Tokyo Demons Book 3: Chapter 2, Part 2

“You need to go to the hospital.”

Jo grunted and rolled away, tucking his folded arm under his cheek. “No,” he muttered against the bandage on his forearm.

“Jo-kun,” Emi wheedled, in that weak voice she used on Kiyoshi. “Please.”

“You’re basically a doctor, right? And you patched me up.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Emi argued. “And even if Aisha were here, we don’t have X-Ray or Ultrasound equipment. You need a facility.”

Jo squeezed his eyes shut tighter, trying to block her out. He was tired and everything ached, and his thoughts were processing at half-speed. He just wanted to sleep.

“Mitsuko’s at the hospital and she needs…time. Or something.” His jaw throbbed when he moved it, so he rested it on the bed and reduced his words to a mumble. “Some of her girls asked me to stay away.”

“Jo-kun, your health is more important than–”

“I’m trying to give the gangs something for once–in exchange for dying for us. Just let me do this, will you? It’s important.”

Emi sighed. He didn’t see her wringing her hands or twitching her fingers, but he was sure she was doing it.

“How long do they need?” she asked at last.

“I dunno.”

A pause.

“I’ll give you one more hour.”

Jo grunted in response.

“Please don’t argue with me. And if I see symptoms before then, I’m taking you immediately.” She released an audible breath from her nose. “One hour. Adam-kun will carry you if you can’t walk.”

He sighed. “Emi-san,” he murmured.

“Hush. Sleep.”

Jo stopped arguing. “Nngh,” he murmured into his arm.

***

Ayase sat in the waiting room of the jail, her hands closed in her lap, and watched Kiyoshi’s feet tap anxiously on the tile floor.

The bench they shared jiggled with every movement of his restless legs. Ayase was already antsy herself–every moment here was a moment she wasn’t looking for Touya–and his anxious energy wasn’t helping. She closed her eyes and took a long, calming breath.

Relax, Kiyoshi.

“Relax, Honda-kun.”

Ayase opened her eyes. Hatsumi, sitting across the room on her own rigid bench with Aisha, leveled her eyes on Kiyoshi. Her gaze was sympathetic under the lenses of her glasses.

Kiyoshi rubbed his mouth. “Sorry. I’m trying.”

“The Core ops won’t recognize you,” she assured him, gesturing to his sunglasses and baseball cap. “And they’ll have their attention on us. Stay close to the back and you’ll be fine.”

“It’s just… Nick-san told me from day one that Core can’t see me.” He swallowed. “If they know I got away from them and lived, they’d put me at the top of their Wanted list with him.”

Ayase sighed. “At this point,” she murmured, “we might all be at the top of that Wanted list. Who knows what Touya told them before he left?”

Hatsumi leaned back in her chair. “Touya seemed to want us to keep fighting Core. It wouldn’t be to his advantage to sell us out.”

“Like we trust anything about Touya,” Ayase snapped.

Hatsumi quieted. She shrugged.

“And I don’t know how much help I’m gonna be,” Kiyoshi mumbled. “We know these guys work for Core, so who cares if I recognize them?”

“I don’t know,” Hatsumi admitted. “Detective Nakajima might want a little insider info to scare them into talking–if you can tell her something we’re not supposed to know, like the specific job of some guy in Core, the ops might think we know more than we do.” She shook a cigarette free of its box. “It’s a police interrogation tactic. Works sometimes, too.”

“Do you have experience with police work, Hatsumi-san?”

She lit her cigarette. “You could say that.”

Another loud alarm blared through the room, causing Kiyoshi to jump in his seat. He cursed and settled down as the now-familiar announcement crackled behind it.

“Holding block, code 333. Holding block, code 333.”

Ayase stuck a finger in her ringing ear. That alarm had gone off half a dozen times since they’d arrived, always with the same warning. She wondered if it had anything to do with Nakajima being late to meet them.

Kiyoshi exchanged glances with Ayase, then flicked his eyes at the still-closed door. He lowered his voice into a hushed tone.

“Jo’s worried about Detective Nakajima.”

Ayase frowned. “I don’t like her, either, but–”

“No, he thinks something’s changed–since Ochi died. She was weird at the funeral and he thinks she set up Byakko.”

Hatsumi took a drag on her cigarette. “Wouldn’t surprise me,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say that’s a ‘change’–that’s the way she’s always operated. We knew what we were getting into when we started working with her.”

Kiyoshi squirmed. “Did we?”

Ayase opened her mouth to offer reassurance–the counter-argument that Jo was disproportionately worried about cops, for example–but the look in Kiyoshi’s eyes made her stomach sink.

Kiyoshi seemed to know Jo better than anyone. Maybe it was because he hung on Jo’s every word, but Jo actually talked to him, even when he was being dodgy with everyone else.

And Jo had proven, time and again, that he had a good intuition for incoming trouble.

Hatsumi shook her cigarette box and held it out in Kiyoshi’s direction. “Do you smoke?” she asked. “It might help you calm down.”

“Uh… No. Thank you.”

Ayase turned down the same offer. Hatsumi held the cigarettes out to Aisha and said a few words in English; Aisha replied in English and politely turned her down.

Ayase paused. “Hatsumi-san?” she asked. “Do you speak English?”

She tucked the box back into her jacket. “Not well, but yeah.”

“Can you understand Aisha-san’s English? I have trouble with her accent…”

“Well enough. Most English I’ve heard doesn’t sound like the English you learn in school.” She took a drag. “Including Nick’s.’

Ayase’s mind wandered back to that morning in the safe house. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Aisha alone, and in the cramped quarters of the safe house, Zayd would probably always be nearby. Maybe she could…

Aisha caught her eyes, and Ayase immediately felt embarrassed. Just do it, she ordered herself.

“Aisha-san,” she began. “I wanted to ask about…Zayd. And his medicine.”

Aisha seemed to understand that much in Japanese. She waited.

“If the medicine helps control his power, is it dangerous for him to stop taking it? And I don’t just mean for us.” She squirmed a bit. “Will it be harder for him if he has to worry about what he might be doing to everyone?” She remembered his uncharacteristic flush in the dark, the way he ran his hands through his hair. She wasn’t sure how to explain it.

He’d always been so stable. And seeing him otherwise just felt…wrong.

Aisha clearly didn’t understand the Japanese, so Hatsumi slowly translated. After a little back-and-forth, Aisha seemed to understand.

“Eh… Yes. Okay,” she replied in Japanese. “Zayd’s medicine. He is…alive with this medicine, but not alive. Like a…” She frowned and switched to English.

“A ghost,” Hatsumi translated.

“Okay? He is thinking about his power as bad. He is thinking…he will make everyone sick because of his heart, if his heart is sick.” She shook her head. “I am telling him no. The power is not bad–the sick heart is bad. I want him to be happy.” She lifted her hands, both palms toward the ceiling. “Then we will be happy. Because of Zayd.”

Kiyoshi stared at her. “You’re saying…it’s okay if his power affects us?” he ventured. “But…”

“In a good way,” Ayase finished.

Hatsumi didn’t have a chance to translate, because the door to the hallway finally opened with a loud chak.

Detective Nakajima held open the door. “Time to go,” she said flatly.

Ayase got to her feet with the others. As Hatsumi gripped the handle of the second medical bag, Nakajima’s eyes landed on her.

“Put it out,” she snapped. “Smoking’s forbidden in this building.”

Hatsumi took another drag on her stick. “Good to know,” she said coolly.

Nakajima glared at her. Hatsumi smoked, and waited.

Surprisingly, Nakajima just jerked her head toward the hallway. “Follow me.”

Ayase ran to catch the door as Nakajima released it. After checking that everyone was behind her, she followed the woman into a thin, concrete hall with dim lights. The temperature seemed to drop as they walked deeper into the corridor, and their small chorus of footsteps echoed in the narrow space–but, as usual, Ayase didn’t hear a whisper from the bottom of Nakajima’s shoes.

The woman stopped at a thick, looming door that barred the end of the hallway. After hitting a loud buzzer and looking up into a camera, the door’s automatic lock released with an echoing choom. Nakajima shoved the door open, and the next hallway was wider, flanked on either side by rows of doors with small, barred windows.

Cells.

Ayase’s eyes ran over the tightly packed rooms as they passed. She caught glimpses of people through those bars–sometimes a head bent over something, or just the edge of an arm or leg–but the quiet made the humanity behind those bars hard to imagine. Nakajima cut through the eerily silent hall like a woman plowing through a graveyard.

A prisoner sneezed somewhere. Ayase jumped.

A guard at the end of the walkway gestured with a nightstick. Nakajima glanced back at Ayase.

“I need two minutes. Stay here and don’t move.”

Ayase nodded, but Nakajima was already headed for the guard. Ayase turned to see Kiyoshi dragging his eyes around the hall, clearly as fascinated by the silent cells as she was.

Aisha re-gripped her bag, her gaze locked on the floor. Hatsumi finished her cigarette and ground it out in a portable ashtray.

“Huh?”

The low, rumbling grunt wafted out of a cell beside Hatsumi. She turned her head to meet the eyes of a scarred, bald prisoner peering through his barred window.

He was at least middle-aged. Ayase saw the edge of tattoos poking out from his uniform along his neck and shoulders. She stepped a little closer to Hasumi, tensing in a defensive reflex.

To Ayase’s shock, the man murmured, “Hatsumi-san.”

Then he stepped back from the door and bowed.

Hatsumi quickly shook her head and gestured for the man to stop. The man straightened, nodded, and turned away from his window.

“Time to go,” Nakajima barked from the end of the corridor. “Hurry it up.”

Hatsumi brushed past Ayase, leaving her alone in her wake. Ayase brushed off a chill and followed.

The room beyond the corridor released a burst of raucous noise the second the guard opened the door. It looked like an office, but it housed an embedded jail cell in one corner, its open walls made entirely of bars–a community holding cell of some sort. It was packed with at least a dozen complaining thugs who rattled the bars and shouted curses. The prisoners looked dirty and strung out; many were wrapped in peeling bandages encrusted with old blood. The violent contrast with the neat, silent hall made Ayase’s head spin.

She noticed a few of the prisoners–both men and women–had torn sleeves or pushed-up jackets. Pitch veins snaked over more than half of the exposed arms.

Core ops.

The prison guard scowled and headed for the holding cell, his nightstick raised. Nakajima pulled him back and murmured something in his ear.

The man nodded stiffly. He bowed to Ayase and her group before leaving the room.

The prisoners grew even louder when the guard left. “Hey!” somebody shouted at Nakajima. “You gonna lock us up or let us go, bitch?!”

“I’m legally allowed to hold you for weeks,” she snapped back. “Get comfortable in there.”

“I’m not pissin’ in that bucket no more!”

“Give me somethin’ to eat that’s not a piece of shit!”

“I’ve been puking my guts out! I need my meds!”

It was hard to tell in the crowded cell, but Ayase definitely saw some hunched figures in the back rows–people sitting or cowed over. She heard wheezing and grunts. She even saw a pair of legs lying on the floor, the toes of its boots pointed toward the ceiling: a body on the cold tiles.

Nakajima whipped out the two nightsticks tethered to her belt and hit the bars with a resounding CLANG. A prisoner cried out and reeled back, clutching his crushed fingers.

“All of you need to shut your mouths,” Nakajima snarled. “Or I’ll leave you here to whither without your Pitch.”

The thugs quieted, their curses reduced to growls. Nakajima expertly flipped her nightsticks back and tucked them under her arms.

“You all think you’ll be fine once you reach the proper cells, where the smuggled Pitch runs like a river through this place. What you don’t know is I’ve been tracking that supposedly secret Pitch, and this jail is running dry. There’s certainly not enough to save a new influx of prisoners who were probably instrumental to getting it here in the first place.” She quirked up an edge of her mouth, but it wasn’t a smile. “Yes, I know Core is running low on field agents and you’re spread thin. Your infrastructure is falling apart.”

A woman in the cell hissed. “You’re full of shit,” she spat. “And we’re not telling you nothin’.”

Nakajima glanced over at Kiyoshi. He was huddled against the wall with Aisha, his head bowed as he subtly scanned the prisoners through his sunglasses.

Then Nakajima slid her nightsticks onto an empty counter and gestured to Hatsumi. “Give me a dose,” she ordered.

Hatsumi dug into her medical bag and pulled out two small bottles: one held the pills from Kiyoshi and Shouri’s detox, and the other had a liquid Ayase had never seen before. She wondered if that was the “new” addition to the cure Hatsumi had mixed up since the raid on those medical clinics. Aisha hadn’t given it to Shouri, saying she didn’t want to experiment on Shouri’s health when she was already detoxing well with the antagonists…

As Ayase watched the semi-opaque liquid swish against the walls of its bottle, she wondered if that new medicine had been tested yet.

Nakajima grabbed both bottles. She rattled them against the bars of the cell.

“You don’t need Pitch anymore. Because I have the cure.”

The cell burst into angry cries–screams of denial and rage. Someone tried to swipe the bottles from her, but she jerked back and kicked through the bars, her small leather shoe ramming into the prisoner’s stomach. He gurgled and fell to the floor while the other ops roared.

“Bullshit you have a cure!”

“No way we’re gonna drink whatever poison you put in there.”

“Fuck off, you old bitch!”

Nakajima slapped the bottles into one hand, reached through the bars, and grabbed a much-taller man by the hair.

She jerked forward and down so fast that his head bounced off a bar. He collapsed to the floor with a heavy thud.

The operatives nearest to the bars pushed back into the crowd to get away from her, but still complained loudly. She stared into that mass with hard eyes.

“Those of you who are junkies,” she announced, loud enough to be heard over their voices, “you have two options. One: you can stay in here until the withdrawal symptoms turn you into a seizing, slobbering mass that dies on this floor. Two: you can tell me what I need to know and I’ll detox you off of the Pitch.”

A high-pitched laugh rang through the cell, suddenly quieting the other voices.

Ayase watched, surprised, as that pair of lying legs on the floor retracted into the crowd. While the other ops cringed out of the way, the owner of those boots clomped through the jail cell.

A torn, gothy dress hung from her wiry frame. She smiled with her bloody mouth, revealing a single remaining canine tooth that had apparently been filed down into a fang.

“Detox,” she drawled. “You make it sound like a reward.”

Nakajima sneered. “It is. For you Pitch slaves.”

The fanged woman laughed. “Slaves!” she repeated in delight. “I think you’re mixing us up with the non-cons we grabbed to give the gift of ecstasy. And even they were squirming in pleasure by the end.

“You should’ve seen it. No one turns down Pitch once they feel it inside them.” The woman licked a finger, rubbed it in the dried blood around her mouth, and slowly sucked at the resulting paste. “Once it’s in your blood, it stays there. And you always beg for more.”

Ayase grimaced at the bad taste in her mouth and glanced at Kiyoshi. He’d visibly tensed by the wall, the cords of muscle in his neck standing out against the collar of his long-sleeved shirt. His gaze dropped to the floor.

Aisha whispered something to him, and he anxiously rubbed the back of his neck.

Nakajima stared at the fanged woman for a moment, then looked over her head. “So,” she called coolly. “You can die like this fool, or you can live. Step forward if you want the cure.”

Several ops started yelling complaints again. “That’s not even a cure!” someone yelled. “You want us to sell each other out for a bottle of bleach and rat poison!”

Someone actually started laughing at that. As the cell grew rowdier, Nakajima jammed the bottles in her pockets.

In half a breath, she spun on her heel and darted for the wall. She grabbed a clearly surprised Kiyoshi by the front of his shirt and dragged him to the cell.

“What–?!”

Ayase went rigid as alarm bells rang in her head. She lunged for Nakajima, but she was too late.

Nakajima pushed Kiyoshi’s sleeve up his arm, revealing his Pitch veins to the cell of operatives.

“It is a cure,” she called flatly. “We detoxed Kiyoshi Honda.”

To be continued in Book 3: Chapter 3

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