Still cloaked by dust, Ryuuki laughed. “Do you think I would tell you? I may be an exile, but I am not a coward. Kikiou has told me of your true powers. If Shinjuku’s preeminent manhunter cannot uncover Kikiou’s cloaking mechanisms, then that world will never yield its secrets.”

“So I take it you won’t be spilling the beans.”

“This is a pointless conversation. My bones should have crumbled long ago in the yellow sands of western China. Princess saved my life. Even today, I cannot say whether that was a blessing or a curse. But the debt of honor remains.”

“Then why exile yourself from her?”

“I am not so certain myself. Perhaps because I am tired. Living by itself is a hard thing, and living an eternal life all the harder. Would you perhaps know the name of he who invented death?”

“What do you intend to do in the city?”

“Nothing, beyond living.”

“You know that’s not going to happen,” Setsura said, as a night breeze caressed his cheek.

“I know. You are the kind of man that belongs in this city. But neither will I go down in dishonor. Bring it on.”

Ryuuki reached out his hand. In his left hand slept the ghost koto Silent Night. A strange, indefinable, ghostly aura rose up between them.

A white hand also rose up to settle things. When it rested upon his shoulder, Setsura Aki didn’t budge an inch. “What are you up to, Mephisto?” he asked.

“Let us call this off. Eliminating him solves nothing. And General Ryuuki’s overweening pride might well prove perfectly fitted for this place.”

“The craving of a vampire’s bloodlust is as natural as sleep is to us. Doing without would lead to madness and death. He would surely seek out human blood before that happened, making no distinctions, the child and his grandmother alike.”

Mephisto’s voice fluttered like a butterfly in Setsura’s ear. The fragrances it bore graced every breath the good doctor took. “You are not wrong. But you cannot know of that sweetness.”

“Mephisto—” Setsura said, still as a statue.

“What?”

“Ryuuki has bitten you.” The night deepened. The moon rose in the sky, more white and more serene. “I cannot imagine that you’d let your blood be taken so easily. So what the hell has gotten into you?”

“Whatever could you mean?”

“I mean the reason you would stick your neck out—literally.” Setsura stepped forward, leaving only Mephisto’s lingering white hand. “You can tell me later. For now, don’t interfere.”

Setsura sized up the distance between himself and Ryuuki and cast his devil wire at the upright silhouette.

A white shadow sliced through it.

Rather than repeat the attack, Setsura turned his attention to Mephisto. “Hey, I told you to stay out of this.”

“I do not appreciate your acting in such a familiar manner with my colleague.”

His colleague. Since when had he become Ryuuki’s colleague? Or Ryuuki his? Setsura silently observed the thin red line running from the top of his head to the tip of his white cape—the attack intended for Ryuuki’s body. Mephisto’s eyes cast off a fiery glow.

“An attack like that could have killed the normal me.” Would anyone other than Setsura have recognized the trance-like echoes in his voice? “But not so much now.” The wound melded into the snowy white. “I have wanted to test my skills against your devil wire. Which would prevail?”

In the next instant, Setsura’s neck was enveloped by a silver light—a strand of wire wrapped around his neck. The other end looped through the air and disappeared beneath Mephisto’s cape.

Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto had finally faced off. One a manhunter and vampire hunter. One a doctor and a vampire. Who would carve the epitaph on the other’s grave?

Mephisto’s mouth twisted into a smile, baring his fangs. They were white and sharp. And beautiful. “I have to wonder, can you cut through it?”

“No,” Setsura answered readily.

“I can slice or dice or garrote or strangle—shall we make it your choice or mine?”

“None of the above.”

The ring tightened with a jerk. Setsura’s expressionless face darkened. In a flash, Mephisto approached him with unearthly elegant strides.

“To say I am free to kill or let live is such a tired way of putting it, but I haven’t the time right now to express myself more creatively. What say you?”

The two most beautiful countenances in the world stared at each other, mere inches apart, black pupils sucked into each other’s voids, darker than the night, clearer than pure water.

If the moon could express a will of its own, these two faces—so close together as to appear as one—would drive it into a jealous rage. And yet would pray that they would never part.

As they seemed about to fuse together, a low moan arose from the paper-thin gap like a deadly miasma—Mephisto.

The black-clad manhunter drifted backwards from the white-clad doctor, standing there stock-still. The ring around his neck dissolved and returned to a simple strand of wire.

Setsura Aki said, his physique and countenance as comely as ever, “Mephisto’s wire cannot be cut but it can be undone. My devil wire in no way impugns the Demon Physician’s good name. We should all be able to agree on that.”

“Gladly,” Doctor Mephisto said coldly. “Neither would I wish to draw and quarter the ordinary you.”

“Hoh. Shall we become brothers then?”

“Ah, what joy such a relationship might bring. Would you be a friend? A colleague? The dictionary does not easily yield the proper definition in such a case.”

In which case, what might he have meant by calling Ryuuki a colleague?

“The enemy seems to have fled,” Setsura said, raising his right hand. “That would be your responsibility, Mephisto.”

“So it is.”

Setsura rotated his wrist slightly downward. Unseen and unheard, the devil wire it unleashed contained the power and will to sever the Demon Physician’s neck.

Mephisto ducked a hair’s breadth out of the way and spun around to the right. With every pirouette, another “Mephisto” suddenly appeared. One, two, three, four doctors in white surrounded Setsura, their capes flashing.

The devil wire shot out. And met no resistance. They were phantoms—or not. Steel filaments sprang out from the seams of the capes, skimmed past Setsura’s back as he dodged out of the way, and severed the concrete bench behind him like a slab of tofu.

“Not bad,” Setsura said to Mephisto from behind the bench.

Had a battle this pretty ever been waged before? The hunters all had the same face and the same physique, and that somehow compensated for the pervading and uncanny weirdness of the scene. From high above, the moon looked down on the predators and their black beauty of a prey as if in a trance.

Watching as the Mephistos leaned forward and pressed their right palms against the ground, Setsura started to jump backwards.

The earth shook beneath his feet, followed by a powerful shockwave. The surface collapsed as if falling into a bowl, pulling the asphalt and seesaws and jungle gyms into the great divot in the ground.

The Mephistos stood at the rim of the thirty-foot-wide sinkhole that had suddenly appeared in the midnight playground, as if traced by a line connecting their hands.

One of them peered down airily into the bottom of the sinkhole. All the rest of the Mephistos vanished. In their places, half-foot long shards of wire jutted out of the earth.

The Setsura seriously attempting to remove Mephisto’s head was Setsura, just as the Mephisto fully intending to bury Setsura deep in the earth was Mephisto.

The doctor in white stood above. The manhunter in black lay buried below, beneath a pile of rubble. Mephisto swept back his cape. With an indescribable look on his face he peered down at the black slicker peeking out from the side of a swing set.

He reached out his right hand, a slender hand that a beast would rather lick than bite. He was holding in his hand a coil of wire. “A death in the arms of the moon is altogether fitting. And I shall deliver the coup de grâce.”

Gripping the coil, with his left hand he pulled out two, then three lengths of wire, forming a shining lance. A tribute to the dead, or his own personal predilection—attached to the long hilt was a flower finely sculpted from the same wire.

“I wished to spend one night with that other you. However, we will meet once again in the devil’s palace in the sky.”

He raised the spear. Overhead and very close came the cry of a raven. A dull thud reverberated against Mephisto’s chest. Mephisto whirled around. A wide blade protruded from his chest, precisely through the heart. It was at least a yard long.

Three shadows appeared next to the swing set a dozen feet away. The young blonde girl standing next to Setsura—sans his slicker—was dressed in blue like the ocean depths, like the quintessence of water itself.

“Bull’s eye,” said the big raven, perched on Setsura’s left shoulder. It sounded surprised by the accuracy of the shot. But perhaps an understandable response by the witnesses to Mephisto’s mortal wounding.

Setsura caught the blue velvet scabbard as it fell from the raven’s beak.

“As I might have expected,” Mephisto said, with a nod in Setsura’s direction, and without the slightest inflection in his tone of voice or expression. His heart had been pierced by a long sword. That was all.

“That was your coat. I should have known better. The prospect of warring with you must have been so regrettable as to strain my eyesight.”

“What a pity,” said the doll girl, without an ounce of pity in her voice. “That Doctor Mephisto did not take note of me and this wretched raven tailing him is indeed a remarkable shame. Worry not. Aki-sama is doing fine.”

“Well, not so much.”

“What’s that?”

The doll girl reflexively looked up at him. His countenance—pale on a good day—was bloodless to the point of becoming transparent, even sublime.

Pressing his right hand against his chest, Setsura said quietly, “The wound inflicted by Shuuran has opened up and continues to bleed. Whose quarters should we impose ourselves upon?”

“I am the attending physician,” said the man who had just tried to destroy him. This doctor’s mental make-up was a true mystery. “But who cast that spear?” he asked.

“I did,” said that other Setsura.

“That is a relief. Not being able to dodge a spear thrown by a doll would have reflected poorly on me and my hospital.”

The doll girl pursed her lips. “Speak for yourself.”

“Then let us be on our way,” said Setsura, stepping forward.

“No, I am afraid that here we must part. I have, as you might expect, other unpleasant tasks to tend to.”

Mephisto waved his left hand. His white scarf appeared. A moment later, the man and the girl and the bird were shrouded by a curtain of white. When it severed neatly in two and fell to the ground, the moonlight revealed only Mephisto’s absence.

“I guess I shall have to rely on your good offices,” Setsura said, looking down at the doll girl.

“She is delighted,” said the big raven.

The doll girl rested her blue eyes on it. “Even Doctor Mephisto has become a vampire. Find and follow him.”

“No,” said Setsura, stopping the bird as it started to flap its wings. “I know where he is going. The more things change, the more his world remains the same as it ever was.”

“Mephisto Hospital? Won’t that put you at even more of a risk?”

“Like I said, that’s the way things are. Shall we give the police a ring?”

“No.”

“I will go tomorrow. Until then, if you wouldn’t mind the imposition—”

“Not at all. You are welcome anytime.”

They hailed a taxi and drove to the home of Galeen Nuvenberg. Setsura Aki made his way to the bed he’d arisen from not that long before and collapsed.

The doll girl covered him with a blanket, and then busied herself in the kitchen brewing a pot of tea.