The truck hissed to a stop, steam rising from its undercarriage. The doors opened, and two men got out. They were roughly dressed, in jeans and zipped-up hooded windbreakers. The rain fell steadily, rattling off the truck's metal body.
A moment later, the headlights from a vehicle spiked through the gloom. A black Toyota sedan pulled slowly into the parking lot and drove up to the panel truck, parking beside it. From his perch atop the truck, Shido peered down as the car's door opened. A human couldn't have kept that position through the streets, but for the vampire, it was no problem.
The man who got out of the car wore black slacks and a white button-down shirt, his dark hair slicked back from his forehead. He looked entirely normal, but Shido caught something off about him at once.
He tastes of darkness. It was certain, now, that Noguchi had pointed them in the direction of the correct body-snatchers. Their client, this man, was connected to the night breeds.
"Well, what do you have for me tonight?" he addressed the two hooded men, rubbing his hands together.
"A nice fresh one."
"Good, good."
He continued rubbing his hands. The skin on the outside edges was peeling a bit, Shido noticed. It must have itched; the buyer raked it repeatedly with his nails.
"Hey, you're not the regular guy," said one of the body-snatchers."
"Is there a problem?"
"I don't like it when plans get changed. It usually means bad news."
The buyer took a thick envelope from his rear hip pocket and tossed it to the doubting Thomas. The graverobber caught it, tore it open, and riffed through the yen notes. He unzipped his windbreaker and tucked the payment away inside.
"Glad to see you appreciate my concerns."
"Excellent. Now, if we may proceed? This rain is so unpleasant for one's health." He smiled as if he'd said something funny.
The body-snatchers went around to the back of their truck, opened the door, and unloaded their merchandise. The body was wrapped up in white and looked only vaguely human-like, the sheet around it concealing anything that made the corpse unique or special. In a way it was appropriate. Without an abiding spirit, a corpse was just meat and bone, with particular meaning only in the memories of the living. The buyer opened the back door of his Toyota and they pushed it inside.
"Been a pleasure, pal. Same time next week as usual?"
The buyer nodded, still worrying at the edge of his hand with his nails.
"Of course."
The graverobbers turned to go back to their truck and the dark man made as if he would, to, get behind the wheel of his vehicle, but he stopped with one hand on the door. Shido's night vision caught the flexing of the buyer's nostrils, as if he was sniffing the air, sensing...what? A lurking vampire?
In a flash, Shido rolled off the far side of the truck, landing silently only a few feet behind the bodysnatcher who was getting into the cab on that side. The man never turned as Shido bounded away through the rain, taking cover on the far side of the lot, which was only to be expected. Vampiric stealth always had an edge on purely human senses. It made Shido worry about the buyer. Had he truly been scenting something? If so, how? Was he possessed by a breed, made less than human?
The truck pulled away, water spraying from its tires. Where it went wasn't his business; as Yayoi had pointed out, their morbid trade wasn't within her jurisdiction. She might or might not put the local police on to them, depending on whether she valued more her duty to the law or her promise to the yakuza boss. What manner of justice awaited them was not Shido's present concern.
The Toyota and its driver were a different matter. As it turned out of the parking lot, Shido rejoined Yayoi, who had tailed the truck through more ordinary means than he had. Riho was waiting in the back seat.
"So, was Noguchi playing it straight?" Yayoi asked as Shido got in.
"It looks that way. Whomever the buyer is, he's involved with the night breeds."
The Toyota wasn't difficult to follow, despite its common color and make; the buyer seemed almost intoxicated, driving too fast, reacting to traffic signals and upcoming turns too slowly so that the car would jerk to a stop or swivel suddenly into a corner, usually from the wrong lane. Since Shido had gotten the plate number, Yayoi called it in while they followed. The vehicle was registered in the name of Shinji Kawamura, and the owner's listed address was in the general direction the car was heading.
"He's supposed to be a student, twenty-four years old," Yayoi relayed what the official records had to say about Kawamura.
"Then he can't be the buyer," Shido said. "That man was older, in his early thirties."
"An associate, then? Or maybe a family member? I'll have the agency dig up what it can on Kawamura and see if anything shows up."
"It shouldn't matter," Shido said. "We should be able to resolve this tonight."
The Toyota pulled into a residential side street, then into the driveway of a large, Western-style mansion set on an outsized estate.
"That's the right address," Yayoi said, pulling to a stop up the street on the far side.
"Shido and Riho ought to feel right at home," Guni commented. "It looks like something out of a Dracula movie."
"The creepy house, the rain...All we need is the lightning," Riho agreed.
"Just be on watch; there are real night breeds to go with the theatrical atmosphere."
Shido led the way through the open gate in the estate's brick wall, then up the path towards the house. The buyer had parked his car up the drive and gotten out. He opened the back door and took out the sheet-wrapped body, hefting it up onto one shoulder with apparent ease. He walked up to the elaborate porch and opened the door, then took the body inside.
"He didn't even take it around to a side or back door," Shido said. "Whatever is going on, it's no secret from the rest of the household."
Yayoi grinned wolfishly.
"Then I'd say we don't have to play this out subtly, do we?" She drew her gun, a specially-modified automatic loaded with the NOS's standard silver hollow-point rounds and with an underbarrel flashlight so that her aim would be in sync with her vision.
The vampires carried no such weapons. They didn't need them.
The buyer had been careless about his security. Not only had he left the gate open, but they found the door unlocked as well.
"Something's wrong," Shido said. "That man isn't thinking like a human any more." He remembered the remark the buyer had made about health that he'd somehow found funny. It would have been ironic humor, if the man's body was already dead and he was only a breed inhabiting it.
He hadn't stopped to wipe his feet, either. A trail of wet footprints led down the unlit hall, then around a corner and into a study, a small room with a writing desk and the walls lined with bookcases. One section of the shelves had swung away from the wall like a hinged door, revealing a staircase going down.
Shido had only a few moments to take in those details. With a chittering growl, a form launched itself at them from its perch on top of the bookshelves. Shido grabbed Yayoi and pulled her aside while Riho sprang the other way. The figure's clawed hand struck the parquet floor hard, cracking the polished wood and spraying off splinters.
"Another breed!" he snapped. This one looked nearly human; its blank blue eyes and massive talons were its only apparent changes from its human host's shape, that of a young blonde woman in a green dress.
Riho actually reacted faster to the threat than Shido did, since she'd only had to look after her own safety. She spun, putting her back to one of the cases, and bit down on her right forefinger. Blood welled up in the cut, twisting and hardening until it took the shape of a bloodsword like Shido's own. A mix of emotions rushed through him at the sight. He was proud of how well she was mastering the skills of her new existence, but at the same time it was balanced by pangs of sorrow at watching an innocent girl fall deeper and deeper into the darkness, all because of a momentary act of kindness he'd showed her at the love she'd developed for him.
There was fear, too, a fear that never really left him, that one day Riho would fall all the way into the dark, lose her human heart and become nothing but another monster for him to hunt. Cain had once plucked that fear from his mind, showed it to him in all its twisted glory, and the despair of it had nearly killed him. In a way, though, he owed Cain a debt of gratitude, for it had been that same vision which forced Shido to recognize that Riho's feelings for him were genuine, not a silly schoolgirl crush, and had likewise opened his eyes to the depths of his own feelings for her.
The thought of losing someone, after all, is no threat if one doesn't care for them in the first place.
Riho slashed down with her sword at the night breed, but the monster got its clawed hand back around to block the strike, talons grating against the blade. One hand was not enough, so it used its other hand as well, but still Riho forced the creature back, down to one knee. As a vampire, even a young one, she had much greater power than a low-level breed like she faced.
In desperation, the breed opened its mouth in a rictus-like grin and its tongue lashed out. It was long and flexible like a frog's, but the last foot of it at the tip was covered with barbs like rose thorns. As if it were a whip, it coiled around Riho's neck, slashing into the girl's throat as it tightened.
In the next instant the breed's advantage was destroyed as Shido's own bloodsword plunged into it from behind. With the sword piercing its body, Shido sent his power through the blade and into the night breed. Blue flames wreathed the creature in its stolen corpse, and in the next instant there was nothing left but ash.
"Riho! Are you all right?" Shido cried, taking her shoulders in his hands, trying to get a look at her wounds.
"I...I think so, Mr. Shido." She looked down at her feet. "I just can't believe that I was so stupid. I shouldn't have let it hurt me at all!" She touched her wounded throat and winced; a necklace of puncture marks ringed it, and blood had streamed from more than one in little ribbons down her neck.
"Don't worry about it. You haven't had centuries of fighting the night breeds to practice, after all." He brushed back a few stray hairs from her face, grazing the back of his fingers gently against her cheek. "Just remember that even the ones that inhabit human bodies aren't bound by that form. They pervert their host's body to suit their own nature."
He was impressed by the way she didn't seem to be frightened by the injury. Shido had killed the breed before it could inflict serious damage; to a vampire the wounds were painful but no more. Her natural healing would erase them in minutes, even faster if she had the chance to drink blood to replenish her strength.
"I'll try, Mr. Shido."
Shido led the way down the narrow staircase, followed by Yayoi and with Riho in the rear. Light streamed up from down below, so he was not expecting a dank catacomb, but the unusual laboratory was almost as strange. Antique fixtures and fittings that looked a century old were combined with crazed devices.
"It's like the set from a Frankenstein movie," Yayoi commented.
"Indeed it is," cackled a voice, that of the man who'd bought the latest body. He stood at the far side of the room, between two metal-topped tables. The skin he'd been scratching now hung in tatters from the heels and edges of his palms, revealing a smooth substance like midnight-blue glass beneath. "For here new lives are breathed into the dead flesh of corpses. A modern miracle, as this young man thought."
The breed reached down towards one of the tables, and ran his decaying hand over the naked chest of the young man lying there.
"He was very diligent in his work, performing experiments with scientific zeal. He really believed, you see, that in carrying out this work he was restoring life to deceased tissue--at least, that's what he believed until he accidentally killed his fiancee with all this dangerous electrical equipment and was not precisely pleased with his attempts at resurrection. I'm afraid I had to step in personally at that point."
"Then this place...is some kind of factory for night breeds?" Yayoi exclaimed.
"Exactly, my dear. The techniques performed here call the breeds from the darkness and provide them with ready-made hosts. I showed this house's owner how over a century ago, but I'm so pleased that someone would seek to follow in his footsteps."
"So this is your doing, then?" Shido challenged. "Not content with your own evil, you bring more of your murderous kind here to prey on humans?"
"I seek to offer my kind shelter and protection in the light. Do you not also propagate your own, and teach and shelter your spawn...vampire?" he said with a meaningful glance at Riho.
"Don't you dare compare Riho to your filthy kind!" Shido snapped, then raked his hand across his fangs and sprayed the blood droplets towards the breed with a flick of his wrist. The bloodmissiles were stopped in mid-air, though, by a shimmering blue aura that sprang up around the breed. The breed then waved his hand, and a surge of force seemed to rush outward from the barrier, ignoring the laboratory equipment but slamming into the three intruders with such impact that even Shido was knocked down.
"Please don't be hasty," the breed said. It scratched at the back of its right hand, sloughing off more skin to reveal the blue glass "flesh" beneath. "You've spent what must have been considerable effort to find me. The least I can do is provide you with a demonstration."