Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1)

by Travis Heermann

  If only Kuan-yin had been a fighter when the Black Lotus Clan came. Maybe he’d have escaped.

  Young Kenji had gravitated more toward his mother’s martial arts style rather than his father’s. He had thought the simian antics of Monkey-style kung-fu looked silly, its acrobatics difficult, overblown, fun to watch in a movie but useless in a real fight. In the western MMA world, no one took kung-fu seriously as a practical martial art.

  Nevertheless, he enjoyed watching his father spar with the high-ranking students and other instructors. It was like watching a dangerous form of comical ballet. What Django realized now, but didn’t appreciate then, was that the monks of Shaolin Temple were legendary for a reason. Pretenders and poseurs didn’t realize that kung-fu, practiced in its real, combat-ready form, required incredible mental discipline, plus hardening of the limbs and body in ways that boggled the mind of soft, modern people.

  His father often said, “In ancient times, you face Monkey kung-fu man, he rip off your ear, your eye, your jewel sack.”

  You could fake credentials, but you couldn’t fake the iron body of a real kung-fu master. His father was a small man, but he had hands like a gorilla’s, thick-knuckled and hardened from decades of striking wood and bricks. The skin on the back of his hands was so thick and tough that it couldn’t be pinched, yet his wrists and fingers were no less limber than a ballerina’s. Django remembered how, as a boy, his father’s hands could feel as hard as leather-wrapped stone one moment and as gentle as a kitten the next. Chen Xiu’s shin bones were so hardened and impervious to pain that he could shin-kick a steel post at full strength, over and over and over again. The concept of chi, inner power, life force, called ki in Japanese, was ubiquitous in Chinese martial arts and medicine. What most human martial artists didn’t know was that it was but one facet of the wonders of mahō. He had devoted his life to cultivating his chi through training and combat until he was one of the world’s few living masters of Monkey kung-fu.

  And Django’s last words to his father had been, Oh, yeah? Fuck you, old man!

  What a witty sixteen-year-old he had been.

  That very night, his parents were slaughtered. All of their skills with martial arts hadn’t been a match for mahō-powered assassins. Like bringing knives to a gunfight.

  “Let’s just wallow, shall we?” he growled at himself as he threw down his bokken in disgust and dropped into the punishing series of push-ups his parents had taught him. He did each push-up with a different hand position: on the backs of his hands, the sides, the heel, the fist, the second knuckles, the fingertips, then three fingers, then two, then one, then the thumbs, then cycling to the backs of the hands again. He had hated this as a teenager. It had been excruciating at first. Now he could do all of them easily.

  Then he went for a ten-kilometer run, and still he couldn’t outrun his anger.

  He was eight kilometers into it when the Summoning came, a buzz that cut through his Brand, into his brain, and down his spine like lightning.

  THE COUNCIL OF FIVE ELDERS SUMMONS YOU.

  The thought reverberated simultaneously in his mind in English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean.

  A Summoning could only mean one thing.

  His stomach went sour. While he often reveled in hunting supernatural creatures, yokai, hunting human beings was another thing entirely.

  ON THE TRAIN RIDE ACROSS Tokyo to Asakusa Station, flashes of memory hit him like strobe lights. Blood on the walls of the living room in Honolulu. But the blood had belonged to the attackers taken down by his parents. The bodies of the assailants had been removed before Django got home late that night.

  His mother had been in the living room, staring at the ceiling, her sword nearby, her flesh bloated and blackening through sickening hues. She didn’t even look human anymore. His father had been likewise found in the kitchen. Both of them had several superficial wounds, but nothing looked serious enough to kill them. They had gone down fighting.

  Django had found his brother Kuan-yin, thirteen years old, in the back yard with a bokken in his hand, under a koa tree, beheaded.

  That was when the lightning hit him.

  He was standing there, numb with horror, anguished by the fact he would never hear his brother’s easy-going laugh again, never again enlist him to steal all the coconuts they could carry from houses all over the neighborhood just so they could gorge themselves on coconut juice. Who could do such a thing to a kid? The immensity of the horrors he had just stumbled into had beaten him into a senseless lump, unable to feel anything at all.

  Then from a clear night sky came a blinding flash and deafening crash.

  When he awoke, he was lying face down in the back yard about ten paces away from his dead brother. He was not injured, but his waist, groin, and buttocks felt like they were on fire, throbbing with heat and...power? As a sixteen-year-old boy, he spent a great deal of time with his groin throbbing for no clear reason, but this was different. His legs felt made of stone, making standing difficult.

  Then the police came and destroyed what was left of his world with their fruitless investigation and meaningless reports.

  The autopsy report said that his parents had died from massive injections of hemotoxic venom, the kind of snake venom that attacks red blood cells. However, no known snake could deliver the volume of venom necessary to kill them so quickly. No snakes were found anywhere near the house, and Hawaii had no indigenous venomous snakes.

  Kuan-yin’s cause of death was obvious.

  The police never got back to him with suspects or any details of the investigation, because a few days later—Django wasn’t sure how long he was lost in a black, bottomless fugue—the Hunter-Seeker came for him, a man in a black business suit and sunglasses, calling himself Toshirō, with the power of the Universe at his fingertips.

  ON DJANGO’S WALK FROM the train station to Sensō-ji, the oldest temple in Tokyo, the rush-hour crowds diminished. The sun sank toward dusk, but the heat would not relent. It would still be hot and muggy long after nightfall, making his heavy duster uncomfortably warm, but it was still the best way to help conceal the tools of his trade. His Third Eye was powerful enough to cloud the perceptions of others to a limited degree. Most people were so self-absorbed in their own private hells that it took little effort to help their eyes slide right past him. He did catch the eye of a perceptive few, but in a city where anime cosplay was a cultural phenomenon and a wildly creative youth culture reveled in sticking their thumbs in the eye of traditional norms, he could still slide past with only a moment’s curiosity. Nope, no trained killers here. No concealed swords either. And definitely no creatures of the night who’d love to chew your liver for dinner. All he needed was a wide-brimmed hat and he’d look like Vampire Hunter D.

  He’d read a comic book once, back when he was still in Hawaii, that he recalled reflexively whenever he got down on himself. There was a scene in Watchmen where this vastly powerful super-being, a man capable of destroying the entire planet, had fallen in love with a human woman. What stopped him from abandoning his humanity altogether was the wonder of her existence, the fact that in a random universe it was a miracle she existed at all, in all her uniqueness and frailties.

  On the days when he hated himself for choosing a street gang over his family, it was as if voices stepped in to remind him of his worth. How unlikely it was that little Kenji had even come to exist. A Chinese father and a Japanese mother, two nationalities that habitually hated each other, especially after the atrocities of World War II, had loved each other enough to bear not just one son, but two. A master of Monkey kung-fu and a kunoichi, a female ninja, second in line to inherit the title of Master in a line of succession stretching back centuries to the ancient Japanese province of Iga, the cradle of the historical ninja.

  Yes, dumbass little Kenji, dubbed “Django” after he’d beaten up a black boy walking home from school as his initiation into the Red Dragons. He still remembered the feeling of raw power of having another human b
eing at his mercy, and the memory shamed him. How lucky that he’d been skipping school and stealing stereos out of parked cars instead of coming home in time to be slaughtered with his parents.

  But if he’d been home, maybe he could have done something. Thanks to a young start and natural athleticism, he was a brown belt in ninjutsu by then, in addition to being well-versed in the seriously lethal techniques his mother had taught him—the kind of stuff she couldn’t legally teach in the modern world. Maybe he could have done something, turned the tables. Anything.

  And so the self-recrimination went, a circle-shaped rut.

  Even after he’d been brought to Japan, he’d held onto the name Django like a shield. It had come from a horrible place, but he would own that and use it to make him strong.

  The Taito City neighborhood of Asakusa lay some six kilometers east of his usual Shinjuku haunts. The shops along the narrow street were closing for the evening, but the smells of broth and grilled yakiniku skewers, “meats on sticks” as he called them, still filled the air from sidewalk stands and izakaya.

  As Sensō-ji was Tokyo’s oldest temple, built in 645 CE, it was a huge tourist attraction. The legend went that a couple of fishermen—Edo was only a fishing village at that time—discovered a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon, goddess of mercy, and then built a shrine in her honor. Over the next thousand years, it grew in size and prestige until it was named the tutelary temple of the Tokugawa clan by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself, the warlord who crushed the last of his challengers at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, unified the country, and declared himself shogun in 1603.

  Many of the shops surrounding the temple grounds sold trinkets and souvenirs: armored samurai on keychains and spoons, dolls of beautifully robed courtiers and courtesans ranging from kitschy plushies to four-figure porcelain. The main approach was through the great torii gate, which led down a long avenue, Nakamise Shopping Street, filled with more shops selling souvenirs, gifts, clothing, and snacks. But Django approached the temple from the northeast, avoiding the lingering crowds.

  The five-story pagoda of Sensō-ji Temple rose into view, its orange-vermilion heights gleaming in its spotlights, just as the two-meter-high hedge surrounding the grounds came into view.

  With a moment of concentration, he Shadow Blinked past the hedge, into the darkness of a bamboo fence near the western torii gate, a location he knew from memory. From there, he stepped out and walked the last block or so to a pair of drink-vending machines near the corner of the pagoda.

  He stepped behind the vending machines, but no casual onlooker would see him step out again. Perhaps they would imagine he had, but he did not. Instead, he touched the rear of one of the machines and announced his presence via his Brand. Instantly the sensation of being engulfed in a cold vortex seized him, and he was transported to a chamber somewhere below Sensō-ji. How deep he did not know, although he occasionally heard the rumble of the subway. This was the “front door,” one of the handful of entrances to the Council’s complex.

  He didn’t know the extent of the complex, but he had lived in a tiny subterranean room for a while during his apprenticeship. He had scrubbed more tatami mats and nightingale floors than he could count and helped fix modest meals in the complex’s simple kitchen. Gourmet fare it was not: mostly plain white rice, vegetables that were roasted when in season, pickled when not, and occasionally whole fish grilled on skewers.

  The Council’s occult library was a maze of subterranean alcoves lined with scrolls and books going back thousands of years. He had learned several mahō techniques through studying there and practiced them in the safety of the Council’s spacious training hall. He guessed the members of the Council kept quarters in the complex, but he didn’t know for sure—in truth, he knew nothing about where they kept themselves. He knew the guards lived here, as did the Librarian and his three acolytes.

  The arrival chamber was fashioned to resemble the genkan of a traditional Japanese house, the vestibule where shoes were removed and weapons stowed before entering. He hung his duster on a coat rack, placed his swords in the weapons rack, and stacked his array of shuriken neatly below the swords. Taking any weapons into the Council chamber would be a grave insult. Then he stepped out of his shoes, into a pair of waiting slippers, and crossed the nightingale floor of the hallway to the antechamber. There he would wait until the Council was prepared to receive him.

  The antechamber walls were decorated with ancient scrolls painted not just by the hands of Japanese artists, but by Chinese and Korean artists as well. The scrolls depicted epic battles, the grandiose exploits of great heroes, but unlike scrolls seen in the mortal world, these showed heroes wielding the powers of gods. Encircled by brilliant halos, they cleaved through hordes of ravening yokai with blades of fire and hands full of blue flame, calling lightning from the sky to blast their enemies to ash. Who these godlike beings were, he did not know. It was probably all in Shiseki no Gotairō, The Annals of the Council of Five Elders, but his interest in studying waxed and waned. Nevertheless, he did not doubt the existence of powers and combat applications he had never considered.

  The doors opened, flanked by a mahō-enhanced guard on each side. He didn’t know their names, but they were always there, always heavy with Earth mahō, simmering with Fire, and quietly bristling with hidden weapons, including submachine guns. They kept to the shadows, silent as statues.

  Fresh tatami mats squished underfoot and filled the air with their distinctive scent. He knelt in seiza before the dais where five figures sat. Shadows clung to them like living tendrils of India ink. The walls of the chamber were the traditional sliding partitions of rice paper, leading where, Django hadn’t the faintest idea. He no longer needed his Third Eye to tell him that Level Seven mahō was manipulating his perceptions.

  At sixteen, when he’d sat here for the first time, he’d found the way the shadows clung to the Elders terrifying, like the tentacles of a coal-black octopus. Nowadays, he knew himself how to command shadows through the negative aspect of his Third Eye.

  From seiza, he pressed his forehead to the floor. “I am at your service, Exalted Ones.”

  A black-lacquered tray appeared beside him with a manila folder. “A sleeper has Awakened, Wong Kenji-san,” said their voice.

  Whenever any of them spoke, their voices sounded the same, through manipulation of Voice mahō, although he’d come to be able to differentiate them through speech patterns and accents.

  He straightened and picked up the folder—no doubt a dossier on some frightened Level One, fresh from their lightning chrysalis. Another envelope full of money, and if his quarry refused to be brought before the Council to receive a Brand, a delicious infusion as he took their essence for himself. Just as a Hunter-Seeker had come for him when his first essence pool had Awakened, he would come for someone else, as he had done seventeen times since becoming a Hunter-Seeker. Thus far, all of his prey had seen the wisdom of being Branded. Whenever the Council sensed an Awakening’s shockwave through the planes, whatever mysterious means they possessed pinpointed the source, and they Summoned a Hunter-Seeker to bring the Awakened in.

  They scrutinized him as he opened the folder. How many centuries of collective experience regarded him, he was not sure. The Annals described Level Sevens, as all members of the Council were, having longevity bordering on immortality. From studying their speech patterns, he also knew that most of the Council were at least a century old, a couple of them perhaps much older.

  One man spoke in an archaic dialect of Japanese that was dead in the modern world, using the syllable ye, which modern Japanese had officially shortened to e right after World War II. The man apparently eschewed English as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. This man Django found the most difficult to understand—and the most dangerous.

  The other Japanese member of the Council was a woman. She used the modern, polite suffix “-san” when addressing him but spoke with an honorific courtliness usually reserved for those in attendance on the
Emperor and his family.

  The third was a Chinese man who spoke English with a thick accent, wearing a formal changshan robe, the color of which was concealed by the shifting shadows. Pins bound his long hair in an X behind his head.

  The fourth was another Chinese man who spoke only in Django’s mind, conferring thoughts and images rather than language. He had the frail form of an old man but still sat rod straight.

  The last was a Korean woman who spoke sharply, directly, and in accented Japanese, using none of the soft language common to Japanese women. When she spoke, she sounded like a man.

  Any meeting with the Council was a mish-mash of Asian languages and English, but it kept him on his toes. In their presence, his Brand thrummed, as if its power resonated with theirs like a mahō tuning fork. Whenever he departed from them, that thrumming continued for hours afterward, making him feel freshly invigorated and ready for action.

  Django opened the dossier, took a glance at the photo, and then dropped it again as if it were a hornet’s nest. Was he going crazy?

  “What is it, Wong-san?” said the Japanese woman.

  “You know her,” said the Chinese man.

  Tendrils reached through his Celestial pool into his mind, tiny fingers rummaging through his memories. The sensation nauseated him, and the feeling of violation brought his gorge into his throat. But if he threw up right here in the Council’s audience chamber, they might find it a mortal insult.

  “Leave him alone.”

  We cannot be too careful.

  The Japanese man spoke in his archaic tongue. “Tell us, boy.”

  Django swallowed hard and opened his mouth.

  They were lovers.

  “Let him speak.”