36

GO FISH!

I hate burns. They heal slower than other wounds, and they hurt worse while they heal. The dead flesh screams while it comes back to life. I let my were-hyena guide—a different one—drive me back to my clothes and my backpack, but I didn’t wait out the next match this time. I wanted to see if Sig’s match was as deadly as mine.

The same Asian fellows who had given me instructions at my first match tried to lay down the law about me waiting until the second match was over, but I wasn’t having any of it. We were all insisting that we couldn’t speak each other’s language, and when one of my guardians got impatient and palmed a Mace canister that smelled like wolfsbane, I snatched it out of his hand, gave him a gentle slap that hurt me more than it hurt him, and put the canister back in his hands before he was done blinking.

Another guard started to reach for his weapon and found himself staring at the semiautomatic I’d just taken out of the first guard’s holster.

The air became cold almost immediately, and for once, it felt good. The yuki-onna’s voice cracked and splintered from somewhere in the mist that had suddenly formed behind us. “Haven’t had enough fighting for tonight, Down Boy?”

I understood how she killed her scent, but how did she move so quietly? “I’m not trying to dishonor anyone,” I said, putting the firearm back where I’d gotten it with no sudden movements. “I didn’t make any big defiant gesture in front of the crowd, despite the way your boss is holding up his end of our agreement. If you want a war with the Templars, just kill me now. Straight up. No bullshit.”

She hummed, more a hungry sound than a contemplative one. When I turned around, I saw that she was pale-skinned again, almost as white as the robe that flowed around her. It must have been her dinnertime. She certainly sounded hungry when she said, “I didn’t think you were this excitable. If you have rules or concerns about the fights, you should have mentioned them beforehand.”

“I have no way of making an appointment with Mr. Satou,” I pointed out. “No phone number or set location or schedule. Would you like to give me one?”

She giggled, half girlish and half ghoulish. “How about I escort you to the Crucible instead?”

“Fine,” I agreed. “But keep your hands to yourself this time. I’m a bit jumpy.”

The yuki-onna pouted but acquiesced, gliding slightly beside and in front of me without touching as we began the trek back to the arena. She set a brisk pace without seeming to rush. It hurt to keep up, but I did.

“Are you doing this because you don’t care if your boss gets a little pissed?” I wondered. “Or are you doing this because phones and radios don’t work here and you don’t want to kill me without his say-so?”

She spit, and a hailstone cracked against the concrete beneath our feet. “I am here because the food is good, the risk is low, and I get lots of entertainment.”

That didn’t precisely answer my question, but I went with it. “I amuse you?”

“It always amuses me when the fish think they are the ones fishing.” She turned and gave me an exaggerated wink. “Like you and your new friend, the half-elf. You pull against the line between you and the onmyouji and think you are reeling him in. You don’t feel the hook in your own mouth.”

“And you’ve seen a lot of others like me,” I clarified.

“Countless.” She made that humming noise again.

“You know, I had a refrigerator that made that noise once,” I said. “I replaced it.”

She laughed again, and the sound made the crowd that we were approaching make room hastily. The yuki-onna put her palms together, extended her fingers, and moved her hand frantically from side to side. “Wriggle, little fish. Keep wriggling.”

For a moment, I saw a large distorted blur against the backdrop of a torch. The oni, Akihiko’s personal invisible ogre, shadowing us. It would be like having an imaginary friend who could rip limbs off people or medium-sized trees without breaking a sweat.

The same half-elf who had been selling blood the other night was packing up a stand that had been selling lavender-scented bandanas. He must have made a profit tonight. Most of the beings there had an enhanced sense of smell, and the stench of burning mapinguari was still in the air, stomach-twisting and fetid. The bastard was charging forty dollars a bandana, and they were worth it. I had discarded my vomit covered T-shirt.

“Your bookie has my cash right now. Can you loan me forty dollars?” I asked the yuki-onna.

She made that crackling laugh again. “Alvin, give him one of your handkerchiefs.”

Alvin? One of the many names for those Fae who look human is Alvar, and I suspected the handle was one of the yuki-onna’s disparaging nicknames. If it was, “Alvin” didn’t object. He was too busy hastily giving me a bandana. No money changed hands, and I kind of doubted any ever would.

The bandana helped. I tied it over my nose and mouth slowly, my back protesting when I had to flex my arms upward and behind my head. The surface of the skin was healing rapidly, but the nerves that were coming back to life weren’t happy about it.

It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that I didn’t see Aubrey anywhere. It was hard to think through the pain, but I didn’t hear him. Hadn’t smelled him. And the yuki-onna had made a point out of mentioning his name. I turned to ask her about that, but she was gone.

I drifted down to the trench and found Sig in the Crucible arena. It was a weapons match, and she was fighting a gashadokuro, one of the more traditional giant economy-sized ones without a uniform. You have to understand, it wasn’t a real skeleton. It was a sculpture made out of different fused bones, its connecting points a series of smaller elbow and knee joints and hip and arm sockets working together. This gashadokuro was about the size of a small house, and its skull had once belonged to an elephant.

How many people had been starved to death so that their spirits and bones could infuse that thing?

Sig was armed with a spear, and the gashadokuro was armed with a wrecking ball and chain that someone had taken off of a crane, whirling the iron sphere over its head as if it were a tetherball. She ducked once as the ball went over her head, stepped forward, and leapt over the chain the next time the ball came around, and then the fight was over. Sig threw her spear through the gashadokuro’s skull, and the statue began to disassemble. First, its left leg collapsed in a small avalanche as bones began to scatter and fall in a ripple effect, then its right arm dropped wholesale from its shoulder socket and shattered into a thousand separate bones on the concrete. The wrecking ball flew off to the side in a splatter of cement chips.

I didn’t allow myself to smile or even dwell on feelings of pride or relief, not then, not there. A lot of the crowd seemed puzzled and sullen, and the kitsune made a point of checking Sig’s spear, but she wasn’t going to find any sigils or glyphs. Sig hadn’t just been fighting while she was dancing around that monstrosity. She had been talking. However many unhappy spirits had gone into the making of that bone golem, Sig had managed to break the ties binding them, gotten them to form a union and go on strike. I turned and walked away, toward the van where my money was waiting.

Again, it struck me that Akihiko’s weakness was that he didn’t have followers or family. He had servants and slaves. There was no one who was going to defend Akihiko out of love or loyalty. One sign of vulnerability, and his entire empire would start collapsing into fragments just like that giant skeleton.

It was just a question of finding the right weak spot at the right time.

I crossed the bridge—the snipers were gone now—and found the onmyouji near the van. Akihiko was wearing his white definitely-not-a-trench-coat and smoking his much-more-than-a-cigar and calmly talking to a burly pale vampire who was wearing a winterized version of gang-style clothing. He had multiple layers beneath a hoodie, gloves with metal studs embedded in the knuckles, a black bandana visible beneath some kind of stocking cap, and hiking boots that had never been in any kind of wilderness that wasn’t paved over with concrete. The vampire probably looked like sex on legs to anyone who was susceptible to the mental broadcasting he was putting out, but to me, he looked like a big greasy grub with limbs and teeth.

I used my hearing to listen in on them while I collected my winnings. Akihiko was saying, “You could use the Crucible to discipline your more unruly hive members, Alfonse.”

“I deal with my soldiers myself,” the vampire responded.

“Then you could use your best fighters to increase your hive’s prestige,” Akihiko countered blithely.

The vampire showed a little fang. “I want to impress some fool, I blow one down.”

He was definitely trying to sound gangsta, whether naturally or by design. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire hive or a werewolf pack structuring itself like a gang—the violence, secrecy, and mobility of the lifestyle make it ideal for supernaturals trying to stay off the grid—but vampire leaders tend to be centuries old, and they take pride in that. When talking to peers, they usually sound more like a Lord Byron than a gang lord, no matter how they’re dressed. Either this Alfonse was relatively young, or he was rejecting that standard for a new one.

That was all the world needed: fangstas.

The harionago stepped in front of me as I drifted over. Her long black hair writhed down her body rather than hung limply, braids with metal spikes sinuously winding and unwinding around her like snakes. I wondered, irrelevantly, what the yuki-onna called her. Harriet? Dreadlocks? Braidy?

“Ah, well, it was just a thought,” Akihiko told his companion blithely. “Would you excuse me for a moment? I want to congratulate one of my fighters.”

“The wolf.” The vampire said this the same way he might tell someone that they forgot to flush, but Akihiko had already left his side to come greet me. The harionago stepped aside.

Akihiko and I stared at each other. What had he been doing all day? Casting divining charms? Researching me the same way I’d been researching him? Kidnapping and torturing Aubrey? Making arrangements for the mapinguari? I still didn’t have a handle on the man. I could smell anger coming off of him, and his politeness was starting to fray around the edges. Maybe he just wanted any uncertainties in his life removed, and I was one of them.

“Mr. Powell,” he said. “I have to tell you, I haven’t had much luck locating that person we discussed.”

Did he mean the rakshasa I was supposed to be hunting, or Kevin Kichida? The ambiguity was probably deliberate.

“You didn’t tell me that I was going to be in a death match, either,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have to kill that beast. I could have gotten many more fights out of it.”

“It was trying to kill me,” I said softly. “Were you?”

Akihiko waved his cigar dismissively. “I would have lost money if you had died tonight. A lot of money. I needed to do something a little more extreme to get ten-to-one odds against you after the last Crucible, and you said the creature you are after is attracted to violence and spectacle. I decided to help us both out. What is the expression? Win-win.”

Uh-huh. At the very least, he was trying to not-so-subtly encourage me to pack my bags and get the hell out of there if I really was just a knight who happened to be annoying him. As if to drive that point home, Akihiko added, “But you’re a guest here, not a prisoner. If you don’t like my games, you are free to leave.”

“I promised you three fights,” I reminded him.

“Yes, you did.” He smiled around the cigar clamped between his teeth, a fierce and brief smile, though he didn’t seem to enjoy making it.

“So, when is the next fight, anyhow?” It took a lot of effort, but I didn’t flex my shoulders or wince.

His face went opaque. “I don’t like to give much advance warning or keep to a regular schedule.”

“That sounds like a man who has enemies,” I commented.

“Any man who doesn’t have enemies isn’t a man,” he observed. “You know this. You have had all kinds of enemies, I think.”

“What kinds of enemies do you have?” I persisted.

“Only two kinds.” He made that fierce baring of teeth again. “Dead ones and soon-to-be-dead ones.”

I pretended to mull that over. “That’s pretty tough talk. Weren’t you a priest once?”

He nodded, but to himself, not in answer to my question. “Have you been checking up on me, Mr. Powell?”

“I have. You’re an interesting man.” Blatant flattery, but it was worth a try. Most sociopaths like to talk about themselves. It’s the narcissistic part of their disorder. Psychopaths are the ones who are so completely isolated in their own skin that they could care less if you understand them or not.

“You are interesting as well.” He said this with the air of someone being gracious. “You know, I thought about becoming a werewolf once. To stay young and heal from most injuries. What a magnificent thing.”

“But the hours suck,” I pointed out.

He waved that off impatiently. “I decided I did not like the odds against surviving the first full moon. Or the constant struggle with foreign instincts, either.”

I shook my head slightly. “You don’t like to lose control, do you?”

“Does anyone?” he wondered. “It was the discipline and ritual of religion that appealed to me, to answer your original question. The idea of re-creating the same ceremonies and traditions that had been performed for thousands of years, so that I was in effect helping make something that was immortal… being part of something timeless and beautiful… that was a kind of drug when I was a young man.”

“So, what happened?” I asked.

His mouth tightened. “I stopped being a young man.”

“That does tend to happen,” I said.

“To ordinary men. That is when I realized that I was simply doing what everyone else was doing,” he elaborated. “Trying to be immortal and failing. I realized that if I really wanted to honor the… I suppose you would call it God… if I really wanted to honor God, I would have to try to be more like him.”

I might call the force he was talking about God. I wasn’t sure I would call that force “him.” And even if we agreed to use the same word, I was pretty sure the underlying meaning to the universe I believed in but didn’t understand wasn’t anything like whatever Akihiko was talking about.

“You decided to become immortal,” I summarized.

“Not just immortal,” he said. “Timeless. So powerful that just my existence would cause others to be an echo or expression of me. A man has to have a goal, yes?”

“And you decided that being a priest of whatever religion you’re being so coy about was a weak substitute?” I probed. It would be a lot easier to try to track him down through history if I could narrow him down to Shintoism or Buddhism or some more obscure religion.

“All religions are a stepping-stone,” he asserted. “We are all driven to become part of something bigger than ourselves. But the things we experiment with are traps if we don’t grow and move beyond them.”

“What kind of things?” I said.

“Everything,” he said. “Fame. Religion. Art. Family. Fortunes. They are all things we try to build or be a part of so that some part of us will live on after we die.”

I shook my head then. “I don’t think family is a trap. That’s one of the worst things about being a werewolf. Constantly being driven to have a family and not being able to have children.”

He tapped the side of his head. “That is because you are trapped in here. You are Catholic, yes? Your God sacrificed his son.”

And there it was. The left turn from Self-Obsessed Asshole to Batshit Crazy.

“Sacrificed an aspect of himself, as I understand it,” I said. “And not for selfish reasons.”

“Abraham’s trial—the way he proved his godliness—was through his willingness to sacrifice his son,” Akihiko pressed on. “And David failed his test of faith when he was unwilling to accept the loss of his son, Absalom. Abandoning mortal attachments is one of the final steps toward understanding divinity. Do you read your own Bible?”

“I’m actually a lapsed Catholic,” I said. “You should really be having this conversation with a priest or a rabbi.”

Again, that mirthless smile. I wondered how long it had been since he felt anything like joy. “But I told you. I have moved beyond priests.”

And then he moved beyond me, at least physically. He abruptly turned and strode off into the night, his shadow stretching and lingering and deepening behind him in a way that was entirely unnatural.