Chapter Twenty-Two: Hidden Trauma
Exploiting the vantage of the night, Tora peered down at the old hotel's courtyard from the bakery's roof on the other side of the street.
"Something seems off," he called back. Sporting his two-toned jacket and skull cap, his face mask was pulled down to just below his chin. He crossed his arms against his chest, frowning. "I count six guards and like five sedans parked out front."
"Is that a lot?" Kagome asked, hidden in the shadow of the roof access.
"It draws attention, which is typically what they don't want for a place like this." He hummed thoughtfully. "Could be that this is where they retreated after our adventure at the nightclub."
"If that's the case, then there will be more guards inside than usual as well, including that bastard boss of theirs."
He nodded.
The double doors of the entrance swung open and a group of men exited the hotel. Western in facial features, they poured out, their clothes disheveled. Flanking them on either side were more men, these ones in suits. They directed the group toward the train station a block away.
"They're kicking the customers out," he said, revulsion souring his voice. "Simplifies matters, but I would have enjoyed blowing out a few of their kneecaps."
"Same here," she agreed as she approached him at the edge of the roof.
He turned around, surprised.
Sporting black boots and matching leggings, she had kept her green skirt but now wore a white hoodie in place of her sailor top. The hood was drawn up over her head. Over the top of her hoodie was a white Kevlar vest with a stylized sun stenciled onto the back. At her hip, a quiver of arrows hung, and across her back, a compound bow was slung. And like him, her face mask sat wrinkled below her chin.
Before he could comment, she held a thick vest out to him.
"It's only fair that if we get protection that you get some too," she said with a soft smile. "We're all in this together."
Reverently, he accepted it, "Thank you."
"Since he paid for it, Sesshoumaru was supposed to give it to you, but…" she trailed off.
Already securing the vest over his jacket and adjusting the straps, Tora reassured her. "He's pretty good at tracking, so he'll be here. He's tough too. And most importantly, he's stubborn."
She nodded, knowing that too well. It was a family trait.
"Still," he added, "I'm not sure what the next step should be. This hotel is ten stories with an unknown number of enemies inside. We don't even know where the girls are being held let alone if Amaya is even here. Obviously, we're going to rescue them no matter what, but I've never done anything like this before."
"I thought you were a street hero."
"Yeah, the emphasis on street. Roughing up some low-level baseball bat losers is not the same as sieging this place. This is outside of my experience."
"Should we call the police?"
"We could," he replied thoughtfully, "Hell, we could go to the police box on the corner and report suspicious activity, but our concerns aren't going to outweigh the yakuza's legitimacy in this neighborhood."
"Like the police are corrupt?"
"Not necessarily," he sighed. "More like an anonymous report versus a business owner. Unless someone is getting assaulted right in front of them, the police aren't going to look too closely. It's like a bandaged wound. If it seems all right on the outside, you might not realize that it's festering underneath even if someone tells you it smells off."
The bottom of her fist struck her palm as an idea popped into her mind. "What about the fire alarm again? Like at the nightclub?"
Raising an eyebrow, he considered it. Then he shook his head. "Same problem as with the police. If they have a fire system that's connected to the local fire station, they can just say it's a false alarm. It only worked at the nightclub because the patrons were free to flee if they chose to. These girls can't choose to evacuate."
"What are we going to do?"
"I don't know."
"We will siege it directly," a cool voice commanded from behind them.
They both spun around, startled.
Catching the oblique light from the streetlamps below, Sesshoumaru emerged from the shadows.
"#%$# me!" Tora blurted out, his hand grabbing at his chest.
"You've been shot!" Kagome exclaimed, her eyes fixed on two dark stains: one at his flank below the vest and the other at his right thigh. When she approached him, her attention flowed from the stains to his shredded coattails, and then finally to his pockmarked chest where his vest had absorbed the damage. She reached to touch his injuries.
"Do not concern yourself," he said dismissively when she fumbled in her pocket for a penlight. "One bullet passed through and I dug the other out. My youki is healing both wounds as we speak."
"Don't concern myself?" she repeated, astonished. "You were supposed to create a diversion. Not fight twenty armed guards to a standstill. We're a team. We agreed upon signals and you ignored them. I can't believe you were lecturing me on impulsivity right before we made our plan for the nightclub."
"I'm fine."
"No, you're reckless. As can be seen, your armor doesn't protect your whole body. What if they had shot you in the head and your thick skull didn't hold up? There are plenty of arteries and veins that aren't protected by bone or the vest. What if you had been hit there? Your youki isn't what it once was. You could have bled out. This doesn't even include a scenario where a bullet gets lodged in one of your internal organs and we can't get it out."
He waited, his expression unreadable from behind the mask.
She threw up her arms. "I don't understand. You're family. We care about you and your safety. This is excluding the fact that from what you're willing to admit, you're the last youkai. There are so many reasons for you to be safer. To minimize risks. To rely on others." She sighed. "I just don't get it."
Silence passed.
"Sesshoumaru?" Tora interrupted, breaking the tension. A few steps further away from the two of them than a moment ago, he gazed down at the hotel entrance, the prospect of risking death suddenly appealing.
The daiyoukai looked at him.
"Do you have any ideas on how we can support you in a direct siege?"
Sesshoumaru swept past Kagome to study the hotel.
"In terms of scale," Tora explained, "There are a lot of unknowns and no effective ways to do reconnaissance, at least not on our timetable. We don't know how many enemies there are or where they're keeping the girls. And we don't know the floor plan. It goes without saying that you're going to do most of the fighting, so what can we do to give you an advantage that won't also get us killed?"
Together, they appraised what they could see. The armed guards stationed at the entrance and the occasional silhouette as it passed by the hotel's curtained windows.
"Power," Sesshoumaru said finally.
"Power?" Tora asked.
"Kill the power. My night vision is far superior than that of humans. It was the key to my success at the gambling den."
"Okay."
"And it will eliminate the elevator as an access point."
"But not the stairwell," Tora added, frowning. "How about we kill the power and ambush any of them that try to move between the floors. Keep you from being flanked as best we can or send you a signal to let you know where they're moving.
He nodded. "That will be satisfactory."
They both turned to the side to look back at Kagome. With her arms crossed against her chest, frustration hardened her features.
They waited.
"Whatever we need to do," she agreed at last, her expression unchanged. "We're rescuing these girls and hopefully Amaya too."
"All right. Let's do it," Tora said.
OOOOOOOOOO
Loitering around the hotel courtyard, the yakuza guards patrolled. Nervous energy pervaded the air around them, and many of them paced with their guns drawn and their fingers hovering dangerously over the triggers. With their backs against a neighboring wall, Tora and Kagome hid just beyond the closest guard's line of sight and waited.
Then one of the sedans parked on the street disappeared.
A loud boom echoed, rattling building windows. The guards shouted, sprinting from their positions outside the entrance and down to the far side of the hotel.
Tora and Kagome edged out to survey the situation. At the second story, the back end of a car protruded from the hotel, rubble and dust spilling out from the wound it had created.
"That's our cue," he whispered, chuckling softly with admiration. "If the man is consistent at anything, it's knowing how to be the diversion." He pulled the staff from the pouch at his thigh and extended it to half its full length. "Let's go, Kagome-san."
Together, they ran from around the corner of the wall, heading for the hotel entrance. Keeping to the shadows as best they could, they skirted the lamplight as they crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the entrance. Through the glass doors, they scanned the lobby. Spying no one, they burst in, weapons in hand.
She pointed to a sign featuring a set of steps in profile on a maintenance door.
He nodded.
They covered the wall on either side of the door. Using his fingers, he counted down from three, and then they exploded through the door and into the stairwell. With Kagome aiming high at the flight leading to the next level and Tora ready for what was in front of them and below, they checked for enemies. It was clear.
Taking point, he headed down the stairs towards the basement and she covered his back, her eyes and ears sharp for any movement. In the distance and muffled by countless walls, she could hear the commotion of men shouting, and occasionally, their higher-pitched cries of agony.
They reached the basement. With a dead end to the left, a fluorescent lit hallway lay before them on the right. Maintaining their formation from the stairwell, they moved down it until they came across a heavy metal door marked by a high voltage warning and lightning bolt symbol.
"I think this is it," she said quietly.
He nodded in agreement and tried the doorknob. It was open.
"For a place that values security, I'm surprised that this isn't locked."
He shrugged. "I'm sure workplace safety is not high on their list of concerns."
He pushed the door open and then braced his back against it to keep it from closing again. She slipped past him into the room. Inside, she found a series of large gray boxes hanging on a cinder block wall. Conduit cables coursed from the top of each box and into the ceiling.
"The circuit breakers are housed in these boxes," she explained, more as an affirmation to herself than anything else, "So, if we flip them to the off position, we should kill the power. At least that's according to Bikini Girl."
He looked at her quizzically, shook his head, and leaned back out to check for interlopers.
Opening the first box, she discovered a panel lined with two columns of black switches. At the top, there was a large red switch. The main circuit breaker. She flipped it to the off position.
The lights in the basement died.
"Guess that means success," she whispered. Feeling for her pocket, she pulled out her penlight and turned it on. Using the light, she located the next circuit breaker panel and turned off the main switch. Soon, she had killed every panel. Her light beam tracked to Tora.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yes."
He nodded. "I don't think there's anyone down here or else they would have come running by now."
She handed him her light. "I'm sure all of the shouting, gunfire, and explosions were irresistible."
"For sure."
Using the penlight as a guide, they headed back out into the hallway and toward the stairwell.
"I just don't get it," she said, frustration tight in her voice.
"Get what?"
"Sesshoumaru."
He blew out a breath and then stifled a nervous chuckle.
"It's not funny," she scolded.
"Look, I'm not trying to laugh. It's just an awkward subject, and if I could run away from the both of you right now, I would."
She scoffed.
"I'm an outside observer to all this. I respect both of you, but I don't know either of you. So, I'm not sure if you really want my opinion."
"Doesn't that make it easier for you to see something that I'm missing? Because I don't understand why he does what he does. And he explains nothing. Most of the time he just waits for me to give up and I won't live as long as he will, so I do."
"You want the truth?"
"Yes."
He paused, and then with a deep sigh. "I don't think you're in the headspace to get him."
"What do you mean?"
"You're operating under this understanding of who he was. I don't know any of the history, and honestly, it sounds like it could be a mind-blowing story best told when we're not in the underbelly of a yakuza hideout. But I don't think he's the same person that you knew."
"I know that he's not."
"But do you?"
The heat of her anger warmed his back.
"Please, I'm not trying to upset you," he assured. "You said he's the last one of his kind, right?"
"Right."
"Well, I don't think you become the last one of anything without some kind of trauma."
She was quiet.
"As someone who knows nothing about youkai or the man Sesshoumaru once was, all I see is someone who's hurting. Someone who's self-destructive. Someone who when he says that not everyone can be saved, isn't always talking about other people. Get what I'm saying?"
"But we're here for him," she murmured, her vision starting to blur. "He has family now."
"And that's beyond important, trust me," he reassured. "He wouldn't stand a chance otherwise. And he has a purpose on top of that. Being a guardian to the impoverished people of this city. But until he's ready to personally deal with the trauma that's shackling his heart and mind, all you or your family can do is be there for him."
They reached the door to the stairwell.
"I'm sorry if I upset you," he apologized. "Personal trauma is something I've seen a lot of in my work. It's so hard, for the victim and for those who care about them."
"Thank you for being honest with me," she replied, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand.
A flurry of muted pops sounded somewhere far away and were swiftly followed by a series of booms that shook the building.
"Ready to join the party and hopefully not be terribly injured or killed?" he asked with another nervous chuckle.
"Ready."
And they opened the door.