Chapter 26: Car Chase

Masaaki had picked out a nice little stack of boxes and canisters that had obvious tea-leaves on them and then began to get impatient. Leaving his boxes piled on the floor, he walked around the corner where she had seen Shannon disappear, then frowned at the abandoned cart.

“Shannon?” he called, ducking down a nearby aisle. Aside from a little Chinese woman counting eggs inside the carton, it was empty. He went back to his tea aisle saw no one, then glanced behind him at the indecipherable racks of items under the humming white lights. “Shannon?” he called again, walking partway down the coffee aisle. As he rounded their cart, he saw the single canister, upside-down on the floor.

Masaaki stared at that a moment, then broke into a run. He jogged down the end of the aisle, stood and looked around in the main thoroughfare, and was just in time to see Shannon being shoved through the elf-powered double-doors by a large, silver-skinned man before the doors closed behind them and they were lost to the dim half-light beyond.

Ancestors be merciful, it’s the lord.

Masaaki bolted for the exit, but they were some distance away, moving fast, and Shannon and the man were already climbing into a huge, open-backed truck by the time he got through the doors to the courtyard beyond. He heard the huge, rumbling engine start.

Heart hammering, now, Masaaki unsheathed his sword and ran after them. “Shannon!”

The great truck backed toward him briefly, then twisted and started to turn away. Masaaki harnessed his hikari and pressed it into speed. He dashed after the rumbling vehicle and had just enough time to grab its open back with his fingers before it was flying through the courtyard, dragging him.

Masaaki held on, knowing that to let go now would be to never see his daimyō again.

The truck took a sudden left turn, almost hurling him off into the road, but then came to a sudden stop at the corner, next to the big red ‘stop sign.’ Masaaki used the moment to climb quietly over the back of the truck and creep forward along the bed.

The vampire lord was looking ahead of them, one hand gripping his daimyō by the wrist, the other hand on the steering-wheel. He hadn’t seen him, yet.

Masaaki slid forward as the car turned and started down toward a big ‘traffic light’ at the bottom of the hill. When it rolled to a stop at the base of the hill, he struck.

Shoving his fist through the glass, Masaaki summoned his hikari and lit up the inside of the car in a wash of daylight, focused on his fist. The lord screamed and recoiled, releasing the steering wheel to protect his face.

“Shannon, go!” Masaaki screamed.

She tumbled out of the open door and fell to the ground on her back, staring up at Masaaki and the screaming lord in horror.

“Run!” Masaaki shouted. “Back to the car! Now!” He gave the vampire an extra-long dose, ensuring he would not follow, then jumped from the bed and, drawing his sword, moved to the door.

“No!” Shannon shouted. The infuriating woman had not run, as instructed. “Don’t you dare, Masaaki!”

“This is twice now,” Masaaki snarled, “He’s going to die.” He yanked the driver’s-door open, revealing the whimpering vampire on the other side. He lifted his sword to strike.

“That is an order, Masaaki. Goddamn it. You can’t.”

He could. Easily. And, as the vampire looked up at him in wretched, shuddering misery, huddled against the floorboards of his massive car, Masaaki realized they both knew it. Seeing the monster’s pale, silvery skin, the demonic pupils dilated all around, Masaaki raised his sword again.

“As your daimyō, I am telling you no,” she snapped.

Masaaki snarled and lowered his sword. For a long moment, he and the vampire lord locked gazes, and, in the welling of old loathing and horror that followed, Masaaki almost killed him anyway. Then, focusing his hikari on his hand again, making the vampire hiss and cringe away from him, he leaned into the cab and growled, “You’ve been spared once. It won’t happen again.”

Then, with one last look at the sobbing wreck on the floorboards of the truck, Masaaki sheathed his sword and stalked after his daimyō.

#

Theo somehow managed to climb back behind the wheel and pull the doors shut and drive himself back to his hotel, though his entire body was trembling from head to toe, feeling awash in putrid liquid fire. He weakly tugged the keys from the ignition and got out, but couldn’t get his feet under him and he rolled out onto the concrete.

“You okay, buddy?” a tourist in the hotel parking-lot asked, pausing in unpacking luggage from a shiny new rental car.

“Fine,” Theo rasped, crawling to his feet and slamming the truck door behind him, denting the frame.

Seeing that, the man’s eyes went wide and he put his dinky rental car between himself and Theo. Theo stumbled past him and into the hotel lobby. Then, ignoring the clerk’s questions at the front desk, he made his way to the staircase and climbed to his third-story room. His hand was shaking so badly that it took him a good five minutes to force the keycard into the door, and by the time he pushed it open, Theo was close to simply ripping the entire thing off its hinges and throwing it down the stairs.

Calm down, he told himself, as he stepped inside and shut the door behind him. You’ll already be lucky if they don’t call the cops. And police, in his current state, were not something he would be able to deal with. He’d simply feed from them, to cleanse the filth from his system, then move to Tibet.

A yatagarasu. In three hundred years, he’d never been attacked by a yatagarasu. He’d seen them, twice, in two different dungeons, while out visiting fellow refugees from the Third Lands. But never free. Never with their magics unfettered.

“Chriiiiiiiiiiist,” Theo moaned, slumping to the bed. “Oh fuuuuuck that sucked.”

That was two for two. And both times, Theo had gotten his ass handed to him. She had enthralled a yatagarasu. And the yatagarasu had fully intended to kill him, he’d seen it in the man’s eyes. And she’d stopped him. Because she wanted a lord as a thrall. But she wasn’t going to take him in public, too dangerous. Hell, she’d probably followed him here.

“Fuuuck,” Theo groaned tilting his head to look at the window. Whichever way she decided to enter, as nauseated and disoriented as he was, he wasn’t going to be able to do jack shit about it. He’d even forgot to put up wards as he stepped into the room. Not like he had the ability to even feel the magic right now. “Gooooood,” he whimpered, curling into a ball on the bed, boots and all. “Fuck me, fuck me.”

A few minutes later, he was dry-heaving over the edge of his bed, onto the floor, having already retched up the meager remnants of his roast beef sandwich he’d purchased at the nearby gas station. Whimpering, he panted and tried to get his bearings as the world increasingly began to twist around him. He was grabbing the bed with both hands, now, just to assure himself that he wasn’t being thrown off by the way the world seemed to be spinning without him.

Then he heard movement in the hall outside his door and he froze. Footsteps. Stopping outside his room.

“Um, Mister Strongwell? Theo recognized the voice of the hotel clerk.

“Do not disturb!” Theo shouted, dropping his head back to the bed in relief.

“Uh, sir, I’ve got some folks here who say that you were just attacked by a guy with a sword. You injured, sir?”

“Fuck off,” Theo shouted. “No, I’m not injured.”

“Sir, you were stumbling… Can you please open the door? If you won’t open the door, I’m going to have to call the police.”

Cursing, Theo rolled off the bed and crawled to the door.

“Sir?”

“Goddamn it, I’m coming! Let me get dressed.” Theo crawled up the frame, held himself steady a moment, took several deep breaths, and opened the door.

The vampire queen, the yatagarasu, and the hotel clerk awaited him on the other side. The yatagarasu was in jeans and a T-shirt, arms crossed over his chest, giving him a flat look. Theo could see the tip of the longer sword poking out under his unzipped, long jacket.

“He looks okay,” the clerk said, inspecting him. “I don’t see any blood.”

“Me neither,” the queen said, peering up at Theo’s face with a flat expression. “Apparently he didn’t get stabbed.”

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” the hotel clerk said hurriedly. “Come on, folks, let’s let Mister Strongwell get his rest.”

“Actually, I think I might’ve witnessed an assault,” the vampire queen said pointedly, “so I think Mister Strongwell and I should probably get his side of the story, before I decide I need to go talk to the police anyway.”

The hotel clerk hesitated. “Uhh…”

“They can stay,” Theo rasped, not wanting to involve a human in the blood-bath he knew was about to follow. And, for the first time in centuries, he wasn’t exactly sure whose blood would be bathing whom. He could barely stand up straight, and he was trembling from head to toe. He stepped deeper into his room. “Come in. I’ll do what I can to alleviate your fears.”

“Yeah, we should probably just talk to him a minute, make sure we didn’t actually see what we thought we saw,” the queen replied. “You go on. I’ll come get you if I need to make that call, okay?”

The clerk licked his lips, gave Theo a nervous look, then said, “You sure, Mister Strongwell? It was kind of against policy to come get you, but there was a hole in your back window, and the way you’d been walking…”

“Dammit, just go,” Theo snapped. “I’ll take care of this. They obviously saw it wrong.” He backed into his room and waited for his guests to step inside.

The yatagarasu followed first, then the queen. She softly shut the door behind her.

“So,” the queen said, in the long silence that followed. “What the fuck, dude?”

Theo was warily working his way back to the bed, the yatagarasu keeping his body between the two of them, though he had thrown his jacket to the floor as soon as the door had shut.

“What do you mean, what the fuck?” Theo growled. “You send your parents to capture you a lord and you go enthrall a yatagarasu and you ask me what the fuck?”

The queen glanced at the yatagarasu with a frown. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“I want to kill him,” the yatagarasu said. “Let me kill him.”

“No, dammit,” she growled. “I want to know why he fucking attacked me. Twice!”

“He was going to take you to his lair and force you to produce him an army,” the yatagarasu said, without taking his eyes from Theo.

“I was going to kill her,” Theo said.

From the sudden flash in the yatagarasu’s eyes, he knew it hadn’t been the smartest thing he’d ever said, but at that moment, he didn’t really care. He slumped to the mattress and just rolled over onto his side, feeling so sick that death, at that point, was a welcome change.

“Okaaaaay,” the queen said, obviously not having expected that response. She licked her lips and looked nervously at the door. “So how many of you are there? And why do you want me dead? It was my parents, wasn’t it? They hurt someone, didn’t they?”

“I killed them both,” Theo said, squeezing his eyes shut and gripping the bed again to still the wretched world’s spinning. He figured if he stayed as un-threatening as possible, maybe the yatagarasu wouldn’t hit him with another blast of sunlight before he put one of those swords through his neck.

There was a very long silence before the queen said in a soft voice, “Seriously?”

“They fucking deserved it,” Theo growled. “And you’ll get the same, when you don’t have your damned pet following you around.”

“I’m not enthralled,” the yatagarasu said.

Theo snorted. “Right.”

“I’m not.”

“Why would he be enthralled?” the queen said.

Theo lifted his head from the bed just long enough to see the perfectly fake puzzled look on the queen’s face, then dropped his forehead back to the blankets. “Just have your pet kill me and get it over with. Right now, I’d rather be dead, anyway.”

The queen started moving towards him. “But I don’t unders—”

“Stay the fuck away from me!” Theo snarled, tumbling out of the bed and up against the far wall, facing her, his entire body trembling with the feel of the yatagarasu’s magic. “You try to take me, bitch, and I will rip off your fucking arms.”

In that instant, the yatagarasu flared again, this time his whole body, and Theo shrieked and curled into a ball against the wall, sobbing under the vile filth that inundated his being.

“Masaaki, stop it,” the queen snapped.

The yatagarasu didn’t obey, but actually stepped forward, bringing the eye-searing light closer, wrenching a helpless wail from Theo’s chest. A few feet away, the man’s voice growled, “This one needs to die, daimyō. He intended to kill you. He fed from me against my will.”

“Stop hurting him, Masaaki. Now.”

The light vanished, leaving sweet, blessed darkness. Theo realized his face was pressed to the hard hotel carpet, tears and saliva sticking to the floor under his sobs.

“Look,” the queen said, “I’m, um…not like my parents, okay? Ask Masaaki.”

“He’s enthralled!” Theo screamed. “Fucking kill me already!” He couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t even hear worth a damn. He felt like his whole being had been dipped in tar.

“I’m not enthralled,” the yatagarasu retorted. “But you may be, if you don’t start treating her with respect.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Theo said. But it came on a whimper of despair. He knew he couldn’t stop them, if that’s what they decided to do. With the yatagarasu pinning him down, she could sink her fangs into him and there wouldn’t be a damn thing Theo could do about it.

“Dude,” the queen said. “Why does he think you’re enthralled?”

“You know how I sliced open your wrist and drank of your venom?” the yatagarasu patiently explained to her. “If, instead, you had injected that same venom into my blood-stream, before I’d had a chance to immunize myself, I would be, even now, unable to disobey you, daimyō.”

“Well, shit, I wish you had told me that before I let you cut open my arm, you asshole. A lot of stuff would have gone a lot more smoothly.”

“And I wouldn’t have been able to leave that tea-aisle, once you told me to stay,” the yatagarasu retorted.

“Oh.” She actually sounded embarrassed.

Slowly, even through his dimmed senses, the truth of the situation was beginning to dawn on Theo. He had heard her tell the yatagarasu to stay in the tea aisle. It was why he had accosted her in the coffee aisle and taken her around behind two other aisles and out. He had assumed the yatagarasu couldn’t follow.

Very slowly, Theo opened his eyes and looked up at the yatagarasu, who was standing a good four feet out of reach, katana drawn. Then, shaking all over, utterly weak, he turned his head to look at the queen.

“So,” the yatagarasu said to the queen, “I said I’d let you thrall a lord, if we couldn’t get anything else to help.” His gray-on-brown eyes were fixed on Theo. “This is a lord, and the sanzuwu fled.”

Theo’s heart started to hammer violently and he tried to crawl away.

“Stay there and face your fate like a man,” the yatagarasu growled, “or I’ll douse you with light again, demon.”