“What’s the connection?” Himeno asked. “Other than the surprisingly high survival rate?”
“My theory is that a person hit with the fiend’s arrow is knocked out but lives. Instead, whoever they love most dies.” Himeno gasped. “I think we took on the fiend of loneliness.”
“Loneliness …”
“My guess? A man died alone somewhere in this complex and was possessed by the Loneliness Devil. The fiend didn’t want to kill people. It wanted to make people as desolate as it was. That’s what happened, right? The survivors were left with no one.”
“Are you sure about that? The woman in the first attack lost her family. But what about the couple in the second attack? The wife was attacked first. By your logic, shouldn’t she have survived and the husband died?”
“Yeah. If she’d loved him.”
That brought Himeno up short.
“She was having an affair at work,” explained Aki. “She no longer loved the man she was married to. When she got hit with the arrow, she passed out, but her husband lived. But the poor guy still loved his wife, so when he got shot, she died.”
“Hang on! An affair at work? How could you possibly know that?”
“I did some investigating while you were sleeping off that hangover. At the exact time the apartment was attacked, the wife’s boss died under mysterious circumstances. An arrow through the heart.”
“What about the third case, then?” Himeno gaped.
“You remember how the guy got a phone call at the end of our interrogation? It really seemed to upset him. While you were down for the count, I looked into that too. Turns out his mother died. Same deal. She was a single mother, all he had.” The phone call, Aki gathered, had been from a neighbor who’d discovered the mother’s body.
Himeno blinked her one eye twice, then three times. “You knew the person who gets shot doesn’t die. Is that why you were willing to take the hit?”
“Pretty much.” He hadn’t exactly been eager to go down for fifteen minutes. But he’d been ready to throw himself in front of the arrow if necessary.
“You didn’t tell me any of this!”
“Pot, kettle. You wouldn’t even tell me what we were here to do.”
“Yeah, but …” Himeno’s face contorted in exasperation.
“Still think I’m just cannon fodder?”
Himeno gave him a long, hard look. Abruptly, something seemed to occur to her. “Hang on here! I have to admit, I’m almost impressed, but that was reckless. You knew you’d survive, but the people you cared about would die! How could you possibly do it, knowing that?”
“Believe me, it wasn’t a problem.”
“The hell it wasn’t! What about your family, Aki? Friends? A girlfriend?”
Aki stood up, brushing the dirt off his suit. The sun in the western sky was red as blood, soaking the world in a throbbig, melancholy glow. They’d named his brother after it. Taiyo. It meant “sun.” But he was cut off from its warmth now, buried deep in the cold, hard ground. The sun would never rise again for Aki’s little brother. He’d never feel the warmth of dawn on his skin. Aki would never see him walking over the horizon.
Taiyo had this much in common with his namesake—he was utterly, forever, beyond Aki’s grasp. For the barest instant, the dust drifting through the air, caught in the dying light, looked like the snow falling on his home.
He said, “There’s no one left I care about.”
With the case resolved, they waited outside the apartment for the cleanup crew. Aki leaned against the fourth-floor railing, gazing down at the city below. Himeno lit a cigarette. “You don’t smoke, Aki?” The chill wind lifted her bangs. An airship floated lazily in the distant sky.
Aki didn’t look at her. “No. It’ll rot your bones.”
“We’re gonna be working together closely. You should learn.”
“I’m not here to make friends.”
He heard Himeno sigh softly. “Let me guess. You came to Public Safety to kill the Gun Devil, right?”
That made him turn.
“It’s the same for all the dark and brooding types who join Public Safety. Since we’re the only ones allowed to carry pieces of that damn gun,” Himeno explained.
That much was certainly true. He was doing all this to get at the Gun Devil, the devil that had taken his family. He was prepared to sacrifice everything to do it. As far as he was concerned, he already had.
Did Himeno recognize the commitment Aki had made? Her tone gave nothing away as she chirped, “Us devil hunters don’t live long anyway. It’s not the smoking that’s gonna kill you.”
“I won’t bite it so easily,” Aki said firmly.
“You’d better not.” Himeno leaned back. With the faintest of smiles on her face, she said, “It’s a hassle when my partners die on me …”
There was a gust of wind, but he was sure he’d heard it—partners.
Himeno exhaled a trail of smoke that meandered through the winter air and tickled Aki’s nostrils. He thought suddenly that the acrid aroma of nicotine and tar wasn’t so unbearable after all.
“Himeno …” Aki murmured. The snow was still falling outside his hotel room in Hokkaido. He closed his eyes to it as his departed partner’s name crossed his lips.
That had been his first case as a devil hunter. Not that much time had passed, so why did it feel like it had happened long ago? Because so much had changed, he decided. He’d started treating his partner with the respect due to a senior officer and had even learned how to be halfway polite. Together they’d buried devil after devil—along with more of their colleagues than Aki wanted to remember.
It wasn’t just life around him that had changed, though. There was something else now.
Aki gazed around the room. Denji and Power were still snoring boisterously. “Himeno,” he said, “I don’t think I could go up against the Loneliness Fiend now.”
He’d been prepared to give up everything to kill the Gun Devil. There had been no sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make. He’d had no one to care about. And now here he was, worried about losing these two. After the loss of his family, he hadn’t believed he’d ever find anything or anyone he wished to protect, anyone whose happiness mattered to him.
The blankets shifted. Denji crawled out from under Power. “What’s up with you, all lost in the view?”
“Oh, shut up.”
Denji sat across from him and looked out the window. “Can’t see crap with all this snow.”
Aki was silent for a moment. Slowly he brought his can of beer to his lips. “Every year, when I went to visit my family’s graves, I’d remember nothing but bad things. It was depressing. But this time, you guys were such pests that I didn’t have the time to get lost in bad memories.”
Denji gave him a blank look. “You’re welcome … ?”
A corner of the bleak, snow-clad sky was beginning to brighten. Morning was coming to Aki’s frost-stricken home.