Tokyo Demons Book 2: Chapter 4

Jo slept without dreams. When he finally woke up, his blurry gaze focusing on the ceiling of the sick room, he felt like the weights on his shoulders had lifted a little. He closed his eyes and let out a long, heavy sigh.

There was no cough at the edge of it. His eyes snapped open.

Please, he begged silently as he struggled to sit. He fished through the pockets of his robe. He pulled out a loose cigarette, lit it, and took a careful drag.

The warm smoke curled inside him, licking the raw edges of his throat and lungs. He coughed once, but there was only the barest edge of pain. He dragged again and felt the sweet smoke spread nicotine into his starving body.

“Fuck yes,” Jo breathed, a cloud of smoke spilling over the precious stick.

“Those are bad for you, dude.”

Jo rolled his eyes to the hospital bed. Shouri, fully dressed but still hooked to an IV, didn’t look up from typing furiously at her laptop.

Jo took another long drag and popped a crick in his neck. “I know,” he muttered. “But I’ll be damned if I’m quitting this week.”

Shouri shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Jo pushed back the futon covers and got to his feet. He suddenly noticed Aisha in the corner of the room; she was sitting on her knees on a rug that faced the wall, a quiet mountain of layered clothing. She was whispering so softly that Jo could barely hear it.

“She’s praying,” Shouri explained over the clacking of her fingers. “It’s a Muslim thing.”

Jo wandered toward Shouri. “I’ve seen Zayd do it.”

“Did you know they pray five times a day, and it’s 80% the same every time? Think of somebody praying the same words for 70 years, five times a day.” She shook her head. “It’s practically hypnotism. I can see it working as a form of meditation, but prayer? I don’t get it.”

Jo let out a puff of smoke. “What do you mean?”

“When I pray, I’m talking to God. It’s specific…and personal. It doesn’t mean anything to me if I’m just repeating some holy words that are supposed to show my devotion.” Shouri sighed as she typed. “I’m not good with the ritualistic stuff.”

Jo took another puff. “Okay,” he answered awkwardly.

Her dark eyes flicked up from the screen. “Do you pray a lot, Jo?”

Jo frowned. Malum or not, he’d just met Shouri.

“That’s…kinda a personal question,” he murmured.

“What are you, Shinto? Shinto/Buddhist?” She smiled. “‘Live Shinto, die Buddhist.’”

Not practicing, he wanted to say, but something stopped the words in his throat. A swirl of his smoke tickled his nostrils, bringing that familiar burning scent of a long-lost living room. He suddenly thought back on his final day there, staring at the incense sticks in front of the small altar. The photo of his second-to-last foster mother staring back. He’d snuffed out the incense and lit a cigarette in its place.

Jo dropped his eyes to the floor. “Uh…twice,” he eventually muttered, although he wasn’t sure why he bothered. “I’ve prayed twice.”

“Only twice?”

He took a long drag. “Yeah,” he clarified in irritation. “So?”

Shouri raised her hands in her defense. “I was just curious.”

“Well, don’t be. I’m staying at a church out of necessity, not because this is some religious field trip.”

“Dude, we’re in Japan. Christians are a tiny minority, and even Daniel’s barely run into any since he moved here five years ago.” She went back to typing. “I didn’t figure you kids were here for the psalms.”

Jo grumbled as he smoked.

“That said, I guess Kado’s Catholic, and Ayase was raised by nuns. Even Sachi’s got that cross pendant from his real parents or whatever. But I guess that explains why he chased down Daniel in the first place.”

Jo took another drag. “What pendant?”

Shouri brushed off the question. “Daniel said it’s something Sachi had when he was put up for adoption. I don’t know the details.”

Jo scratched the back of his neck. He absently wondered if that was why Sachi, Ayase, and Kado were so quick to work with the church. Or why the three of them hung out–though Jo figured Sachi’s relentless lust for Ayase was partially behind that.

He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and licked dry lips. As his eyes rolled back to Aisha, he felt some strange, ethnocentric compulsion to defend his homeland faiths.

“I…prayed when someone I loved died,” he said quietly. “A few years ago. Someone put a Buddhist prayer in her altar, so I just read it out loud.”

Shouri stopped typing. A small smile tugged at one side of her mouth.

“That counts,” she drawled. “People usually get religious around death, Jo.”

“It was one prayer.”

“Just the one, huh? What was your second prayer?”

Jo hesitated. He tapped a few ashes off his cigarette.

“Right before Motoi.”

Shouri’s dark eyes rose from the screen. Between that and the now-familiar tug of her pheromones, Jo felt weirdly exposed.

“Really?”

“Yeah. We had a few minutes in that industrial part of town, so I sorta…poked around for a little shrine. And I found one for Inari tucked next to a gas station.” Jo took a long drag, released. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to pray before a suicide mission.”

Shouri raised an eyebrow. “It wasn’t a suicide mission.”

Smoke rolled over Jo’s lips. “Close enough.”

“Hm.” Shouri’s eyes dropped as her fingers clacked on keys. “And when you prayed to Inari, did it make you feel better?”

Jo grunted. “You’re starting to sound like Zayd,” he muttered.

Aisha suddenly sucked her teeth from the corner of the room. Jo glanced over to see her staring meaningfully at Shouri as she rolled up her carpet.

Shouri sighed. She picked the small white clip of the heart monitor from the sheets and slid it on her finger. Jo’s stomach sank as the familiar high-pitched beeps of the monitor filled the room.

“Uh…how are you, by the way?” he asked. He suddenly realized that it was weird for her to seem better.

Shouri scowled as she tried to type with the clip on her finger. “They pumped me full of Pitch yesterday,” she said quietly. “So simultaneously awesome and terrible.”

Jo stared at her. She brushed a strand of her pulled-back hair from her face.

“Have you ever tried hard drugs, Jo?”

Jo pulled the portable ashtray from his pocket. “Just nicotine and booze,” he answered as he ground out his shrunken cigarette.

“Well, I tried a lot of shit at least once in San Francisco. And Pitch reminds me of cocaine–it gives the euphoria of a high, but it comes with a nauseating, jittery feeling of being alert and powerful. And below that is a surge of something that burns through your veins to every corner of your body.” She barked an unpleasant laugh. “A hit makes you feel like you’re being forced through an orgasm while you’re hyperaware of it. And since I was hurting for it yesterday, it basically soothed the cravings while my heart tried to burst out of my chest.”

Yikes. Jo’s eyes fell on the finger clip that typed against the keys.

“So it…messes with the heart.”

“For me, at least,” Shouri confirmed. “But I’ve got heart problems in my family. And Core kicked the shit out of me before giving me my first hit, and that didn’t help.”

Aisha appeared by the bedside. She said something in English to Shouri as she tried to pull away the laptop.

“No, dammit!” Shouri switched to English, then cursed again in Japanese. She shook her head vehemently and pulled the laptop back to her lap.

“What’s the matter?” Jo asked.

“I’m trying to get some damn work done while I’ve got Pitch in me. She can do her tests later!”

Aisha sighed and released the laptop. She fingered the stethoscope clipped around her neck.

Shouri shook her head again and kept typing. Frustrated with the finger clip, she yanked it off, abruptly cutting off the beeps.

Aisha paused for a long moment. She finally turned to Jo.

“Kiyoshi,” she told him in a thick accent. “He is…yours.”

Jo blinked at her.

“She just started learning Japanese yesterday,” Shouri explained. “She’s trying to tell you Kiyoshi’s clean.”

“Really? Since when?”

“Since now. His last dose of the antagonists was yesterday, and he cleared his physical tests this morning, so…” Shouri raised an eyebrow again and glanced up from the laptop screen. “He was poking around here earlier. I think he was hoping he’d accidentally wake you up.”

Jo recoiled in embarrassment. He slid a new cigarette between his lips.

Probably, he agreed silently. He had a bad feeling their reunion was going to be…uncomfortably emotional. Jo remembered Kiyoshi’s reaction to Kado’s secret the night before, when he’d dropped everything to hug Kado as the guy screamed in protest.

Jo’s stomach shriveled inside him. Shit, that whole thing with Kado. He’d blissfully forgotten it for a few minutes.

Jo sighed. He lit the new cigarette and took a long drag.

The warm smoke filled him with an old, calming comfort. He held it inside his chest for a moment, coughing with the effort.

“Bad,” Aisha said in Japanese.

Jo coughed again as he let the smoke stream from his mouth. “I know,” he muttered as he headed for the door. “I get it.”

Shouri started translating that into English. Jo rolled his eyes and pushed through the door.

He couldn’t find Kiyoshi. A bunch of people were arguing in the kitchen, and Adam was working out in the sleeping room, but Jo didn’t see Kiyoshi anywhere. He frowned in the hallway.

Is he hiding out in the girls’ room? Jo wondered. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places to be alone in the church. As he turned to head back, he found himself stopping as words drifted from the kitchen.

“…promised us some anonymous help from the police, but I don’t see what we can do with it.”

“How hard can it be for us to just break in?” Sachi asked. “Assuming we can get in and out without being noticed.”

“It’s on top of a jewelry store. The building itself is probably under strong security, even if the office itself isn’t.”

“Perhaps that is why they chose that location. It would not draw attention the way high security on a simple office would.”

There was a long silence. “That’s very Core,” Daniel said dryly.

Jo heard a dull clacking sound behind him. He turned to the far end of the hallway.

The door to the public worship room was cracked open. He saw movement through the sliver of visibility.

There he is.

Jo abandoned the kitchen. Carefully, he pushed open the door to the rest of the church.

Kiyoshi didn’t look up. Dressed in real clothes for the first time in days, he hunched over a long archer’s bow with two horizontal strings dangling off it. He stepped on one of the strings and slowly pulled up, straining the curves of the bow straight until he deftly adjusted the second string. Then he unclipped the first string and tossed it into a nearby case.

Jo had seen one or two kyudo matches before, but this bow was nothing like those traditional wooden pieces. The middle of Kiyoshi’s bow was cherry red, made of some reflective material that looked like plastic or metal. With the strange screws and holes cut out of the center piece, the bow looked more like those giant contraptions used at the Olympics. Kiyoshi carefully ran his fingers over the long, black curves.

Jo put out his cigarette. He slid his portable ashtray back into his robe pocket.

“Kiyoshi,” he called at last.

Kiyoshi turned. His eyes, finally free of that doe-like dilation, blinked. The crease between his eyebrows loosened.

“Jo,” he said quietly.

Jo waited. But Kiyoshi, for whatever reason, didn’t pounce on Jo. He just cleared his throat and kicked his case shut.

Jo slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. “Is that your bow?” he offered at last.

Kiyoshi crouched to a long polyester bag on the floor. He nodded as he unzipped it and folded back the top.

“Yeah,” he said quietly as he buckled the bag over his hips. The ends of a dozen arrows with bright yellow tail feathers jostled in the bag as he rose to his feet. “My sister brought it from the dorm.”

Jo vaguely remembered seeing the locked case under Kiyoshi’s dorm bed. As Kiyoshi drew an arrow and put it to the string, Jo suddenly noticed a pile of tied cardboard resting against the far wall, beyond the rows of pews. A makeshift red target had been painted on the surface piece.

Jo straightened. “You’re…not gonna shoot that in here.”

Kiyoshi shook his too-long bangs from his eyes. “Daniel-san said I could,” he murmured as he drew back the arrow. He paused for several seconds, the tip of his arrow shifting incrementally, before he released.

The quick twang of the string slapped behind the flap of the arrow; from the other side of the large room, Jo heard a dull choonk. He squinted.

Second ring outside the bulls-eye. Kiyoshi sighed and pulled another arrow from his hip quiver.

“I’m rusty,” he murmured as he put the new arrow to string. “And this bow’s a little small for me now.”

“Look, it doesn’t…” Jo frowned. “You’ve only been clean a few hours, Kiyoshi. Take it easy.”

Kiyoshi raised the second arrow. He shook the bangs from his eyes and focused on the target.

fwip choonk

Bulls-eye. Kiyoshi let out the breath he’d been holding and retrieved another arrow.

“I have to train,” he said quietly as he raised the bow again.

“For what? You can’t leave this place or Core might figure out you’re alive.”

“Touya knows I’m alive. Maybe Core knows, too.” Kiyoshi loosed. Another arrow buried itself in the center bulls-eye. He pulled another.

“Kiyoshi…”

Kiyoshi lowered his bow. He let out a long breath and turned his half-hidden eyes to Jo.

“I’m just sick of this,” he muttered, an unusual edge behind his voice. “All of it.”

Jo’s fingers twitched. Mercifully, he could feed his craving again. He retrieved his cigarette box and shook another stick free.

“I hear you there,” he murmured as he slid the cigarette between his lips.

Kiyoshi’s mouth pulled into a thin line. “I’m sick of being so weak.”

Jo lit the edge of his cigarette and snapped the lighter away. “Kiyoshi,” he said carefully. “You’re not weak. You just got fucked over worse than anyone here.”

Kiyoshi sucked at his teeth. “Nick-san got it worse from Core,” he said bitterly as he turned back to the target. “Shouri-san got it worse from Core–they even treated me nicer because I didn’t fight back like she did.” He raised his bow and drew back the arrow. “Some man I am.”

Jo rolled his cigarette between his lips. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.

Jo released smoke. “Kiyoshi, there’s a difference between playing things smart and being a coward.” Choonk went the arrow. “You followed the plan. It got you out alive.”

“Great!” Kiyoshi suddenly growled, his voice dropping half an octave. He dropped the bow by his side and snapped his head back to Jo. “So I’m alive. Now what the hell am I good for?!”

Jo flinched. Kiyoshi’s yell echoed against the stone walls.

Kiyoshi blinked, the rage vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. He gritted his teeth and ran a fist over his eyes.

“Dammit,” he blurted. “I-I’m sorry. I don’t mean to yell, I just…” He took a shuddering breath. “I’m really nauseous.”

Jo swallowed. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to be shooting things.”

Kiyoshi shook his head and drew another arrow. “No,” he insisted as he turned back to the target. “I’m okay.”

Jo decided to drop it. He smoked in silence for a minute, leaving Kiyoshi to shoot several more arrows. When he finally lowered the bow, Jo could see the muscles in his neck weren’t clenched as badly.

Kiyoshi sighed. “Jo,” he said at last. “Thanks for always…y’know. Helping me.”

Jo released a puff of smoke. He shook his head.

“You and everybody else have been protecting me for a long time. And I know I don’t have any powers like those other guys, and I don’t have, like, super DNA like you and Shouri-san and Touya…” He clenched his hand around his bow. “But I do have something.” Kiyoshi tightened his jaw and swung his eyes up at Jo.

“The body Core put me in.”

Jo’s stomach tightened. Hearing Kiyoshi’s voice drop into a lower rumble when he said that was…unnerving.

Jo remembered this, from the night of Kiyoshi’s detox. He flashed back to the words Emi had offered in the dark.

“It’s…it’s still your body, Kiyoshi.”

Kiyoshi grumbled and drew his last arrow. “Pitch turned Nick-san into a tank,” he said as he twisted toward the target. “And Shouri-san’s tripping on Pitch, but she’s already back on her computer, trying to figure out the security on that accountant’s office. I hated feeling that stuff get forced inside me, but…it’s over now. I’m over it.” He raised his bow. “So I might as well use what they gave me.”

Twang went the bow as he released the arrow. Jo heard a dull snap as the arrow cut the twine holding together the makeshift target. The pile of cardboard scattered on the stone floor, every square centimeter of the red bulls-eye buried under a bouquet of clumped arrows.

Damn. Jo put out his cigarette, not sure what to say.

“The accountant’s office,” he managed at last. “So…everyone really wants to go on that Touya mission.”

Kiyoshi nodded. “Kado thinks Touya was telling the truth.”

“And how’d he justify that?”

“Well…you know he can read minds, right?” Kiyoshi switched his bow to his other hand and rubbed the sides of his fingers together. “And he knew Touya back in the day. He said Touya’s a pretty bad liar.”

Jo raised an eyebrow skeptically.

“Touya let me go and saved Detective Nakajima. And when Nee-san met up with him, she said he seemed serious about helping us.”

Jo rubbed at his temples. “Let me guess,” he muttered. “We don’t have any other leads.”

“Kado wants to go on the mission. He’s a pretty nervous guy, so he must think it’s safe.” Kiyoshi brightened slightly. “Did you know he can hear Ayase’s thoughts through the bugs? That means he can be a communicator between here and there.”

A communicator, Jo repeated in his head. Like that’s gonna save our asses from a trap.

But as Jo stood there and mulled that over, the slight hint of optimism melted off Kiyoshi’s face. He dropped his head and stared at the bow in his hand.

Something stirred in Jo. It was actually kinda predictable, considering how much of their relationship was based on Jo unconsciously protecting Kiyoshi and his feelings. Jo wasn’t sure he liked that. Kiyoshi had just said he was tired of being protected, right? That he wanted to start giving back?

So it was ironic that Jo’s knee-jerk reaction was to agree to a bad mission. Just because, for a few seconds, Kiyoshi had talked about that mission with hope in his eyes.

Don’t do it for the wrong reason, Jo begged himself. Don’t forget your priorities in the middle of a war.

Kiyoshi swallowed. “I know I probably can’t help with this one,” he admitted. “But if we find out about more Core buildings, like Touya said we would…” He brushed his bangs behind his ears so he could focus his gaze on Jo. “I can help next time. I know I can.”

Jo’s eyebrow twitched. His stupid heart. His stupid human heart twisted as he was assaulted with newly lucid puppy eyes.

Goddammit.

Jo took a long breath. “Touya didn’t mention me when Emi-san talked to him,” he said at last. “Right?”

Kiyoshi nodded.

“He might not know I teamed up with the church. So if I go on this thing, he’s probably gonna find out.”

Kiyoshi frowned. “The other guys can go without you.”

“No,” Jo said, slight bitterness behind the word. “They can’t do this without me.” When Kiyoshi opened his mouth, Jo cut him off with a hand.

“But Touya’s gonna find out sooner or later that I’m staying here. If he’s reaching out to the church, maybe this is the safest time for me to let him know.” Jo ran a hand through his hair. “And maybe…I dunno. Maybe it’ll be a good thing for me to indirectly reach out to him. He never actually threatened to do anything if I didn’t join his side.”

The hope slowly returned to Kiyoshi’s face. He nodded again, stronger this time.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “And he seems to like you more than he likes us.”

Jo snorted. “Lucky me,” he muttered.

“Lucky us,” Kiyoshi corrected. “Because we actually got you.”

Jo stopped. As Kiyoshi smiled at him, clearly free of ulterior motives, Jo felt the words sidestep his insecurities and soothe his aching ego. They reached further than Shouri, the church, or Byakko. They even zipped around the barriers that flew up around Mitsuko.

Jo had forgotten how it felt to actually take a compliment. New, stupid confidence pushed against his better instincts–he tried to force it back down, but he couldn’t help the hint of optimism that pushed back.

Jo cleared his throat.

“Just…listen to Aisha-san and get better, Kiyoshi. We’ve got a lot of shit ahead.”

Kiyoshi nodded quickly.

“And I don’t know how useful arrows are gonna be in a gun fight.”

Kiyoshi ran his thumb along his bow grip. “I know,” he admitted. “But Sachi said Byakko has a girl with a slingshot, right? And she’s been useful?”

Jo remembered a smoke bomb smacking the not-vampire in the face.

“Good point.”

Kiyoshi beamed. He suddenly stepped forward and clapped Jo on the back.

“Thanks, Jo,” he chirped. “You always make me feel better.”

Jo smiled a little, despite himself.

The boost was enough to get him to the kitchen, at any rate. And when he burst into that conversation, and everyone stared at him while Kado cringed back automatically, Jo realized he was shedding some of his fears. He wasn’t burying them or ignoring them, he was…shedding them. Somehow.

“You need a plan,” he said firmly. “A good one.”

Sachi squinted. “Well…yeah. That’s what we’re trying to–”

“I heard you earlier. The cops can’t investigate, and it’s too hard to go in as burglars, right?”

Ayase frowned. “We’re past those plans, Jo. We know they won’t work.”

“They won’t. Not separately.” Jo took a long breath. His fear of the police nipped at him, followed by his worry that everyone would ask questions when they saw what he could do…but in that moment, the dread just fell off him. He tensed his jaw.

“But we can get creative.”

***************

 Ayase waited outside the bathroom. As she wiped sweat from her palms, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She fished it out and flipped it open.

It was Detective Nakajima. She had texted her message in as few kanji as possible.

Officers Aihara and Terada. Beat starts at 11pm. Rookie shadows have to leave by 3.

Ayase read the message several times to burn it into her memory. Takeshi had promised Jo that his guys would be there after midnight.

The bathroom door opened. Ayase looked up as Sachi stepped into the hallway.

“Uh…hunh.” He smiled nervously as he adjusted the hat on his head. “How do I look?”

The police uniform fit him, thankfully, especially in length. He tucked a little loose fabric in at the waist.

“I guess Ochi used to be thinner,” he commented. “And I’m not that skinny myself.”

Ayase mulled over the sight as she formed an insect in her hand. With his contacts in and his hair combed flat under his hat, he looked a little different from normal. Her gut still wanted a fake mustache or something, but Jo had assured her that would look stupid.

“Do you think I look old enough to be a rookie?”

Ayase pursed her lips. “You’re a pretty big guy,” she admitted. “With the uniform…I can see it.”

His eyes dropped to the insect in her hand. He tapped his hat with a white-gloved finger.

“Maybe up here.”

Ayase buzzed the bug up to Sachi’s pointed hat. After a few seconds of exploring, she shook her head.

“There isn’t a good dip to hide in. I think we should do under the collar.”

She barely noticed the shiver he tried to hide. “S-sure.”

She flew the bug down to crawl under his stiff collar. Both she and Sachi reached to adjust it at the same time; she pulled back at the same moment he did. He chuckled nervously as they both colored.

The others were waiting for them in the kitchen. Jo, dressed in a tie and trenchcoat for his detective disguise, tapped on his mobile phone. He looked up at Ayase through his fake glasses and slicked hair.

“Did you get the message from Nakajima? The cops will be here in 15 minutes.”

“Yeah.” Sachi tugged on his shirt. “And Nakajima already told them we’re from out of town, right? We don’t have to explain the whole shadowing thing?”

“She said they take trainees on beats pretty frequently. And I guess they already agreed to show us around for her.”

Ayase formed another insect and flew it over to Jo. He opened a button flap on his coat so the bug could burrow in.

Footsteps shuffled near the doorway. Ayase turned.

Kadoyuki marched into the kitchen, his downturned face hidden by the round bowler cap on his head. Emi sighed as she followed from behind him.

“I did the best I could,” she offered.

Ayase stared at the police uniform that hung a little loose on Kadoyuki. The black skirt surprised her.

“Oh, dear.” Daniel chuckled. “I guess Detective Nakajima was a beat cop before the female uniform adopted pants.”

“It’s not so unusual that I’m worried. And a pair of my pantyhose fit him, which helps.” She leaned down. “Can you lift your face, Kadoyuki-kun?”

Kadoyuki slowly looked up. With some softening of his bangs and a smear of lipstick on his lips, he was actually pretty convincing.

Ayase felt bad for him, although she wasn’t sure she should. They had all agreed that Sachi and Jo could pass for older–but Kadoyuki definitely looked his age, if not a little younger. In drag, they wouldn’t compare him to the older-looking boys.

He swallowed. “It’s fine,” he murmured. “I need to go.”

Ayase sent him a bug. She walked up the front of his jacket as he dropped dark eyes to her.

Can you hear me? she thought. From down here?

“Yes,” he replied. “But I might have to whisper to you, so please come higher.”

She crawled further toward his collar, careful to give his actual skin a wide berth. Am I quieter through the bugs? she asked.

“A little. You have a different…timbre to your voice. It has a higher pitch.”

Jo closed his phone. “Are you talking to Ayase?” he asked. “We’re only hearing your side of it.”

Ayase nodded as she positioned her bug. Shouri finished typing on her laptop and gave a slanted smile.

“Cool.” She unplugged a camera from one of the ports. “This is ready to go. I’m sorry we have to be so low-tech this time, but I guess Core did that on purpose.” She handed the camera to Jo. “Good luck, guys.”

Kiyoshi and Adam repeated the sentiment, and Daniel crossed himself. Zayd and Aisha spoke in another language, but Ayase was starting to recognize those words as a prayer.

“Thanks,” Jo murmured as he pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’re gonna need it.”

Proceed to Chapter 4, page 3–>