Stabbing a man in the back was the easy part. Getting close enough to make it count was another matter entirely.
No hit man with a reputation worth keeping would divulge his tricks of the trade to anybody else, not so much fearing he’d be out of a job as ending up being given a dose of his own medicine.
When it came to following the rules, the Munakata Brothers were old school all the way.
How would they come at him from behind? Setsura stood there silently. His hand hung by his side. Thousands of devil wires spilled from his sleeves. With a keenness of touch on a par with his eyesight, he felt what they found as they crept along the ground.
The wind blew at ten feet a second. There was nothing dangerous in the dust and sand. Nothing lurked behind the torii gates or was hiding in the bushes. Nobody at all was on the grounds, except Mina.
Setsura strolled over to where she was lying face down, gasping for breath. Stepping onto the grounds of the shrine, he sensed no signs of life from the strand of devil wire wrapped around the neck of the big man.
His foe must have fled.
Next to the corpse, Mina looked up at him with a faint smile. “I really did intend to get away, but before I could get to the bridge—”
Setsura undid the buttons of his slicker, but Mina held out her hand. “I’m fine as is,” she said, getting to her feet on her own. The hickeys and teeth marks covering her skin flashed in the dusty sunlight. “The day I need a helping hand is the day I retire.”
Making no attempt to cover up, she started walking. Setsura was halfway between the big man’s body and his secretary. He started after her, leaving the body on the ground behind him, when a gust of wind struck his back.
Setsura turned in a graceful spin. His back was now to Mina.
His secretary’s face transfigured in that second. Her brows hiked up, her eyes grew wide and wild, forming the mien of a demoness. Her arms reached for Setsura’s neck, and then stopped in midair, as if restrained by unseen hands.
Setsura didn’t move. The quiet eyes of the senbei shop owner were drawn to the body on the ground.
The naked woman frozen in the act of leaping at him—the young man dressed in black in this sultry season—the lifeless corpse—all bathed in the milky sunlight and colored by the yellow dust.
For a long moment, this surreal scene arrested the flow of time itself.
“What do you say?” Setsura asked the headless man lying on the ground. The look in his eyes and the tone of his voice were such that he could just as well be addressing a friend. “Won’t you come out and play? You’re just going to leave me like this? I don’t much care to leave empty handed myself. That was a good move, making me turn my back to you by getting my own secretary to attack me. But I have eyes everywhere. Well? I can’t imagine it’ll reflect well on your reputation if you don’t at least give it the old college try. To say nothing of your employer.”
The dust swirled around the dead face. When it cleared a second later, it was another creature entirely. The corpse aroused itself with remarkable force and charged at Setsura in a swirl of wind.
Setsura stepped to the side like a matador as the big man stampeded past him. At the same time, his body parted vertically and then horizontally. This time, Setsura paid no attention to the mist of the blood and the scattering body parts. Rather, he focused on the small shadow springing up from inside it.
A human being no bigger than a three or four year old. Drenched by the big man’s bodily fluids, metallic luster glimmered inside the little hand.
Large black wings wrapped around Setsura, the hems and tails of the slicker. Accompanied by the bark of the automatic handgun, the ejected shell casings glittered in the sunlight as the bullets pockmarked the fabric.
Trailing a thin line of blue gun smoke, a dwarf with the face of an adult landed on the ground a dozen feet away.
“But of course. The Munakata Brothers finally reveal themselves.”
The low voice drifted out from the shadow of the slicker. The dwarf’s eyes widened with surprise. There could be nowhere to hide from the impact of the silenced 9 mm armor piercing rounds that could punch through two inches of steel. Even a flesh wound should kill, when the explosive tips would fragment into thousands of shards.
Setsura said, his voice as cool as a winter’s night, “The brothers—a small thing in a big, human-shaped package. I’ll treasure the holes in my coat as souvenirs of our encounter.”
By the time he had folded those black wings around him, the dwarf standing there had been drawn and quartered, the severed body parts strewn across the dusty earth.
“I could undo the spell myself, but Mephisto’s the specialist in that department. I suppose it’s about time I sent you on a paid vacation.”
So spoke the genie in tones any listener would find more than a tad hair-raising as he tossed Mina over his shoulder, the demonic visage still etched on her face by the hypnotic spell.
“Hey, mister, you need a ride?” rang out a woman’s voice.
From beyond the torii gates, at the foot of the stone steps, came the heavy rumble of an engine. A car with tires the size of steel drums bounded up the steps. The windshield wrapped around the driver’s seat and the passenger’s compartment, while the eight cylinder engine was exposed. Pipes coiled like thick snakes down from the manifold and along the frame to the bull horn exhaust stack in the rear, belching clouds of purple smoke.
Excepting the driver’s seat, the chassis itself hung lower than the tops of the tires. This was a “street legal” off-road buggy all the rage these days.