Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 2 (21 page)

He was referring to his partner, the driver.

“What are you two talking about? Get back in the cell or I'll shoot!”

“Knock if off,” Endou said in a tired voice.

“What are you saying?”

“Don't you get it? You're pointing a gun at the man who saved your hide.”

But he ignored the commando cop, as if he'd just started talking gibberish, and tightened his finger on the trigger. Setsura was already headed out the door.

“Freeze!” Endou aimed his Magnum right between his eyes.

The jail clerk's body did a one-eighty. Endou watched, amazed, as the man ran full tilt into the wall. This time none too gently. He dropped like a rock, the breath clean knocked out of him.

After watching Setsura disappear through the door, Endou said with a rush of emotion, “Dumb bastard doesn't know how lucky he is.”

He wasn't referring to Setsura.

Darkness covered the city.

The darkness in Demon City Shinjuku wasn't the same as in the outside world. The residents of Shinjuku knew that as well as they knew their own names, and they'd noticed in the past few days that it'd taken on additional meaning and depth.

It was tinged with crimson.

The two figures walking along Shinjuku Avenue in the Yotsuya third block neighborhood suddenly stopped. In the pale blue light, they could easily be discerned as a fierce and gallant man, and a woman of spellbinding beauty.

They were both wearing Chinese dress. The man was missing his right arm below the elbow. In this city, even that was not enough to draw undue attention. The ancient koto he was carrying, though, was rare enough to be an exception to the rule.

“What are we going to do?” the girl asked in an anxious voice.

The man watched the people flowing past him with a disinterested expression. He said in a stone-like voice, “
I
shall be going on alone.”

“What are you saying?” The girl's face colored with a degree of anguish resembling death. “You are so awfully tired, Sir Ryuuki.”

“I've been tired for two thousand years now.” The warrior smiled wanly. “You should return, Shuuran. I will disappear.”

“W-Where to?”

“I don't know. But in this city, there must be places that would grant me asylum. I suppose I could live out my life slumming among the vagrants.”

“Live out your life—you are talking like a person whose life can end.” Resignation tainted the words of her ravishing beauty. “Sir Kikiou doesn't understand. Even in this city, there is no place we may call home.”

As if in proof of her words, the currents of humanity flowed silently around them. Those who had a home to return to and those who did not right now had only the road before them. A man never stopped walking until he rested in the grave.

Though as Shuuran said, the two of them did not belong here. Their faces, let alone their bodies, bore no scars or evidence of how they had broken through the impregnable walls of Mephisto Hospital.

“I understand.”

Joy shone in Shuuran's eyes. “Then stay here and fight Setsura Aki to the bitter end, as Princess ordered. If you do, then I will do likewise. Ask me anything and I shall be at your service.”

“That is not possible now.” Ryuuki stared off into the distance, as if listening to the darkness itself. “Princess will not forgive another blunder. I do not fear being punished. Nor am I frightened by whatever Setsura Aki has to offer. At some point we must fight until the last man standing. All I want is the time before that occurs. Except that I do not know when that will be.”

“Then fight with me by your side.” She wrapped her white fingers around his right sleeve. The strength flowing from her fingers soothed the infinite extremes of Ryuuki's melancholy countenance.

“No.” He shook his head. “Losing you would leave Princess at loose ends. I can be replaced. You cannot.”

“There is no one for me but you. Besides—” She couldn't finish the thought.

“It is all right. As far as Princess is concerned, I am only one man. But Princess has undoubtedly changed since returning from Mephisto Hospital.”

“That's why—!”

More than the surprise at not having realized this until Ryuuki pointed it out, Shuuran's reaction was more a response to the development of a situation she thought impossible. She hadn't understood the cause.

“Are you saying things have come to the point that she could lose you and not bat an eye? What happened in Mephisto Hospital?” Her voice quieted to a low moan. “I can't believe it. That—that doctor—Sir Ryuuki, have you abandoned so much hope? To even abandon Princess?”

“I do not know myself.”

As if pushed apart by the moonlight shining down on them, the two shadows separated. One did not move. The other silently retreated the way it had come.

An infinite distance stretched out between them. The remaining silhouette said to herself heavily, “Setsura Aki. If you died, Sir Ryuuki would return. No. Even if he never returned, I cannot pardon what was done to Princess. You will learn to fear the night. Make even the slightest mistake, and I will be there to take advantage.”

Instead of hightailing it out of Totsuka Station right after emerging from the death match in the holding cells, Setsura made his way to the captain's office. The cops chasing him froze in fear—until the order came from the Chief himself to investigate all outgoing communications and Internet connections.

Shortly after sunset, Yakou visited Mephisto Hospital in the company of several of his subordinates. He'd originally planned on making this visit two days earlier. The Elder's funeral accounted for the delay.

His purpose was to determine where the enemy was hiding.

In light of the showdown at the hospital the night his grandfather was attacked, they'd transported Takako to a different location. It wasn't that he doubted their defensive capabilities, but he feared other patients coming to harm.

Of course, no matter where she was, the vampires would come after her. The victim would try to run back to her accursed master. Yakou knew how to guard against that eventuality as well.

The problem was the new location of Princess's safe house.

But even in this case, the young leader of the Toyama clans did not lack for confidence. Which was why, when the secretary told him that the hospital director was “unavailable,” he could hardly believe his ears.

“I let him know you were here. As far as Miss Kanan is concerned, he said to leave it up to you, but that he cannot meet with you at this time.”

“Was he suddenly called away on business?”

“I do not know.”

“Please tell him that this concerns master expropriation.”

“But—”

“Did he say you were not to contact him?”

“No.”

The secretary spoke into her tiny lapel mike. The answer came at once. “I didn't think an opportunity to perform another master expropriation would present itself so soon.” Doctor Mephisto's voice sounded on the intercom. “That police officer is useless. And there are no other vampires available.”

“No, there is one. The man we found in the ruins next to Shinanomachi Station.”

“Except his throat had been torn out. He was breathing his last.”

“Has he died?”

“He seems to be doing well enough. But there is no mark of the vampire.”

“I suspect it would be found on the flesh missing from his neck.”

“If he is a vampire, then the wound would have healed already.”

“There is only one exception. The master
intended
to kill the victim.”

“Do as you see fit,” Mephisto said, in exactly the same tone of voice as before. “And how do you plan to proceed? If there is anything you need, let the hospital personnel know.”

“I'll take you up on that. I would ask that nobody else be allowed to enter his room.”

“Understood. He is in D-wing. Nurse Sayaki, please show them the way.”

At some point, a small figure of the nurse had appeared next to them. She bowed politely.

Several minutes later, Yakou entered a room in the intensive care unit alone.

Setsura Aki. Doctor Mephisto. Four demonic beings. And Yakou. The ends each of them had in mind, and the wills they possessed to achieve them, would turn things in a new and frightening direction.

The night had only just begun.

Setsura surveyed the scene before him. He muttered to himself, “
This
is the classy place these guys choose to hang out? What does that make
my
place?”

His voice vanished into the big hole in front of him, a symmetrical half-circle bored into a white wall. He looked down. In the direction of an uneven footpath about a yard wide was a drainage canal brimming with black water. Splotches of white light reflected off the wavering surface, fracturing the moonlight shimmering there.

According to Shinjuku's civil engineering schematics, any such canals should have dried up long ago. It was hard to believe that the wastewater collected here from the peaceful abodes of Shinjuku had ever been discharged from the treatment plants to again quench human thirst.

The steps leading up to ground level from the walkway behind him had partly crumbled away. The walls to the left and right were rippled and folded like the bellows of an enormous accordion squeezed in the hands of some rude giant.

Looking up from where Setsura was standing, only one of the huge chemical tanks remained. The rest had fallen into the abyss. The skin of the last cylinder was scarred with rust.

This was the one place in Shinjuku where water had once flowed freely—the remains of the underground water treatment plant beneath the old Ochiai district.

It had undergone extensive renovations just before the Devil Quake struck. This prestigious public works project, utilizing the latest in cutting edge technology, had been thoroughly cannibalized by the restoration crews and now was good for little more than scrap metal.

But the water still flowed.

A splash—something that looked like a fish leapt upwards, droplets dripping off its silver scales—and plunged back into the water several yards away. Water returned to its source. Even with its human operators long gone and their dreams so many tears in the rain, life had returned to this subterranean treatment plant.

Setsura walked toward the entrance of the tunnel. The final quality control facility stretched on for several hundred yards. Chasing the vampire assassin who'd fled Totsuka Station, he'd arrived here.

The moonlit shadows cast deep, dark silhouettes on the walls, creating a terrible kind of beauty, a ravaged and worn still life. At the same time, this young man radiated back whatever beauty lay hidden in all this sickly degeneration. Those men who could transform the cruel and hideous into beauty were few and far between in Demon City Shinjuku.

What looked like a fat rope broke the surface of the water, right next to him. Setsura paid it no mind. The black torso reared up, shedding droplets of water. Its rigid stance made it look like a fence post. But the voice falling upon Setsura's head brought to mind anything but an inanimate object.

“Hey, fashion model guy, where are you going?”

The white head floated there in the air. A small, innocent face of a child. But attached to its glistening, snake-like body, the result was frightening and grotesque. Most likely, during the Devil Quake, the soul of a young boy washed into the sewers had been abducted by evil spirits nesting in the earth, and had spawned this creature.

Setsura continued on his way. After a dozen feet or so, he again heard the voice beside him. “Hey, Mister, answer me!”

Setsura kept going. He'd taken five more steps when a black lump landed at his feet. With a heavy, sticky sound, it slapped against the concrete and rebounded. A twitching, fish-like animal, a third eaten through, the white bones sticking out. It had limbs like a person and translucent webbed fingers on its hands.

“That's what I eat. There's tons of them in the water—but they taste awful—a human body floated down here once—that was
so
good—I can still remember it—but they hardly ever come down here—but I can't reach up there yet so I'm really happy you showed up here Mister—”

The kid's head bobbed back and forth in front of Setsura's face, talking in a nonstop stream, not pausing between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Then the face vanished, and there was only the black torso.

The face popped up on his right. The kid smiled. For being confined to the water, the skin was remarkable, white and glowing. The smile on its lips was almost too cute to stand. It flashed its teeth. They were all black.

The snake body wrapped around Setsura and slowly began to squeeze. The mouth opened wide and rushed towards his head. Even baring its fangs, it was an adorable face.