Tokyo Demons Book 3: Chapter 7, Part 3

It was the final one–the last of the Pitch. Jo hesitated for a moment, the sliced I.V. bag clutched in one gloved hand.

The last chance to wean off anyone dying from a detox.

Kiyoshi looked up from shredding the tag with Kagome’s name on it. “Jo?” he asked. “What are you waiting for?”

Jo looked down at Kiyoshi from his perch on the stepstool. At the hard line of Kiyoshi’s jaw and the darkness behind his eyes.

Jo shook his head. “Nothing,” he muttered as he poured the last of the poison to burn.

***

“TOUYA!”

Someone else was calling for him through the haze. It didn’t matter.

Touya had stopped caring about his endless enemies, because they would mean nothing soon. They weren’t the true shackles burned into his skin, coiled around his bones, clogging his bloodstream. Once he was free, the endless waves of Tokyo’s demons could stay here to rot. He would leave everything and start again–a new life and a new start.

He would be free.

“TOUYA!”

The nurse had gone limp in his grip; he threw her useless body aside. He reached through the blurry rivers of time for any other warm body. He needed a brain that knew Kagome. A brain connected to a mouth.

Someone yelled at him again–someone female, threatening to shoot? Liar. He was surrounded by civilians, their bodies shields of meat. His clawing fingers landed on shoulders and he clenched.

A man screamed as Touya felt bone snap beneath his fingers.

“TOUYA!”

Touya dragged the body toward him, slid his bare fingers into its open mouth. He dragged the jaw open–careful not to break it, so it could still form precious words. It could tell him where Kagome was.

“We already have the Pitch!” the female voice yelled again, her voice piercing through the mist. “JUNICHI!”

Touya froze.

***

He didn’t move. As people ran and cried around them, as the captive doctor hyperventilated around Touya’s fingers in his mouth, Touya stayed locked in position like he’d been turned to stone.

Ayase leveled the gun in her sweaty grip. The metal was cool in her feverish hand, her fingers clenched so hard that the joints screamed. “You won’t find the Pitch!” she shouted, her human voice hoarse in her ears. “Because we already found it!”

Touya didn’t look up. Slowly, his fingers dragged out of the doctor’s mouth.

Ayase furiously stomped one foot on the tile floor, shooting pain up the bones of her bare sole. “The Pitch is ours! Do you fucking hear me?!”

And then, eerily…

Touya’s neck craned to her like a slow-moving nightmare. His dilated eyes rolled to her face.

He dropped the doctor like a sack of bricks.

Ayase staggered forward with her gun as the man scrambled away; she kept the weapon trained on Touya, the end of the barrel shaking. Fury blew through her like a storm, adding a violent tremor to the legs beneath her.

When Touya straightened, she stopped and tensed. She tried to focus the quavering gun on him, his heart mere meters away.

“It’s over!” she snarled. “With everything you destroyed to get it, with all the things you took from us, we still beat you!” She clenched her teeth, regret boiling in her stomach. “With all the things…you took from us…!”

Touya’s knees shook, but Ayase barely saw it through the thickening film over her eyes.

“Agh, you BASTARD!” She shook her head violently. “Kadoyuki died to get you here, to get me here, and you are NOT WORTH IT. You sick, sadistic asshole and all the puppets you think you can control! Kadoyuki knew how to destroy you from right under your nose, because he was better than you, and he did it to protect us from your disgusting hands…”

She choked out a furious sob. “But I wish he hadn’t! I wish he’d just taken care of himself, because you were never worth a fraction of his life, you pathetic piece of…!”

The film over her vision was wet now–a wall of hot tears. She tried to blink them away. She had to keep her focus on the monster in front of her.

But the angry tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her face just as Touya’s blurry outline collapsed to its knees.

Ayase’s heart jabbed against her ribcage. Before she could process what he was doing, she stumbled forward in that precious second after his knees hit the floor.

She jammed the gun against his forehead.

“How could you take him from us?!” she screamed.

She felt the soft press of his flesh against the barrel, the hardness of his skull beneath. She gagged down another sob and shoved the gun forward, thrusting his head back so she could look into his face.

Touya’s dilated pupils retracted and expanded, pulsing the blackness in those horrifying eyes. Blood stained the white of the left, crackled in veins on the right. The shifting orbs locked on her, then detached to peer through endless nothingness beyond her.

“I give up,” he croaked.

Ayase tightened. Her hand shook.

“What?” she hissed through her clenched teeth.

Touya gurgled another word, but Ayase couldn’t make it out. Bloody saliva dripped down his chin.

He closed those pulsating eyes.

“I can’t…do this anymore,” he murmured, the words garbled through the fluids in his mouth. “I-I give up.”

Trapped wrath hammered against the cage of Ayase’s chest. She screamed in fury as she ground the barrel into his forehead.

“How could you take him from me?!” she wailed, her breath spitting through the tears rolling down her lips. “How could you kill Kadoyuki when all he wanted, all he ever wanted, was to have his own life?!”

Touya’s forehead tightened beneath her gun, rolling skin beneath the barrel. His sunken mouth twitched.

“I don’t know,” he rasped.

Ragged, fragmented rage sputtered through Ayase’s bloodstream, racing through the pathways of her human body. It swarmed every nerve ending and flew circles around her heart.

“K-Kadoyuki said…” She choked. “He said he thought…his God sent me.”

Touya’s eyelids slowly lifted, fluttering in broken twitches. His dilating eyes focused and unfocused on her.

“Do it,” he breathed.

Ayase grunted through her clenched jaw, the sound breaking through her nose in a high-pitched whine.

Her finger trembled on the trigger.

To be continued in Chapter 8, Part 1.