Dream of Crimson – Part III
By Vikki
Disclaimer: It belongs to Takehito Koyasu, not me. Please don't sue, I am broke.
Flame Policy: Do you remember the OVAs? When Ken gets that really crazed look while he's killing that man? Yeah. That's the Ken that lives with me. Draw your own conclusions.
* * *
"Aya, how come you didn't say anything while we were in there? What's Bethany-san got on you?" I asked as we passed into the cool nighttime air and walked to Aya's car.
". . ." Aya scowled at me before unlocking the car door.
That was the typical Aya I knew. Feeling slightly more assured that the world wasn't spinning off its axis I shrugged indifferently and slid into the passenger's seat. Obviously I wasn't going to get any answers from Aya tonight, so instead I sat back and contemplated Bethany.
The woman unnerved me. What was she? Inwardly I was quaking the same way I had after my up-close-and-personal encounter with Stacey. She had been trying to do something to me with that damned pen, too, though I was completely stumped as to what, exactly.
Surprisingly, it was Aya who broke the silence in the car. "Do you know how to fire a gun?"
I jumped and spun to face Aya. His eyes were focused on the road. Anyone would have thought he had just asked me to buckle my seat belt or something. "Uh . . ." I said brilliantly. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."
Actually, it had been over a year since I'd touched a gun. After I nearly got mugged during a trip to America as a J-League goalie, my coach insisted I get a gun for self-defense. I learned how to shoot it, of course, but then I'd been kicked out of the League and ended up in Weiss. Guns had been too loud for assassination. Even the telltale sound of a silencer is sometimes too much. I had gotten rid of the gun and ironically started killing after it was gone.
"Good." Aya's jaw tightened before he continued, "Buy one. Get silver bullets."
Silver bullets . . .? "Why?" I asked, raising my eyebrows at him.
"There are two ways to kill a vampire." Aya turned on his left blinker and changed lanes. "The famous one is to drive a wooden stake through its heart. Another way is to destroy the head and chest cavity. Only silver bullets can do this amount of damage to a blood vampire from great range."
"Why silver bullets?" I couldn't help asking.
"Silver is the bane of a blood vampire's existence." We were nearing the apartment complex we lived in. "It is deadly to them."
It sounded as plausible as anything else I'd heard in the last twelve hours, though I was beginning to mentally question the sudden volunteering of information. "Okay," I agreed as Aya parked the car. "Whatever you say."
We didn't say anything else to each other that night; it was a lot later than I had thought. I went to my apartment, stripped down to my boxers, and took two asprin before flopping into my bed.
Sleep was a long time in coming. When it finally came it brought nightmares.
* * *
Aya stood over a dead body, katana in hand, chest heaving. He was covered in blood, stained a malevolent crimson hue. I didn't know if the blood was his own or his victim's.
Purple eyes met my own; they were lifeless. There was evil intent in those eyes. I tried to cry out, but my voice would not come.
The blood on Aya's clothes came to life. It sprang up towards me like a viper, into my throat and up my nose, cutting off my air. Aya began to laugh, but someone else's voice sprang from his mouth – a voice I could not identify. I could not breathe. I was dying.
The last thing I saw was the flicker of a black-waxen candle.
I sat up in my bed gasping for air and covered in sweat. Clutching my bare chest, I struggled to catch my breath. The images of the dream were fresh in my mind.
The phone rang.
I picked up my watch with a trembling hand: 4:30 AM. Instantly irritable and feeling sick to my stomach, I struggled to my feet and stumbled to the kitchen. I reached the phone on its third ring. "Who is it?" I demanded tiredly.
"Well, good morning to you too," answered the voice on the other end. It was a woman's voice, sultry and lustful, but I didn't recognize it.
"What do you want?" I asked, ignoring her affronted tone.
"Aren't we the cold one today?" the woman giggled. "I thought that was Aya's job."
"Look," I snapped, waking up a bit. "You called me at four-thirty in the morning for no apparent reason. If you don't give me a good reason to listen to you insult me in the next thirty seconds, I'm hanging up the phone and trying to salvage what's left of the night."
"They were right, you are short-tempered," she answered, voice bemused.
I bit down on my tongue, then told her, "I'm hanging up now," and began to do just that.
"No, wait," she said, voice suddenly urgent and devoid of the teasing tone she had used earlier. "I need to talk to you."
"Then talk," I said in my best imitation-Aya voice.
"Atashi no namae wa Ryuuki Yumi," she said quietly. "Please call me Yumi. I know all about you, Ken Hidaka – you and your friends."
So I had been woken up in the middle of the night to confront a stalker. It was my turn to be amused. More likely than not, it was one of the girls who frequented the flower shop. I knew that some of them were obsessed enough to look up our (false) personal data, as they flagrantly discussed what they thought they knew while cooing over us in the flower shop. I wasn't in the least concerned by one young high school student who thought she knew everything about us. "Really?" I asked.
"Yes. And before you dismiss me as a foolish, obsessed fan, let me demonstrate just how much I know."
"Go ahead," I answered. This could be amusing.
"I know that you, Aya Fujimiya, Youji Kudou, and Omi Tsukiyono are all assassins working for a man who is code-named Persia. Would you prefer I called you Siberian?" she asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "I also know that today you encountered vampires and that you have had a rendezvous with the woman called 'Bethany' – better known as Bel'uah."
I felt my throat go dry as she revealed her knowledge. I had been horribly, horribly wrong. "Just who are you?" I rasped.
"Someone who needs to ask you a few questions."
Not again. "Look, I don't have any idea what's going on either. When do I get to ask the questions?" I said impatiently. My heart was doing a tap dance.
"Help me, and I'll help you," Yumi answered, voice turning sultry again.
"Like hell," I snorted. "You want to talk? I pick the place and the time, and I get to ask the questions first. I'll only answer what I want to answer. Agreed?"
"You are in no position to bargain, Hidaka-san. You need us more than we need you," Yumi said coolly.
"I don't need anyone, thank you," I practically snarled.
"You have no choice in the matter. Don't forget, I know all about your … nighttime activities."
"Resorting to blackmail?" I asked sarcastically to hide how queasy my stomach had become.
"I use what works." I could almost hear her shrug.
I squeezed my eyes shut, rubbing the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger to stave off the approaching headache. Already the concussion I had sustained throbbed fiercely. "All right. All right. When and where?"
"Tomorrow – no, tonight – at 9:30 PM, at the Hot Cat Club." The name of the place she gave was in English and sounded sleazy on her tongue. "It's in the commercial district. I'm sending the directions now."
"Sending?" I was bewildered.
"Faxing them, you idiot," she sensed my confusion. "What did you think?"
I realized I'd been expecting something exotic and supernatural, and just as quickly I realized that I knew – "You're a witch."
She gave a little gasp of surprise. "Strong you are," she said, somewhat formally. "Strong and fearsome will be your rage, but you must direct it. This is why I must see you. I must give you direction."
A moment of irritation rose again. "And I should receive directions from a total stranger … why?"
Yumi laughed gently. "Why not? You already do from Persia." Her voice became sober. "We could be listened to on this phone. Your end is not protected. This is why you must come to the club. No vampire can enter here." I heard her lick her lips. "We cannot talk any longer. I will see you tonight." Click.
I stared at the phone for a moment, then hung up before the courtesy message could tell me to do so.
Vampires and witches and things that go bump in the night. Ken Hidaka, you really are going mad – and if you're not, you're in really deep, deep shit.
* * *
I barely slept for the rest of the night, and my dozing dreams were colored by Yumi's seductive, insistent voice and Aya's maddened laughter after a kill. When I 'woke up' (more like rose out of my bed like one of the Living Dead), I stumbled my way over to the Koneko no Sumu Ie, apologized to Omi and told him that I wouldn't be at work today, and wandered out into the streets of Tokyo equipped only with my wallet and my new preternatural sense of what was human, what was superhuman, and what was nonhuman.
I would love to say that I was absolutely fearless on that bright spring morning, but that would be a lie. I was terrified. Until yesterday my world had been comfortably stable, if a little unreal. Now nothing was safe. Our newest mission was to kill vampires and werewolves. Aya was some sort of a magician – a nonhuman magician, at that. A powerful nonhuman named Bethany was trying to exert her control over me and already exerted control over Aya. A witch who worked in a sleazy club wanted answers from me. And I – I was a superhuman, one who sensed what others could not.
As I wandered through Tokyo, I knew that there was only one thing I really wanted, and that was a gun. Silver bullets or no, just having a gun would have been a comfort. My claws were nice for ripping out the throats of other humans, but they would not save me from someone like Stacey with her preternatural strength and fearsome eyes.
In the end I realized that purchasing a gun legally was out of the question. It would put my name on the records of Tokyo, and maybe someone would look at my photo someday and say, hey, that's the soccer player who got kicked out of the J-League … isn't he dead? And then there would be questions for which there were no legal answers, and maybe the press, and my family …
It just wasn't worth it.
Of course, maybe I was just vain thinking that someone would ever recognize me, but why risk it? I wandered away from respectable Tokyo, into the alleys of the lower class housing. I had a destination in mind.
When I found the little door into the warehouse I was looking for, it was still bright light outside, but the alleyway was shadowed and cold. I hunched my shoulders and twisted the doorknob. Not surprisingly, it was locked, although the warehouse was probably still abandoned. Using an old trick that Kase had shown me, I pulled out a credit card and tried to shove it into the space between the doorframe and the door itself.
A bottle fell from one of the heaps of trash behind me and shattered on the ground.
In my paranoid state of mind, this was an attack warning. I spun around, fists held up, ready to run.
Two teenaged boys stood before me. They were in aggressive stances; they had been about to rush up and attack me when the bottle fell. Their eyes widened when I spun to face them.
But they were both human, blessedly human! I nearly cried with relief. Even when one of them rushed up to attack me regardless, I struck him aside almost carelessly, completely unafraid. He sprawled on the ground. The other youth stared at me for a moment before turning and running out of the alley.
The one I had hit began to rise to his feet slowly, hands groping for the pipe he had carried. No longer overwhelmed by the relief of facing normal people, I kicked the pipe out of his reach and grabbed him by the shirt. He looked at me, eyes wide. I scowled as darkly as I could. "Don't be stupid and throw away your life," I snarled. "Because it starts with the mugging, then you're killing, and before you know it, you are the king of crime. And then I will come out of the night, your first attempted victim, and like an Angel of Vengeance I'll kill you for your waste!"
It felt so righteous, so good, to scare this youth out of crime. He nodded violently, stuttering apologies. If I hadn't been holding him by the shirt, he probably would have started bowing, bobbing like a store clerk. "Don't apologize to me. Go apologize to your mother, and never do it again!" I released him, and he bowed deeply to me and ran from me, very nearly sobbing.
I turned back to the door, picked up my credit card, and broke into the warehouse. My confidence in myself had been restored.
The warehouse was much the same way I had remembered it – cold and dark and empty. It smelled faintly of smoke. Silently I supposed that they never could have really aired out the warehouse without peeling back the roof.
I felt the edge of fear slip in again, and I let it make me wary. Certainly it was no defense against the images that threatened to well up in my mind as I fumbled in my pocket for a penlight.
Burning, acrid smoke filled my lungs and nostrils, and I choked as I tried to rise to my feet. My legs were both broken; I couldn't even crawl. Kase, Kase –
I shook my head to clear it and gripped the little flashlight. It provided a bit of illumination as I crossed the gigantic concrete floor, almost jogging in my haste to find what I sought and leave.
"Ken!" he screamed as they dragged him away. "Ken! Help me!" And the lighter flew back over the man's shoulder and landed in the oil all around me, and in that horrible instant, through the pain of broken bones and bruised innards, I knew I was going to die, and I would never see my family or Kase ever again. I reached out to my friend as if holding him would save us both.
The flames rose around me and Kase disappeared forever.
I was finally at the wall, but I found myself leaning my head against the flame-blackened concrete and trying not to scream or cry. Kase! It had all been a lie. A damned, damned lie. He had set me up and he left me for dead here in this warehouse, trusting that I would be burnt to a crisp and never found.
Turn and turn about, my friend. Kase was dead by my own hands. Or perhaps that was 'by my own claws'.
I hated myself far more than I ever hated Kase. I hated him for being a liar, but I was a murderer.
I gritted my teeth and wrestled with my anger for a few moments before I was calm enough to squat next to the wall, reach into the crack between it and the floor, and find what I was looking for.
I pulled my old handgun, a .44 Smith and Wesson semi-automatic, free from the dirt of time and examined it in the penlight. My name was still etched into the handle. I had no bullets, but those were easy enough to purchase legally.
"You are Weiss' bodyguard," I said quietly, brushing the dirt off of the gun with my thumb as I squatted there in the darkness. I was so glad I had kept this and not thrown it into a river. I already felt safer despite having no bullets. After checking the gun for damage (there was none), I pocketed it and left the warehouse without incident, my old demons wrestled back into the shadows of my mind for the moment.
* * *
By around 4:30 PM I had purchased two packs of exploding tip bullets for my gun and had practiced at the shooting range for an hour, making myself accustomed to the weapon again. I had no silver bullets, but I felt less fear. At least next time I would have something to fight the vampires with that didn't require me being in their faces, intimately tearing at their skin, and within their grip.
Having nothing else to do, I came back to the flower shop where Omi and Aya were surrounded by the middle-school girls who often invaded the shop after school. Almost immediately my own group of fans flocked to me. "Ken-san!" "Ken-kun!" "We missed you! Where have you been?"
The familiarity of such surroundings was comforting and frightening at the same time. I can't be caught off-guard! There are worse things than vampires. I thought of Bethany and her clicking pen and shivered before wondering when I had begun to classify her as more dangerous than the vampires we were supposed to kill.
I remembered Youji abruptly. "Omi! How's Youji doing?"
Omi looked up at me distractedly. "He's probably sleeping still. Aya-kun says that it's only natural after last night." He threw a glance at Aya. Aya stoically ignored us both as easily as he ignored the girls fawning over him. Again Omi's gaze returned to me, his eyes pleading. "Ken-kun, can you please help us in here?"
I shook my head. "I have to see Youji." With that, I turned away and waded through the girls towards our apartment complex.
Behind me Aya barked, "If you're not going to buy something, get out!"
I smiled.
* * *
Author's Notes: Again, I have wonderful reviewers! Thank you forever and ever! ^^x
To answer a few more questions: someone asked if I wrote the poem at the beginning myself. I did. At the time I thought it had something to do with the plotline. Now I know better. It does sound pretty cool, doesn't it? ^^x
On the subject of pairings: I blatantly avoid the subject in this fic. Personally, I love YoujixKen and RanxKen pairups. I also have this little thing for AyaxYouji … in this fic, you may notice that Ken appreciates the female bodies around him, but there will be plenty of eyecandy (if you have a good imagination) for the female fans that I'm sure are reading. (Think leather! Hehehe …) You can decide for yourself which way each character swings. I myself am not sure with this particular work.
Finally – the next section strives to make my fic earn the 'R' rating I have given it. Stay tuned …