Peaky Blinders in the Moonlight

Song of a Demon Slayer

A Peaky Blinders/Demon Slayer Crossover

I don't own anything with Peaky Blinders or Demon Slayer. Please note that some liberties are taken with the timelines.

Story is Rated M for obvious gang and demon violence, sexual situations (both violent and nonviolent) and themes involving war, suicide, and child soldiers.

With this in mind, please enjoy!

Chapter One – A Life of Lies

Year: 1920

My name…well, I go by many names, but the only one you need to know is Max Shelby. My current last name was granted to me by the only man I trust.

I was born in 1903 in Small Heath, Birmingham, and my father, Amos Jacobs, was a man of the cloth…supposedly. If you believed him, he was the most pious and purest man in Small Heath, third only to God and his wife. My mammy, Shannon, was a Gypsy girl who abandoned her "foul way of life," to marry him, and gave him five children – including myself.

But…the truth runs ugly. My father was a bookie and opium dealer behind the scenes, and my muther had contacts within a certain Birmingham gang…the Peaky Blinders. They worked alongside Polly Shelby and members of the Shelby family throughout my childhood, joining hands with the gang more often than not. My three brothers were in and out of jail alongside them, and my sister was getting protection from the Shelby family as a whore from the time she was fourteen.

Me? I was the family oddity and wanted none of it. By age eight, I was the only child of the five of us without a criminal record. By age ten, I had stopped going to my dad's church, knowing it was merely a front for his crimes.

And by age thirteen, in 1916,…I had no parents. You see, when the war broke out, all my brothers got the call-ups. My father pulled strings with some of his criminal mates to go, too…and all four of them were dead in ninety days time, shipped off to the trenches and the Somme.

Then…my mum's physical and mental health collapsed, and my sister disappeared to God-only-knew-where with my niece, likely France to serve as a soldier's whore. In the spring of 1916, my mum had died of spring fever, and the niece and sister were dead of typhoid.

Now, as the sole remaining member of my family, I had two choices: join up with the Blinders and become a whore myself, or flee to Switzerland and get a shot at a proper education with my aunt Mathlide. I chose the latter – and I chose something else.

I chose to reshape my identity after Mom died and pass myself off as a man. I was tired of being a woman, trapped between being married off as a creepy old man's wife or threatened with life as a whore. I was tired of being someone else's plaything. No more was I Elizabeth Jane Jacobs – I became Max. Just Max.

No shitty expectations. No jumping through hoops to please others. I was Max. Max was me…and I was free.

In this new identity, I gave up talking, walked like a man, and dressed like a man. I didn't drink or smoke, but I did take up archery, horseback riding, and shooting – even though I didn't like guns.

I was a man – and if I was going to be a man, I would be a man men looked up to.

My identity was perfect in Switzerland, and my grades were…well, I passed, but I can't say much else. However, there was this one weird class. It was called Japan: Her Demonic History. It was a shitty elective about how creatures called "demons" – basically humanoid cannibals - had been terrorizing people in Japan for centuries – and the mysterious thousand year old organization known as the Kisatsutai – or Demon Slayer Corps – tasked with hunting them down and destroying them, right under the noses of the Japanese government.

I don't remember much about that class – fuck, I barely remember the teacher. She was some small waif with huge butterfly hairpieces on both sides of her head, and always seemed tired for some reason. But…she gave me some rocks before class concluded winter of 1918.

"Would you please keep them safe for me, Max?" she said. "I want these to be an inheritance for a very special child someday. A child that is akin to my flesh and blood."

I nodded, feeling free to talk because the teacher didn't know me. "I will. Don't you worry 'bout nuthin."

She sighed, as if she were grappling with something internal. "Thank you," she said. "I hope the child never has to use it…"

She walked out of the room. "Wait, wot?" I asked, but she was gone.

I never saw that teacher again…but if I found her, I swore to myself I would join the Slayers.

After graduating, I returned to Birmingham, retaking control of my own information network of street rats and ne'er-do-wells from Polly and Tommy. Polly Shelby was running the Blinders, and things were okay…until Scotland Yard caught on to me. A couple weeks ago, I was walking out of a meat shop…and a Scotland Yard inspector was waiting at the door.

"Wha'cha wanna get yourself locked up for, Elizabeth Jane Jacobs?" Inspector Charles Campbell asked me, pipe in one hand, and a cane in the other. We'd never met, but his name has been swirling around South Birmingham for three years, and he was pig swine in my network. "Draft dodging, bribery…or fraud and indecency, for your little cross-dressing scheme?"

I growled. I knew the bastard was a dirty bobby right then and there, in his natty black bowler and dark coat. "You'd do London and yourself a greater service by returning to the estate God assigned you than shaking a finger in His face."

I shook my head at him, and he produced a pair of cuffs. "No? Well, then…the choice is yours. You either do me a little service…," he said, the little smile on his face suggesting that he wanted to make a whore of me. "Or, you infiltrate the Blinders, serving as a spy to clean up this God-forsaken shit hole."

I knew I was fucked either way…but a street rat like me never leaves themselves backed into a corner. I produced a stolen bladed cap and plopped it on my head, tucking it down.

"I think you do yourself disservice, Miss Jacobs," Campbell said, walking away. "But, then again…your father always thought you were the devil's mad piece of shit."

I didn't answer. I was on my way to meet with Thomas Shelby.

I may have been a dirty street rat…but I wouldn't deal with a dirty-ass bobby like him.

Not without a price, anyway.

…

"So, Max," Thomas Shelby said, dragging slowly on his cigarette in his office. "Campbell thinks he's got ya in his pocket?"

I nodded.

"You can level with me, Max – I know you're on to me," Tommy replied, running a hand through his mop of dark hair. "You know, you're probably the most honest liar in Small Heath. If your gender's the only thing you truly lie about-"

His blue eyes darted around the room for a bit, as if he were assessing where I fit on a grand chessboard. I sat there, trying to figure out what to say without a word.

"Max…the greatest informant Small Heath has ever known. Knows everything…even when the copper's piss. Except the shit that goes on in people's bedrooms," Tommy replied, chuckling. "That's yer only flaw."

I nodded – my lone rule was staying out of people's fuck lives. What they did was my business – who they were making love to was theirs. I was a dirty street rat, but even I had a line I would not cross.

Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby respected that – and I respected and loved him, even more so than my own father. As far as I was concerned, he was my father. He ran this town without a word spoken, and all the rats knew it. I watched as he picked up a small pamphlet, but then he put it back down.

"Yeah…that'll be perfect," he said. "Mr. Shelby…I know you don't like-"

I nodded my head, knowing what he had just done. "Mr. Shelby, there's a small ship coming into Birmingham Harbor from Japan in about an hour, the Kisatsutai."

I looked at him in confusion.

"You say what I think – what the fook is a ship from Japan, with a weird-ass name I can hardly pronounce, that isn't a cruise ship, doing here?" Thomas said. "Well…I want you to meet that ship in the harbor when she ports. I want the names of all crew members, what they were carrying…and why they've come. The Japanese are ruthless bastards…and if they've come for a takeover…it'll be a fooking mighty war."

I stood up and tapped his shoulder. "You telling me not to worry about it?" he said. "Good."

I wanted to stop him and tell him what the name meant, but he was off.

…

One hour later

Birmingham Harbor

The Japanese flag on the Kisatsutai should have been my first warning something was off. She was an old shipping barge, and she looked like she was one or two voyages away from being retired. Her flags were all straightforward, nothing incredible.

But the Flag of the Rising Sun set off a chill in my stomach. The Japanese had no cause to start a war here…did they? And what the fook did they want in Small Heath?

Suddenly, the sound of the rigging coming down snapped me to attention. The gangplank came down not long thereafter, and I looked up…to see what looked like a brother and sister pair standing in the sun.

The girl was dressed in what looked like a blue kimono with a white sash around the middle. Her eyes were black, much like her hair, and she was small and slight, with…a white bamboo bit in her mouth.

The boy…the boy was even weirder. He wore a Peaky Blinders-style hat on his head, and the standard grey jacket. It was a much smaller jacket than the standard, but it still appeared to nearly swallow him. He walked down the gangplank with the girl, patting her arm as he walked.

And then…I saw an identical copy of Tommy Shelby's eyes staring back at me, a huge flame-like…port-wine stain?... surrounding his entire right eye. The boy looked up, turning his head…and that's when I saw the twin sheaths on his back.

"Oi, little boy," I asked, talking quietly to break my act as little as possible. "Who are you?"

He lifted up ten fingers, then put them down…just before a man with his face completely concealed in a white helmet with a black butterfly across the front ran to the children.

"You know you can't talk to strangers, they're just as bad as the demons here, Kanao," Butterfly Man replied. He wore long white robes with purple pants and had a muscular build, but that was all I could gather. "Come, we have to move on."

"Can't you just want a minute, Zaraki?" a female voice said. I looked up to see a woman dressed in all black with a white cat mask on her face. "Kanao was only answering the question with the answer from HQ!"

"But even that is dangerous for Kanao, and no one was supposed to meet us here," Zaraki replied, pulling out a sword. "Leave here, street rat, or-

Before he could finish the sentence, Kanao had grabbed the blade between his fingers, shaking his head – that was way too much Thomas Shelby for my liking. He then gestured to the street, and the four headed for the city in silence, leaving me behind.

"Just what the fook was that all about?" I thought as the quartet went down the street. I then set my sights on the ship itself…but a familiar thorn in my side was already on the way to beat me to it.

Grace Burgess…the fookin' blonde-haired whore who had herself wrapped squarely around Tommy Shelby's finger. It didn't matter how many times I told him that she was suspicious, or no good, or in Campbell's pocket…that woman could have said that the sky was purple, and he would have believed her.

And now…she had not only returned to Small Heath…she was in my business, too. I grabbed her arm before she went up the gangplank, spinning her to face me.

"What the-ahh!" She said, looking terrified in her prim and proper green dress and hat. "Elizabeth-?"

I shushed her, walking her prim little arse away from the harbor and down to a storage area, putting a knife to her throat. "Listen 'ere, whore," I growled in the lowest voice I could muster. "Yeh need 'ta get gone 'fore I put yeh in 'de dirt myself! Yeh hurt me dad, an' I won't stand for it!"

"I'm not here for Tommy," she protested. "I'm here to save the children from the Demon Slayer Corps!"

"Bullshit!" I said. "That's prolly some poor family-"

"No," Grace said. "And before you go on the Kisatsutai, I already plied the whole crew with liquor and songs. A rich man – Kaguya Ubyashiki – has sent a doctor, a swordsmith, and those poor children to an undisclosed location. What he plans to do to them, I don't know…but I do know the one posing as a Peaky Blinder has the ability to summon flames from her blades!"

Now she had me thinking she'd lost it. "You know that's a boy, right?"

Grace was about to cuss me out, but my knife was still on her throat. "They're hiding that on purpose, too. I believe the girl has some connection to Tommy. Something they don't want Tommy to know."

I growled – she was there to get back into Thomas Shelby's bed and head…and by way of a poor little girl trapped in a potential nightmare. I lowered my knife. "Fine," I growled. "But no nuthin' with Tommy – an' I mean nothing, you whore-rat."

Grace gasped and left.