Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Chapter Two

  Five minutes had passed since the interior of the mausoleum filled with water. However accursed an omen he might be, Setsura Aki was still a man and he could not hold his breath forever.

  Kikiou smiled. Strangely for this evil old man, this smile was pure. He would hold his ground forever, if that’s what it took. He laughed loudly.

  A “stain” appeared in the door to the mausoleum. The wall itself turned opaque. A human figure appeared from further inside, as if striding through deep water.

  “Setsura.”

  Even this demonic warlock spoke his name in awe. The “stain” was the black-clad young man, calmly taking leave of the “water stone” that could hold back even a fire-breathing dragon.

  “I do not know of a way to escape the water stone. How did you do it, Setsura? This is a puzzle that must be solved.”

  Kikiou brought his forefinger and middle finger to his mouth and blew, producing a shrill whistle quite unlike him.

  Setsura wandered down to the water’s edge as if Kikiou wasn’t there at all. Several seconds later, over their heads came the fierce beating of wings. The descending shadow cast Setsura into darkness. The silhouette of a large wing a good thirty feet long.

  Setsura didn’t bother looking, even when a giant claw closed around his head.

  The Ming Dynasty classic, In Search of Strange Worlds, contained a record of a giant wing and claw appearing over the capital. It captured and killed five children in the morning, five at noon, and four in the evening, and then left. The shocking scene repeated itself the next day, though five were taken in the morning, five at noon, and five in the evening, a total of fifteen. The number did not change the day after that.

  The wise men in the city made note of this strange madness. After a frantic search they found a girl who had been attacked and escaped by the skin of her teeth. Questioning her further revealed that she had been sleepwalking at the time, wandering through the neighborhood when the monster attacked.

  They gathered hypnotists from throughout the kingdom and put the people in the capital into a trance. The monster did not appear after that and the creature itself went into history unnamed.

  Kikiou summoned it to attack Setsura. The only people safe from such an assault were those lost in a dream state. Kikiou cried out in dismay. The giant claws closed together as if grasping thin air.

  Setsura approached the shore without a mark on him. The waves broke on the rocks. He walked across the water.

  Now the hidden mystery that was Setsura struck Kikiou forcefully. “Only dreamers are safe from my half-bird. I do not understand, Setsura, what kind of miracle you are performing here. But you have turned into a dream.”

  Ah, the clam was dreaming. Dreaming of a beautiful young man. The soles of his shoes didn’t sink. He looked almost transparent. The scenery behind him appeared as if through dark glass.

  Kikiou’s groan was entirely reasonable. How did one strike at a person who had turned into a dream?

  The giant claw pursued Setsura across the water, piercing his chest and stomach and waist, but to no effect.

  Setsura looked up. A silver light flashed from his mouth and wrapped the claw and wing in light. They severed and fell away. The lifeless wing and trembling claw fell into the water behind him. Setsura glided onward. To the left bank where Kikiou stood. To the road that had brought him to this world.

  The silver threads again poured from his mouth. A filament carried here by the wind. A filament there by the water. Severing anything they encountered.

  A boat floating far off was engulfed in a shimmering dew and bit by bit dropped into the water.

  Trees in the forest beyond split apart horizontally and vertically, littering the ground with limbs.

  A large snake popped out of the water and was neatly divided into thirds, each section dropping away in a puff of red like sausages going through a buzz saw.

  “Bastard! You’re not getting away, Setsura Aki!”

  Grinding his teeth, Kikiou fled the wharf. Thin strands of light attacked the posts and wooden planks, a human jigsaw gone mad.

  “Wake up, I tell you! Do you not understand? You are nothing but a dream!”

  The silvery gleam undulated back and forth like a wave, gliding over the ground in pursuit of the old man chasing after Setsura.

  How far would this strange, three-sided chase drama go? And when and how would it be resolved?

  “Hey, take a look at that.”

  “Wow. Far out. What in the world is it?”

  “No idea. This morning when I opened for business, there it was.”

  The first two speakers were customers who had come to the shop to buy flowers. The last was the shop girl who worked at the place, who wasn’t qualified to do anything more than observe the situation along with the rest of them.

  Every customer that morning asked the same question, and left shaking their heads. Here in the Yonchome block of the Wakamatsu district in Shinjuku, a small miracle had occurred in the Water Queen flower shop.

  When the shop girl opened the shutters several hours earlier, she took in the display in the shop window—that she had arranged the night before—with a start.

  Thanks to developments in fertilizers, even with the stems intact, the bloom and beauty of roses, lilies, irises, and cyclamen could be preserved for long periods of time. But in their stead, greeting her was an indescribable transfiguration.

  The thick bed of petals—tranquil whites and pinks and passionate reds and sad blues—an otherworldly mélange of color and hues, accompanied by a rich fragrance that had stopped her in her tracks when the shop girl first came in.

  It was hard to believe this could be the product of nature or human effort. For the shop girl—she only worked there, after all—the cause was a complete mystery. She frantically phoned the owner, who told her to buck up and just sell them. And so she finally returned to her senses.

  One other thing she’d taken note of. A number of liquid plant food tanks were scattered in front of the prefab shed behind the store where the fertilizer and supplies were kept. She was sure she’d stored them away the day before. The door to the shed appeared to be jammed closed and wouldn’t budge.

  The shop girl gave up. She certainly had no idea that a woman was sleeping in there. Equally out of the question was that this woman had sung the siren’s song of blood and darkness and destruction for the past four thousand years.

  The shop girl didn’t know that the demonic spirits emanating from her presence injected the gentlest flower with a raging boldness, transforming it in wondrous ways. It would never occur to her that when the sun set, crimson light would flash from that woman’s eyes, or that in order to quench the hunger within, the woman would desire to embrace her and sink her white fangs into her tender throat.

  When Hitomi came to, she found herself inside a latticework of iron bars. The walls and floor and ceiling of the twelve by twelve foot room were made of concrete. A narrow hallway led away from the bars. The only light came from an electrical fixture in the hallway ceiling.

  Her thoughts still seemed to be struggling through a mist. Thinking about how she came to be here, Hitomi looked around hastily.

  Takako lay on the ground behind her. Hitomi rushed over to her and shook her. She opened her eyes. Hitomi paid no attention to the icy coolness of her body. There was no point explaining what they were doing here. She didn’t know, and it was obvious that whatever waited for them couldn’t be good.

  Hitomi shook the bars of their cell. Nothing budged. She checked her watch. It was four-fifteen in the afternoon. Evening in July was still some time off.

  With a small sense of relief, she looked down at Takako. Even if the victim of a vampire attack didn’t herself become a demon at sundown, she would seek human blood. Everybody knew that. On the other hand, if the man called Ryuuki was a vampire and she was his servant, then he would come here for her using his supernatural powers.

  And that thought
thrilled Hitomi down to her bones.

  Instead, an older man in a grungy white lab coat showed up wearing thick glasses. “Doctor Kuranishi!” Hitomi said, his name coming to her in a flash. “You’re still alive!”

  The “serial killer scholar” whose exploits had shaken Demon City two years before. He gazed upon Hitomi and smiled. “So somebody in the world above still remembers that name? I’d like to think that an honor. But bringing up the unpleasant past only causes unnecessary trouble.”

  Simply speaking the words changed the gaze of this experimenter on human subjects into one of loathing.

  “However, this time around we have ourselves such important test material. Nobody will be hurt. Instead, I will inform you, step by step, what will happen next. That should put quite a fright into you.”

  “W-what’s that?” She was doing her best to put up a brave front, but it showed in her quavering voice. “Can’t you hear that?”

  The old man’s face turned toward the iron door. From beyond the door came the unmistakable sound of a drum—the beats loud and soft, smoothly blending together and roughly breaking apart.

  An old memory made Hitomi shiver. His past victims. The corpses discovered under Kuranishi’s house. Seeing what he had done to them made the toughest cops blanch. The victims lured there were all women. But people who passed by there all reported the sound of drums fading away into the bright moonlit nights.

  Perhaps it too was alive.

  “Can you feel it yet?” Kuranishi said.

  Feel what, Hitomi was about to ask, when she suddenly realized that she was throbbing and wet. From that music alone?

  “Don’t be alarmed. What you are feeling is the normal reaction. That taiko drum amplifies the tremors of life and the pleasures of sex. Only one player remains, its performance abandoned long ago to the bowels of the earth.”

  “If you let me go, I won’t tell anybody. I swear. Not a word.”

  “If you think I would find such assurances believable, then you must be one very stupid girl. That one was bitten by a vampire. I bagged two trophies today. Ah, I haven’t hunted so well in quite a while.”

  “The sun will set soon. If you don’t release her unharmed, her master will surely come for her.”

  “Whether our friends in Toyama or refugees from Eastern Europe, I have ways of dealing with them. Don’t forget that I am a citizen of this city as well,” Kuranishi sneered. “However, before they arrive, I shall see for myself. I’ll save you for later. A little waiting will do you well. After I’ve enjoyed myself first.”

  Degenerate lust radiated from the old professor. He came closer. Hitomi instinctively backed away. Kuranishi reached into the pocket of his lab coat and drew out what looked like a piece of root or tree branch or arm of an octopus. He tossed it between the bars of the cell.

  The wall against her back, Hitomi had no more room to retreat.

  The thing rolled and undulated like a taut spring, advancing with a frightening vigor. Hitomi braced herself to bat it away. Almost as if it knew to feint and parry, it slipped past the downward slash of her arm and stole up her leg and inside her skirt.

  She reached down and tried to scream, but was rendered inarticulate by a shock of pleasure radiating from between her legs.

  Hitomi’s mind was thrown into confusion. The sense of sexual ecstasy was overpowering. She was hardly starved for experience with the opposite sex. Yet she’d never reached the heights as strongly and quickly as this.

  Unimpeachable evidence of her physical bliss escaped her lips and permeated her body, wiping away any vestiges of shame.

  But it wasn’t burrowing deeper into her.

  Writhing on the floor, Hitomi unconsciously pressed her hands against her sex, pushing it in, seeking a deeper, stronger invasion.

  All at once it slipped out. The sensation of it rubbing past her slippery inner folds made her cry aloud.

  Her breaths emerged in feeble gasps. She turned her moist, entranced eyes on Kuranishi. Gripped in his veiny hands was what looked like a dark brown piece of a branch from a tree. Except it was moving. Like the foot of the mollusk. It squirmed as if to escape his grasp.

  Had Hitomi’s mind been operating normally, she would have noticed that the licentious movements and the reverberations of the drum swimming through the room appeared to be subtly syncopating with each other.

  “Your eyes are wet. Indeed, they should be. None of the women in whom the little fellow has made his burrow can forget that throbbing feeling. When it bends and stretches, the whole world goes away. All it needs is a peek inside and voilà, she becomes a crazed nymphomaniac for life. And yet no matter the skill of the Lothario she sleeps with, getting screwed by him will never be more than a simple screwing. Such will be her frustrations that in as little as three years, she is doomed to die in agony. Imagine it! A woman driven crazy by the thirst for sex while in the embrace of a man.”

  Kuranishi laughed out loud. But he wasn’t speaking to Hitomi. A fierce light burned in his eyes. The fires of madness.

  The mad scientist whose name was emblazoned in the criminal records of Demon City turned his incandescent gaze from Hitomi to Takako.

  “Mortal women have their place. From the two-hundred-year-old grandmother to the newborn baby, their value is a settled thing. But these creatures of the night are a different matter. From all outward appearances, the victim of a vampire. A shame she is not an actual vampire. But we can extrapolate. It was well worth my time and money to hire a bus and crew to scavenge for test subjects. Come here, woman.”

  He beckoned to her, but Takako might well have turned into a statue. Only a vampire, the victim’s master, could deliver such orders.

  The particular frustrations of the mad fueled the glowing heat in Kuranishi’s eyes. “Fine. You won’t come? Then, suffer there. That pale flesh of yours shall experience all the more detailed experiments afterwards.”

  He opened his hand and released the wriggling thing. It fell to the floor. Unlike with Hitomi, it moved at a leisurely pace as it approached its fresh game. The creature could apparently detect the different physical condition of this new opponent.

  What to outside eyes must have looked like an old dried-up piece of wood, flexed and moved like warm rubber that would fill any woman familiar with the allure of sex with a longing for the obscene.

  Simply imagining it stealing into her physical being, stimulating and arousing her senses, tore from Hitomi hot, dogged breaths.

  Chapter Three

  Takako’s eyes were vacant.

  As if the blood of the other carried with it the soul of the other, this salacious branch that had made the hearts of women beat fast despite themselves aroused in her not the slightest reaction.

  It came to Takako’s feet. The tapered end slipped inside the leg of her sweatpants and disappeared. The small lump traveled up her ankle, across her knee, and to her thighs. Imagining what awaited it at the end of its journey, this could only be the quiet prelude to a most savage scene.

  Kuranishi gripped the bars of the cell. A small shiver traveled down Takako’s body. The twig had surely arrived at its destination. Kuranishi’s face was drenched with wretched anticipation. And soon turned to disappointed surprise.

  Takako didn’t move at all.

  “This is not possible—” moaned the madman. “Nothing exists on this planet that can consume my branches and continue on as if nothing were amiss. There is no way.”

  The mad scientist was about to fall into despair when the expression changed on Takako’s face. In a twinkle, it had darkened with ecstasy. Either a credit to the wood or its creator. Soft pants—that would make man and woman alike grab themselves—issued from her pale lips.

  “It’s working! Even the victim of a vampire cannot deny herself the pleasures of the flesh. The name of Dr. Kuranishi has never known failure! None shall ever exceed me!”

  Evil and madness, fortune and insanity clouded his countenance. A flash of insight came with his next utte
rance.

  “Chief among those instincts controlling the body and soul of a vampire is the lust for blood. The joys of my wood may exceed even that. Ah, a once in a lifetime opportunity to put the theory into action!”

  He refocused his gaze from the moaning Takako to the reporter, still suffused with the reverberations of unsated desire. He beckoned to her.

  “Wouldn’t you again like to drink from the well of bliss? As a woman? Come and love it, fully and deeply. Come.”

  No matter how deranged and treacherous a criminal, his brilliance as a scientist was unquestioned. Hitomi had been eyeing the squirming Takako, gripped by envy and hatred. Now she came tottering to her feet. With uncertain sleepwalking steps, she approached the bars of the cell.

  “Hold out your hands.”

  She thrust out her arms between the bars. Ripe and womanly arms. Kuranishi pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist. With the echoes of the wood still resounding in her frame, she stiffened and groaned.

  The old man’s tongue licked the young woman’s forearm, leaving behind a trail of slime as if from a large slug. He reached her elbow and continued back down a different path.

  The lover’s caresses of this awful geezer brought tears to her eyes. And then a second later, a scream of pain. Bright red flowers blossomed on the floor as a trickle of blood ran down her arm.

  The mad scientist had bitten her wrist down to the vein. Restraining the wailing girl with his hands and mouth, he shouted, “Blood! The fresh blood of a woman. The stuff of life.”

  The side of his face was smeared with Hitomi’s blood, transforming the face of the madman into that of a beast.

  More blood spilled from her trembling wrist, filling the room with the thick smell of salt and iron.

  “Stop,” Hitomi said in a rational voice. The pain canceled out the lust and restored her to her normal self. “This woman was taken by a vampire. What do you think the odor of blood will do to her?”

  “Relax. See for yourself. This parasite of the night has forgotten all about her quest for prey. The sexual impulse controls all others. I have done it. My wood wins over all others.”