Tokyo Demons Book 3: Chapter 7, Part 2

There was blackness.

There was a pinprick of light.

There was a flood of every color of the rainbow, twisting up with shadows in a psychedelic swirl.

He heard voices, thunderous rolling, high-pitched beeps, yells. It mixed with the colors and swirled down an unseen drain. Like blood in a sink. Like Pitch in a toilet.

He saw Kado’s dark eyes and heard that dead rasp in his ear.

“Look into my eyes,” the boy whispered. “And remember, senpai.”

Remember.

Remember.

“I can’t save you anymore.”

…

…

Touya’s eyes flew open.

A bright light seared his retinas, forcing his eyelids to close. He gasped, his breath echoing in plastic strapped to his face. He tried to raise his hand…and found it as heavy as the pressure crushing his chest.

A surprised blurt erupted from nearby. “You’re awake!” an unfamiliar man said. “Can you hear me? Don’t try to move!”

Touya opened his burning eyes. The fuzzy shapes in his vision wouldn’t clarify–he saw layers of movement shift around him, objects and humans and sounds and light. Ghostly echoes of beeps and alarms stacked like bricks in his ears.

“Young man…?”

That one male voice was louder than the others. Touya fought to breathe against the weight on his chest, fought to lift his hand to his face. His shaking fingers finally closed on the plastic mask over his mouth.

He dragged it off, plastic snapping around his ears.

The man’s voice said something else, but Touya lost it under the waves of sound. A louder beeping noise started to pick up speed, drilling into his ears until he touched wires on his chest. He pulled, ripping stickers from his skin, crushing the snakes in his hand as the beeping snapped off into ghost echoes.

“Please, don’t try to move…!”

He could feel it. That rising surge through his body, those barbs in his veins…that compounding adrenaline, unnaturally squeezed from his cells by Pitch.

He rolled his head, his vision smearing. A male orderly, fuzzy but spread across the layer of the present, ran to Touya’s bedside and leaned over the bed rail.

“Can you hear me?” the man repeated. “What your name?”

Touya raised his hand, reaching for the man…

And clamped his fingers around the orderly’s throat.

***

Sirens blared through the air. Ayase closed her arms tighter around Adam’s neck as he pushed through the crowds, her eyes focusing on the phone in her hand.

They were two minutes over. If Jo’s prediction had been correct, Touya was already awake.

BLAM BLAM BLAM

The crowd erupted into screams at the sound of the nearby gunshots. But unlike the other district, these people weren’t trying to leave–they flooded in the same direction as Adam, surging against a police line in front of T. Hospital.

“Let me in!” someone cried. “My wife is in there!”

“My son is on life support! I need to get to him!”

Ayase’s eyes darted until she saw the sign over the front entrance: North. She ducked her head closer to Adam’s and pointed East.

“There!” she ordered in English.

Adam gripped her thighs and changed course, pushing his way through the mulling crowd. When he finally broke free of the densest cluster, he stopped to catch his breath, sagging slightly under Ayase’s weight.

He can’t carry me much longer. She checked her phone; all her important texts were sent, awaiting replies. Daniel and Emi had found Mitsuko, and they were spreading out to protect Byakko. Still no reply from Hatsumi about Nick–even though Ayase had sent multiple messages.

There wasn’t any more she could do.

So I don’t need two arms.

She jerked her head once to look behind them, but the crowd paid them no attention. Sachi burst out of the throng, panting.

“Ayase?” he wheezed. “Did you see the staff entrance around here?”

She nodded shortly and pulled one arm into its sleeve. Sachi seemed to understand what she was doing; he ran to block her body with the berth of his arms.

“Do it,” he breathed.

She melted her arm into insects, sending them zooming up her skirt to rebuild her leg. Adam’s hold shifted on her thigh as she pushed out throbbing flesh beyond his fingers. When she jostled on his back, one of her gripping arms down to a stub, he carefully slid her body toward the ground.

Her feet slapped on the pavement–one in a sneaker, one bare.

Adam murmured a thank you in Japanese as he stretched out his back. He quickly untied Ayase’s second sneaker from where it hung on his belt.

Ayase’s vision darkened for a second, wavering with a sudden drop of energy. She blinked hard against the exhaustion from her shift of bugs.

No, she ordered herself.

The fatigue quickly faded, only leaving a slight burn to her eyes.

Adam dropped her sneaker on the ground and Ayase slid her foot in, although Sachi had to kneel to help her. Then he unstrapped the staff from his back and handed it to Adam.

“With one arm, your balance won’t be great when you run,” Sachi warned. “So be careful.”

Ayase took a breath. “I know,” she murmured. As if to prove it, she slid her arm through his. “But if Touya’s here, and awake…maybe I won’t need a body at all soon.”

Sachi’s dark eyes met her own. His forehead creased slightly, but not in concern.

Jo finally caught up, pushing out of the crowd with Kiyoshi. “That’s the entrance!” he wheezed as he pointed past Ayase’s head. “Do you see it? Over there!”

Ayase whipped around to see a small entryway with double doors, half-hidden at the end of a nearby wing. She also saw the police tape over the door–and several cops milling around, talking into their radios.

Crap!

Ayase let Jo stumble ahead of them, although he seemed just as confused as she was. Sure enough, the cops stopped them before they even got close to the door.

“Turn around,” an officer ordered. “No one’s allowed in.”

Jo quickly gestured to his lab coat, then Sachi and Kiyoshi’s hospital disguises. “We’re staff with a pair of patients! You have to let us in!”

Another officer shook her head. “This hospital is about to go into lockdown, sir. No one in or out.”

“Then you have to let us in before you lock it down!”

“Hey!” the first cop snapped. “We have reason to believe there are active gunmen inside! You really want to run into that?!”

“Yes!” Sachi cried.

Jo let out a frustrated breath. “We were part of an emergency surgery!” he tried. “You’re killing our patient if you keep us out here!”

“Your lives will be in danger if I let you in!”

Ayase’s hand trembled over her phone. She glanced at the screen; Touya had been awake for seven minutes.

“Officer, please! You have to let us in!”

“No! Go back to the crowd control line!”

“You don’t understand–”

“Let them through.”

Ayase stopped. The cool voice drifted from over the police officers, causing them to turn.

There was suddenly one more officer–a policewoman Ayase hadn’t noticed before. For a second, Ayase thought it was Nakajima, although the voice proved it wasn’t. This petite woman was unfamiliar…yet something about her gave Ayase an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

The policewoman stepped forward and leveled cold eyes at Jo.

Jo paled.

“Excuse me?” one of the other cops asked. “We’re about to go in lockdown–”

“They have clearance,” the policewomen intoned, touching a receiver in her ear. “Their surgical partner should be arriving any moment to let them in.”

“B-but you heard the chief! We can’t let anyone–”

The double doors opened with a loud chak, revealing a slight man in scrubs. He, too, was unfamiliar and unnerving. He beckoned Jo with cold eyes.

“Let’s go,” the man ordered. “You have important work to finish.”

Jo hesitated for a second, sweat dripping down his temple. But then he finally nodded at Ayase and ran through the doors.

Ayase rushed past the protesting cops and into the dim stairwell of T. Hospital. She turned back before the door closed, to get another glance of that strange policewoman–but she was already out of sight, hidden behind the arguing police officers.

Who was that? Ayase wondered, turning back to the stairwell. To her surprise, the man in scrubs was nowhere to be found, either.

Jo gestured to the door half a floor up. “We have to get out of the stairwell,” he ordered. “If they go into lockdown, we’ll get sealed inside!”

Ayase followed Jo up the short flight of stairs, gripping Sachi’s arm for support. “Hey,” Sachi called ahead of him. “Who were those people, Jo? Do you know them?”

“No,” Jo answered flatly.

“You…look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Close enough,” Jo muttered as he shoved open the door.

***

Jo didn’t have time to mull over the Kiri bodyguards. Maybe they’d come on their own, or maybe Kado had sent them. It didn’t matter–they were already gone.

Two seconds after Jo stepped into the familiar hospital lobby, somebody screamed.

An alarm blared out of the intercom, screeching through the air. Jo winced and covered his ears as the overhead lights dimmed.

“Code silver,” a voice called over the loudspeaker. “Code silver. Patients and staff, return to your rooms immediately.”

People in scrubs started running through the lobby. Jo heard a series of short metallic clangs and then someone grunting; he turned to see Kiyoshi trying to tug the end of his lab coat from the closed stairwell door.

“Crap,” Kiyoshi breathed. “These doors just locked.”

Someone deeper in the lobby screamed again. Now Jo could see where it came from–at an information station half-hidden behind a corner, a man struggled with a woman in uniform. He dragged her backwards, something glinting in his hand.

A gun.

BOOM

Jo automatically ducked as a gunshot exploded in the lobby, followed by screams. When he jerked his head up, he saw a second man with a gun, firing at the first man as the woman scrambled to safety.

Shit, Jo thought. They weren’t kidding about active shooters.

“We need to find Doctor Kagome!” Sachi yelled over the and panicked screams. “Did Shouri-san make the call while we were running here?!”

“Yeah–the only active doctor here named Kagome is in orthopedics on the fifth floor, but…!” Jo quickly checked his phone, praying for a new message from Kado. They couldn’t go after Doctor Kagome until Kado saw Touya’s future with the man, trying the same thing…

“Code purple,” the intercom blared. “Floors one, two, four. Code white: floor eight.”

Jo looked up helplessly. What do those codes mean?!

“Jo!” Ayase snapped. “We have to get to floor five!”

“I-I was thinking!” Jo tried. “If this is a giant stash of Pitch we’re talking about, Fujito couldn’t carry it to this place, so she would’ve had it shipped. Shouri said incoming mail is by the loading dock on this floor!”

“But–”

More gunshots rang out, exploding over the blare of another alarm. As glass shattered and people screamed, Kiyoshi finally shrugged off the lab coat he couldn’t untangle from the door.

“We’ll start here and make our way up!” he shouted. “Adam-san!”

Adam nodded and adjusted the grip on his staff. Ayase formed several insects in her palm, then sent them zooming down the lobby.

Jo took a breath and ran with the others, the muscles in his legs screaming with the prolonged effort. A few seconds ahead of them, both gunman jolted and slapped at the stinging bugs in the faces, crying out as Ayase’s stingers went for the eyes.

Adam slid into one of the gunman, knocking the man into the information desk. Adam whipped around, his staff sweeping in an arc, and cracked the wood down on the man’s clavicle with an audible crunch.

The man roared in pain as the gun fell from his limp hand. Kiyoshi grabbed the man’s shirt in both fists and threw him at the second gunman. The second man, struggling with Ayase, didn’t even look up before his opponent flew into him and sent them both crashing into a potted plant.

Jo ran through the panicking civilians, his eyes darting across the various signs hanging from the ceiling. He saw a wing marked “Staff Resources” and made a beeline for it.

He nearly collided with a small group of cops who raced through the lobby. “Get back to your room!” one of them yelled at him as they rushed past. “This hospital is in lockdown!”

“C-can I take the stairs?!” Jo called back.

“Internal stairways are still open! Anything that opens to the outdoors is locked!”

Then that’s how we get to the higher floors. Jo ran into the staff wing, his sneakers pounding on the tiled floor.

“Code purple,” the intercom blared again. “Floors one, two, four. Code white: floor seven.”

Proceed to Chapter 7, Part 2, page 3–>