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Part 6
Page 18
This bad feeling wasn't going away.
Actually, it was getting worse. Kougaiji couldn't
remember the last time this sense of foreboding had taken root.
...Well, actually, he could remember. It had just
been a long time ago. Five hundred odd years ago. You got a lot of bad
intuition back in those days.
But that was before his kingship. That was before
a dominion over water and the other elements, and a great reservoir of
raw magic energy to bend the world to his will, if so inclined. You didn't
tend to succumb to paranoia when you were that insulated.
But right now he was paranoid. Right this moment
he was chewing on a claw while the other hand tapped in impatient clicks
upon the desk and he couldn't read the text on the vidscreen display if
he tried. People at the head of the table were prattling on about numbers
and percentages drawn out to the fifth decimal, and it was all so very,
very important, but he couldn't focus.
It was nagging in his head. It was the burn of cigarette
ash, small and painful but too minute to merit the yell. Just gnawing.
Gnawing. Gnawi--
Oh damn it. He'd snapped the claw right off.
Then came something the executives were calling a
'recess,' and Dokugakuji seized the opportunity to lead his lover off into
the washroom. And splash cold water on his face, but only after a few efforts
at molestation failed.
"Are you all right?" he asked subsequently, genuinely
concerned. He provided the king with a hand towel. "You haven't gone and
lowered your immune system and gotten sick again, have you?"
Kougaiji grimaced into the washcloth as he palmed
his face dry. It'd be nice if illness could explain things. "Maybe,"
he answered.
"Can you expel it? Look, Kou, biology is one thing,
but these are important meetings we're seeing to."
"I know."
...Five hundred years. Or maybe closer to four hundred
and fifty. There was a defining moment when these bad feelings stopped,
because there was nothing else to bring them about...
"Some of this is very crucial to our financial operations
in Asia. If we don't settle this stuff now, we'll be dropping the ball
on an awful lot of business interests."
"I know."
...It had nearly broken him aurally when his mother
had taken ill. It had nearly broken everything when she'd died.
And then came Gojyo. And Lirin. Yaone. Kouryuu. Goku. Hakkai.
Hakkai had died last. Great terrible irony as the
healer had ever known. He'd wept the day of his death. Kougaiji had witnessed
it.
And after Hakkai's death, no more intuition. No
more sinking feelings. No more dark forebodings and the top of his brain
buzzing with something he couldn't put a name to. There'd never been something
calling...
"So this isn't the time to be unfocused,
Kou," Dokugakuji insisted, shaking a shoulder. "You need to wake up. You
need to concentrate."
"I know," the Youkai King repeated, frustrated.
"Just--"
And then he dropped off. In turning, his eyes had
drifted to the window of the bathroom, just a bleak rectangle high up near
the ceiling. That should have been letting in sharp white sunlight, and
wasn't. It was dark. Slate gray, and getting darker. Like evening time.
He noticed something else. There were mirrors in
the bathroom with them.
Mirrors were a standard commodity of such places,
though Kougaiji usually saw to having them removed or covered up in the
hotels he stayed in. Mirrors were dangerous. Mirrors were the greatest
magical artifacts in existence, after water.
Mirrors were powerful weapons, in the hands of the
right mage. Kougaiji distrusted them on principle. Because it wasn't just
the power they wielded, it was what they stored.
And what they stored was memory. Small, gleaned
particles, slivers off the top of everything they were witness to, but
it stayed and compacted and learned and, to the right ears, spoke.
You could always distrust your brain. Five hundred
years was a long time to go over and back over insanity to know just how
unbalanced the anthropoid mind was. If your brain was feeding you senses
that didn't agree with reality, there was always the option that you were
simply wrong.
Mirrors weren't.
And something sharp and shrill was crying at him
through the glass.
Night was hours away, but it was already falling.
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