“Sure am. So be a good boy and get me some shochu from the corner store so I can sober up a little. You can use my car.”
“How would hard liquor help you sober up? Anyway, I don’t have my license yet.”
“No fooling?” That brought Himeno back down to earth. She blinked, then slumped over the desk, listless. “Crap. Another useless newbie.”
Aki fumed. He wanted to spit something back at her, but after getting an inkling of how far she outclassed him as a hunter, he found the words caught in his throat.
“Here’s your punishment—when we fight the fiend tomorrow, you stand back and watch. I’ll take care of this creature myself.”
“What? Are you crazy?” Aki leapt up. This was going too far. A resident passing by the window looked over, startled. “You listen to me, you drunkard. I didn’t become a devil hunter to sit on the sidelines.”
He clapped a hand on Himeno’s shoulder, but she didn’t stir. Her eyes were unfocused. “Cocky newbie,” she muttered, almost to herself. “Can’t even drive.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Doesn’t even smoke.”
“Even less relevant!”
“You’ll die.”
“What?”
“I told you,” she murmured. “Five of my partners have bit it. I’m a jinx. Least, I seem to be …”
Himeno finally turned toward him, but her gaze was dark and empty. She didn’t seem to see anything at all. It was the way she’d looked when he’d met her at the graveyard.
She reached out, hesitant, as if feeling for something in the dark. “You’re still so young, Aki. Lookit your baby face. Doesn’t feel right, letting you die.”
“Still don’t really think of me as your partner, huh?” Aki was frustrated. “You can take your pity and stuff it. I told you, I’m not going to go down so easily.”
Himeno didn’t seem to hear him. “They say they’re a ramen place, but the noodles are so bad and the fried rice is so good. I told them they should drop the ramen and focus on fried rice, but the owner, he’s stubborn. He’s convinced he can make the world’s best ramen …”
Aki wasn’t sure what she was getting at. All he knew was that, having tried the alleged star dish, the owner was making a big mistake by not listening.
“Yeah? So what?”
“They’re all like that … Think they know what they’re doing. They’re so sure. So sure and sooo wrong. Poof! Gone! Leaving their partner behind.”
Aki looked down at Himeno, draped over the desk. She looked ready to pass out. He’d had nothing but disdain for her unprofessional behavior, but now he was beginning to understand it.
“Himeno, I—” He broke off. Himeno’s one eye was closed and her breathing was even. She was asleep. “Damn,” Aki muttered. He took a swig from his bottle of water. It had gone tepid. The mingled alcohol and tobacco on Himeno’s breath burned his nostrils. The only sound in the room was the heater laboring away. A hollow sound in an empty night.
When the old man came to check in the next morning, Aki told him there hadn’t been any trouble. Then he put in an appearance at Public Safety, where he found Himeno had taken the morning off, leaving only a succinct instruction—“Meet me at the scene at dusk.”
He kept busy at headquarters without his partner around. When the sun began its descent through the sky, he hopped on a bus.
The old man showed him to apartment 401. The occupants had taken their valuables and gone to stay with relatives for the night. Word must have gotten around about what was happening, because the grounds of the complex, full of noise and life just the evening before, were empty. The shadows of the buildings swathed the area in darkness. The playground stood abandoned; a seesaw rocked back and forth in the wind, each movement producing a little screech like the cry of a wild animal.
The apartment’s floor plan was simple. Just past the entryway was the toilet. At the end of a short hallway, a door opened into a dining room. Adjacent to the dining room were a bath on one side and a pair of standard bedrooms on the other. The climate control was on the fritz, leaving the air chilly. The evening sun pouring through the aluminum-framed windows dyed the tatami floors orange; they smelled noticeably musty.
Aki noted a calendar marked with a local supermarket’s “deal days.” A ventilation fan dripping with oil. A refrigerator whose age looked like it could be measured geologically, with a notice about trash collection stuck to the door with a magnet. It wasn’t much, but it was somebody’s home. To Aki, it felt like a taste of what he’d lost in Hokkaido. The Gun Devil had taken this from him. Home. Family. Everything.
Aki checked the time. 3:30. He found a spot in the cluttered dining room where he could sit and watch the front door. He slid his katana out of its scabbard and gazed at the blade. The faint silver gleam helped him calm down. He expected to make a contract with a devil sooner rather than later, and it felt good to have his weapon ready. He took a deep breath, hand still on his sword—and at that moment the doorknob turned.
Aki drew in his breath and jumped to his feet. A familiar one-eyed face popped in. “Just dropping by!” Himeno joked. When she saw Aki’s face, she scratched her head awkwardly. “Sorry for passing out on you yesterday, Aki. If it makes you feel any better, my head’s pounding from the hangover, and I ache all over from sleeping on the desk.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.”
“I don’t usually go down that easy. Maybe I’m getting old. Hey, how old do you think I am?”
“Don’t care.”
Himeno sighed, then locked the door and sat down beside him. “I don’t remember last night super clearly. I didn’t say anything, like, weird, did I?”
“Lots of things.”
“Oh no, really? But I didn’t get violent, did I?”
“You got in my face, but I pushed you back.”
“Ugh! I’m the worst! Pathetic …” Himeno clutched her head dramatically, then gave up the histrionics with another sigh. “Well, what’s done is done. I’ll have to make it up to you by absolutely crushing it tonight.”
With a hup! she got to her feet. He could hear her joints crack as she stretched. “Just remember what I told you,” she said, pausing in front of him. “You stand back and watch.”
“You remember that much, huh?”