Edited 1/9/24
Detective Artemis stood over the dead body and frowned. "I get that he's reprehensible, but death?"
Usagi shrugged, "I was hungry, and he's a rapist. He didn't have the nerves a first-timer normally does."
He sighed and shook his head, "I'll call it in. You better make yourself scarce."
"Thank you, Artie! You're the best. I'm so glad you grew up to be a detective."
"I just can't believe that woman who saved my life that day still looks the same fifty-two years later."
"It's a good thing I am what I am, too. I was underwater for ten minutes looking for you."
He nodded his head and pulled out his cell phone. "And you gave me some of your blood to heal me. I always remember that the most. Even when I was five, that shocked me."
She beamed at him, and then the smile slid off her face. "Are they getting hard to hide?" She cast her eyes over to the body and frowned.
"Honestly, yes. Can't you leave them out of my jurisdiction for a while? Five in a month and a half comes off like a serial killer."
She looked down and pouted, "They're really bad guys. All of them. It truly was for the good of the community." She didn't want to say just how evil the men had been. Putting him in danger was the last thing she wanted to do.
"And we have a court system to deal with them," he pointed out kindly.
"It's such a new way of thinking. Dueling was outlawed in 1859 in America and in England in 1819. That's recent history to me. I was born in the 1500s before any of that. Dueling even continued after it was illegal because it worked for people. All these modern ideas of jails…" She thought about it a bit and then said, "Give me a good dungeon, and I'll toss them in."
He rolled his eyes good-naturedly. "You have to learn Usagi, adapt even."
"I know." She sneered at the corpse. "But someone will wake in the morning to the excellent news that her attacker is dead. Probably multiple someones." And she knew there was another danger she was avoiding.
"Still, you need to stop killing. Can't you drink from a blood bag?"
She scoffed, "No way! They have anticoagulants in them. I tried once, and it didn't stay down. It looked like a scene from a Tim Burton film."
"Who?"
"American film director that uses over-the-top amounts of blood in his films."
"Noted," he shuddered, thinking of her vomiting and excessive amount of blood.
Artemis then pressed the call button on his cell for the station. "I found a body. Grab Yamato and get a wagon. It's fresh." He hung up, looked to his right, and Usagi was gone.
Mamoru walked into the morgue, and Yamato was sitting on a chair by his desk, staring across the room at a new dead body. "Something bothering you?" Mamoru asked.
"Yes. I was waiting for you to get in and look over the body. I don't want my preconceived notions going into this one." He was unsettled and wanted his findings confirmed by another rational person. What he observed was just too odd, again, for his liking.
"You won't say your findings?"
"I haven't touched the body. And honestly, I think I'll find exactly what I'm thinking I'll find. I just need to know it's an unbiased decision."
Mamoru walked across the room, pulled the sheet from the dead man, and looked at him. "I'll cut off his clothes first."
"Good. Be careful with your visual inspection."
"I will. And I know to always look between the toes," he teased.
Yamato laughed, "Hey, I solved a murder that way. The guy was stepping out on his wife, and she tried to hide the puncture that way." The wife had injected her cheating husband with poison and tried to hide the injection sight in a place that regularly got missed. He was just too good at his job, and she was now serving life in prison.
When Mamoru cut the shirt off, he frowned, "What does the black crescent on his shoulder mean?"
He heard his boss stand up quickly and make his way over to look at the tattoo. "Dang. It means the rival Yakuza I was telling you about. This is a Dark Kingdom member."
"Retaliation for the drug overdose?"
Yamato raised one eyebrow at him, "If I was a detective, would you say that?"
"No. I was just postulating out loud. That and, on second thought, I have a feeling this isn't a rivalry killing. That I would say on the record."
"Why?"
"If it were, it would have been brutal in order to send a message. I don't see that he fought at all. He doesn't have a mark on him. Who found him?"
"Detective Artemis. That is why I want you to look at this one first."
"Is that odd?"
"No, and that's why I want you to do this. I'll explain afterward."
Three hours later, Mamoru was frowning down at his findings. "Sir, um….. he doesn't have blood left in his system, but there aren't any cuts, and he doesn't have internal bleeding."
In an uncharacteristic moment, Yamato cursed, "Shit. I knew it."
"How? I don't get this."
"Neither do I, but this is the fifth one, and they are all cases handled by Detective Artemis."
Mamoru looked concerned at his mentor, "He's a serial killer?"
"No, but he might be covering for one or a vigilante. And based on past experience, I can guarantee this guy here has allegations of rape, even without running anything on him. The other bodies, all men, the ones with little to no blood left in them, too, have all been rapists. I just don't get how he's doing it."
"He?" Mamoru asked, wondering how Yamato could be sure it was a man who was the killer.
"Not to be sexist, but most murderers are men. Also, if you note all of the dead men's sizes, they're large men, and there are no signs they fought back. I can't picture a scenario where a woman could kill like this. Of course, I can't think of one where a man does either."
"So we're looking for Batman?" Mamoru said, his lip tweaking in a small smile.
Yamato chuckled, "Very funny. No, we're probably looking for someone who went through family trauma."
"So he is like Batman," Mamoru said, no longer joking.
"Regarding his past trauma fueling his vengeance, probably. I'm guessing a woman he loved was raped, and he's trying to protect other women from the same fate. His loved one might've even committed suicide."
"So it's possibly someone with a sad past eliminating terrible guys. I can see what Detective Artemis is doing."
"This isn't justice. This is vengeance. Also, aren't doctors supposed to do no harm?" Yamato asked, referencing Mamoru's future oath.
"I'm not doing any harm, and I'm not a doctor —yet. I'm just empathetic to the idea. How would you feel if someone you loved was raped?"
Yamato's look soured, "I'd want to kill him slowly as my sister watched. What I would do would be to ensure he went to prison to pay for his crimes."
The amount of certainty in Yamato's voice shocked Mamoru. "How can you be sure?"
"My sister was twelve and pregnant. The monster was thirty-four and a family friend—he got twenty years in prison. Secretly, I hope someone made him his girlfriend in prison. My niece is six years younger than me. She's beautiful and has special needs —cerebral paisley. I get wanting the attacker dead and feeling like you couldn't protect your sister. I still feel that way."
Mamoru sat down heavily on the chair. He had teared up. He wasn't the only one in the room with a traumatizing past. "What do we do about this?"
"I have to know the truth. I need there to be justice. I'm just honestly not sure what that means in this case."
"His penis is intact," Mamoru said, thinking out loud.
"What?"
"I can't believe that's a sentence I said, but the truth stands. If you were killing someone out of vengeance for a loved one, who was raped, wouldn't you mutilate the guy?"
Yamato stared at the dead body and frowned. "Yes. It is odd….."
Mamoru then went through the man's clothes and held up a packet he pulled out of the pocket. "Date rape drugs?"
"Run them, and let's find out."
Usagi loved the taste of blood —that was a fact. But it just so happened she also loved chocolate milkshakes. And through the search for her favorite food, she had absolutely fallen in love with the Crown Arcade. Motoki, who worked there, made the best milkshakes, and he was really easy on the eyes.
As cute as he was, his blood didn't call to her, and that, more than anything, made her comfortable to flirt with him. It was all harmless fun that she knew wouldn't go anywhere. After all, since the first time she heard about bonded love over four hundred years ago, she hadn't found the one that moved her like had been described to her in detail.
That was something she discovered around fifty years after her death. She met up with a group of vampires. At the time, she didn't know how incredibly rare it was to find a group of them together, and they explained the undead life to her.
First, they told her that Vampires always mate for life. Something she believed all the more since six of them were in bonded pairs. William and the crazy Drucilla seemed beyond strange to her, but she saw their love clearly. But the two other couples were good to her and helpful and didn't set her teeth on edge.
Lucy and Dracula taught her the most of all of them. He's the one who looked lovingly into his bonded love's eyes as he explained what it was like to find the love of your life. He was born in 1431.
It was the other couple, though, Kaname and Yuki, that drew her to Japan. They had both been born there and described the rich history and beauty of the land. Of course, when Usagi got to Japan, it was in the early sixteen-hundreds, so Usagi got to witness some of that history, too. The beautiful and the brutal. She was even there when the bombs fell during World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.
It was that group of six that she lived with for two decades. She saw true love in effect, and she realized thatone, she didn't understand what it felt like, and two, it looked like a lot of intense emotions. She wasn't sure she even wanted that obsessive kind of love. After living her whole life without romantic love, she was used to being in charge of her own life.
She still kept in touch with them. And in a stroke of hilarity, she followed them all on Twitter. William's Twitter name, "William the Bloody," still cracked her up. His avatar was a caricature of him with a bloody nose. Yuki's avatar was a picture of a perfect rose in bud. She also had all their cell numbers.
She stared at her milkshake and frowned. None of her vampire friends were in Japan right now. She wanted the bonds of friendship right now and someone to get together with. Recently, she just had to distance herself from her latest human friends. They started asking where she got her plastic surgery done to stay looking so young.
It got her thinking, and she decided it was time to sign up for university. She needed a way to meet people who looked her age, and that was the best place.
She heard the doors to the arcade slide open and an entirely new scent wafted through in the air. She inhaled the scent of blood that called to her and thrummed in her veins. Then, a deep desire that she'd never known flooded her being so fast that it felt like her head spun. Never had such a profound want raced through her before.
She looked up, and a handsome, tall, dark-haired stranger was sitting at the counter talking with Motoki. She smirked, glad that if she was about to be bombarded with intense emotions, at least her blood had excellent taste in men.
For the first time since she heard about a bonded love hundreds of years ago, it didn't seem like quite so much of a burden.