by Anna Frost
“Please, you have to get up.” When he failed to respond, the voice turned harsh. “You’re going to let them kill us too?”
His hand sought his sword’s hilt and tightened on it convulsively. “No.”
Straightening slowly, he called out the power that dwelled inside those of his kind, the power of his inhuman half. It came to him like battle fever in the blood, heating body and mind. He felt the color bleed out into his hair, turning it a shade similar to his sister’s. Many on the field had also called upon their hidden strength, but few had a color as vibrant as he. He kept pulling until his eyes filled with color, and strange red markings appeared on his skin. He halted there: his body would tear itself apart if he went too far.
A new body had appeared in the mud, the death so fresh that the wounds bled freely, and Yuki’s breathing was battle-quick. He stared. “What happened?”
“He tried to sneak up on us.”
Crimson rage washed across his vision. This man had tried to sneak up and stab them in the back while they were attending to Sanae! The bastard was lucky he was already dead!
Akakiba laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder and struggled to speak evenly. “Thank you for watching my back.”
Yuki flinched, raising a hand to protect his eyes. “Your aura’s blindingly bright. And your face…is that normal?”
“I told you you’d see.”
The approaching men never had a chance. Filled to bursting with pure energy, Akakiba moved faster than human reflexes could handle and hit harder than a human body could stand. Because he had practiced in secret before, in those rare times he was well and truly alone, he knew how to handle the extra speed and strength and never once stumbled. Bones shattered and flesh parted like water under his strikes. The glyphs on his katana shone bright, responding to the spirit energy that flowed from him.
He sought more enemies to kill but found nothing but broken weapons and corpses nearby. The battle had moved back toward the edge of the trees, the two fighting forces decreased in number. The largest group was the non-fighting one—the healers, wounded fighters, and exorcised humans—and the battle had turned to one of defense as monks and foxes sought to keep the enemy away from those unable to protect themselves.
“Fools,” he said contemptuously.
He saw and understood everything now. The clan had never fought like this, parent with child, wife with husband. They lacked the discipline for it and could not refrain from turning to help those they knew and loved. When they were thus distracted, the enemy pounced.
He watched foxes stumble and make fatal mistakes. It was so obvious. Tiredness, once it settled deep into the muscles, was a terrible enemy. It took their advantages and dulled them, forced them to be more careful with their superior strength. Disarming the enemy became a difficult and dangerous task. Still they tried and took too many wounds in the process.
Why had they accepted this foolish plan? They were saving human lives at the cost of their own, but why? Sanae had been worth more than a few human lives. These humans were fools too, or else they wouldn’t have been turned into slaves. They weren’t worth saving.
He shifted his sword backward in his grip and began to run.
Yuki kept up, his sword also out and at the ready. He spoke, his tone alarmed, but his words were without meaning.
Akakiba fell upon the enemy like a fox upon baby rabbits and showed them no more mercy. He was the god of death come for them. He taught them fear and the horror of battle. He taught them pain and the weakness of flesh bodies. Their screams and pleas went unheeded as he turned them into hacked meat. The directive, to wound rather than kill, was meaningless now. He fed his vengeance with blood, and it called for more.
His sword descended toward a screaming youth and met resistance, another blade blocking the deathblow.
“Stop.” Yuki grunted in effort, his human strength insufficient to contain him for long. “It went out. The demon went out.”
Akakiba pulled back, blinking rapidly to refocus his gaze. “What—” The return to reality was like a fall from a cliff, swift and brutal. Strength and color drained from his body, and he almost forgot to keep breathing. He swayed on his feet with the sudden acknowledgement of the energy he had expended. This did not stop him from seeking another enemy to fell, but there was no one left to stand up to him. The living remaining in the vicinity were unpossessed humans who cringed away from him.
“You scared the demons right out of them,” Yuki said to his puzzled expression. The boy watched him warily, as if afraid he might butcher the helpless humans regardless.
Which is what he’d been doing all along. How many had he murdered? How many had he left crippled for life, missing a hand or an arm?
“They weren’t skilled,” he murmured, surveying the battlefield, which now was almost quiet with the wind covering the moans of the injured and dying. “We were having difficulties, because everybody was trying to be careful.” The others had wanted to save the possessed humans, and he’d gone and slaughtered them.
Clan members and monks were picking their way through the field to offer care or mercy to the survivors of his frenzy. Nobody looked at him or spoke to him.
He didn’t know he’d moved until he recognized the broken body before him. There he sat after arranging her body as neatly as he could, gazing at her untouched face with its halo of wild red hair and feeling his sanity threaten to break anew.
Yuki limped over and collapsed on the ground, his face so pale that Akakiba stirred out of his self-pitying haze to ask, “Are you hurt?”
“I can’t help it if I’m entirely human,” Yuki snapped. “This body isn’t meant to keep up with idiots with inhuman strength who go charging around like they seek death.”
Once he had noticed Yuki’s state there was nothing the human could say or do to stop him from investigating every scrape and cut and treating them as best he could with his meager supplies. He shredded his clothing to provide bandages and cleaning rags and spread numbing salve on the two most severe wounds: the cut on Yuki’s leg that caused the limp and a wound on his shoulder, where the armor had been pierced. The dragon made distressed noises all the while.
The work done, Akakiba sat in the mud, saying nothing and thinking even less. His world had imploded, and he couldn’t put the pieces back together.
A high, keening wail interrupted his non-thinking. His mother approached, her clothes torn, her hair dirty with more than blood, and her limp grown severe. She held in her arms the battered fox shape of her husband.
“Not my baby, not my little girl…” Akahana bent to Sanae’s still form, shaking.
Kiba crawled to nudge his daughter’s hand, once, twice, thrice.
Akakiba walked away from his parents, disgusted by their grief. They hadn’t listened to him. They’d brought this pain upon themselves.
“Will you please stop stumbling all over the place?” Yuki said, the words slurred. “I’m tired, thirsty, injured, and weary of caring for a man who won’t get out of battle shock or at least suffer his battle shock sitting down.”
“Honestly, Brother. You’re embarrassing me. You need to sleep and heal.”
Akakiba gazed at the fire-red fox sitting in front of him and understood from its unsteady edges that it was a spirit taking his sister’s shape to taunt him.
“Sanae…”
“Get some sleep already! I’m in better shape than you, and I’m the one who died! Oh, good, here comes Jien. He’ll handle this.”
The spirit faded away. He stared dumbly at where it had been.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mamoru
MAMORU LAID ON HIS futon, awake but too weary to rise. Usagi had been assigned to assist him in his recovery, but so far she’d done more crying than assisting. Her sobs would sometimes stop for hours at a time, only to start anew later. It was difficult to accept that this bedraggled and grief-stricken girl was the same Usagi he knew, the one with perfect hair, exquisite makeup, and haughty attitude.
Then again, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising considering the situation: Nagato had left forever and with him most of the men and women they called friends and family.
Mamoru owed his life to a fellow shinobi’s kindness. Someone had seen he was still breathing and carried him to the healers. He didn’t know who had done it, but the man must be dead, for none of the survivors claimed the deed as their own.
The red-haired girl’s hit had broken not his neck, as he’d thought before passing out, but his jaw. He wouldn’t be able to talk or eat much more than miso soup for a while, but he would live.
“You were lucky,” Usagi told him in between sobbing fits. “Since you were brought to us early, we evacuated you via a raft on the river before we even knew we were losing. The last raft was so full, we couldn’t bring all the injured with us.” She started sniffing again. “Few others got away. It’s mostly us women who were on healing duty and the injured we got on the rafts.”
Mamoru didn’t ask for names. He didn’t want to know who had been left behind with a poison pill shoved down their throats. That was what shinobi had to do with seriously injured comrades they couldn’t evacuate.
“It’s about time,” a voice said in the hallway. “I was getting nervous the bastard would flee before we were ready to handle him.”
“We had to be certain we’d gotten away cleanly first. It wouldn’t have helped if samurai showed up here while we were busy fighting each other over the leadership! We were watching the old bastard, anyway. He wouldn’t have gone far if he’d tried to run.”
“Right, right. We—Oh, wait. We forgot to tell the kids.” The speaker, one of their ex-instructors, stuck his head inside the room. “Usagi, Mamoru, you should come.” He disappeared without waiting for an answer.
Mamoru rose to his feet and went. Usagi followed, drying tears on her sleeve. Unable to offer words of comfort with his jaw in the sorry state it was, he reached back for her hand instead. She accepted the gesture, squeezing his fingers hard.
The survivors—the mobile ones—gathered like wolves around the leader, whose face was an emotionless mask as he said, “Decide among yourselves who is the best to succeed me, and send him to my chamber. I shall be waiting.” He turned and left, seemingly unconcerned about the possibility of taking knives in his back.
Unable to weigh in on the topic and not caring about the outcome—anyone would be better than that crazy old leader—Mamoru silently retreated from the room.
Like any other shinobi, he had long ago discovered and explored their hideout’s shortcuts, hidden passages, and other interesting components. The leader’s chamber, too, had its secrets. He knew some of them and planned to take advantage of it.
He wiggled into a space so narrow he could hardly fit through and crawled his way to a secret passage that provided an escape route from the leader’s chamber to the outside. Normally, the passage could only be opened from the leader’s chamber, but Mamoru had come across this unintended crawlspace access during his youthful explorations. He slid down into the passage, daggers in hand. He couldn’t open the door from this side, but he could wait to see if the old man tried to flee while everybody else was busy arguing. He wasn’t willing to trust a crazy man’s honor.
He stepped up to the door, which was conveniently outfitted with discreet peeping holes, and settled in to wait.
Footsteps eventually approached. It was Yoshio, a quiet man about whom Mamoru knew little. He had a flattened nose, an ugly patch of burned skin tissue near the ear, and a chilling smile. At the moment he also sported a deep cut on the cheek and an exhausted expression. Since he was one of the least severely wounded, he must have worked hard over the last several days.
In Yoshio’s hand was a sake bottle marked with the kanji for poison. It had been understood from the leader’s manners that he was asking for a second to witness his suicide.
The leader was kneeling at a low table, facing the wall behind which Mamoru hid. He gestured, saying, “Be seated, Yoshio.”
“Your time is over, Shinichi,” Yoshio said, rudely using the leader’s name instead of his title. “Before we begin, I must know who the client was. You kept it a secret from us.”
“You wish to know? I shall tell you. It was Advisor Yoshida.”
What? A man from the emperor’s inner circle wanted the foxes dead? But why? The foxes had never moved against the emperor, and the intelligence indicated that he trusted them.
If Yoshio was surprised, it didn’t show in his voice as he asked, “Was he the one who required the mass attack?”
Shinichi, soon to be their ex-leader, grunted affirmatively. “We were disappointed by the result, but it will have to suffice. The fewer foxes, the better the plan will proceed.”
“The plan? What do you mean?”
“It is none of your concern. Let us begin.”
“As you wish.” Yoshio handed the poison-laden sake over. “Very strong,” he advised. “Five breaths before it begins to act, ten more before lucidity is lost.”
The old man smiled. “Very well.” After gulping down the sake, he put the empty bottle aside and folded his hands together. Five breaths later, he opened his mouth wide. A black mist came pouring out of his throat.
Jumping back, Yoshio cried, “Demon!” He snapped his mouth shut on the last syllable as if suddenly understanding the danger. But he hadn’t thought to cover the cut on his cheek, and the demon latched onto it.
Yoshio began to thrash on the floor, keeping his mouth shut and flailing at the demon. But mist couldn’t be stopped with fists. A glyphed blade would have done the job, but of the few they had, none were in this room. It might not have been a coincidence.
Mamoru stood transfixed, watching the battle on the other side of the thin wall. The mist was inexorably seeping inside the open wound. Would Yoshio prove stronger and succeed in expelling the demon, or would he become the demon’s slave? In the stories, brave men always succeeded in repelling demons. But Yoshio was wounded and exhausted, hardly in any shape to battle evil.
An eternity later, the struggle ended. Yoshio rose and stretched, rolling his head and his shoulders. “Ah, a young body. How wonderful.”
Mamoru had been trained by the best. He was certain he made no noise as he stood up to retreat. And yet, the man who was no longer a man turned his head and stared right at him.
Not good.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Akakiba
SO MANY BODIES littered the ground, so many more lay wounded and in need of care. Peasants, monks, foxes, all dripping the same red blood. A handful of demon-possessed men and women had fled the battle, pursued by those who were fox-trapped. The other able-bodied saw to the needs of the wounded. Maru and the monk healers went from one patient to another without pause, saving those they could, drugging those they couldn’t.
The peasants who had been exorcised were sobbing or staring or praying. Monks circulated to offer comfort, but there were victims who turned their faces from them. Other peasants were catatonic, responding to no stimuli, and others appeared to be insane, believing themselves to be the demons.
Akakiba sat nowhere near the peasants, but his hearing was painfully sensitive, and he caught enough bits of conversation to understand what the saner peasants thought of him.
“Over there, that’s the mad one. Don’t go near him.”
“The Mad Fox, yeah. He was laughing on the battlefield.”
“I heard him. Laughing with his face covered in blood. He’s dangerous.”
“I didn’t know they had people like that. I always heard they were a nice clan.”
He’d have moved farther away, but his muscles screamed if he so much as twitched, having been pushed too far too fast. Besides, he deserved to hear their fear and hate.
There was a bowl of rice in his hands, and he didn’t know how it had gotten there. It was warm, but his stomach wanted none of it.
Maru came by, pills in hand. “Have you changed your mind yet, you thick-headed
fool? You’ll be useless for weeks if you don’t go into a trance.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Liar,” Maru said, cuffing him behind the head. “Don’t try to walk around or I’ll come back and shove these pills down your throat.”
Fine, he did need healing. But he didn’t want to go to sleep, not here and now. Judging by the dirty looks he kept getting from people, it wouldn’t be safe for him to be unconscious. What if someone came to try to slit his throat and Yuki tried to fight them?
His Yuki, who at that moment came back from crisscrossing the battlefield to sort out the living from the dead. He’d volunteered to do it, the idiot. “I think we found everybody,” he said in a numb voice as he dropped to the ground. “So tired.”
“Here.” He put the bowl of rice in Yuki’s hands. “Eat.”
The human fell asleep before the bowl was empty, slumping sideways against Akakiba’s shoulder. The dragon opened an eye and closed it again.
The sun was on its way down when Jien came over to poke him with the butt of his spear. “Hey, Aki, message from Maru. They’re organizing groups of wounded to visit the nearest healing springs. It’s for people too severely hurt to heal quickly but not so badly hurt that traveling might kill them. Maru said you qualify, so you should go with the fox group.”
“Understood.”
His torn muscles were beyond a nap’s healing, and he had no desire to stick around for longer. Since Maru had the kindness to send someone to warn him, he shouldn’t waste the chance.
Jien was eyeing him with an odd look. Was that concern?
“I could come along,” Jien said. “Just in case.”
Yuki yawned widely. A moment later, so did his dragon. “Don’t worry. We’ll go with him.”
Jien went back to the sohei half of the camp.
Yuki left and returned, leading two saddled horses. “Can you ride? There are carts too, but I thought you’d rather have a horse.”
“You were right.” His body didn’t like it when he mounted up. Water blurred his vision, and he bit through his lower lip. Oh, this was not going to be a fun ride.