The lieutenant spoke with the cigar still clamped between his lips. He yanked it out of his mouth and snubbed out the glowing end in the palm of his right hand. The sparks scattered and the smoke curled into the air.
The mayor narrowed his eyes as he stepped forward. “There’s no sleeping from now on. This city will never experience another peaceful night.”
He threw down the gauntlet and turned around. Kajiwara heard the startled cry of the secretary from the outer office. She really hadn’t seen them come in after all. He let out a long sigh just as she came running in.
“Who—who were those men?”
“Calm down. Just a few old drinking buddies.”
“But when—?”
“Apparently they can walk through walls as well. In any case, I’ll be in the office all day. I want you to place a priority on getting hold of the following two people: Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto.”
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.
Part Five: The Mollusk's Nightmare
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 p
erson. 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.
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