Tokyo Demons Book 3: Chapter 3, Part 2
Ayase shivered. Her wings unconsciously flapped under Kiyoshi’s touch; she tried to rub away the flush she felt on her face.
“You okay?” Shouri asked, releasing Ayase’s final bug.
“Um… Yeah.” Ayase touched her earpiece. “I just…don’t like this thing. I can hear through my antennae, so this is giving me an echo.”
“Do you wanna toss it?” Mitsuko asked. “We can talk for you.”
Ayase shook her head. “Maybe I’ll get used to it. Should I fly to the camera now?”
The audio line cracked. “Yes,” Nakajima ordered.
Adam looked down from his position higher on the slope. He flashed a thumbs-up.
Ayase launched the half-dozen insects resting on the ground by Shouri. Three of them had tiny vials of a corrosive chemical strapped to their backs, and she struggled to stay aloft with the added weight. They buzzed toward the house in a flopping, uneven group.
It took her a full five minutes to fly the short distance to the mansion, where she rested the exhausted insects on one of the roof rafters. She felt her human chest heaving.
“I’m there,” she gasped.
“Good. Release the acid.”
Ayase trudged on her insect legs. She crowded all six pieces of her around the wires of the designated security camera; the wires looked thin enough to short-circuit if the corrosive chemical melted through the plastic. Then, taking a breath, she positioned her three untethered bugs near the bugs carrying vials.
She rammed their heads into the release buttons.
Or tried to, anyway. She glanced painfully off the buttons again and again, unable to gather enough force to effectively press a switch. One of them finally slammed hard enough to activate the button, but knocked the vial-bearing insect off its perch; the bug went flying off the roof in free-fall, and Ayase desperately flapped her wings as the acid exploded over her tiny body.
It ate through her. The pain was tiny, but agonizing.
She felt a scream erupt from her human throat as she flapped her wings desperately. The moment her tiny body slammed into something was the same moment hands smothered her mouth.
“The hell…?” said an unfamiliar voice.
She lashed her limbs out in all directions while overlapping voices crackled in her brain.
“Shut her up!”
“Ayase?!”
“What happened?!”
She was being lifted; her perspective snapped around, landing on Shouri’s panicked face and then the roof and then into Kiyoshi’s eyes before she realized her dying insect was the one being held. An unfamiliar face peered into her melting compound eyes.
“What the… Shit!” She was flung to slam into the ground; she twitched helplessly until something crushed her.
The pain blinked out.
She caught her breath. She opened her human eyes and pushed Mitsuko’s hands off her mouth.
“Sorry,” she hissed. “Hang on!” She switched back to the roof and peered over the edge.
One of the guards was cursing and frantically wiping at his head. Another guard, female, was trying to help him wipe something off his fingers.
“What the hell happened?!
“Something landed on my head! It burns! Shit, why did I pick it up?!”
The woman grabbed a nearby water bottle and dumped it over the man’s head. While he hissed and shakily doused his fingers in the water dripping out of his hair, she dropped to her knees and stared at the porch.
“It’s…a bug. There’s something strapped to it…”
“Are you kidding me?! Bugs again?!”
Uh-oh. Ayase quickly drew her insects back onto the roof as the female guard looked up. There was the crackle of a radio.
“We might have an insect problem on the east porch. Looks they were trying to plant something.”
Ayase’s human eyes snapped open.
Mitsuko and Shouri stared at her expectantly; Mitsuko was even gripping one of her wrists. Adam looked down from his vantage point and whispered something in English.
“They didn’t hear me scream,” Ayase answered before Shouri could translate. “But they saw the bugs. They saw the vial.”
Nakajima grunted on her end of the earpiece. Ayase’s brain echoed the sound in multiple directions and her patience snapped; she tore the audio line from her ear.
“This thing is messing me up. I’m sorry; just talk to me directly!”
Nakajima’s finger slid under Ayase’s legs somewhere; she closed her eyes and shifted back to her. The tinted lenses of a pair of sunglasses loomed over her.
“Listen,” Ayase said, and vaguely heard Mitsuko repeat the line. “Taking out the camera was supposed to catch their attention, right? So you can breach the other side of the building?”
Nakajima’s lip curled up. “I wanted it to seem like a malfunction,” she said through her teeth.
Ayase heard guards getting louder under the roof, the crackle of more radios. “Well, forget that! It didn’t work!”
“You had one job.”
Ayase’s frustration turned to anger at Nakajima’s icy tone. She flapped out her wings and glared into that looming, hateful face.
She was sick of feeling helpless. And more than that, she was sick of being lied to, of being manipulated… She was sick of Nakajima flinging them around like her personal toys. Was it because Ochi was dead? Had she dragged him around on a leash, too?
She thought of Nakajima’s sneer back at the jail, and her rage erupted like a volcano.
“The acid was your stupid idea!” Ayase hissed. “So this is on you! Do you want this distraction to be good or not?!” She threw out her human arms. “Let me do what I’m good at and let’s see if you can hold up your end!”
Nakajima’s jaw tightened. More footsteps pounded under the roof as guards gathered down below.
Somewhere else, near Kiyoshi, she heard Zayd whisper into her antennae. Fingers slid onto her chitinous back.
“You are stronger than her,” he breathed as new, powerful purpose welled up inside her.
No more regrets.
Nakajima shoved Ayase back into her collar. “Do it,” she snapped in a whipping flap of her coat.
Ayase burst into the swarm.
To be continued in Chapter 4, Part 1.
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