Dreamlands (2 page)

There was still no Keno, which was beginning to worry me. We found that asshole Heiseg, though. He was very dead, and I was kind of happy about that, because I never had liked the man for a lot of reasons besides what he was doing to Keno. He was half dressed, his pants falling off his hips and his shirt unbuttoned. I didn’t like that. He also looked softer and more puddingish than usual with blood tricking from his eyes, mouth, ears, and nose.

“Check to see if he wasn’t doing something odd,” I muttered to Goose, one of the medics. Goose had been here longer than me and Wolf. He had an air about him like he had seen it all and nothing surprised him anymore. My request seemed to surprise him.

5

DREAMLANDS

“Huh?” he asked.

Wolf looked at Heiseg and nodded. “See if he was attacked.” I shook my head. “See if the bastard raped anyone, was what I was thinking.”

Murphy was glaring at us for still worrying about Keno, and I saw a couple of sessions with the company’s head-shrinking psych in our future. Wolf scowled at Murphy, and we headed down to the server level, taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Keno might be hiding down there; it had been his favorite hiding place before we’d been sent offsite, but I was losing hope in finding him. But Keno wasn’t among the dead, so where was he?

“Where’s the
Junge
?” Wolf muttered, echoing my thoughts.

I glanced around. No body parts or bodies. No blood really, not like it was on the upper floors. It was all splatter, like a dog had shaken himself down here. Or several big dogs, from the mess on the walls.

“He escaped?”

Wolf glared, knowing that was impossible. “I wish,” he finally admitted.

Wolf was the one who noticed that there seemed to have been more than a couple of monsters down here recently, someone who was wearing sandals and another someone who was barefoot. Both could be Keno, from the size of the prints. But who was the second person? An intruder? Another survivor? It wasn’t like we could get an accurate count on people with all the body parts scattered around.

We got into the server room, which was where all the tracks stopped, right at the door. It was eerie. I half expected to see a horde of the whatevers that had killed the Hákarl behind the door, and there was nothing, just all those machines just humming along happily like they had been working all evening. The fucking things had been off for hours and had turned themselves back on right before the blast doors opened. I didn’t know much about computers, but I knew they weren’t supposed to do that. Wolf and I stared at each other in confusion.

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“I don’t think that Keno is here,” Wolf finally said after a few minutes of silence.

I thought about the last few years of the kid’s life; I thought about my time in prison. “And I think that it’s a good thing.”

“Mason?”

I was aware of the cameras that were probably recording every damning thing I was going to say and still didn’t care. “The kid didn’t see the sun or get treated right for as long as we’d had him.

There were times that I think that it would have been better if we’d kacked the kid.”

“I know,” Wolf said quietly.

Wolf had spent a lot of time with Keno, watching movies and trying to be a friend to him because he spoke Japanese. I knew about three words in it and none of them polite. I’d have done it even with the language issue, but Keno was scared of me. He’d probably seen my prison record―double homicide and twenty years in a maximum security prison before I was “cleared” by the Trust in exchange for doing their dirty work―so I didn’t blame him for being wary around me. Let me just tell you that it wasn’t killing humans that got me in trouble. The people I supposedly killed had been monsters that just looked human, and those were the ones the authorities had been able to charge me with killing. I had been a suspect in couple more killings, but there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge me with those. All those killings had been monsters, passing as humans.

“We just got to think about where he might be,” I said. “Because he sure in hell isn’t here, and he didn’t walk past us on the way out. So where the fuck did Keno and those other monsters disappear to?”

7

DREAMLANDS

SAMOJIROU

I WAS practicing my sword
kata
when my lady returned with the Reavers, her devoted guards, darker than ink, man-sized with a blank mask for a face, the wings of a bat, and claws to rend their prey.

I cut one more dummy apart and sheathed my sword. I was aware of the rank smell of my own sweat and the way my
yukata
―a casual, cotton kimono―clung to me as she approached. My lady was as elegant and serene as always even though her pets were splattered with blood and other things. She looked tired, and I knew she had journeyed to the real world. Tamazusa had been gifted with the ability to sense and use gates to travel to other realms, a rare talent. It tired her, though, and she didn’t do it often. She had been doing it more often lately, probably for some move in the Game she was plotting.

“Samojirou-sama, I have a present for you,” she purred.

I raised an eyebrow even as I bowed in greeting. “I am flattered that you thought of me, my lady.”

She laughed. It was practiced and empty, the laugh of a trained companion, which was what she had been in the real world. I have never seen the woman make an unpracticed gesture or word in all the FELICITAS IVEY

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centuries I had known her. “I wish that you could have escorted me.

The event was boring and the atmosphere dull.”

“I am sorry that you did not enjoy your outing,” I murmured.

I was content to be my lady Tamazusa’s loyal second, the moon to her sun, as she plotted and planned, scheming in the hate that consumed her to become a Lord in the Dreamlands, the lands where heroes and other beings lived after they died.

Tamazusa and I had been banished here, turned into demons―
oni
―by the treachery and weakness of a coward, Satomi Yoshizane. I had been greedy and disloyal to my lord Jin-yo and deserved my fate, but my lady had been an innocent. She lost that innocence in the hatred she felt when she had been killed unjustly. She cursed the one responsible, Satomi, and embraced the darkness to become an
oni
in the Dreamlands. Here she had become a personage to be feared, a consummate player in the Game of power that is a passion to those here.

I chose to retire to my studies, uninterested in such things. It seemed I lost my ambition when I died for a second time. I’ve been unable to leave the Dreamlands for some time now. It was a mild annoyance, even if I didn’t want to leave, since there was little in the real world that interested me. Tamazusa didn’t usually flaunt her freedom to do so to me. Something must have irked her to make her so careless of my feelings.

“I should have known that the man was common and a bad player,” she continued. “He lacked refinement and intelligence in our earlier dealings. The place was a bloody mess. It looked like a slaughterhouse.”

“Many are unable to entertain as well as you are,” I said with a smile.

To open a gate between the worlds, power was needed. Such power came from the sacrifice of an intelligent being, usually a human.

Since my lady Tamazusa had been gifted so, she did not need to resort to that crude method. The practitioners of dark magics were often unskilled blunderers who had a tendency to butcher when a much tidier 9

DREAMLANDS

sacrifice would do. It wasn’t the amount of blood spattered about that raised the magic, but the death of the sacrifice.

Her Reavers looked like they had been fighting. That was interesting. Tamazusa generally didn’t get involved in the petty squabbles of humans or other monsters.

“He also thought because he had a dangling piece of flesh between his legs that he was better than I,” she snarled.

“You know that men have not changed over the centuries. There will always be the ones who think that because they are a man, they are better than you,” I soothed her.

So
that
was what put her out of sorts, dealing with a man who didn’t respect her intelligence or her skills. I had thought modern men were wiser than that. I also knew that she had probably changed his opinion of her skill with a demonstration, one he might not have survived, but that didn’t matter to me. If the man was a fool, it was better that he didn’t annoy the rest of the worlds with it.

“He was thinking with it,” she told me ruefully. “I fear that your gift is a bit… bruised.”

I looked at her with a puzzled frown on my face. She smiled indulgently at my confusion and clapped her hands. One of her Reavers pushed a bound boy toward me. I shook my head. Bruised was an understatement. He had been beaten badly and was streaked with blood, his dark hair hanging in rat-tails to his hips. He also was naked and limping, shivering uncontrollably, and had a blankness about him that showed he had been pushed to his limits. His left eye was swollen shut, and the same side of his face showed bruises from being slapped or having his mouth forced open. I started to make a comment, when I really looked at him.

He had power, magical and intoxicating, that called to me.

I studied him a few moments longer and then looked sharply at Tamazusa. If the boy recovered his wits, he would be a powerful magic user, a talent not common here. If he didn’t recover, he would be merely a well of power to be dipped into often by those who could FELICITAS IVEY

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manipulate his magic, such as my lady. He would be a tool to be enjoyed in other ways by me.

“You play with fire, my lady,” I said softly.

She smiled coyly. “You just see some of it.” Tamazusa reached out and stroked his hair. The boy flinched. She moved his hair off his left shoulder, tracing a mark there with her fingernails, leaving faint scratches on his skin. My eyes widened when I saw it; the boy was marked with the sign of one of the
Hakkenshi
.

That probably was the source of the magic in him.

The
Hakkenshi
were descendants of Satomi, the one who had caused our demonhood, the coward who couldn’t keep his word, even to his own family. His unjust killing of Tamazusa had caused her to utter a death curse, saying his descendants would be beasts because he had no honor. Those cursed were the children of his daughter Fuse, and they had been scattered across the Kanto region of Japan before they were born by magic to other families.

Satomi’s grandsons, the
Hakkenshi
, had been drawn to the man when they had reached manhood, to defend him against his enemies, of which I had been one. Their adventures had been legendary, filled with sorcery and heroics. Most of Satomi’s grandsons were now here in the Dreamlands. Satomi, fortunately, was not. I had fought and tormented Satomi and the
Hakkenshi
when I was still able to travel to the real world. Our hatred had carried on here, at least on the part of the
Hakkenshi
. I had tired of the hate after a while. Tamazusa focused hers on playing the Game.

“You are bold,” I commented.

She laughed. “They will say nothing.”

I stepped forward to claim him. Tamazusa laughed again, and the prisoner shivered harder. If they discovered it, the
Hakkenshi
would rage over the fact that I was in possession of one of their avatars.

However, he was here now and mine.

“What is your name, boy?” I demanded.

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DREAMLANDS

“Keno. Inuzaka Keno,” he said hoarsely. I sensed that the boy had screamed himself out to sound like that. What had happened to him?

Then I realized what he had said. Keno had been the name of my lover, one of the
Hakkenshi,
since all of their family names had started with the kanji for dog―
Inu
―fulfilling my lady’s curse that they were to be born beasts. I had seduced Keno to corrupt him. I had fallen in love instead and lost him. Now I stared.

Tamazusa smiled back. “How could I ignore that?” she asked.

“I am deeply in your debt,” I said humbly.

I was. She had no use for such attachments or indulgences, but I, upon occasion, wanted companionship of an intimate nature. I also thought that she liked seeing me occupied in such a manner since ours had never been an intimate relationship. To give me my former lover’s avatar was something she knew would please me. That he was magical was a bonus.