Chapter One

Chapter One

“And who might you be?” Setsura asked the owner of the unseen voice, with no hint in his manner that he might well be the target of an impending attack. Like the refined young scion on a leisurely stroll about town.

“Hoh. Aren’t we all calm and collected.” The man was impressed. “Well, I don’t suppose you would be prowling about Chuo Park by yourself otherwise. But you’ll have to call off the explorations for the time being. We’ve got some questions about the babe and her four-thousand-year-old boat.”

He took a breath. “You got it, bud. I’m a telepath. At the top of my game. Not just what’s in your head, but I’m onto what’s running around down in your subconscious too. As for why I’m interested in vamps, no comment. You’ll just have to wait for the results of our cross-examination. Hey, hey, that’s an interesting weapon you’ve got there. Move a hand and that’s all she wrote.”

“So now what?” Setsura asked, purging his mind of all thoughts. Like the man said, he had to control his subconscious as well. That wasn’t easy.

“Oh, don’t bother. It’s called the subconscious because it can’t be controlled consciously. Turn your head into a blank slate and it’s still churning away. Yeah, rooting out where I am right now is totally where you need to begin. But it’s not like I’m leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind. C’mon, about face and back the way you came. Move it.”

Setsura turned around. He was in midair. He moved naturally, as if walking along an unseen path beneath his feet. How he was doing this was not immediately apparent to the Telepath. But as long as Setsura was within the Telepath’s detection field, he would know what Setsura was up to as soon as Setsura did, and would have countermeasures ready. As with the stalker and the stalked, being seen put him at a far greater disadvantage.

“Look at you with the blank mind. And all that white noise in the subconscious. You’ve got some decent training under your belt. I wouldn’t have believed a mere amateur could hide so many cards up his sleeve.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Setsura said with a straight face.

The voice broke into loud laughter. “Oh, please. If a little lip was all it took to make me to pop a rivet, there wouldn’t be enough plots in all the graveyards in the world. I’m a buggering asshole, you say? Well, to start off the torture training, everybody gets it up the ass. So we’re all in that literal hole together. Needless to say, there were never guys like you around. If you’d showed up, it would have thrown us all in a tizzy.”

“Good grief,” Setsura said with a shrug of his shoulders. It wasn’t clear whether this was because he was at his wit’s end, or was dumbfounded by the gruesome nature of his shadowless foe’s training.

He continued for several more yards in the air.

“You actually erase your subconscious, and that’s all she wrote, bud.” The sound of his voice was sharp enough to taste. “I’ll shoot you dead before that happens. With this gun, I could put a hole through a quarter at four thousand yards. Besides, what would a human being be without his subconscious? You don’t know either. Can you even get back to normal?”

Setsura didn’t answer. His interrogator was about to speak again when the black silhouette perched on his handsome shoulder soared into the air. The report of a gun followed immediately upon the sound of flapping wings.

The sound alone identified it as a small caliber rifle. A puff of feathers, and the rest of the bird was blown backwards. A second later came a brutal scream. A fountain of blood erupted in the air. Something fell to earth with a dull thud. A left arm clothed in green army fatigues. Then a downpour of blood that shook the blue-green grass.

The headwaters of the crimson waterfall between heaven and earth was a human figure floating thirty yards above Setsura’s head.

The face twisted in agony as it continued on its downward course. More than counterattacking, more than the state of his wounds, when his own well-being was made part of the equation a Special Forces soldier prioritized survival expressly in order to accomplish the mission.

Constantly adjusting the repulsive magnetic field, the wide metal belt around his waist set him down gently behind a big tree. The “levitation belt” he was wearing was one of the SDF’s proudest achievements in military hardware.

He reached with his right hand to the first-aid kit hooked to the belt while searching Setsura’s consciousness.

Nothing. A totally unexpected response.

Still, by concentrating his mind, he was able to staunch the flow of blood. The spray-on synthetic skin combined analgesic, anti-inflammatory and tissue regenerating compounds, but couldn’t reattach a severed limb.

The smooth edge of the wound made the Telepath gulp. His fatigues were woven with carbon fibers and ballistic materials that would stop a .45 Magnum. A heavyweight wrestler could swing a Japanese katana with all his might and not leave a nick.

He never would have expected that the titanium threads he read in the young man’s mind could do something like this.

And that crow had been talking like a person. That meant he should have been able to read its mind. Letting it be was a mistake. There were three telepaths or clairvoyants in the whole world who could read non-human flora or fauna. The way it’d suddenly taken off, it must have known its thoughts were unreadable by him.

Of course, having tipped his hand to the youngster, he’d let down his guard for an instant and been caught flat-footed. He’d screwed that pooch but good. No matter how badly he’d wanted to off the kid, as long as the plan was to bring him back and make him talk, his instincts slowed his finger on the trigger. Besides, if anything funny started to crop up, he was sure he’d be the first to know.

Instead he’d been played within an inch of his life. The kid was plugged right into his own subconscious. A combination that was hard to beat.

The Telepath wiped the sweat from his brow and regripped his ACR, his adaptive combat rifle. Based on what he was reading, opposing him was not a single strand of wire but a spider’s web hovering in the sky, ready to vivisect anything that touched it. He didn’t understand how he could do something like that without even thinking about it, but Setsura in his current state was beyond a telepath’s comprehension.

It’d been twenty minutes since entering the park. After ten minutes more, his partners on the outside would send in somebody after him. His watch-sized combat indicator was still strapped to his left wrist. His best recourse was to stay put. Given what he was up against, he didn’t know how else to proceed.

Too bad he was only a passive telepath. Active telepaths could transmit as well. He had to shake his head at his cruel fate. And if he could read other living things, he could detect the bastard’s position from how everything around him reacted to his presence.

The Telepath sensed something above him. He reflexively looked up. A foot and a half above his head, the trunk of the tree began to slide apart.

“God damn!” he exploded in English, his mother tongue.

He scrambled to the side just as the weight of the giant chunk of severed wood was about to crush him. An instant later, his body split in half from his right side to his left hip. Fresh blood splashed onto the grass.

The upper half of his body thumped onto the ground. The diagonal remains of the lower half continued to move under the power of the levitation belt. A second later, it too was drawn and quartered, falling down behind its missing half.

Such was the cleanness of the cut that the Telepath’s head still registered surprise at what had happened. As the pallor of death colored its features, a dark silhouette emerged from the shadow of the grove of trees ahead of him and walked toward him.

Setsura paused above the man’s head and looked down at the corpse. The breathtaking beauty of his utterly expressionless face remained unchanged. The impression of a soulless doll was more likely the result of his currently nonexistent subconscious.

The black art of casting forth his devil wire required not a scintilla of conscious thought. It could be described as a purely autonomic reaction. The body of this young man could strike down his enemies independent of his volitional will.

Ah, but what a beautiful genie this Setsura Aki was.

The Telepath’s head rose up. This time, if someone had been monitoring the man’s pulse, he would have flatlined a long time ago and gone gray.

“Not bad, bud.” The voice of the dead sounded like it was rising from out of the ground.

Setsura stopped in his tracks. His eardrums must have registered the sound vibrations and transmitted the impulses through the nerves to his brain. Or rather, the signals had taken a shortcut on the way there and on the way back.

“This is the end of you, too. That brain of yours remains a mystery. But my colleagues will soon arrive. Even if you kill them as well, after them will come those whose power puts them in a completely different league from ourselves. You can’t escape. You might as well start digging your own grave.”

The right arm barely attached to the shoulder jerked up. The black muzzle of the ACR reached out along the line of the forearm.

Just as the wrist severed cleanly from the arm, with a flapping of black wings, the raven landed on the rifle. With the hand still attached, the rifle soared away into the sky. The Telepath glared at the big bird, clucked his tongue, and drew his last.

“Alas and alack,” the immortal crow sang down at the corpse, “I’ve got a body made of ectoplasm. Anything that’d kill a human won’t kill me.” It cast off the rifle and winged its way back to Setsura’s shoulder.

In that instant, its body split apart, from the head down to its tail feathers.

Setsura’s intentionless body interpreted this state of non-being as the product of mortal combat, and accordingly struck out indiscriminately at anything approaching or even moving or exhibiting signs of intentional life.

A nightmarish state of non-mind.

Setsura silently walked away, without any conscious recognition of the Telepath or the big raven. Where to? Beyond the forest, in the direction he had originally been headed.

By the end of that deathly duel, his quiescent purpose—to rescue Takako and Yakou—might as well have been etched into the marrow of his bones. But having turned into a destroying angel, such actions had become all the more difficult. The demonic monsters of this park lay in his path. What ghastly spectacle would result from such a dreadful course of exploration, even if nothing more than the product of him wandering about?

Setsura’s figure was swallowed up by the poisonous greenery. Two black lumps on the ground tottered toward each other. Laying the severed ends against each other, they came together to form a single large raven.

“Son of a bitch!”

No sooner had the words left its beak than the two halves began to slide apart. Even if it was a flash of unthinking instinct that would not kill it, what Setsura’s devil wire had wrought wasn’t allowing this Humpty Dumpty of a crow to put itself back together again.

“This sucks rocks, man. Even if I get my right and left halves to cooperate, I’m going nowhere fast. What the hell am I supposed to do? Run for help? Stick around and watch that beautiful fiend’s back? If he lassos everything that moves with his devil wire, in his current state he’s going to put the whole park and Shinjuku through a Veg-O-Matic. Decisions, decisions.”

With great care, the bird went to fold back its wings. The severed sections popped open again.

“Shit!” the raven screamed.