“Is he asleep?” The fat lady asked the doll girl when she emerged from the steel door and shut it behind her.
“Yes,” she answered with a nod of her small head. The glittering strands of gold spilled to one side of her face in a silky wave, casting off flickering beads of light.
It wasn’t the lamp in the ceiling lighting up the doll girl’s hair, but the early morning glow pouring in from a crack in the curtains. Demon City still slept soundly at four o’clock in the morning.
“Even I am taken aback. He could have run for the hills but chose to return of his own accord.”
Her mouth bent into a frown. Tonbeau Nuvenberg sighed. As a precaution, she’d gone to the hospital to have the wound looked at—the one inflicted by the vampire gangbanger at the apartment in Shin-Okubo. But hearing that she’d be charged for the visit had returned home an hour ago.
While basic hospital services were free for residents of Shinjuku, those from outside the ward were charged an arm and a leg. And Tonbeau was very much an alien here.
The doll girl updated her on Ryuuki’s status. Tonbeau sat down at the living room table and mumbled and grumbled as she wracked her brains. All of a sudden, her eyes flew open wide.
“We’ll kill him, of course!”
“What?” the doll girl said with a start.
There was normally no end to the fat lady’s greed, her avarice only outmatched by her timidity. That is, until she came up with some hair-raising scheme that only the sister of the Czech Republic’s greatest witch could pull off.
“That’s it! Leave a piece of trouble like that just lying around and nobody could say what’s going to happen next. He’s all peaceful as a baby now that’s he’s drunk his fill and all, but once the cravings start, it’s gonna come back and bite me in the ass.”
A vulgar image to conjure up, but not off the mark, especially after the death and carnage the doll girl had witnessed. As the old saying went, even the hunter refrained from killing a bird who flew to him seeking shelter. But be seized by the ravenous hunger for just one night, and this bird would bare its poisonous claws and fangs and turn into a demonic vulture.
That was why, in any case, the duty of the hunter was to kill the prey.
“But—” the doll girl said. “How to destroy him?”
The impossibility of the task had been well demonstrated in the Shinjuku police station special detainment lockup. Even a staking by Galeen Nuvenberg hadn’t caused any deterioration to Ryuuki’s body.
Tonbeau furrowed her brows and scratched her butt in studious contemplation. “Push come to shove, there’s nothing special about that vampire. The only sure way to turn him into dust is to destroy his sire. But that is a whole lot tougher than giving him a long nap.”
“It is as you say.”
Tonbeau’s eyes flashed. “Don’t you have anything to be upbeat about?”
“What?”
“Something smells fishy to me. Somehow or another, when it comes to killing him, seems like maybe you aren’t so raring to go.”
“Not at all.”
Even as she spoke, the doll girl’s glass heart sent an unprecedented volume of blood flooding through her body. This was one of the most frightening characteristics of her mistress’s sister. Grandmother’s intuitions had reached an almost supernatural acuity that covered all of creation in ways that Tonbeau’s could never compare with. But in certain respects, nothing could approach her own ominous abilities.
“Well, that’s okay,” Tonbeau said stiffly. “You’re my big sister’s servant. You’re not going to betray us, no matter what. But there’s one more way of doing away with that chap. What do you imagine it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“We predestine the fact that it will happen.”
The doll girl drew her picturesque eyebrows.
“You still don’t get it? That. We make use of that.”
“And by that—”
“I’ve always wanted to give that a whirl.” Tonbeau’s voice hushed to a whisper. “The very experiment banned by the Vatican in the year 1400, that only Doctor Faustus successfully pulled off. Even my audacious big sister did not dare dabble in that arena.”
The doll girl’s eyes flew open with surprise, with an expression of horror that came to human eyes on gazing upon the black death.
“It is not possible. No record of it was ever made!”
“No, I’ll do it. I’ll give it my best shot. There is nothing we can do but that. Faced with such a powerful vampire, we cannot turn away from predestining him to destruction.”
Tonbeau clenched her fists in a show of determination. The doll girl didn’t raise an objection to this silly and ostentatious show of bravado. More than respect for her mistress’s sister, the black hand of fear had seized her celluloid throat.
Reading in between the lines of their conversation, “destruction” could be “predestined” using the “record.” Even in Demon City Shinjuku, there should be no one capable of such a thing. What was this “record”? And what would Tonbeau do with it?
“Let’s get down to work, then.”
The woman who looked like a paper bag stuffed with pastries rolled up the sleeves of her hamhock-like arms. The doll girl turned her eyes toward the foyer.
“Somebody coming?” Her vim and vigor dimmed and she asked the question in a disquieted manner, perhaps because of having messed with a JDF Special Forces contingent on a previous occasion.
“Yes. A civilian automobile. A man.”
A knock came at the door.
“Tell him to strip before letting him in. He could be carrying one of those suitcase nukes for all we know.”