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Part 12
Page 1
The boys all agreed it had
been a real shit evening. A lot of panic over nothing. The whole complex
freaking out over one kid and a couple of her friends, and in the end the
boss had taken care of it in a matter of minutes. There was a ton of damage,
a lot of wasted bullets, and a broken mirror to take care of. And three
bodies, one of which was missing, and another no one wanted to dig out
of the basement just yet. And then there was the last one, that no one
wanted to touch.
Fan Shuyin hated being in
the same room as that youkai corpse, but Shen had been specific about posting
guards on the printing floor. Even if the machine was running blanks now,
and the body was long cold. But it was just eerie there, crumpled
on the floor in what would have otherwise been a very nice business suit,
with a strange white streak in its hair and an antique earring dangling
against its jaw. The skin was too dark for the kid to be local. Tibetan?
Maybe farther east than that. Maybe Indian. The accent had been hard to
pin down.
He'd had eyes like a dead
man even before Fan shot him.
So, really, he shouldn't
have felt bad about it. It wasn't like he'd done anything wrong. The guy
had been asked to stop and he hadn't. He'd seen the gun and known Fan was
serious and he hadn't cared. His own fault. Really.
"Royal flush," Weng was saying
across the table. "Pay up, fellas."
"For shit's sake," Zou complained.
Others groaned things to similar sentiment. "You're recoding yer hand there
or something."
The elder Cima twin nudged
Fan's shoulder. "Yo, man. Pay the sonnovabitch already."
The braided man pulled his
eyes away from the body, tried his best to focus back to the card game.
He pushed a small pile of notes to the grinning boy probably half his age,
revelling in his recent turn of fortune. Fan smiled back to humor him.
It was important to encourage the young ones.
Really, he shouldn't care.
It wasn't like that youkai had meant anything. Hell, Fan had never even
caught his name. They'd clean up the place in half an hour and by tomorrow
he'd forget even shooting him. For the moment, it was far more important
to knock Weng off his fucking pedestal before he got ideas.
It was thus, so engrossed
in the next deal, that Fan Shuyin nearly missed something out of the corner
of his eye.
He managed to glance over
just in time to see it twitch.
Twitch.
Twitch.
Cough. Violent, lung-shredding
cough.
As King Kougaiji, Lord of
Youkai, started to climb to his feet.
For the first few seconds,
Fan was frozen, sitting there half-turned in his seat with deckscreen in
his hand. Frozen, and intent to believe it was just his mind playing tricks,
the result of too many long nights, the left-over adrenaline of the evening,
the kids at home, the wife, the guilt wedging in and making him imagine
he was seeing the youkai pull up onto his knees, to sway on unsteady feet,
dab at the blood on his forehead. Trace the edge of the wound.
But when Kougaiji looked up
and met his gaze, with eyes swimming ultraviolet and burning like the corona
of a sun, and his mouth, grinning, sharp fangs shining-- Fan Shuyin
started to scream.
"Christ, Shuyin, what's got
you in such a--"
They looked. The cards dropped,
deckscreens cracking as they landed. People getting to their feet, going
for their guns, shouts and safety catches and "God in heaven, look at his
face!"
"How the fuck? How the fuck is he still standing?!" "What the fuck is this
guy?!"
Fan saw his hand move. Palm
flat and forward, claws curling needle-sharp from the fingers.
And a voice. Not at all the
voice he'd heard before.
"'Swirled round him was
the demon-song,'" the king said, no rush to the words, tasting the
blood on his tongue, "'that built him up and gave him throne on which
to sit, sword with which to wield...'"
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