Tokyo Demons Book 2: Chapter 8, Part 2

Jo watched the cab rumble off into the gray afternoon. A few spits of rain still tickled him in the post-storm mist–not enough to bother him, but enough that he wouldn’t open up Touya’s wallet outside. He’d compromised that thing enough without getting it wet.

“Dammit,” he muttered as he turned from the road. They needed another taxi, but…not yet.

Not yet.

Kiyoshi was unusually pale, which meant he’d probably seen more than Jo had. And Jo’s stomach had already shriveled into a tiny, throbbing ball, recoiling into the deepest recesses of his body.

Jo reached out to Ayase and gripped her trembling arm. She was turned away, the curve of her jaw pulsing; her muscles were rock hard.

“Ayase,” he said carefully. “Did you know about those pictures?”

Ayase grunted and squeezed her eyes shut.

Kiyoshi took a long breath. “Was that…Kado?” he asked weakly.

Ayase stamped her foot in helpless frustration. “He…he made me swear not to tell anyone. It was the last thing he hid from us, because…because he just…” She threw up her hands. “Because he didn’t want anyone to see him like that?! Because he’d been victimized enough?! It’s not fair!”

“Ayase–”

“It’s not FAIR!” she screamed. “Touya already won! And the only thing Kadoyuki was spared from was…was THIS! Us knowing this, us seeing this!” She choked down an angry sob. “And now he’s lost that, too!”

Jo slowly released her arm. His mind was still working in overdrive, but he felt like he’d had the strength sucked out of him. His energy levels dwindled in murky depression.

He tried to cling to the spark of anger in his gut.

“It’s better that…we have them,” he muttered. “Who knows what Touya would’ve done with these. And now we can use them against him.”

Kiyoshi ran a hand nervously through his hair. “Like as evidence?” he asked quietly. “With the cops?”

Ayase flicked furious eyes back at Jo. “No,” she hissed. “No one else sees them. We’re burning them.”

Jo bristled. “I’m the last person in the world who wants to work with cops,” he snapped. “But we have to be rational about this, Ayase. If we can rescue Sachi and Kado and get Touya arrested, we need the charges to stick.”

“You can’t tell that it’s Touya in the pictures!”

“Did you look that hard?” he shot back. “Because I sure as hell didn’t. And I wouldn’t know, either–I’m not a fucking prosecutor.”

She clutched her hands into fists, her eyes wild against the gray sky. But rather than the furious, focused Ayase–the version of her that became the swarm, that had blazed through a parking garage to descend on their worst enemy–he saw a girl his age, panicked and paranoid, crippled with helpless rage. He saw himself every fucking time this war backed him into a corner.

But Jo, at least, was used to feeling powerless.

“This is about more than Kado,” he said, his voice wavering slightly. “Touya just went on a murder spree, and we can’t handle him on our own. We need help. We need ammunition.”

“We’re not sacrificing Kadoyuki to take down Touya!” she screamed. “Not after everything he’s already lost!”

“I don’t like this any more than you do–”

“You hate Kadoyuki! You’ve always hated him!”

“I didn’t hate him!” Jo shouted back. “I was…scared of him! Of everything he was dragging us into!” He threw up a hand. “And I never understood him, Ayase! I thought Touya was grooming me for something, and that I was going through the same shit Kado had gone through, only I was smart enough to back off… But I had Kado wrong. I had Touya wrong.” He swallowed. “Touya never actually gives anyone a choice. He just loves using that fucking word to make us think we have…free will in whatever future he’s laid out for us.” He furrowed his brow. “Like with Sachi. Like Sachi had a choice with a goddamn gun in his mouth.”

Ayase visibly tensed at the name. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“I’ll kill Touya if he hurts him,” she hissed.

Jo looked away. “We’ll get them back, Ayase.”

“But when?!” She frantically shook her head. “You didn’t hear them in Touya’s car. Kadoyuki said he’d ‘take care’ of Touya because he didn’t want Sachi to get hurt. And you know that much about Kadoyuki, don’t you?! The way he throws himself into danger like…like…”

She gripped her mouth. “I won’t let him sacrifice himself anymore! We’re not using those photos. I won’t let us or the police or anyone else sacrifice him anymore!”

Jo opened his mouth, but her frustrated cry cut him off. She lifted her face to the hazy sky.

“Why couldn’t I save them?!” she wailed, her voice breaking. Tears squeezed out from under her shut eyelids and spilled down her cheeks. “I was there! He was…I could feel Kadoyuki’s heart under my legs, and Sachi was staring right at me… I was right there and I couldn’t do anything! How could I lose them?!”

“You…you didn’t, Ayase.”

Jo twitched. He turned to Kiyoshi the same moment Ayase did.

Kiyoshi sighed, something dark building up behind his eyes. “You didn’t lose them,” he insisted. “They were taken from you.”

Ayase choked down a sob. She ran a fist over her eyes.

“Look, I think you both have, like…good points about those pictures, but…” Kiyoshi frowned. “We’ve all lost stuff in this war. We all know what that feels like. I think it’s easy to forget, when we start finding something we’re good at, and we wanna save everybody else, but…you guys have been on the other end of that, right? When you needed to be saved…and you still wanted to keep your pride?”

He rubbed his arm in discomfort. “If some sick bastard took pictures of me like that, I wouldn’t want people seeing them, either. But I don’t know if I’d wanna destroy them, if they could take Touya down, and I don’t know if I’d want someone spreading them to cops and lawyers who didn’t give a crap about my feelings, either…I don’t have a clue what I’d want. But I’d wanna do something.”

Jo furrowed his brow. “Kiyoshi, we’re trying to do something–”

“That’s not what I mean.” Kiyoshi let out a breath. “I mean…I’d want to do something. I’d want to make that decision myself.” His voice softened in the quiet. “I wouldn’t wanna lose that, too.”

For a long moment, Jo didn’t know what to say. And Ayase stood there, sniffling back her tears, her eyes falling to cracked concrete.

A real choice.

Jo brushed a gloved hand over the lump in his pocket. They wouldn’t need to build a case against Touya until they had Touya. And if they had Touya, they had Kado back. They didn’t have to make this decision now.

They didn’t have to make it at all.

For the first time, Jo looked at their surroundings. The cab driver had dropped them in a tiny parking lot between residential buildings on a quiet side street; a gated park of some sort loomed nearby. Jo saw a canopy of trees, the curved eaves of roofs, and the tiniest, barest edge of something bright red.

He jogged a few steps out to get a better view. Sure enough, the edge of a tall torii gate sliced through the trees, a red beacon at the mouth of urban foliage.

“Kiyoshi’s right,” he murmured, turning back to Ayase. “This isn’t our call.”

Ayase swallowed, finally rubbing the last tears from her cheeks. “We’ll…let Kadoyuki decide,” she breathed. “Once we save him.”

“There’s a temple over there. We can bury the photos…and I’ll give the rest of Touya’s wallet to Nakajima.”

Ayase took a shuddering breath. She nodded and bit her lip.

***

They waited until the last few patrons of the temple wandered out. Kiyoshi found an offering of tofu in a closed plastic container that someone had left at the foot of a fox statue; he pushed the tofu onto the ground in the same spot, murmured an apology to the air, and wiped out the container with a corner of his shirt.

“Will this work?”

Ayase watched Jo carefully remove the photos from the wallet with his gloved hands, the pictures still turned away from them. He paused for a second, then pulled one glove inside out and tucked the photos inside it like a sheath. He draped the other glove inside the plastic container and placed the packet of photos on top.

“Good enough.” He glanced up at the temple as he closed the lid. “Is anyone watching?”

Ayase glimpsed someone in the building. But before she could say anything, Kiyoshi caught her eye.

“I’ll distract them,” he promised. “You just…help Jo, okay?”

Ayase nodded stiffly, the base of her throat still constricted. She felt her stomach churn below it.

Kiyoshi ran into the temple without looking back.

Jo took her arm. “Over here,” he murmured, pulling her toward the line of tall torii that led to the temple. He picked one of the gates in the middle of the path.

Ayase dropped to her knees and started to dig into the moist ground. Jo knelt to join her, but she tore out chunks of earth so fast that she barely needed him. He rested the sealed container in the hole, then helped her cover it with the dirt.

The sun was finally coming out. Through the tree canopy and the gates that slashed through them overhead, dappled sunlight broke free and danced across Jo’s hair. Ayase stared at the disturbed dirt, the sunlight playing off the tiny, barely noticeable lump at the foot of the bright red gate.

I can’t fix your past, she thought, even though she knew Kadoyuki couldn’t hear her this time. But I can help you bury it.

Jo sighed. He rubbed his sinuses.

“Maybe…maybe we should say a prayer,” he murmured. “If you’re…into that kinda thing.”

Ayase swallowed. “I’m not.”

“Neither am I, to be honest.” He scratched the back of his neck. “But…Kado would’ve said something. Something Christian. You were raised by nuns, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Do you know anything he would’ve said?”

Ayase groaned weakly and looked away. “No. He doesn’t pray in Japanese except to…call to God and Jesus and Mary.”

“Then just do something general, I guess.” He twisted to read the name of a hanging banner. “What kind of temple is this, anyway? Kishimojin? Uh…Kiyoshi grabbed the container from a little Inari shrine over there, so I’ll stick to that.” He awkwardly clapped his hands twice.

When he bent his head over those clapped hands and closed his eyes, Ayase felt a new wave of depression surge up inside her. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t know what she believed in.

“Touya just went on a murder spree, and we can’t handle him on our own. We need help. We need ammunition.”

Hating the hypocrisy of praying when she didn’t have faith, she tried to remember Kadoyuki clinging to God. She remembered Sachi first bringing her to the church, explaining that he thought his birth parents might’ve been Christian. That golden cross necklace they’d left him, winking out from under his collar since after Motoi.

I should do it for them, she told herself. For their faith. She swallowed, clasped her hands like the nuns, and closed her eyes.

***

When Jo finally lowered his hands, he took a long breath. He’d wanted a cigarette for hours, but now the urge dragged on him like a leaden anchor.

When we’re out of here, he thought sourly. His fingers twitched.

Ayase hiccupped.

When he turned back to her, she was unclasping her hands to wipe at her eyes. Her shoulders slumped forward, speckled with patterns of brightening sunlight as she swallowed down a sob.

Jo let out a breath. All his panic at seeing her fall apart that afternoon–with Touya, in the cab, with her breakdown in the parking lot–melted away with all the now-distant threats.

She sobbed again, a new burst of tears rolling down her cheeks. She wrapped her arms around herself and dug her fingers into her sweater.

He watched her cry for a few seconds, her body trembling as sobs wracked her small frame. But when her arms tightened around herself…

He stepped closer, wrapped an arm around her, and tucked her against his shoulder.

She cringed slightly when his forearm brushed her back; he murmured an apology and shifted his grip up. He slid his fingers around her shoulder and felt her shake under his touch.

She didn’t lean into him. She just stood there, huddled beneath his chin, and cried her eyes out.

“You’re only human,” he reminded her quietly, but he wasn’t sure she heard him over her tears.

Continue to Epilogue–>