He descended from the roof, exercising all due caution, though it was not clear what kind of caution he ought to be exercising. He cast in another strand from the window to confirm the occupants inside.
“Good,” he said, in English for some reason. He landed inside the front foyer and knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Setsura entered. The familiarity of the voice aroused no suspicions. Checking the layout of the rooms, he headed straight to the bedroom.
“Yo,” he said with a smile and a raised hand. He had the sense that Takako was being looked after.
Doctor Mephisto looked up from the table next to the bed and said in his refined manner, “Welcome back. Did you find Kanan-san?”
“Nope,” Setsura said bluntly, as if to say obviously he would have brought her with him if he had. “That woman ditched me as well. It’s just not my day.”
“This isn’t like you’re baking senbei, you know.”
“If you want to go tracing this thing back, we’d find your goofball treatments are to blame. Is Kanan-san’s soul coming back anytime soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
Setsura glared at the doctor in white. Hardly a menacing glare. More like a gun ready to be cocked and fired, Doctor Mephisto knew.
“So what do you plan on doing next with that fighting spirit of yours?” The look he gave Setsura was as piercing as the question he asked was light. “You collected something else along the way instead of Kanan-san. It’s getting a bit humid in here.”
Setsura turned the other way and started whistling softly.
“I would think a man of your age would have a less embarrassing repertoire than a nursery rhyme like Cooing Doves.”
Mephisto drew closer to him. Setsura hastily backed away. “What are you doing?” Though it was Mephisto who asked, not Setsura.
“Getting away from you.”
“Why?”
“Hands off, okay? You got that look in your eyes, Doctor.”
“I only wish to examine you. Hold out your hand.”
“The only one here you should be examining is Kanan-san.”
“She is resting peacefully. For the time being, I can do nothing for her. You are the greater concern.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Be a good boy and come here, else I won’t be able to give Kanan-san the attention she deserves.”
“Cheap shot.”
“I am not the kind to ever leave a patient behind.”
Setsura stopped. The white hand touched his forehead. “Seems you went for a swim.”
“Yes.”
“Seems like you drowned a bit in the process.”
“A bit.”
“Took in considerably more water than air.”
“Rub-a-dub-dub.”
“You must be treated right away.”
“Enough with the bad jokes.”
“I have not told a joke since the day I was born,” Mephisto said coolly. “I have crossed a hippopotamus with a shark on occasion, but with concrete motives in mind. I am always serious.”
“Yeah, I should have known.” Setsura clapped his hands with obvious irritation.
“I will prepare the medicines right away. Wait over there.”
“There’s no need for that either. I’ve got to get my hands on Kikiou.”
“Why?”
“To get the hell out of here. That woman and Kanan-san’s spirit must have been caught up in that space-warp thing.”
“Kikiou is not here presently. I went looking for him about a pressing matter and found that he had left.”
Setsura cocked his head to the side. “Damn. Well then, whatever I guess.” He sat down in the chair on the side of the table opposite Mephisto. “How long is that going to take you?”
“Kikiou is a great alchemist. So it comes as no surprise that the place is well stocked. Preparing the compounds should take but a minute or two.”
“Hey, close is good enough, so don’t dawdle.”
Setsura furrowed his brows and rubbed his shoulders. Where his fingers pressed against the skin shimmering drops of water welled up, creating small wet stains on the floor. The one flowed into the other until a rather large dark shadow had formed.
Call it the drippings of a ladykiller and the metaphor would come too close to the real thing, as if attired as stylish young men do, it sprawled on the second floor of a small restaurant to the accompaniment of a samisen, one after the other leaving their effusing essence behind.
Mephisto turned to the laboratory equipment arrayed on the table next to the bed and began mixing the compounds. To ordinary eyes, his hands would have moved in a blur.
He selected a bottle, opened the top, measured out a quantity into a sterile measuring spoon and poured that into a mixing mortar. This process took less than three seconds. It was only the white doctor’s hands that switched into a fast-forward mode. And suddenly returned to normal.
“Done.”
Mephisto got up and went over to Setsura and held out his right hand. There was a white capsule in his palm.
“Just one dose, but the efficacy is guaranteed. Go ahead.”
“Yes, yes,” said Setsura, taking it.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“Done,” Setsura said, popping it into his mouth and holding up his hand.
“The effects should become evident shortly.”
“What effects?”
“Your body temperature will drop, and your breathing will grow ragged.”
“Jeez.” Setsura’s body suddenly stiffened.
“Then you will feel an intense pain in your heart. I could address it, but there is not enough time. After that, you will be the same as any normal dead person.”
Setsura lay down on the table, his body twitching. The spasms were intense enough to make the table shake.
“How are you doing?” Mephisto asked, turning to the door. Though the real Mephisto should have been, like Yakou, drawn through that warp in space.
“Good show,” said the silhouette filling the doorway. Kikiou strode over to Doctor Mephisto. “I’d heard that the director of Shinjuku’s hospital had his own double. Making my own in half an hour was quite an achievement, if I say so myself. Instilling the proper memories was a challenge, though.”
Kikiou patted Mephisto on the back. This time, everything was going according to plan, and he had every reason to preen.
The first thing on Setsura’s mind would be Takako Kanan. Knowing that he would seek the assistance of Mephisto, Kikiou exploited that chink in his psychological armor to plot his extinction. In fact, he had no concrete methods for achieving the latter. The poison could be nothing more than the product of calculating backwards from Setsura’s abnormal change.
“I had intended to make use of the young woman, but that appears unnecessary. So leave her here or take with?” He thought it over for a minute. “Leave her. Having joined Princess’s brood, Doctor Mephisto should return here. But no matter how many of you there are, lacking my powers, the question remains whether you can return her to her original state. In the meantime, let us finish him off. If you would, Mephisto.”
“Understood.”
The white doctor hoisted Setsura onto his shoulders and slipped out of the room, Kikiou following after him.
Part Eleven: Dark Aura
Chapter One
“Is he asleep?” The fat lady asked the doll girl when she emerged from the steel door and shut it behind her.
“Yes,” she answered with a nod of her small head. The glittering strands of gold spilled to one side of her face in a silky wave, casting off flickering beads of light.
It wasn’t the lamp in the ceiling lighting up the doll girl’s hair, but the early morning glow pouring in from a crack in the curtains. Demon City still slept soundly at four o’clock in the morning.
“Even I am taken aback. He could have run for the hills but chose to return of his own
accord.”
Her mouth bent into a frown. Tonbeau Nuvenberg sighed. As a precaution, she’d gone to the hospital to have the wound looked at—the one inflicted by the vampire gangbanger at the apartment in Shin-Okubo. But hearing that she’d be charged for the visit had returned home an hour ago.
While basic hospital services were free for residents of Shinjuku, those from outside the ward were charged an arm and a leg. And Tonbeau was very much an alien here.
The doll girl updated her on Ryuuki’s status. Tonbeau sat down at the living room table and mumbled and grumbled as she wracked her brains. All of a sudden, her eyes flew open wide.
“We’ll kill him, of course!”
“What?” the doll girl said with a start.
There was normally no end to the fat lady’s greed, her avarice only outmatched by her timidity. That is, until she came up with some hair-raising scheme that only the sister of the Czech Republic’s greatest witch could pull off.
“That’s it! Leave a piece of trouble like that just lying around and nobody could say what’s going to happen next. He’s all peaceful as a baby now that’s he’s drunk his fill and all, but once the cravings start, it’s gonna come back and bite me in the ass.”
A vulgar image to conjure up, but not off the mark, especially after the death and carnage the doll girl had witnessed. As the old saying went, even the hunter refrained from killing a bird who flew to him seeking shelter. But be seized by the ravenous hunger for just one night, and this bird would bare its poisonous claws and fangs and turn into a demonic vulture.
That was why, in any case, the duty of the hunter was to kill the prey.
“But—” the doll girl said. “How to destroy him?”
The impossibility of the task had been well demonstrated in the Shinjuku police station special detainment lockup. Even a staking by Galeen Nuvenberg hadn’t caused any deterioration to Ryuuki’s body.
Tonbeau furrowed her brows and scratched her butt in studious contemplation. “Push come to shove, there’s nothing special about that vampire. The only sure way to turn him into dust is to destroy his sire. But that is a whole lot tougher than giving him a long nap.”
“It is as you say.”
Tonbeau’s eyes flashed. “Don’t you have anything to be upbeat about?”
“What?”
“Something smells fishy to me. Somehow or another, when it comes to killing him, seems like maybe you aren’t so raring to go.”
“Not at all.”
Even as she spoke, the doll girl’s glass heart sent an unprecedented volume of blood flooding through her body. This was one of the most frightening characteristics of her mistress’s sister. Grandmother’s intuitions had reached an almost supernatural acuity that covered all of creation in ways that Tonbeau’s could never compare with. But in certain respects, nothing could approach her own ominous abilities.
“Well, that’s okay,” Tonbeau said stiffly. “You’re my big sister’s servant. You’re not going to betray us, no matter what. But there’s one more way of doing away with that chap. What do you imagine it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“We predestine the fact that it will happen.”
The doll girl drew her picturesque eyebrows.
“You still don’t get it? That. We make use of that.”
“And by that—”
“I’ve always wanted to give that a whirl.” Tonbeau’s voice hushed to a whisper. “The very experiment banned by the Vatican in the year 1400, that only Doctor Faustus successfully pulled off. Even my audacious big sister did not dare dabble in that arena.”
The doll girl’s eyes flew open with surprise, with an expression of horror that came to human eyes on gazing upon the black death.
“It is not possible. No record of it was ever made!”
“No, I’ll do it. I’ll give it my best shot. There is nothing we can do but that. Faced with such a powerful vampire, we cannot turn away from predestining him to destruction.”
Tonbeau clenched her fists in a show of determination. The doll girl didn’t raise an objection to this silly and ostentatious show of bravado. More than respect for her mistress’s sister, the black hand of fear had seized her celluloid throat.
Reading in between the lines of their conversation, “destruction” could be “predestined” using the “record.” Even in Demon City Shinjuku, there should be no one capable of such a thing. What was this “record”? And what would Tonbeau do with it?
“Let’s get down to work, then.”
The woman who looked like a paper bag stuffed with pastries rolled up the sleeves of her hamhock-like arms. The doll girl turned her eyes toward the foyer.
“Somebody coming?” Her vim and vigor dimmed and she asked the question in a disquieted manner, perhaps because of having messed with a JDF Special Forces contingent on a previous occasion.
“Yes. A civilian automobile. A man.”
A knock came at the door.
“Tell him to strip before letting him in. He could be carrying one of those suitcase nukes for all we know.”
The doll girl didn’t say anything as she went to the door and threw back the bolt.
“I apologize for barging in so early in the morning,” said a very haggard Mayor Kajiwara, stepping into the house.
“You’ve arrived at exactly the right time!” Tonbeau said with an excited little jump. “You don’t need to apologize for anything. I was just thinking of ringing you up. We need to talk. Supposing I was able to rid Shinjuku of all that ails it at the moment—”
“I’ll pay whatever I can.” In front of the pair of greedy eyes, he thrust out a brown overnight bag.
“What?”
“Whatever I’ve got in my pockets. But first you need to take care of this.”
Tonbeau and the doll girl exchanged glances. The mayor placed the bag on the table and unzipped it with stiff hands. He reached in, then thought better of it and backed away.
“I put it in there, but lack the confidence to extract it. If you would, please.”
“Me? No way. What the hell is it?”
“A wooden box.”
“A box?”
“Yes. But no ordinary knick-knack. There’s a dragon and tiger painted on the cover. They escaped last night.”
They didn’t doubt what he said was true, not in Demon City. At the same time, Tonbeau picked up on something else.
“They were certainly there to guard the box,” she observed, a white-hot intensity in her voice. “If they escaped, it must have been because they were beckoned by the person they were supposed to protect. Or went to her on their own volition.”
“That’s not all,” Kajiwara said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “After the creatures took off, I peeked inside the box and saw green forests and fields beneath white clouds. And from the window of a magnificent mansion, an old man the size of a grain of sand looking back at me.”
“You don’t say.”
Tonbeau wasn’t addressing the mayor, but the bag on the table. She opened it and peered at the thing inside. Her beefy arms reached in.
“I shut the top right away. A minute later I tried to open it again, but couldn’t. I wasn’t dreaming. So I brought it here. An item like this can’t be casually tossed aside. This is a mystery that needs unraveling. I’ll make it worth your while.”
Her fat wrist disappeared inside the bag and stopped. “Worth how much?”
“I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”
“Make sure those arrangements amount to more than a trifling.”
“Rest assured they will be made.”
Tonbeau harrumphed and fell silent. A trifling was all she could expect. She wouldn’t have been surprised at all to learn the mayor’s salary. Though official salaries amounted to no more than sparrow’s tears, the movers and shakers in Demon City could expect to receive generous additional perks and benefits. The “honorariums” bestowed on Shinjuku’s civil service whenever a “specialty product�
� was added to the list of “allowable exports” were frequent and generous.
Tonbeau smiled, as if to say: Then let it be so. There would be many more ways to skin this particular cat.
“Let’s see what the fuss is all about, shall we?”
She buried her arms in the bag down to her elbows. And removed them without incident. The doll girl focused her attention on the cracked and desiccated surface. Small colorful flecks fell off.
“A part of the paintings. It seems to have been damaged when the creatures fled.”
Tonbeau seized the lid. The mayor took a deep breath. She exerted all her strength but the lid didn’t budge. She jiggled it back and forth and lifted the box off the table.
Then softly set it down. “It is sealed with magic, and securely at that. However, Mr. Mayor, those guardian beasts didn’t lay a hand on you. They were in a hurry to get somewhere. Or crazed out of their minds. You give the box a good shaking?”
“Ah, yeah,” Kajiwara answered with a vague nod. “The top wouldn’t come off again, so I turned it upside-down too.”
“And maybe that drove them out of their little heads. I wonder how old this thing is. I haven’t seen a complex gadget like this in a hundred years.”
“Is there nothing you can do about it?”
“I can’t make any firm promises, but—hoh, this is beginning to sound like a business negotiation.”
“I have promised you remuneration.”
Tonbeau raised the box overhead. That view proved no more revealing. And yet she smiled broadly. “We’ll do whatever we can do. I assume you won’t mind entrusting it to our care for the time being.”
“That would be fine.” Kajiwara finally felt the tension beginning to unwind. “In fact, I stopped at Mephisto Hospital on the way here, but the director was nowhere to be found.”
“The doctor wasn’t in?” said the doll girl.
“He hasn’t told us where he is, only that he is working on behalf of the city, he and Aki-san too.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. I shall bid you goodbye. My wife is waiting with the car. Later.”
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 22