The two silhouettes stood on the sun-drenched spring field like twin columns of white and black smoke. A hundred and fifty feet separated them. In another place and time, the tension between them might have suggested that they’d be rushing into each other’s embrace at any moment.
And yet tying these two “lovers” together was not a cord of yearning and affection, but the remorseless lash of death.
“Takako’s other half cast aside the you that quenched my thirst. You, though, are different. How did you escape my spell?”
“Well, now.” Only Setsura’s mouth moved. “Because the one you bit was not me.”
“The man who is me but not me. A man is who he is, but you are not. No matter who you are, your fate remains the same. Come.”
Without the slightest trepidation, Princess raised her right hand and beckoned to him. A moment later, those fingers popped off her hand and dropped to the ground.
“Hoh. So that’s how you want to do it?”
She bent over and plucked up the digits with her left hand. With a single touch, the fingers attached to their stumps and flexed as they should, not a scar left behind.
“But it won’t do you any good.”
The Demon Princess grinned, showing her white teeth. But then she again cast down her eyes. Red lines welled up. The fingers again dropped off. The stubs showing again, Princess pressed her palm against the side of her neck. Blood oozed from around her hand.
“That’s right,” Princess said, a smile in her voice. “You cut me once before. Now you have done it again. That is unforgiveable. You alone I will send to hell.”
A flood of blood gushed from her neck as she spoke, staining the sunlight red, the blood red tide closing out the heavens and the earth.
A few moments later, a single presence fluttered within that world.
“Hoh!”
Accompanying the surprised exclamation, the bloody mist cleared away like a raised curtain. Princess stood alone on the green field, as if embossed by the sunlight pouring down. In her hand was the jet-black slicker.
“He ran away.”
She glanced around her, and then down at her gown, dripping with blood. He had not only fixed her attention on the slicker like showing a red cape to a bull, but had succeeded in fleeing with Yakou as well.
“Setsura, you cut me not once but twice, and then deceived my very eyes. You cannot hide from me. You have received my third kiss. No matter where you go, I will be there with you.”
Her white hand gripped the black coat. Like it had been left soaking in water, red blood squeezed out of her hand and rained onto the grass.
✦ ✦ ✦
Strange shadows crawled along every street and avenue. Above the heads of these creatures, who now claimed hegemony over the day, a shadow darker than the night flitted through the sky, beautiful and bewitching, and set down where the Oume Road changed to Yasukuni Avenue.
The shadow set down beneath the central Shinjuku overpass.
It seemed less intentional than on purpose. The shadow didn’t rise immediately to his feet, but rested there on one knee. Still bearing Yakou on his back, Setsura let out a long breath.
That breath was mingled with blood, but not from his mouth. His hands and face were speckled with a myriad of red dots—from the mist that had erupted around him. The greater amount, though, welled up from the pores of his skin.
In the boat sitting in front of the Keio Plaza Hotel lobby, Princess was wringing out his coat.
“That’s what four thousand—no, add in the legendary dynasties and make it six thousand—years of Chinese history will get you. She sure doesn’t make it easy.”
He came unsteadily to his feet like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Blood dripped from his face like sweat. His pale and waxy countenance suggested he hardly had that much left inside him.
He looked back at the skyscrapers behind him and said, “She’s definitely coming. We’ve hardened the defenses, but getting back to Mephisto Hospital will be no walk in the park.”
This was no casual recollection about navigating the city at night. On the streets around them, the ruby pearls of red light inexorably pressed through the darkness.
As the bird flew, it was less than two hundred yards from the intersection beneath the Shinjuku overpass to Mephisto Hospital. No two ways about it, that was going to be a very long two hundred yards.
“You’re not one of us.” From among the assembled throng, at least a hundred strong, came a woman’s derisive voice. “So give us your blood.”
“Now.”
“I’m so damned thirsty I could die.”
Setsura jumped over his head. He wrapped a strand of devil wire around a guardrail on the overpass and swung past the band of vampires. Landing on Yasukuni Avenue a dozen feet behind them, he looked around.
“She’s here.”
More of Shinjuku’s citizens ran like nimble beasts towards them. Setsura turned his attention toward the overpass as Princess came sailing above it.
She landed not ten feet behind him. “I thought you would have already made your escape.” Her voice rang out though the night like a silver bell. “Still playing your little tricks.”
She reached her hand to her white throat and sharply pulled it away. An invisible wire tore from within the white flesh. Not just one. Her whole body glittered in the moonlight as she cast off the thousands of wires biting into her body.
It was a long way from here to there, Setsura had said. But simply getting here Princess turned her body into a human porcupine, minced and mangled, enduring the pains of hell. All inflicted by the defensive web of titanium wires Setsura had strewn across the roadway.
“Get back!”
As soon as she took another step, several of the vampires looking on rushed at her. Without saying a word, Princess parted the air with a slash of her hand. The headless torsos crashed together before her while the soaring heads stared into each other’s eyes.
“Fools! Why are you—”
Her lips twisted in derision. More men and women charged her from the rear. These were the vampires that had surrounded Setsura on the intersection below. No sooner had she beheaded them but another throng converged, a wall of Shinjuku’s citizens forming around her.
“Setsura—damn you—-”
The Demon Princess had already discerned between action and intent. From the reactions of the people pressing toward her, they were not obstructing her path of their own free will, but at Setsura’s bidding.
She tried to jump free. Hands grabbed at her hair, her shoulders, her gown.
Princess drank blood and made men her slaves. Setsura bound them with his devil wires, manipulating not only their bodies but their decaying nervous systems that could make a dead man walk, transforming the hordes of servants she had brought forth into his staunchest allies.
Observing Setsura staggering away beyond the wave of inhumanity engulfing her, Princess rose up in a rage. She twirled her body like a twister, with a sound like the darkness itself tearing apart. Her gorgeous body rose high into the air.
Setsura and Yakou had reached the Mermaid game center. As far as Princess was concerned, practically a hand’s breadth away. She fixed her eyes upon them, like an eagle casting a pitying downward glance at some small stupid creature crawling along the ground. And was about to swoop in for the kill when a pair of black wings flapped across her face.
With a speed and dexterity no normal person could hope to achieve, she evaded the stabbing beaks and crushed them and tossed them aside.
For a brief moment, the black wings and cawing beaks obscured her sight. From before it became Demon City, Shinjuku had been home to droves of the big, spooky, garbage-feeding crows. Their numbers had hardly diminished since, and their natures had grown all the more bold and frenzied.
Moreover, when they set out hunting before the light of dawn, pedestrians, vagrants, ghosts and goblins of all sorts hid while these black-winged air corps ruled the sky.
A while back, the ward government had investigated the natures of these birds by sacrificing a bull to their ravenous appetites. Left on Yasukuni Avenue as the darkness closed in, the half-ton animal was pecked apart, devoured down to its entrails in less than thirty seconds, leaving only a pile of bones behind.
That they were now blocking Princess’s pursuit of Setsura must be sheer coincidence. However, knowing their traits and idiosyncrasies as he did, he couldn’t help believing that this time they’d stepped in to pitch-hit for him.
Though their time at bat was short.
A red glow glimmered inside the swirl of black feathers. Princess’s eyes. As soon as that light burned into the eyes of the crows, they whirled about and plummeted at Setsura. Dispatching all of them with his devil wires would be no easy task.
But at the last moment the crows dove instead into the surface of the road, raising a gory splash of feathers and black blood.
Setsura stopped and looked at his savior, standing in front of the Shinseido Music Emporium.
Princess alit on the ground a few seconds later. Recognizing the man who had caused the obstruction, she grinned. “Ah, of course. So it seems we are tied together by those invisible threads, eh Ryuuki?”
Standing next to the hauntingly smiling Kikiou, the stouthearted statue of a man silently fixed his eyes on Setsura.