by Rhys Ford
“Gut says yes.” Moving my wrists up and down, I made sure I could get to the daggers if I needed them on the fly. The thin leather straps were comfortable, worn in from years of use, but it never hurt to have a final check. “I think there’s an ego there, and he won’t stand for anyone else to get credit for what he’s done.”
We were supposed to end up in a courtyard near the main house. According the overhead shots and Grandfather’s schematics, the layout was standard Japanese estate, lots of outer hallways, river-smoothed gravel courtyards, and sweeping trees poised on hillocks and around water features. A small teahouse sat on a man-made island at the back of the property, secluded from the rest of the house by a grove of willows and surrounded by a shallow pond. The other option the kidnapper had was a gardening shed a few hundred yards away from the teahouse, because I couldn’t see him locking the women into the main house. He’d want to minimize access to communication, although the idiot did leave Yukiko’s nearly dead phone on her—but I couldn’t discount that as the caster wanting her to call Takahashi for help. One last plea to drive home her helpless situation.
“Here goes,” I murmured, opening the gate latch. “I’m low.”
We’d never gone through a door together, but something about Trent and I synced. We went in silent, a single nod from me starting our entry. Ducking, I had my weapon out and swept the space while looking for any movement. Trent was a step behind me, his knee brushing the back of my thigh as he turned to cover my left. With only two of us, it was a harder shuffle to go in, and the courtyard was larger than it’d looked on the blueprints. The main house was directly in front of us with a pair of long formal entrance buildings to the right. Water slickened the cement walk between the structures, and I was glad for the gravel beneath our feet as we worked inward toward the central building.
The compound looked ancient, but I saw bits of modern touches here and there. A gazing pond in the middle of the courtyard was lit with thousands of faerie lights, the magical motes swaying through the trees, and discreet speakers hung along the eaves of the broad pergola connecting the front structures to the main house, a faint instrumental playing under the pounding rush of the thickening rain. An enormous flat fountain splashed slender jets of water back down into the pond, its delicate spray obliterated in the storm. In true Takahashi fashion, his ego wouldn’t allow him to not smear his ownership on the property. An enormous dragonfly made of concrete and glass wrapped around the fountain’s main spire, its curved wings stretching up past the pergola surrounding it.
Even in the ravages of a passing storm, it was all very peaceful, and if I was ever interested in living farther away from the city—and had all the money in the world to spend—it would probably be where I’d want to live.
But something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something wrong. I slowed my steps, hedging Trent back. He stepped around me, glanced once at my face, then turned his attention back to the yard.
“Okay, you’re kind of scary right now,” Trent shouted at me. “Your eyes are going red.” He motioned with little circles at his face. “Just around the edges. The whirling into the copper is very weird.”
“Something’s… off.” I kept my gun up, but the tickle at the back of my brain grew. Something about the water gushing up from the pond, coursing back down in curved sweeps, felt off. We were somewhat protected from the rain by a lush maple, one of many dotting the yard. “There’s a wrongness—the fountain’s—that’s not right.”
The outer wall behind us gave way, a shattering rumble nearly as loud as the thunder rolling over the Bay, and a keening chit-chit-chit sound burned through my ears. A pair of stone mandibles bit into the maple, severing one of its thick branches, and the snapped-off wood came crashing down, burying us in its leaves. A smaller branch struck my back, shoving me into muddy gravel, and I lost Trent in the foliage. With my hands tangled in the damp leaves, I tried kicking out with my free leg, hoping to clear the branch from my lower back, but I wasn’t gaining any ground, and the animated monster slowly dug its sharp front tarsus into the maple’s thick trunk as it struggled to get over the wall’s rubble.
I hadn’t been able to pinpoint what felt off about the courtyard’s fountain, probably because I’d only seen it from above, but it was definitely missing a few pieces, notably two of its Tombo. If I survived long enough to see my grandfather again, I was going to have a serious talk with him about his obsession with our family’s mon.
Up close, the animated sculpture was massive, at least six feet long, with an enormous wingspan nearly double that. I had to give credit to the artist who’d crafted it, because it was nearly perfect, right down to its head-encompassing compound eyes and its jointed legs that advanced its long, heavy body beautifully. The metal and thin glass constructs of its wings were the only spots of color in its pale gray form, their opalescent sheen splotched with smears of yellowish mud.
I needed to find Trent before the dragonfly’s weight crushed him. Smaller branches shifted as the thing moved. The tree’s rain-dampened leaves made it difficult for the statue to get a good purchase on the wall and ground, and its legs moved furiously, trying to stab its pointed, hooked feet into something solid to stand on.
The branch pinning me down shifted, and Trent sat up, shoving it off us. With his gun in his hand, he unsteadily got to his feet, a thread of blood running down from his temple before turning to a pink wash across his cheek from the pouring rain.
I’d have fainted in relief at finding him alive if I wasn’t so scared the thing would eat us if I stopped long enough to kiss him.
“That’s got to be… crap, that’s a big dragonfly,” he said as he grabbed at my arm to pull me up. “You okay?”
“Yeah, let’s get going. We’re going to need to be clear of that thing.” There was a good ten or twelve feet of distance between us and the dragonfly, but its struggles looked like they were paying off. Like the sculpture, I was having a hard time getting my footing with the wet greenery, and while the rain was slowing to a steady light patter, the nip in the air remained to chill our wet clothes.
The stone insect began to move quicker, slithering across a chunk of mortared brick, turning another branch into mulch, then opened its powerful maw to snap at the air above our heads. I smelled blood, more than what there should have been from the cut on Trent’s forehead, and something pale dislodged from its mandibles, bouncing on the fallen branch to land with a splat at my feet. I couldn’t tell if it’d been a man or a woman. There wasn’t much left but the person’s face—and only enough to make out part of their lips, some of their nose, and most of their right eye. Mostly skin, but still enough bone fragments to hold the shape of their cheek and a bit of the shocked expression they had right before they died.
“I’m fine.” After helping me up, Trent steadied me as I stood, thankful to find my legs could support my weight. “But we’ve got a small problem.”
“Bigger than this?” Trent grunted, helping me get clear of the fallen branches. “What the Hell could be worse than this?”
“That.” I nodded toward a rustling coming from one of the long buildings as another of the caster’s animated monsters pushed its way past a set of shoji doors. As I reached for the spell breakers I’d packed into my jacket, I replied with a grimace, “That’s what was wrong with this picture. That fountain had three of these damned things, and it looks like the missing one’s found us. Watch my back. I’m going to see if I can salt the ground at least enough to slow it so we’ve got time to take care of that one.”
Twenty
I HAD other things in my bag of tricks, but they were rogue and untested. Slowing down the first sculpture would help give us some time to take care of the one rampaging through the estate’s outer buildings and walks. Trapped with its limbs tangled in a web of branches, uneven debris, and rebar grid, I at least had a fighting chance of throwing the dragonfly closest to us off its course. If it bought Trent and I fifteen minutes, i
t would be enough to see if we could stop the other one, and if we failed, then it wouldn’t matter if the first one broke free because we’d probably both be dead or close to it.
As if it could sense my intentions—and for all I knew, it could—the concrete monster on the wall lashed, a lean flash of stone and glass. It raged and thrashed, legs tangled in slender, unforgiving branches, and its long tail whipped out behind it, trying to push itself into striking distance. Its wings beat at the trees, struggling to get past the foliage, and Trent pushed me back a few steps, covering me.
“Really, dude?” I sniped, shoving at his shoulder. “Watch your own six. The other one’s coming. Right now I need you to cover me while I slow this one down. Then we need to get someplace we can put our backs against.”
The sculptures were heavy, fueling much of their destruction. Sheer weight mattered when diving into a fight, and there was no way we could go toe-to-toe with those things without some kind of arcane help. The first dragonfly tore through the wall as if the stone were rice paper, and from what I could see of the second, it was disoriented, careening about the long entrance halls in a blind fury.
Bits of the buildings were flying up into the air, crashing down into the fountain, and breaking sections of the pergola’s support. There would be no hiding by the remaining inert dragonfly. I couldn’t trust it not to come to life while we put our heads into snapping range, battling the other two. The main house, with its sprawling outer decks and low-slung roofs, didn’t seem like it could put up much of a fight against a nearly solid battering ram with a skull-crushing jaw, let alone two of them.
The spell I had in mind was a simple one, and I’d used it before to subdue a simurgh who’d taken to attacking tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. While the crazed bird was definitely smaller than the dragonfly, it was the only thing I had in my arsenal to slow something with a greater mass than a bison.
“Can you hurry this up? We’re stuck between two of them, if you haven’t noticed,” Trent grumbled behind me. “And just because that other one hasn’t seen us yet doesn’t mean it won’t soon.”
“Just need to slow this one down.” The salt scatter was a quick arc from left to right, tossed straight from the small gray bag I had in my pocket. I didn’t need it to be a solid line. Not for the flash spell. Mixed with damp saltpeter, then cured in a rune bowl, the grains flashed when they hit the ground, then shimmered softly when I activated the casting. “That’ll hold it in for a bit. I don’t know how long. Maybe half an hour, but it could be less.”
“Get towards the house. At least we can use the eaves to get out of the rain.” Trent pointed to a corner of the Edo-style mansion my grandfather had built for his mistress… my grandmother. “The portico and risers can give us some defense. And we can get into the house if we need to.”
“God, my family is so fucked-up,” I grumbled, slogging after Trent. The other statue was fighting its way clear of the buildings. Then my heart skipped when I heard it go silent. “I think the other one hit on us. How are these things tracking? Movement? Heat?”
“Rain’s cold. It’ll bring our heat signature down. But we’re still warmer than the trees. Where is everyone? Your grandfather should have people—shit!” Trent broke into a sprint when the second dragonfly emerged from the archway between the buildings, scrambling over the wet cement after us. “Fuck, that thing’s on our ass. Is that a slide space under the damned house? Think we can fit under it?”
The building was raised, probably sitting on quake stabilizers, or it could have been a feature of the old architecture. Either way, I wasn’t all that fond of it. There were too many things slender enough to crawl into those spaces… and then I remembered the most paranoid asshole I knew had built the place.
“I wouldn’t go underneath. His specs didn’t have any crawl spaces laid out, and it’s probably a false front,” I said, motioning for Trent to come in tight against a mock-orange hedge. We hit the edge of the house, its white plaster sides rough on my palm when I bent over to take a peek. “Yeah, it’s solid about five inches in. It’s just for looks. Maybe access to plumbing if they have to break through. This is going to have to be good enough.”
A broad glossy golden wood platform floated above the gravel, spanning the entire front of the main house. Square black posts supported the deck’s crossbeams, its overhang covered with broad flat tiles the same ibushi hue as the house’s smaller scalloped roofing. The juts at the corners were nearly flat, lacking the upsweep common in Chinatown, and the roofline was a crazy quilt of angles where the different wings joined the main structure. Gridded wooden doors closed off the house’s multiple rooms and were access to the structure’s inner courtyard. It was a beautiful compound, but a glance to my left gave me a glimpse of the horrors of what we were facing once we got the dragonflies under control.
I found the compound’s people. One of the main house’s shoji doors sat cracked open, wide enough for me to see inside. At first I thought the floor was stained a dark black cherry, an odd choice considering the estate’s Japanese aesthetic, but then I noticed the skein of intestines lying in a pool near a woman’s head. Just her head.
She was youngish, maybe thirty. I didn’t know her. She could have been anyone—anything—to the people who lived at the compound. A sister or confidant, perhaps someone people disliked and avoided in the mornings. I’d never know. Her eyes were open, filmed over in death, and her skin lay slack on her skull, her cheek sagging down to squish into her lips. There was nothing left of her neck, and I couldn’t see the rest of her body, but the bits and pieces of body parts lying behind her were of many different sizes, so I knew she wasn’t the only one who lay dead beyond the door.
I couldn’t see any other sign of life besides Trent, me, and the thrashing dragonflies. The place echoed with a mournful devastation. My only hope was Jie and my grandmother were alive somewhere on the property, and the longer we took screwing around with the dragonflies, they would sink deeper and deeper into danger.
“Shit.” Trent’s gasp warmed my neck. His expression went bleak, sadness pulling down the corners of his mouth. “That’s…we can’t let this guy go, Roku. This is a slaughter.”
“Agreed. But right now we need focus and think this out,” I murmured, keeping one eye on the flailing dragonfly near the trees. I had to not look at the carnage, turning my back toward the slightly open door. The rain kept the smell of death down, but every once in a while, I’d catch a whiff of blood, yanking me back to the image of a woman’s head staring out at nothing. “Let’s guess they track by heat. Can you give us some cover with ice?”
“I can coat the bushes, but we’d stand out behind it. Won’t last long in this rain. Might give us a few seconds at best if it operates on signatures.” He shook his head. “I think our best bet is for me to attack and you go find the women.”
“Leaving you here isn’t an option. You can’t take them both.” I sifted through our options, but it was hard to focus with a dead woman’s eyes on me. “Okay, let me think.”
There was too much noise in my head, but one thing was for certain. No matter what happened today, I wouldn’t abandon Trent. He was an oddity to me still, but for some strange reason, we fit, worked better than I had with anyone else. Also, the sex was pretty damned intense, and I wasn’t going to go screaming into the night without knowing how he felt wrapped around me.
The second dragonfly didn’t give me time to do much more than bring my gun up. One moment it was having difficulty weaving through the pergola’s posts, and then it snapped its head up, its attention pinned on our location. I felt like it should scream or make some kind of noise other than the chitter of its massive feet digging into the gravel when it broke into a dead run. It seemed too alive—too terrifying—to be mute, and its fury escalated when its momentum lasted only for a brief moment before it hit the smooth walkway, its hooked claws unable to get good purchase on the slick surface.
“Looks like someone woke up,” Trent grumb
led. “Okay, MacCormick, time for us to break a few spells. The first one’s gone limp, so maybe the asshole who made them can’t fuel both of them at the same time or that spell you threw around it is confusing the Hell out of it.”
“Nice.” A flicker of concern sent a dark thread into my confidence, but I shoved it back down, unwilling to let myself get flustered. “Like an old kung fu movie. I don’t think I have enough for both of them. We didn’t think… these things are huge.”
“If we take one out, that’s fine.” His reassurance was meant to be a warm balm, but the dragonfly’s mandibles gnashed wildly as it fought to right itself, and it snapped off a length of pipe jutting up from the fountain’s base. “That was solid metal, Leonard, and did you not see that guy’s face fall out of the other one’s mouth?”
“Just… start the spell, Roku.” He locked his weapon down, making sure its safety was in place. “Sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here.”
I wasn’t going to let panic ride me. I couldn’t. Not with this. Sure, my throat still hurt a bit from the scorpion, but that was mostly muscle memory. I knew what I was facing this time around—probably around three thousand pounds of caster-fueled fury—but I had Trent on my side, a handful of salt, and a cup of rage I’d been storing up inside of me ever since I’d first thought Jie’d been killed. This would be the biggest rite I’d ever cast, and if I fucked it up, things would get dicey for both of us. Or we’d be diced. Either way, it would be bad.
“Okay, starting now,” I whispered. “Hope the Gods are listening.”
The mobile odonate skidded, hitting the wet, smooth walkway from the entrance buildings to the house, and I gave a small sigh of relief when it tumbled. Any second we gained was a help, especially since the spell was iffy, something I’d concocted on the fly with the help of a librarian from the archives. But I knew we’d have to face another one of the mage’s creations before long. There hadn’t been time to test it, and we were going to go in blind, hoping the caster followed traditional lines.