Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Setsura Aki stepped into the shadow cast by the twenty-foot high wall. He looked up at it. Its height alone was dispiriting. The west entrance of Chuo Park. In the darkness cast by the wall surrounding Shinjuku’s no-go, DMZ area, Setsura breathed an uncertain sigh.

Not really all that “uncertain”; but no other word came close to describing his current state of being.

The young man’s comely features usually seemed to cheerfully beckon to friends and acquaintances. Now his countenance was clouded by debilitating weakness. The fierceness of the inner demons necessary to withstand its unearthly causes showed on his face, making him look all the more like one of the undead himself.

Chuo Park might seem an entirely appropriate place for the way he appeared. But needless to say, neither his body nor his spirit were happy to be along for the ride. He was here because this was where Kazikli Bey said Takako should be. And where Yakou had disappeared into the woods. Since then, after leaving his first message, a second one hadn’t followed, and Setsura could only assume the worst.

He didn’t know if the Demon Princess and her crew were still here. He had no choice but to venture forth. He raised his right hand high above his head. An invisible line of light sprang into the sky. The black-clad genie flew through the air like a demonic bird. A twenty-foot hurdle was a mere bump in the road.

Just as he was about to continue on the downward trajectory, from even higher up, a black raven glided down and alighted on his left shoulder. “Ho ho ho,” laughed the big raven, covering its beak with its wing. The bright laughter was weirdly charming.

“What do you want?” Setsura asked as he descended. He thought he’d left the raven back at the hospital.

“Hey, don’t be so cold to the living. My die hard old lady told me to go with you. Not to mention that doll girl getting on my case.”

Setsura set down on the long grass.

“She’s got a crush on you. Eyes that can’t cry always on the verge of tears, but staring me down if I balk in the slightest. At the very least, I expect a little gratitude for my generous spirit if you get out of here in one piece.”

“Feel free to fly away whenever you want,” Setsura said breezily as he set off.

“Do you even know where you’re going?”

“No. But it’s not a big place. What I’m looking for should turn up soon enough.”

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. You’d better find her by sunset. I don’t care if you’re Shinjuku’s number one P.I. Pawing through the underbrush in Chuo Park at night is a good way to get us both turned into road kill.”

“In that case, you take off and tell that girl how you ditched me.”

The raven pulled a face as only a crow can and changed the subject. “Oh, yeah. I was cruising past the Hyatt on my way here and ran across a couple of guys giving me that look, you know? One of them had the weirdest transparent kind of eyes. Gotta be a clairvoyant. What the hell is he doing in a place like this? Anybody in this city knows that beyond the wall, the average psychic can’t see jack. They must have come in from the outside world. So what’s their gig?”

Setsura just kept on walking and didn’t answer.

A paved path wound between the overgrown lawns and strange, giant trees. Once upon a time, day and night, lovers had strolled hand in hand down these paths. Of course, Setsura couldn’t have known that two days before, Yakou and a pair of his men had taken this same route.

To be honest, he wasn’t sure that the Demon Princess and Kikiou were hanging out here either. Yakou might have made it to the enemy’s kingdom first. He hadn’t returned, so Setsura was operating under the assumption that he was dead and the Princess had surely moved. For vampires living in the false light of day, having the location of their safe house exposed would be the same as death.

There must be traps everywhere. Yakou’s visit certainly would have tipped them off to the assassins sure to follow in his footsteps.

Again deploying his ancient Chinese high-tech skills, Kikiou had undoubtedly wrapped even more fearsome defenses around the already fearsome DMZ. And Setsura was walking right into the middle of the maelstrom.

After ten minutes or so, the raven called out in a surprised voice, “Hey! Aren’t you taking things at a rather hasty pace? It’s almost like you’ve been here before.”

Setsura didn’t answer. The raven wasn’t worth the breath.

“Anyway,” the bird continued in a curious voice, “you got somebody coming up behind you. I wonder how he got over the wall. If he’s a friend, he would have announced his presence right away. Creeping around here not saying a word—you’re a man with enemies too.”

Setsura stopped. “Hoh, it’s about time,” the raven muttered.

At that moment, Setsura rose into the air, as if he’d suddenly climbed two steps in a staircase. He floated a foot and a half above the ground and then came to a halt. The work of his devil wires.

“What the hell!”

Beneath the alarmed raven, a snake-like creature slithered through the grass. The dark blue spots spilling across the yellow ochre earth wasn’t so much a snake but tentacles. The raven narrowed its eyes but couldn’t see what they belonged to.

“We’ll keep going like this,” Setsura said at length, as if this was still a park and he was simply out for an afternoon stroll.

The raven couldn’t tell where the wires made contact with the earth or what connected them to him.

“Think that guy behind us will get caught?”

“I didn’t expect an oversized crow to be such a people person,” Setsura replied, allowing a bantering tone to enter his voice.

“Hey!” a voice called out from up ahead.

“Somebody’s here!” The clearly rattled raven flapped his wings.

“Stick your feathers in my ears. The sirens are about to start up.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Of the Greek variety. For a witch’s familiar, you sure are clueless. Shut up and listen.”

“Hey, wait!” cried out a voice to the right.

The raven whirled around but nobody was there.

“Help me, please!” a woman wept.

The bird did a quick one-eighty in the air. “Nobody there either. What is this?”

“Look down.”

“You can’t fool me.”

“That was me talking,” Setsura said to the raven.

“What’s this?” said the raven, a gleam in its eyes.

A pile of white bones piled up in a clearing, ragged pieces of clothing still stuck to them. The majority appeared to be SWAT and SDF uniforms. Their fact-finding missions ended here, death being their ultimate accomplishment.

“They were lured by the voices we heard before.” Setsura pressed his hand against his side as he spoke. “The sirens of the park, they’re called. Like the sailors of old, none who came to this vacant land ever left.”

No fences enclosed the area, but the determined investigators would have wandered there in circles until hunger and fatigue overcame them.

“Sound suppressors that scramble the frequencies of the voice have since been developed, but it’s said that after the Devil Quake these sirens have entrapped three thousand souls.”

“So you’re on friendly terms with earplugs, huh? So why wasn’t I affected?”

“Because you’re with me,” Setsura said bluntly and set off again, but with no indication of where he was headed.

Rather than taking flight, the raven stayed right where it was. Before their eyes an incredible sight opened up within the woods. The horizon stretched out beyond it. The brilliant contours of a building wrapped in a gleaming light that made it waver to and fro like a mirage.

The building itself was a city. But of some inexplicable and fantastic nature, unimaginable in Shinjuku where the aftershocks of the Devil Quake continued on an almost daily basis. More of the sort found in the megalopolises of the outside world like Los Angeles, where cutting-edge construction materials, high-strength engineering and spatial design were all the rage, and the results were entirely removed from the real world.

Here and there, dotting the soaring tangle of crisscrossing tubes, were embedded spherical “houses,” like beads on interlaced necklaces. A globe perpetually balanced on the rectangular edges of the walls. Setsura was struck by the realization that this must be the chief residence.

At least the glittering, golden architecture far off in the distance possessed an air of comforting familiarity that came from comporting to the physical laws of the known universe.

These structures instead were a mix and match of all shapes and sizes—spheres, cones, pyramids—arranged and transformed according to hyperdimensional physics, like something out of the Twilight Zone.

“What the hell is that?” exclaimed the raven, shaking its head like a few screws had come loose inside its little skull. “Looks like something the clam dreamed.”

“The clam?” Setsura casually inquired.

“From when the world was born, a giant clam has slumbered at the bottom of the sea. Now and then it dreams a dream. The power of the Devil Quake linked that primordial ocean and Shinjuku together. At least that’s how the story goes. Nobody knows for sure. But it doesn’t look like a nightmare to me.”

“And if it was a nightmare, what then?” Setsura didn’t wait for an answer. He started walking again.

A gunshot rang out. Setsura’s left cheek quivered. A drop of blood welled from a razor-thin sliver of exposed flesh, broke the surface tension, and slid down the skin.

“Don’t move.” The command came from above. Not from human vocal cords, but from a loudspeaker. “Lift a pinky and the next one’s right between the shoulder blades.”

The man and the bird froze in place.

“You can’t see me, but I can see you plain as day. From way up here.”

The assassin who’d trailed Setsura to this point roared with laughter.