Neon lights splashed wildly across the faces and bodies of the club-goers, striping their already garishly-clad forms with an even more crazy-quilt pattern. Uminari City was not Tokyo and this was not Ginza, but there was the same frantic atmosphere, the same desperate energy, the same thousands of hollow-souled revelers desperately seeking pleasure and finding only sensation.
Tengu moved through the herd with the lithe grace of a predator. It was not his nature to be such, he knew. This animal was not designed to stalk, to hunt, to kill. Yet now such things fit him like a second skin, as natural and right as patience and opportunism. Was it something that his master had given him along with everything else? Or was it, instead, some twist in his own spirit that had gone unneeded and therefore unnoticed until he had met the master?
He wondered what it was that these people lacked that drove them so desperately: the punks in their outlandish clothes and body piercings so different than the mass of Japanese society, the drug addict with a wild look as her last fix wore off, the forty-year-old salaryman unmistakable for what he was despite the ripped jeans and leather jacket, the hungry-eyed girl in school uniform advertising a youth that her soul had long since abandoned. To Tengu, who had a place and a purpose, the chaos in the hearts around him was as alien and inexplicable as magic.
He was relieved when he reached his goal, so he could get away from the disturbing thoughts the city raised. Pink and blue letters over a narrow door spelled out in incomprehensible English, "Smile's Kiss Love." Tengu went inside and found himself in a single-room bar, long, narrow, and thanks to some vagary of local architecture, L-shaped. The decor was a schizophrenic mix of black marble like some sleek corporate hotel and woven cane like a kitschy Polynesian restaurant.
Enka music blared from speakers, largely ignored by the sullen, silent drinkers.
There were no wild celebrants here, few party-goers. Those that entered in search of excitement most often left at once. And yet more genuine thrills took place here than in the rest of the district combined on most nights. The bar did not exist to sell drinks; it was a meeting place, neutral ground for Uminari City's underworld.
The underworld fascinated Tengu. It reminded him more than any other human institution of his natural environment. Predators and prey. Scavengers--oh, so many of them, opportunistic and ready to strike, profiting from another's work. He knew the dance well. Money was just a slightly different way to measure success and failure but was the same thing in the end: another day's life and a full belly.
The man he'd come to see was about halfway down the base of the L, the part around the corner from the door. He sat at the bar, drinking Suntory Scotch in short glasses like a salaryman at a corporate party, out of duty rather than any real pleasure. To Tora, "tiger," the whiskey was the price for occupying the barstool, nothing more.
"Tora."
"Tengu. Sit. Drink."
Tora flicked his fingers at the bartender, who set down another glass in front of the newcomer. Tora picked up the bottle and poured a drink. Tengu downed it in one shot, suppressing a wince at the taste. He hated liquor, but the little rituals of hospitality were important. He sat down.
"I'm hiring for a job."
"The way I hear it, things didn't turn out so well for the last people you hired."
Tengu nodded.
"That's why I'm hiring. My ma--" He cut himself off, then cleared his throat to try and cover the slip. "My employer doesn't like when a bunch of second-raters foul things up."
"I see."
No, he didn't, but close enough. Death was always there, lurking under the surface, in every underworld relationship. That was the way it should be, Tengu considered. That the majority of humans lived their lives with no more than a casual perception that death even existed amazed him.
"So it's the same job," Tora mused.
"The same objective. Different tactics," Tengu corrected.
"Wise. Whatever it is you're doing, security will be tighter now." Tora took a drink, then fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his inside jacket pocket. He tapped out an unfiltered Camel, balanced it between his lips, and flicked open the gold Zippo, lighting the cigarette's tip slowly and methodically before taking a couple of experimental puffs and putting the lighter away. "So what do you need?"
"Specialists."
"In?"
"Intrusion and extraction." Or in other words,
break in and kidnap. If the target had been an object, he'd have said "retrieval" instead of "extraction." Tengu had to suppress a chuckle at the coded language they employed.
Tora nodded.
"I can set that up."
"There's something else."
"Oh?"
He took another puff on his Camel.
"The job could get...creative. I need someone who is...open-minded," Tengu replied. For the first time, Tora showed a flash of interest from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes.
"Open-minded how?"
"The kind of person who won't be caught off-guard if the job turns out to be a bit unusual."
"Unusual as in--?"
The target is a vampire. Tengu was certain that was how the first attempt had gone wrong. His master had provided him with a drug that would subdue the girl, by which Tengu had hoped to keep her precise nature a secret. No doubt somehow, without that knowledge, things had gone wrong. This time he wasn't going in unprepared, which meant that he needed to have associates capable of accepting the paranormal as real.
He considered, then rejected several euphemisms. If he said something like "open to extreme possibilities" Tora would probably expect that he referred to how the target would be treated--torture, rape, or similar brutality that more "professional" criminals didn't want to dirty their hands with.
Euphemisms, he decided, weren't going to cut it.
"Supernatural," he said flatly.
Tora looked at him for a long time, perhaps trying to judge if he was serious. At last he took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out in a black plastic ashtray.
"This is on the level?"
"According to my employer," Tengu answered. "I don't argue with him on those points."
Tora let out a sharp sigh.
"Okay."
He reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.
"Okay," he repeated. "I can do that."
His hand shook as he drank, sprinkling droplets of Scotch on the marble surface of the bar.
"But I'm warning you, Tengu, if this is a joke, you're not going to like the punchline."
"Is that a threat?" Tengu let a little hostility creep into his voice.
"No. Or at least," Tora amended, "I won't be the one threatening. Odds are, I'll be just as dead as you'll be."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was weird, Arisa thought. She ought to be cold, feeling the room's cool air on her heated skin. Only she didn't really feel temperature in the same way any more, and she was fairly sure that her body didn't grow hot or cold, either. It was strange. And she'd kind of liked to have felt those sensations, not quite uncomfortable, more like reminders that she'd done something special and important that had left a lasting effect.
Of course, it wasn't all bad. The sofa in the parlor was really no more than a settee, and her neck, back, and legs would have been bruised if they had ordinary muscles and nerves instead of ectoplasm or whatever it was. Arisa wasn't completely sure how they'd gotten there from the chair. She supposed it had seemed like a good idea at the time. She was kind of jammed up into the corner, not quite laying down but not quite sitting up. Suzuka was sprawled across her, head pillowed on Arisa's stomach, one leg dangling over the side of the love-seat onto the floor. Her hair tickled the skin of Arisa's belly, the undersides of her breasts. Her eyes were closed, and every time she exhaled Arisa felt the warmth of her breath.
Like this, Suzuka was much more the Suzuka she knew. Sweet, gentle, and composed, a real lady. Not the...Arisa could only call her
ravenous...Suzuka of the past half-hour. The Suzuka who'd devoured her mouth with passionate yearning. The Suzuka who'd left the shredded tatters of her own clothing strewn on the floor. The Suzuka who'd hungrily gone after her with such abandon that Arisa would probably have had to slap her or go intangible to make her stop, if she'd wanted her to stop. The Suzuka whose hands and mouth had seemingly been everywhere at once, as if she'd wanted to absorb Arisa's entire being. Who'd buried her teeth in Arisa's neck, muffling her own cries as Arisa had screamed out her ecstasy.
Because, of course, there was no getting around it.
I just had sex with my best friend.
Though "best friend" didn't seem to be the right description any more. Not after confessing her love to said "friend." Not after said "friend" had responded by kissing her senseless and all but ravishing her in what wasn't (though she now wished it was) Arisa's first time but what she strongly suspected was Suzuka's. No, they definitely weren't "friends" any more.
Arisa smiled. "Lovers," then. She really liked the sound of that. She wondered how long Suzuka had felt this way. From her reaction, it had definitely been a while. Clearly she'd understood her feelings a lot sooner than Arisa had.
Too bad I was such a slowpoke. We could have been dating for years!
As good as it had felt, and as nice as it was now to be curled up beneath Suzuka, the longer it went on the more uncomfortable it got. Not because of the girl herself or Arisa's feelings, but because she became increasingly aware of where they were: not in a bedroom or other private place, but lying out in the open in one of the mansion's public rooms. The size of the room, the beauty of the furnishings on display, they all reminded her that Noel or Falin might walk in at any minute.
Arisa sighed.
No, it's worse than that. With their hearing, they know exactly what happened in here and the reason they haven't come in yet is out of respect for Suzuka's privacy. Which meant that there was nothing to do but brazen it out. That wasn't so easy. She wasn't ashamed of what they'd done, but it was still embarrassing to talk about.
She sighed again, and this time the motion caused Suzuka to stir. The vampire girl blinked a couple of times and opened her eyes slightly. It was just a side effect of her sleepiness, Arisa knew, but the drooping eyelids made Suzuka's gaze look sultry and seductive.
Do lovers notice stuff like that about each other more often?
"Arisa..."
She stroked Suzuka's hair and smiled at her.
"Hey," Arisa purred.
Suzuka stirred, then seemed to come to full realization and memory in an instant. She snapped bolt upright into a kneeling position, arms fluttering to cover herself while she blushed bright red.
"Oh, Arisa, I'm--"
"If you apologize, I'm never speaking to you again. No, worse, I'll tell Hayate everything with a complete play-by-play commentary!"
The blush flowed down Suzuka's neck and chest at that sally, but she also giggled. Arisa sat up and wrapped her arms around her no-longer-friend.
"Much better. Because the only thing I'm sorry about is I wasn't bright enough to ask you to do this three or four years ago."
"I'd have wanted to," Suzuka confessed shyly. "I've been in love with you since I was a little girl. Even when I didn't understand about adult things and just had childish dreams of what love and marriage meant, I always imagined you as the prince who awoke me with a kiss or the swashbuckling hero who swung in to the rescue just as the evil baron was going to force me to marry him."
"I'd be more flattered if I wasn't always the guy in those dreams..." Arisa murmured.
"I guess it's just that you always seemed so strong and brave. I couldn't imagine you waiting around to be rescued by someone else."
"Well, okay, if you put it like that you're forgiven." She kissed the nape of Suzuka's neck and felt her tremble. "But you didn't say anything all these years?"
"Well, when we were little kids, you had the biggest crush on Nanoha-chan."
"Did not!"
"You did so!" Suzuka laughed. "You followed her everywhere with your eyes, you wanted to do whatever she was doing, and you were
so jealous of Fate-chan for the longest time since she could share all of Nanoha-chan's life and not just the non-magical parts. That's how I knew you were over it, when you stopped treating Fate-chan that way."
"Well, why didn't you say something then?"
"Because we were in junior high and you'd discovered boys."
"Oh."
"Actually," Suzuka said wistfully, "I'd thought that was what happened. You'd stopped being in love with Nanoha-chan because you'd grown up and started imagining your love interests doing..."
"What we just did?"
"Y-yes," Suzuka stammered, blushing. "So the kind of love you felt for a close friend wasn't enough any more."
"I see."
"So I thought, why burden you with feelings that couldn't go anywhere? They'd just get between us and ruin our friendship. This way, we could stay together. Someday, eventually, life would make us drift apart anyway and I'd probably find someone else in time."
"I hope the 'find someone else' part of that plan is on hold now?" Arisa teased, and punctuated her sentence by nibbling on Suzuka's ear.
"Of course!"
"So if you'd known I was bi, you'd have confessed?"
"Yes! Well...maybe. I'm not totally sure. I mean, just because you can like women in that way wouldn't guarantee you would love or even desire
me particularly. I don't have your confidence, Arisa, so I might not have spoken up even then."
"Well, then, I'm glad I finally wised up and said something."
"So am I. I love you, Arisa."
"I love you, too. Um...did you want me to slip up to your room and get you some clothes or a robe or something?"
"Thank you. But..." Arisa could see the pale pink roses forming in her lover's cheeks again. "Maybe...not just yet?"
Suzuka's hand slid down to rest on Arisa's thigh where it pressed against the outside of her hip, and it became the blonde's turn to blush.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Arisa & Friends Omake Roadshow!
Arisa rubbed at the spot on her neck where Suzuka had bitten her; it stung a bit, probably because a vampire bite wasn't just about puncturing skin and sucking blood, but was also a magical "attack" in that it converted blood to energy to fuel the biter's healing, strength, and other special abilities. The pain faded quickly, though; obviously no real damage had been done. The sting reminded Arisa of its existence, though.
"Hey, Suzuka, what was all that with the neck-biting?"
"Eh?"
"I mean, I don't have any blood any more. You got it all the first time."
Suzuka flushed a pale pink.
"That's not it, Arisa. It's...it's just a reflex when we...climax, oneesama says."
"Oh, okay then." At least Suzuka had apparently enjoyed herself as much as Arisa had, which made the blonde feel good. "Um...I'm not going to find one of those body pillows with my picture covered in bite marks in your room, am I?"
2009-08-10, 13:56
Author
*is laughing too hard to review*
Back one choice. followed by The morning.
