Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  The physical functions of his body, already stretched to the limits, had risen to the occasion in response to the dagger. But after that state was undone, the damage remained.

  If the doll girl hadn’t been there, Setsura might well have been unable to sustain the suspended animation and bled out. That’s how powerful an opponent General Bey was. The only reason Setsura could arouse himself now and get a little solid food in him was because of the medicines mixed and applied by the doll girl according to Galeen Nuvenberg’s mysterious wisdom.

  “I’m sorry for not taking the time to thank you.”

  “Oh, it was nothing.” The doll girl lowered her eyes—eyes the same color as her dress. Her needle-like eyelashes fluttered.

  “What’s this, what’s this?” The black bird’s face and wings poked out from behind the sooty old bronze lamp hanging from the ceiling. “Well, a piece of cake. You have me to thank. The girl handled the carnage as well as she could.” Ignoring the blue eyes glaring at him, the bird continued. “Take a look at the bandages around his neck. The flesh beneath is hamburger. The carotid artery is held together with baling wire and duct tape. She stuck by you all through the night. I don’t think dolls need to sleep. The medicine applied to the wound requires the harshest acids and toxins. She’s covered it up with makeup, but her skin is all pockmarked and—”

  The bird abruptly stopped talking and fluttered toward the ceiling. The doll girl plucked a strand of her golden hair and threw it at him. It drew a glimmering line through the air, parting its feathers.

  “Hah! She’d blush if she could. What’s so wrong about describing your tender devotions to the man you love? Besides, it doesn’t look to me like he’s going anywhere for the next day or so. I think it’s time for a sponge bath.”

  “One more word—”

  Apparently sensing that she was serious this time, the raven soared up to the skylight. It released the latch with a poke of its wing and slipped through the gap and disappeared into the sky.

  “That raven is a gossip and a chatterbox. If its great-grandfather were still around, he’d be beside himself. It’s going to catch a beating when the lady of the house gets home.”

  “The raven has a great-grandfather?”

  “Of course. Humans do, don’t they? So do animals. Even plants. Human beings are hardly the be-all and end-all of creation. No matter how highly evolved it imagines itself to be, human civilization will strut and fret its hour upon the stage and then be heard no more.”

  “Huh. And its great-grandfather is a raven of some reputation?”

  “He was supposedly the inspiration for that son of Baltimore, the poet and novelist Edgar Allan Poe, and his most famous work.”

  “Ah, a noble family,” said Setsura with an easy smile. He winked at the doll girl, who was looking at him with upturned eyes. “Good job.”

  “Oh, it was nothing.”

  It was hard to believe that this man and woman had killed such an exceptional vampiress the night before. Setsura remembered everything that had occurred during his period of suspended animation.

  “So, when do you think I can get out of here?”

  “First thing in the morning, the day after tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll need to leave as soon as it gets dark.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You will undo all of my hard work.”

  “Well, if any of my wounds open up, I’ll head back here in a jiffy.”

  The doll girl looked at Setsura with silent eyes. “I would prefer not to go through this again,” she said in an offhand manner, and turned around. The tray in her small hands appeared enormous compared to her small frame.

  “Just a second,” Setsura called after her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Would you have a telephone handy?”

  “There is one.”

  “Could I use it?”

  “It is a rotary phone not so different from the one that Mr. Bell invented. It should do.”

  “Tell Doctor Mephisto to drop by. I’ve got a few things on my mind I intend to share with the son of a bitch.”

  “You know,” the doll girl said in a serious voice, “if you staged such disagreements in a theater, I am sure that you could sell every seat in the house.”

  “Being administrator of a hospital is a tough job. I don’t think he would appreciate the publicity.”

  “Proof of the depth of your friendship.”

  “In any case, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I understand.”

  “After that, one more number. The ward mayor. Could you bring the phone here?”

  “Unfortunately, it is attached to the wall. Is there a message you wish me to relay?”

  “No. I’ll have to talk to him myself. Sorry, but could you help me to the phone?”

  “Of course.”

  The doll placed the platter on the table and came up next to the bed. Using her shoulder for support, Setsura got out of bed. He looked up at the skylight. There wasn’t a cloud in the clear blue sky. The silhouettes of birds soared through the brightly-lit world.

  “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Only during the day.”

  “Night will soon be that way, too.”

  “Would that it were so.”

  “Indeed.”

  The entangled couple made its way to the next room and opened the door. The phone was attached to the living room wall. It looked more like something invented by a cave man than the handiwork of Alexander Graham Bell.

  The doll girl pulled out a chair. Setsura sat down and dialed Mephisto’s number. The nurse who answered sounded vaguely familiar. When Setsura gave her his name she exclaimed in surprise and lapsed into silence.

  “Could you get Doctor Mephisto on the phone?” Setsura said. He waited. After listening quietly for a while, he replied, “I understand. But please let him know I’m camped out here at Galeen Nuvenberg’s house.” He calmly hung up the phone.

  “What is his disposition?”

  “He’s apparently going to be holed up in the Resurrection Room until tonight.”

  “Is he operating on somebody again? Except that he won’t even agree to see you—”

  “The guy’s as fickle as a feline.”

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for you, Aki-sama.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about us.” Setsura sighed. “Let’s give the ward mayor a ring.”

  Between noon and evening of that day, things were happening that were out of the norm even in Demon City.

  For every four fewer sightseers, souvenir sales went up five percent.

  They, of course, knew nothing about a phone call from a certain young man to the ward mayor, or that the mayor had then directed a special unit of commando cops and armored personnel carriers to the Keio Plaza Hotel, where they took custody of a large number of corpses in the underground levels.

  Some of the strangeness couldn’t slip by undetected. A dampness rapidly suffused the air, and yet the temperature began to rise. At the same time, the Shinjuku meteorological agency detected an unusual eruption of cold air arising from the depths of the fissures that permeated the city, and issued dense fog warnings extending through to midnight.

  In a shadowed corner of the ruins near Shin-Okubo Station, an itinerant collecting blood-sucking leeches for medical use came across a young woman lying on the ground. He took her purse, containing over seventy thousand yen and four credit cards. But perhaps fearing she was some new species akin to Dr. Caligari’s Cesare, a somnambulist who could predict a man’s impending death, otherwise left her undisturbed.

  Since returning alone from a local Chamber of Commerce meeting the night before, Saburo Nemuro, the proprietor of Tao, an old school fabric and kimono shop in Yotsuya Nichome, had come down with a minor case of anemia and confined himself to his bed. Shortly before noon, he instructed an employee to go buy thick curtains. By that afternoon, all the windows in his room were covered.

  A
t the morning council meeting, the bigwigs in the Shinjuku city government convened to introduce a measure provisionally titled “Shinjuku’s Strangest Women and their Odd Gratuities.”

  It was introduced for debate, where it was unanimously decided to reward information broker Yoshiko Toya (age unknown, weight approximately 260 pounds) with a pair of panties that would fit the hips of an African elephant housed at the Ueno Zoo.

  The mayor and deputy mayor were absent.

  The mayor’s secretary, Hiromi Oribe, hid herself down an abandoned manhole and immersed herself in bloody red dreams. In the dreams she was ravished (on her back, missionary position) by a hulk of a Chinese man. He had a frame made of muscle fused to steel. His rugged chest crushed her breasts. Fingers that could easily tear her apart encircled her thighs and kneaded the flesh. She felt every inch of the heat and size and hardness of his cock thrust inside her.

  Men like him existed to tear these ecstatic screams and shouts from a woman’s throat.

  She soared to that ultimate, transcendent moment. The poisonous seed shot inside her. A pair of fangs sank effortlessly into her throat. The flickering regret of leaving her old self behind was quickly transformed into a violent rapture that pushed every nerve to the limit. Hiromi pierced the man’s thick neck with her own fangs.

  Her craving and her hunger unleashed the torrid currents between her legs and the vulgar coursing of her blood—in volumes that could fill a swimming pool. Ah, the joy of drinking it all down in a single gulp.

  The licentiousness pouring from the corners of her mouth, Hiromi smeared the gushing blood all over her body to her heart’s content.

  Two sightseers returning to Kabuki-cho from Waseda Gate in Tsurumakicho vanished into thin air.

  A gang battle turned into a free-fire zone on the street in front of the Pension Fund Association building. The three-way melee between the two warring sides and a third gang that had interceded to mediate was unusual enough. Stranger still was Kenichi Fuminori, leader of the gang known as the “Kawadacho Rejuvenation Committee,” who, after getting perforated by at least seven .357 Magnum and .45 ACP rounds, fired back, gunning down Soji Yazawa and Juzo Miyakabe of the “Kanto Rising Dragon Gang” and Shozan Osumi of the “Great Eastern Alliance.”

  Despite the temperature being over a hundred degrees, Fuminori wore sunglasses and covered his face with a muffler, a long-sleeved shirt and gloves.

  Officer Nobuyuki Tateoka, out of the Shinjuku police traffic division, was filing an accident report inside the station when the sergeant called him over and told him to visit the mayor’s office at the ward government building the next day at ten in the morning.

  Life went on, people following the routines of their daily lives without change, fully believing that they never would.

  And when the sun went down, a person left Mephisto Hospital with places to go and things to do.

  “There’s a fog rolling in,” said the doll girl.

  Setsura didn’t answer. The home of a wizardess, the air circulating as nature intended it, would not tolerate the presence of an appliance as crass as an air conditioner. Setsura had seen this coming several hours before the forecast.

  “It is going to be pretty bad tonight. Like pea soup.”

  “Hiding the creatures of the night,” Setsura mused aloud. He was still burning inside. Thanks to the medicine, he was recuperating ten times faster than normal. But his fighting strength was at a low ebb. If General Bey attacked him now, he’d be a pushover.

  “I am not looking forward to any visitors tonight.”

  “Not me. I will have to go even if nobody comes.”

  “You cannot,” said the girl, seizing Setsura’s shoulders.

  A crisp, metallic sound rang above their heads. Someone had emerged from the depths of the fog befriending those creatures of the night and pressed the horoscope diagram-shaped doorbell.

  The doll girl went to the door. ““Who is it?”

  “Mephisto,” a low voice answered. A voice that stood being listened to again and again.

  The doll girl faced the door and asked, “May I pose a question to you?” Eyes like inlaid crystal certainly reflected the visitor’s visage.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Were you born from a woman’s belly?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Is your father your father?”

  “Well—”

  “Please come in.”

  She took a step back. The hinges creaked. White fog puffed from around the jamb of the door. The airy, ethereal haze suffused the room with a milky mist. The silhouette standing in the door seemed to suddenly condense out of the particles of fog.

  “Where is the other visitor?” Mephisto asked.

  “He is inside,” the doll girl said, quietly stepping back into the hallway.

  “I was told he called earlier. How is he doing?”

  “Why would you think he is ill?”

  “He would not be staying here for any other reason. He is quite fond of his shop.”

  “The paragon of a small businessman. But why is the good doctor covering his mouth with a handkerchief?”

  “I blundered a bit on the dosing of a medicine. The musk on my lips is a tad too strong.”

  “I find it quite pleasing. Please come in.”

  “Excuse me.”

  The doll girl watched as Mephisto strode across the transom. The fabric of her skirt softly rustled as she went over to the fireplace. A long sword lay on the mantel. The girl stopped and fixed her eyes meaningfully on the blue velvet scabbard.

  “Hey.” Setsura sat up and greeted the white-clad doctor when he entered the room. “What are you hiding your mouth for? Been making out with the girls again?”

  “I was mixing some drugs and made a mistake. At the moment, my lips are stained with wolfsbane.”

  “I’m impressed that you’re eating your own dog food and all. But when it comes to strong poison, you’d better watch it. Have a seat.”

  Mephisto sat down on a small wooden chair and peered at the patient.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Who dressed you with those bandages?” Though muffled by the handkerchief, Mephisto’s voice still contained its bewitching quality. At the same time, the thin silk fabric of the handkerchief evinced no ripples that might indicate the drawing of breath.

  “You just met her. No badmouthing my savior.”

  “I don’t know the circumstances, but I would recommend she not make a career of it. Who caused all this damage?”

  “A woman.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I can show my face in public again.”

  “That woman?”

  “Except that I was fighting her partner when I got caught flat-footed.”

  The edge in Mephisto’s voice grew somewhat sharper. “And where is he now?”

  “Probably with her. They make a devil of a combination.”

  “Oh, somebody you know?”

  The answer was delivered in as off-hand a manner as the question was asked. “Kazikli Bey.”

  “Unfortunately, I would have to agree with you on that score. I heard that his head was delivered to Constantinople pickled in brine. I would appreciate getting caught up on what was going on with you and the outside world while I was secluded in my cave.”

  Setsura nodded. “But first, what exactly have you been doing in your cave? Don’t tell me you were treating patients.”

  “I thought I indicated I was mixing medicinal compounds.”

  “Hoh,” Setsura said sardonically. He pursed his lips, an image that was at once sensuous and utterly lacking in sensuality. Beauty governed all. The desires of every woman who wished those lips pressed against her own were as transparent as a clear winter’s night.

  “I’ve been sweating blood tracking them down while you’ve been mixing perfumes in that air-conditioned wine cellar of yours. Labor-management relations around here leave a lot to
be desired.” Coming from anybody else, it would have sounded like the height of self-conceit. Then he blurted out, “Mephisto, enough with the damned handkerchief.”

  The air in the room grew distinctly colder. The cry of a crow somewhere in the distance could be heard through the skylight.

  “This bother you?”

  Two pairs of eyes met. Without any particular dramatic pause or gesture, Mephisto took it off. Ah, a mouth that could turn the most banal of words into heavenly music, that a good half of the population of Shinjuku longed to attach themselves to. From that mouth protruded no unsightly fangs.

  “Satisfied now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your turn.”

  “Not yet. What’s with Ryuuki and Shuuran?”

  “Would you be surprised if they ran away?”

  “Not surprised, and not celebrating either. What happened?”

  “I shall go into the details at a later date.”

  “I’d like to hear them now.”

  Grimly responding to the oddly obstinate Setsura, Mephisto said, “After you brought them to me, I spent most of the night holed up in the underground levels. As you know, it’s isolated from the outside world down there. No technological or metaphysical communication can penetrate. When I finally took a break and went outside, they were gone. What would you have me do?”

  “Stay after school and write on the blackboard a hundred times: I apologize for letting the bad vampires get away. Those two were the best shot we had at finding the ship. In any case, did you come up with any substitute drugs?”

  “Of course.”

  Examining the bandages from Setsura’s shoulder to the nape of his neck, Mephisto reached beneath his cape with his left hand. Between two of his slender fingers was a blue vial about as big as his thumb. Its size aside, there was nothing particularly unusual about it. The mouth of the vial was stopped with a cork, one of Mephisto’s special touches.

  “What’s that?”

  There was nothing identifiably unique about it, except that it wasn’t likely that Mephisto would carry around a vial filled with ordinary water.