Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  ‘Come on, boy. Remember if you miss, I win. That’s a powerful weapon you’ve got there. I bet it could go right through me and the princess here. Take your best shot. The countdown has begun.’

  Jun stared down at Crow, his finger tightening on the trigger. The crossbow was old, its aim likely to be off. Even at twenty feet, Professor Crow’s face was a small target. He was right. The only way to kill him was to risk hurting Nozomi.

  He couldn’t do it. She was his best friend’s daughter, a niece in name if not in blood. She was seven years old. She wasn’t collateral. He couldn’t just murder her, despite what Crow had done.

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t be shy,’ Crow said. ‘A penny for your thoughts, isn’t that right? Thinking about your friends, are we? Poor Mr. Guitarist, playing his mournful tune beside the castle gates? Or his pretty little wife, who had so much fun with my birdmen? Or is it someone else? Someone … close to you?’

  Jun tightened. ‘Don’t you dare say her name!’

  ‘Her eyes looked so good as she lay dead in the snow, didn’t they? A regular sleeping beauty, albeit one who would never wake. Do you miss her? Do you miss her, Jun?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Would it make it easier for me to just throw this girl over right now? Then you’d have a clean shot at least. Since we’ll both die either way.’

  ‘No!’ Karin screamed. ‘Don’t hurt my daughter! Back off, Jun!’

  ‘He has to die!’

  ‘Not for her! Not for my daughter! Get away, Jun! This is your fault, you stupid fool! She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you!’

  The rope creaked. Jun stared at Crow as Karin screamed at him and Nozomi cried.

  ‘Yes, boy, this is your fault,’ Crow said. ‘If you had stayed away we could all have lived happily ever after. You should never have come here, should you? What, you’re trying to kill all your friends? What was her name again? It escapes me now….’

  ‘Jun, back off!’

  ‘Jun!’

  Crow gave a wild grin. ‘Oh, Jun,’ he called in Akane’s voice. ‘I always loved you. I loved you from the moment I first saw you, until the moment I lay dead and cold on the snow. Oh, Jun. I miss you.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Jun roared up at the sky. The blood boiled in his mind as the voices seemed to come from all around. Crow’s goading, Karin’s pleading, Jennie’s worried shouts, Nozomi’s tears. And through it all, he could see Akane’s dying eyes.

  He lifted the crossbow, aiming for Crow’s throat.

  ‘If it means your death, Crow, I’ll walk friendless for the rest of my days.’

  Crow smiled, one arm snaking tighter around Nozomi, the other closing over the rope. ‘Then so be it. Sayonara, Matsumoto.’

  He dropped, pulling Nozomi down with him as Jun fired the crossbow, the quarrel passing through air where Crow’s head had been. The rope groaned, and he saw to his horror that the quarrel had cut part of the way through.

  Karin was screaming. Crow was howling with laughter as his fingers came up, closing over the frayed section of rope and slicing through the remaining fibres in one swift motion.

  He looked up at Jun, smirked, and gave a long, lingering wink.

  A collective scream rose from both those inside the cage and those on the catwalk, then the cage was gone, dropping away, rolling over as it plummeted towards the rocks far below.

  ‘Nooooooooo……!’

  Moments before it hit the rocks protruding from the bluff for the first time, something black plumed and drifted away from the falling cage like a puff of smoke. It disappeared among the trees as the cage hit another protruding ledge and then another, finally crashing into the forest far below.

  Jun felt Jennie’s arm on his as the cage disappeared from view. Jun threw the crossbow over the edge and sank to his knees, the whole world screaming into his ears like a giant howling wind. He tried to scream in retaliation, but all he could feel was soundless anger on his lips, as useless as his efforts to save his friends.

  And so friendless I will walk, he thought as he rolled on to his side, pulling his knees up to his chest and squeezing his eyes closed. As all around me fall, I will walk on, lonely and despised, to the ends of the earth.

  Epilogue

  Captivity

  Three months later

  ‘I’m here to see Jun Matsumoto.’

  The glum orderly behind the glass screen gave a curt nod. ‘Name?’

  ‘Jennie Nakamura.’

  ‘Relationship to the patient?’

  She hesitated a moment. ‘Um … friend.’

  The man nodded again. He wrote something down onto a registration sheet, then passed a badge through a gap beneath the screen. GUEST, it read. Jennie thanked him and clipped it to her blouse.

  ‘Level Four,’ the man said. ‘You have to register with the reception again on that desk and someone will escort you to the patient’s room.’ He gave her a smile as if to say, sorry about that. ‘It’s just a precaution.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She found Jun sitting by his window, looking out at the rocky shoreline of Noto Hanto, through which the centre line of Japan’s main island of Honshu passed. The town of Wajima was just out of sight behind a jutting headland to the west, while a line of fishing boats bobbed against a breakwater poking out into the bay.

  It was a nice enough place, she thought. If it was the scenery you were looking at.

  ‘I brought you some snacks and comic books,’ she said, putting a box down on a table by his bed. The receptionist on Level Four had insisted on picking through each one, as if Jennie might be trying to slip in a key or a razorblade. ‘I found the entire series of One Piece in a shop in Toyama. Should keep you busy for a while. There are a couple of CDs in there too.’

  He gave a barely perceptible nod, but didn’t turn round.

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  Again came that slight nod. Jennie suppressed a sigh. He was improving, so the doctors said. For the first month he had refused to get out of bed. Now at least he was showing signs of response.

  ‘I have some news,’ she said. ‘The doctors said they’re going to try a preliminary operation on Ken next week. They’re not sure if they can do anything for him, but they think there’s a chance. It’s better than nothing.’

  Jun’s head tilted slightly, and she saw the ghost of a movement on his lips. Maybe he had a question; she couldn’t be sure. She would have to guess.

  ‘They’ve still not found her,’ she said. ‘Nozomi, I mean. She’s been posted on Interpol as missing, and there have been sightings, but nothing confirmed so far. The officer I spoke to thinks there’s a good chance they’ll find her, though.’ She paused, running a hand through her hair. ‘Um, he is fairly distinctive after all.’

  Jun made no movement this time. Jennie picked at her fingernails for a moment, wondering again why she had taken so much time to fix her hair and do her makeup before coming here. She couldn’t let Jun go, but he had let everything go, himself included.

  It was such a terrible business. The bodies of the hostages stuck in the cage when it fell had all been recovered, including those of Grigore Albescu and Karin Kobayashi. Professor Crow, with some kind of parachute, had escaped into the forest, taking Karin’s daughter as a hostage. The Romanian military had combed the surrounding area for weeks but all they had found were two huge plastic awnings in the shape of wings.

  More than fifty people had died outside the castle gates, attacked by Crow’s birdmen, many of which appeared to have been booby-trapped and exploded on death. None had been captured, but they had exacted a heavy toll before the police had gunned them all down. Some remains had been taken away to labs for investigation, but that was all Jennie knew.

  Whatever the result, Crow had achieved his desire. Heigel was now fenced off and abandoned, the blood of so many dead running deep. It was officially under the jurisdiction of the military while investigations were carried out, but there were rumours in the travel industry that it wo
uld never reopen to the public, and would turn into one of those ghostly forgotten places where future tourists of urban decay would defy KEEP OUT signs and warnings of prosecution to pick through its dirty overgrown streets and peer into its abandoned houses.

  The Romanian Black Eagles were safe, free to roost and breed as they wished, away from human intervention.

  Crow had won.

  Jun continued to stare out of the window. Jennie tried to make light conversation for a while, telling him about her new job working at a tourist company in Tokyo, talking about recent baseball scores and a few things about what was going on in the world, but he gave no further response. Eventually she stood up.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll be going now. I’ll come and see you again soon, Jun.’

  He didn’t move. She picked up her handbag and went to the door. As she opened it she turned back and looked at him, wondering if she meant what she said, whether she could really bring herself to come again, or whether this was goodbye.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Jun.’

  His head tilted back towards her, and for the first time she saw him in profile. A single tear had left a trail down his cheek, and the faint whisper of two words drifted from his lips like fog lifting from the sea.

  ‘My … fault….’

  The Puppeteer King

  The Puppeteer King

  Once-human monsters, giant robot spiders, human statues and a madman with a thirst for destruction … Professor Kurou is back and more dangerous than ever.

  After five years of incarceration, Jun Matsumoto is released from a mental hospital. With his hatred for Professor Kurou still consuming him, he enlists the help of some old friends and tracks his old nemesis to Barcelona, where he hopes to rescue Ken’s missing daughter, Nozomi.

  Kurou, however, has a master plan that will not only destroy one of the greatest landmarks in mankind’s history, but bring war to an entire nation. Jun must battle not only ghosts from his past and his own failing mind, but a man who is now the undisputed Puppeteer King….

  Prologue

  Jimmy Leaves meets a stranger

  The seafront at Monte Carlo was always rich for pickings on summer evenings, Jimmy Leaves thought as he strolled down the promenade, chin jutting confidently, walking with the swagger of a rock star on vacation or an actor between shoots. Twenty-one, carefree, and with the clean, angular looks that had fooled many a naïve young lady into parting her legs or parting with her money, Jimmy looked and acted like something special.

  In fact he was drifting, thrifting, and thieving his way across Europe for want of anything better to do. Fortune favoured the ballsy, and Jimmy Leaves had balls so big they gave him backache. There was no car he wouldn’t try to steal, no home he wouldn’t attempt to infiltrate, no woman he wouldn’t try to lay.

  Look at them, he thought, peering out across the water at the yachts moored up in the bay, some of them lit up with lights and jumping with music. Not a care in the world, these rich pricks. Every single one of them could feed a third-world country, but here they are pissing their money away on poncey champagne and overpriced hookers.

  The waterfront was lined with valet parking lots, no one wanting to take any chances. They felt that a couple of cameras and some chump in a suit would stop their cars being lifted, and to a certain extent they were right. While Jimmy enjoyed a little pickpocketing in expensive clubs from time to time, the super-rich were generally out of reach for his limited resources. Sure, he had a car alarm immobilizer to help him get them off the lot, but there was nowhere to go, and you could hardly flog these cars on. Most of them were limited edition.

  No, the super-rich weren’t Jimmy’s target. He had another, far easier source of income.

  The gapers.

  The tourists, over on their weekend breaks to do some celebrity spotting, to pretend they were something more than school teachers, office workers, salespeople. They came over on low budget flights that dropped into one of the regional airports that had sprung up around Monte Carlo like satellites around a big, bloated moon, got their shuttle buses into town, and for a couple of days tried to forget the astronomical costs of everything from bus tickets to a cup of coffee.

  For the most part, once they arrived, their own relative poverty began to spit at their feet in disgust, and they spent the majority of their holiday walking up and down the streets, taking pictures of rich people, yachts owned by rich people, and the buildings the rich people lived in.

  And they didn’t think for a moment that there might be any crime.

  Climbing over a fence onto one of the small private beaches along the promenade, he found several tourists had also done so, and helped himself to some money from the wallets they had left buried under piles of clothes in hollows dug in the sand while they swam out towards the yachts, hoping to get a look at some celebrities. With night fallen it was easy for him to blend with the shadows, and even if he was caught on camera—there were cameras everywhere in Monte Carlo—he would be difficult to apprehend unless they were really quick in getting down here to pick him up. He had no address, no criminal record, no footprint.

  After a twenty minute stroll along the sand he was roughly five hundred Euros richer. He was a clever thief, never taking the wallets themselves or the cards inside, or indeed all of the money. Half an hour of hesitation while a tourist pondered whether she’d spent that last fifty note was plenty of time to let him get away. Cash was untraceable; cards and all the rest were like little fish hooks caught in his jacket.

  He left the beach and headed into the warren of backstreets behind the promenade. He found a couple of tourist chalets unlocked, their occupants gone to wander the streets or spend a month’s savings in one of the bars, and helped himself to a little bit of money he found under a pillow in one, and a generic Nikon camera in another. Tossing the SIM card into a drain, he estimated he could get a safe hundred for it in one of the junk shops a little further inland.

  At the end of the street he paused, considering his options. He’d done pretty well for the evening, and a glass of wine on the balcony of the abandoned villa where he was squatting might go down well. He hadn’t been laid in a few days though, and it was Friday, so there would be a fresh lot in off the planes, looking to get juiced up and have a good time in starlet-land. He paused, wracked with indecision. Sometimes life seemed too good to be true.

  ‘Sir?’

  He jumped as someone tugged on his arm, spinning around, fists coming up. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of a little girl standing there, looking up at him out of a pretty face framed by straight black hair. She looked about twelve or thirteen, and had large oval eyes and thin lips, a petite nose and high cheekbones. As he looked down at her she gave a half smile out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes relaxing a little.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sir, I need your help.’

  ‘I’m not for hire.’

  ‘I’m hungry. Can I have a little money?’

  The way she looked at him made Jimmy excited and uneasy at the same time. She was on the cusp of her teens—old enough if no one finds out—and here she was, asking him for help on a dim backstreet in Monte Carlo. She looked Asian—Chinese or Korean, maybe—probably a refugee or a trafficked sex worker who’d escaped. It didn’t matter where you went in the world, he thought with a wry shake of the head, whatever the concentration of bloated, rich wankers, there were always the impoverished, the poor, the put upon, laying a base for everything like a rotten, unstable foundation.

  ‘What do I get if I lend you some money? Not got a lot to spare, you know.’

  The girl’s lips parted in a thin smile. ‘So you have some?’

  ‘Depends.’

  The girl took a step closer. A small hand brushed the inside of his thigh, moving up a few inches before pulling away. Her eyes never left his face.

  ‘I’ll earn it.’

  Jimmy nodded, trying to concentrate around the volcano brewing in his pants. ‘Ye
ah, you will.’

  The girl smiled again and skipped off, back up the street he had come down, turning quickly into a side street that led between two tall townhouses. It was darker than he would have liked, but when he reached it the girl was already near the far end, and there was no sign of anyone else. The last thing he wanted was to get caught in a sting trap, lured into some old building and jumped by a group of her refugee mates. It could happen, even here.

  At the end of the street the girl turned to look back. She put her hands on her hips as if telling him to hurry up, then turned out of sight, heading uphill away from the waterfront.

  Jimmy felt a sudden pang of fear. If she had real plans to earn a bit of his hard-stolen coin, she was being a little too carefree about it, almost as if she was excited.

  Damn it, if this is a trap….

  He strolled up to the end of the street, half hoping she had gone. After all, there would be plenty of loose tourists wandering around further down in the town. Jimmy paused a moment, then carried on, his feet making their own decision. The girl had had a look about her, something that just appealed. She was edgy, dangerous. Jimmy lived his life on the edge; it was in his blood.

  She was waiting a few doors further up the street. She smiled and waved him forward, this time waiting for him to catch up.

  ‘Here,’ she said as he reached her, and thumbed over her shoulder at the entrance to a little park.

  ‘Out in the open?’

  ‘Why not? No one cares what we do. Aren’t you interested? I can find someone else.’

  Jimmy frowned. At some point their whole dialogue had shifted to her doing him the favour. How had that happened?