In the middle of this terrace, amid a gravel courtyard, stood a stone dais about five feet high and twenty-five feet square. Before the dais was an elaborate, octagonal, bronze lantern about five feet high. Between two stone lanterns, a set of stone steps, blocked by an offering box and a little fence, rose to a platform circled by a low stone balustrade. And in the center of the dais stood a squat, six-foot-tall stone cylinder, topped by a pagoda-like roof and carved on all sides with the Tokugawa crest.
The tomb itself.
He rubbed the fuzzy ache in his forearm again and felt a shudder of apprehension.
First of all, was the Scroll in there?
He sent his Third Eye to probe within.
As soon as his awareness drew close, however, he felt something wrong.
The closer his awareness drew to the tomb, the more effort it required to move forward, so much so that his body trembled and his vision wavered. It was like trying to force the same poles of two electromagnets together.
Sweat beaded his forehead.
For all his effort, the opposing force held him just outside the tomb.
What was happening here?
The presence of mahō did not appear in his vision. No magical auras, no mahō users nearby. Hage said he had masked its magic. Had he also included a kind of repulsion spell? Or was this the kami of the Scroll, an ancient, powerful spirit, one that he would have to take care not to offend? Who knew what kind of curse it might lay upon him?
He steeled himself and pressed onward with this Third Eye, inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, bracing his feet, leaning into it, gritting his teeth, clenching his fists. Pain seeped in behind his left eyeball.
Then his vision exploded into sparks, and he was back in his body.
A pair of Japanese women, a mother and daughter, gave him strange looks. He acknowledged them with a little bow, then moved away. They stared after him.
Whatever was in there, it knew what he was trying to do, and it had decided not to let him do it. It had to be the kami of the Scroll. Perhaps it didn’t want to be found. Or perhaps it did, but not by him.
Even though he hadn’t laid a Third Eye on it, something was inside, and he was going to wait for nightfall to get it out.
When no one was looking, he Shadow Blinked into the forest crowning the mountaintop around the shrine. Taking a position with a commanding view of the footpath and the road below, he settled himself among the trees and let the serenity of nature sink into him.
In his relaxed, open state, he sensed the birds in the branches above, the worms in the earth below, a nearby colony of black ants, mice and rabbits in the bushes, a family of tanuki living in a burrow under a tumble of boulders. Amusement washed through him at the memory of Hage, and he thought he might try to communicate with them. But he sensed no mahō essence in them. They were only normal tanuki. It was as if the entire mountain were a pond upon which he could see ripples left by every creature, including the humans visiting the shrine. This level of awareness was new. Did the shrine have some sort of innate magical strength? Or was this an effect of achieving Level Four?
The ageless resilience and wisdom of the earth beneath him resonated with his Root pool, and in this silence, knowledge flowed into him like a spring. The kami of the earth and the mountain whispered to his subconscious, sharing their wisdom, and through that wisdom, new abilities coalesced. He breathed them in, breathed them out, until he could summon them as easily as making a fist.
His four Awakened pools thrummed through his body with the music of the cosmos, joining in harmony like tuning forks placed near each other.
He noticed all these things, lived in this moment, experienced the thrill of elation, and then let it pass from his thoughts like an over-active monkey, lest it tempt him to cling to it. Clinging to emotions, memories, and wants was the surest way to fall off the Path. And yet, there was much he still clung to. His past. His parents. Yuka. And yes, his own bravado. Only by practicing stillness and serenity could he learn to let those things go, like opening a hand for a butterfly to depart. Clutching the butterfly crushed it—like the butterfly paused now on his knee, a beautiful swallowtail almost the size of his hand, fanning its dark, iridescent blue wings. He could not help smiling at its beauty, so infinitely fragile, so ephemeral in its lifespan.
The shrine was closing for the day. At precisely 5:00 p.m., polite messages in a brisk, pleasant female voice came over the PA system and filtered through the forest, thanking the visitors for coming. The women working in the gift shop packed their good luck charms, specially made snacks, and other souvenirs back inside and closed the windows in front of the counters. Two smiling men in traditional dress politely herded the visitors to the exit.
The butterfly jumped into the breeze, and Django thanked it for the pleasant meeting.
He would wait until nightfall, a little over two hours away, to be sure any witnesses had left before he went after the Scroll. So he settled into the day’s end, breathing deeply of nature, kami, and mahō. He could sense the power of this place. Its ancient stones held secrets. They remembered hunters and farmers, emperors and shoguns, war and peace.
The planet turned its face to the night, spinning through the gravitational forces of the sun, the solar system spinning through the galaxy, the galaxy and its millions of suns and worlds and nebulae and unfathomable vastness spinning through the cosmos. It was all magic. And this awareness thrummed through his Crown like a musical chord with a thousand notes.
But then, like a rogue celestial body shooting through the solar system, disrupting the natural cycles and leaving destruction in its wake, a power moved into his sphere of awareness, a void, a blackness that only devoured. And around it orbited a moon, smaller but significant, deep in the other’s eclipse.
But this awareness was not really like that at all. These impressions impinged upon the ephemeral substance of his magical self, but they could not be formulated into words any more than a sphere or a tesseract could be accurately represented on a flat piece of paper.
What the hell was a tesseract?
A four-dimensional cube.
His eyes snapped open. Where the hell had that voice come from?
Along his hip, the Sword of Divinity vibrated with more words. Your people call me Xuan Yuan. The thoughts rang his spirit like a singing bowl.
An ancient kami like this must be treated with respect. He had no idea the power he might be dealing with.
He said, “I am honored to have you at my side, Xuan Yuan.”
I thank you for retrieving me. A sword is meant to be used, to bring justice to the world and solace to the oppressed, not to languish in the bowels of a monster’s lair.
But Django’s attention was drawn back to that force of powerful mahō drawing nearer, that rogue asteroid of power.
“I think you might soon be of more use.”
I felt them coming, just as you have.
“It’s you who’s amplifying my abilities!”
It is.
“And how does a sword know what a tesseract is?”
I exist across many dimensions. I have learned a few things over the millennia.
Django wanted to question the sword further, but the roar of approaching motorcycles echoed up the steep mountainside. A limousine and four motorcycles pulled up to the fifteen-foot stone torii arch at the roadside entrance to the cobblestone path up the mountain.
The hairs on his arms stood on end.
A tall, gaunt figure climbed out of the limousine, then a small female shape.
Even at two hundred yards, he recognized Habu and Yuka.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
EVEN ON THE SHIN TOMEI Expressway, the two-hundred-kilometer drive from Shinjuku to Shizuoka lasted two hours. And every passing minute was like chewing on sand. In the back of the limo with Habu, Yuka tried to keep her attention focused on Kenji’s location in the Mirror of Destiny, but her memories kept getting in the way.
This man looked mo
re centered than the boy she’d loved but no less fierce, perhaps even more so, or maybe it was the easy confidence in the way he moved, as a tiger stalking through a herd of goats.
Her tongue flicked over the gouge inside her cheek, tasting blood, the result of another slap for not knowing the significance of their destination. How was she supposed to know who Tokugawa Ieyasu was? It wasn’t like she’d ever gone to high school, and more often than not, her mother pulled her out of middle school to scrub floors and toilets in the hostess bar. Yuka was sure she had graduated middle school only because her mother had “done a favor” for the principal. It wasn’t that Yuka hadn’t liked school. She had loved it but was never given the chance to apply herself. She still remembered the friends she’d had, all of whom had fallen away from her. Now it was just another thing that had been stripped away in a life not worth living.
Today would be the day. She found herself enjoying the sunshine of this last day she would ever see.
“What are you smiling about?” Habu sneered.
“Thinking about you, baby,” she said with long-practiced ease.
“Liar.” But he left her alone, apparently absorbed in his own musings.
From a vantage point high above Kenji, she watched him as he stood in a gravel courtyard near the dais of an old stone tomb, his attention steadfastly focused on it. For several minutes, he stared at the tomb as if he were straining.
Then he relented, relaxing, and hurried away. But his expression seemed satisfied.
She said, “He thinks it’s inside the tomb. I think he was just now trying to look inside.”
Habu nodded. “What’s he doing now?”
“Sneaking into the forest.” The Mirror of Destiny had no problem following a Shadow Blink.
“Probably to wait for nightfall so he can steal the Scroll.”
She chose her words carefully. Asking too many questions was dangerous. “What makes you so sure that’s why he went to this shrine? The logic doesn’t exactly follow. He could be taking a day off. Maybe he loves history. He could be investigating something else.”
Habu’s eyes narrowed, but he must be having an indulgent sort of day. “I searched for the Scroll in Jianghu for a long time. I questioned a great many yokai before killing them and harvesting their essence. I quite enjoyed it. But then I was captured by a tsuchigumo.”
“Oh, that must have been so awful for you! How ever did you escape?” she breathed, cranking up her acting skills.
He grunted. “Django Wong. He was with a huge white tiger and a smart-mouthed tanuki. He was there to save his parents from the tsuchigumo. They’d fallen victim to it, same as I did.”
Hearing about this connection among Kenji, his parents, and Habu, she stiffened but tried to hide it by shifting her posture on the seat.
He took another long drag on his cigarette, then exhaled and eyed her through the haze.
She tried not to squirm, clutching her hands in her lap.
“I learned a lot in Jianghu,” he said, his tone conversational. “I spent all that time there and brought back a treasure trove for the Boss. Lost mahō techniques, artifacts. I even secured an ally for the clan, and it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship ever since.”
“No one could have done it but you, baby.” She had overheard Habu and clan bosses mention this “ally.” She’d heard the word “necromancer” once but didn’t know what that meant and had little ear for English. She’d had to look it up. The closest she could come was “Lord of Death.” She’d had to work it out with her limited English skills. Having a Jianghu wizard as an ally might explain why the clan was using so many yokai as slaves and thugs. The rest of the mortal world didn’t know it yet, but they soon would. Tokyo was now overrun with yokai, but they were skilled at living in the shadows.
“I got everything I wanted from Jianghu,” he said, “except for one thing. I never found the Yamabushi Scroll. But I came close. And that’s why we’re on the way to kill your boyfriend.”
“He’s not—!”
“In Jianghu, Django’s mother mentioned using ‘ancient family scrolls’ to cross over. Since they were normal human martial artists, I was sure they either possessed the Scroll or knew where to find it. It took me years of searching, but I finally found them in Hawaii.”
Yuka clamped down on a gasp with all the will she possessed.
“Unfortunately, they refused to give it up. I’ve often wondered how my own timeline would have been altered if teenage Kenji Wong had been home to die with his family. Would I still have met him in Jianghu? It does set the mind spinning. For a long time after that, I lost hope I would ever find the Scroll.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “But then, you appeared.”
“Me?” she asked.
“Why do you think I’ve bothered to take care of a worthless sow like you all these years?” He eased toward her again, the light of his cigarette reflected in his eyes. “You were there.”
Confusion and panic churned up into her throat, all but choking her. “I’ve never been to Jianghu!”
“Since I first saw you, I’ve been wondering how my path, your path, and his path are all intertwined. See, the tsuchigumo ensnared its prey by stealing images from our minds and spinning ghosts of them with its web. After Wong freed me from the spider, it sent a horde of minions at us, all made to look like you. At the time, I wondered why, but then I escaped and got the hell out of Jianghu. When you first threw yourself at me, I recognized you as the slut the tsuchigumo stole from Wong’s dreams.” He leaned closer. “So, little slut, I’d guess you were lovers.” Menace boiled from him like a cloud of black smoke. “And you’ve never once seen fit to mention this.”
Yuka’s brain scrambled like a mouse in a room full of cats. “He was nothing to me. A cheap fuck when we were kids. I only let it happen once.”
“If that were true, you would have told me. No, you were hoping I’d never find out.”
“No, Habu-sama!”
His voice slashed across her like a whip. “Don’t ‘sama’ me, you lying whore!”
“He was just a punk kid!” she spat. She took a deep breath and tried to channel what she called her mother’s Crocodile Voice, the cruel, contemptuous reptilian tone that could rip a man’s soul apart—or a child’s. “The truth is, I hated him. I was his first lay, so he was lousy at it. Not like you at all. And then he followed me around like a fucking puppy. But I couldn’t get rid of him. Finally, my mom had to scare him off. Now I find that he’s been sent to kill me. I’m going to enjoy watching you blast him to pieces.”
“You’ll count yourself lucky if I don’t kill you here and now.”
She leaned back into the seat, looked out the window, and shrugged. “Then what are you waiting for?”
He lunged across the seat and pinned her to the wall, seizing her cheeks in one hand and slamming her head against the window. “You don’t think I know about your little death wish?” His hot breath stank like roadkill, cigarette smoke, and alcohol. “Why do you think I haven’t fed you still alive to a horde of subway rats?”
She waited for the answer. His story of meeting Django and his dead parents made her head spin. It made no sense at all, and she didn’t have the mental resources or enough information to puzzle it out.
He slammed her head again hard enough for stars to burst in her vision, and barked, “Why!”
“I-I-I don’t know!” came out through lips that wouldn’t close for the pressure of his grip on her cheeks.
His hot mouth was a finger’s breadth from her cheek.
She was a moth stabbed through with a pin, immobilized, transfixed, dying by inches.
He hissed, “Because you wish it.”
He slammed her into the wall once more and then slid, serpent-like, back across the seat, his cold gaze never leaving her.
The sun would be down soon. For her last sunset in the mortal world, it was a mediocre one, hazed by clouds at the horizon.
Soon, it would all be over. Soo
n. All over. Peace at last. Would she suffer an eternity of torture in Jigoku for the awful life she’d led? Would she be reincarnated a thousand times as worms or food animals? What had she done in previous lives to warrant the horrors she’d endured in this one?
Habu was talking again, drawing her momentarily from her death fugue. “So, you see, there can be only one reason our paths are so intertwined. The Scroll wants to be found. Django Wong didn’t know its location when he was arrested, but then he disappeared from the police station, from this world entirely, so that must have been when he went to Jianghu. And now he returns from Jianghu and abruptly leaves town. Therefore, he must have learned its hiding place when he was in Jianghu. If not the Scroll itself, a significant clue. Either way, he has led us straight to it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
DJANGO’S HEART STUMBLED and tripped over a rib. He had to get inside that tomb, get the Scroll, and get the hell out of here before Habu and his goons made it up the mountain. He couldn’t fight Habu, Yuka, and four heavily armed thugs.
He jumped up and ran through the trees. “Cat! We have company!” he yelled, hoping the cat’s superhuman senses would be enough to hear the warning. It was a two-hundred meter climb up the switchback path. About two-thirds of the way up was a wooden gate, shut and locked now that the shrine was closed. He had a little time, but not much, unless they Blinked, in which case he had almost zero. In his mind, he went back over the way up the mountain from the entrance gate, to the terrace with a small Shinto shrine and a well, and then more steps up to another terrace with the gift shop, then to the divergent stairs leading to the museum in one direction and the long stairway up to the main gate of the shrine and tomb in the other direction.
How had they followed him? This could not be a simple coincidence.
If any normal humans were still present to interfere, they had better keep their heads down. He slipped a ninja-style mask over his face to darken it but saved his Third Eye resources for emergency or tactical Blinks. Emerging from the forest, he jumped the fence around the tomb’s courtyard and sprinted toward the dais, gravel crunching underfoot.
Tokyo Blood Magic (Shinjuku Shadows Book 1) Page 24