Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (17 page)

I stared at my feet. “I don’t know.”

He sounded beyond exasperated. Obviously I was the village idiot. “Look, she’s not picking up at any of her numbers—and I think her dad’s off chasing that damned monster. I thought maybe she was with you. I’ve been calling around to all her friends, but none of them have seen her since yesterday.”

“
Well, she’s not with me,” I said as a bad feeling suddenly came to replace the numbness I was experiencing. “I acted like a total ass. She probably hates me and never wants to see me ever again. Hell,
I
don’t want to see me ever again.” I suddenly recalled the dream I’d had in blazing Technicolor, all the little details. The woman in the kimono plunging her long clawlike nails into Aimi’s heart; Aimi’s eyes flying open in surprise.

I stood up slowly, wobbly, and said, my voice a faint whisper, “Does Aimi wear contacts?”

“
Huh?”

“
Does she wear contact lenses?” I repeated urgently.

“
What does that have to do with anyth—?”

“
Does she or doesn’t she?”

“
A lot of kids wear contacts. Jesus!” He sounded, as usual, on the verge of a conniption fit.

I, on the other hand, was feeling a lot worse than that. Aimi, like me, had blue eyes. But I was only now realizing it. Like me, she had found an effective way of disguising them, one so good even
I
hadn’t noticed.

“
Aimi’s in serious trouble, isn’t she?” Snowman said.

“
Maybe.” I glanced around foolishly, like there was transportation at arm’s length. There were plenty of abandoned cars, but I was in the same boat as the looters. There was no way I was going to be able to navigate these streets, not with a car, and the buses weren’t exactly running.

Then I spotted a used car/trade-in place across the street, selling everything from SUVs to dirt bikes, and I felt my spirits rise a little. “Where does she live?” I said, starting across the abandoned street.

For once Snowman didn’t sound like he wanted to rip my head off. He sounded scared. He told me as I stepped into the showroom. I looked over their selection of Hondas, spotting a very sweet looking Shadow with a candy-apple-red paint job and some serious muscle to it, but after checking the dealer’s desks, I realized there were no keys to any of the vehicles. In fact, I had no idea
where
they kept the keys, but a good bet was a safe somewhere to keep them out of the hands of miscreants like myself. I swore violently and kicked at the panel of a hybrid. My heart was knocking somewhere up near my throat with panic. I had to get somewhere, and I had no way of doing it.

“
What’s going on? What’s the matter?” Snowman demanded to know.

I glared determinedly at the Shadow. “I have to hotwire a bike, and I’ve never done that before.” I transferred the phone to my neck while I uncased the hood, looking for the engine bay. If I could find the ignition coil…

“
Smash the key ignition and find the rotation switch, stick a coin in and turn it,” Snowman said, surprising me.

I hesitated. “Why do you think that’ll work?”

“
I
know
.”

It was going to take too long to do this the right way. I ducked into the adjoining garage, found a good, heavy wrench, and carried it back with me. Even though the dealership was abandoned, I still felt a little guilty about smashing the ignition, which, true to what Snowman had said, revealed the key tumblers. I felt a cold, frantic energy bubble up through my stomach and into my throat as I inserted a quarter and twisted the mangled ignition switch. I had no idea if this was going to work, or if Snowman was putting me on.

“
Yes.” The Shadow roared to life.

I could have appreciated Snowman’s advice—messy but effective—but I was far too frightened at the moment. I was almost certain I had killed the girl I was falling in love with.

9

I arrived at Aimi’s building on Fifth Avenue in record time. It was a snobby, pedigree apartment building directly across from Central Park Zoo. According to Snowman, the Muras owned the penthouse triplex that formerly belonged to Laurence Rockefeller. There was no doorman, thankfully. I think everything was running on a skeleton crew, if that.

But once I was inside the building I was forced to slow down. The lobby was being manned by two very nervous-looking security guards watching KTV. Their purpose, I knew, was to keep the lowbrow riffraff like myself out, especially now, with looters hitting every part of the city. One stood up as I headed for the elevators. “Excuse me? Sir? You can’t go up there…”

Oh yeah? Watch me.

I hit the call button as they moved out from behind the big, circular courtesy desk and started toward me. I was feeling frantic again. I had tried stabbing in 911 on the way over, but I kept getting busy signals; the city was officially swamped by calls, and the monster wasn’t even here yet.

“
Sir,” repeated the younger of the two guards, the one that usually gets it in all the horror movies, “I’m afraid I can’t allow you up there.”

He was almost upon me when I turned around and extended my hand, palm up, which suddenly burst into a flamethrower. My hand tingled and then a jet of brilliant flames jumped from it and out at the guards, lighting up the face of the young one and reflecting in the glasses of the older one. A potted hibiscus tree caught on fire and started to burn merrily. The young guard stumbled to a halt and stood there in an apelike half-crouch, slack-jawed, staring at the tree crackling with flames. Maybe he’d seen the same movies I had?

“
Get lost,” I told him. “Go do something useful like dial 9-1-1. There’s a girl in trouble upstairs.”

The young guard said nothing, just hung there until the elevator car arrived. I backed up into it. Then the doors shushed closed and I was alone with the dull buzz of muzak in my ears and my own dark thoughts rattling around my head. I couldn’t help wondering if I was too late.

10

Aimi’s big oaken penthouse doors were unlocked. I didn’t know if that was a good omen or a bad one. But the moment I pulled open one of the heavy, baroque doors, a slush of music papers slipped out and covered the floor at my feet. I didn’t consider that a particularly
good
omen. I stepped over them and into the apartment, looking around at the massive, unfamiliar wainscoted walls, cathedral ceilings and imported Pier 1-type furnishings.

“
Aimi?” I said. My voice echoed. The penthouse was dark and silent.

I had an unnerving moment of déjà vu. I wasn’t standing in a school corridor, looking for her, like in my dreams, but the echoing silence was still weirdly familiar and made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. No one answered. The penthouse seemed to be deserted.

The place was a wreck, like looters had been through it, yet nothing appeared to be missing—rather, the looters looked like they had been bent on destroying what was there. There were portraits and newspaper clippings behind glass on the walls, mostly of Dr. Mura getting this or that award for this or that humanitarian act, but the glass had been shattered by a blunt weapon and some of the portraits slashed. Furniture had been smashed to shards, and I saw a high-end chaise lounge with its intestinal stuffing hanging out, like a psycho with a knife had been at it. A line of ragged, half-crumpled music sheets covered the floor, leading me like breadcrumbs down a long corridor to a music room.

The room was huge, easily the size of my whole loft, but dim. There were reams of paper
everywhere
, covering the floor, the plastic-covered furniture, the ancient, preserved baby grand piano in one corner. The room would have been as dark as night, except that hundreds of flickering votive candles had been lit and covered every surface like a weird constellation of stars. “Aimi?” I whispered again, my voice echoing uncertainly. I walked on the crumpled pages of the music she had once written, hundreds of pages covered in notations and black ink scribbles and scratch-out marks. She must have been blacking out her music for
hours
after she had come home.

A shadow flickered further on, in a dark recess. I turned toward it.

I’d finally found Aimi.

She’d tried to commit ritual Jigai—hara-kiri for girls. She had wedged herself between the baby grand piano and a desk and had tied her knees together with a long silk obi belt. I knew she had done so to bind herself in a dignified position in spite of any convulsions she might experience in death. On the floor beside her were more crumpled music sheets, and besides that a razor blade on a slim silver necklace, the edge of the blade covered in a shining thread of blood that looked black in the near dark.

“
Aimi?” I said, kneeling down beside her. I was afraid to touch her. I stared dumbfounded at the blood seeping from dozens of gashes that covered her arms, her legs, her neck, even her cheeks. She had been cutting herself over and over, maybe for hours. What was worse, amidst all the fresh wounds were dozens of old white scars, hidden only because she wore so much clothing all the time. She looked lifeless, like a marble statue in black clothes, except that her chest was rising and falling fitfully. I pressed two fingers to her throat and found a thready pulse beating like moth wings against my fingertips. But her eyes wouldn’t open at all.

“
Aimi,” I said again, surprised by how calm my voice sounded, even though a blade of panic was slowly cutting me wide open. I took her face in both hands, rubbing my thumbs against her cold, stony cheeks. “Aimi, it’s Kevin. Aimi, open your eyes.”

She made a low groaning noise like someone waking up—or trying to. With effort she turned her head and her eyes cracked open—they were gummed together by the blood leaking from the tiny wounds all over her face. Her eyes were bright pale silvery blue, the color of the heavens after a rainstorm. I definitely understood why she wore the contacts. In her pale, Asian face they looked surreal, almost otherworldly. My mind flashed over to a (perhaps) imaginary memory, a gawky, preteen Aimi being pushed and laughed at on the playground, and fighting back because she knew she was different. “Ke-evin?” she said.

“
Yeah.”

“
Are we dead?”

“
No, Aimi. We’re not dead.”

“
Oh,” she said, a painful noise.

“
What did you do, Aimi?”

“
Kevin,” she said again, more forcefully. Her voice was dry and husky like she had been screaming for hours. She squeezed her fists closed so that more blood wept thickly from the wounds on her wrists. Despite all the blood loss, she didn’t seem to be dying of it. Yet. Her eyes were huge and dark, the pupils almost completely dilated. She stared off into space. “We had fun. At the party.”

“
Yeah, we did.”

“
I didn’t want to fight you. I…you…”

“
I know you’re a Keeper,” I said to spare her a long, stuttering explanation. “And I know you know I am, too.” And the sad truth was, I had only just recently figured it out. So much for a genius IQ, I thought bitterly. “I know you’re connected to Qilin.”

She turned her head away as if she were ashamed of herself. She wouldn’t last, I thought, not the way she was bleeding out from her wounds. Though, from the sight of the blood surrounding her, I thought she should have been dead hours ago. Maybe, I thought, Qilin was such a huge part of her now that it wouldn’t even let her die normally anymore.

But, of course, I couldn’t know that for certain.

That weird calm suffused me again, the same as when I had called Raiju forth that first time. I picked up the razor blade—it was genuine, and as sharp as sin—and cut the silk binding her legs. I ripped the fabric in half so I had two makeshift bandages of equal length and started binding her arms where her wounds were the most severe, pulling the silk tight against the deep black gashes in her wrists. It was the best tourniquet I could make in a pinch.

I picked up my cell phone and tried to reach 9-1-1 again.

“…
don’t,” she managed, suddenly becoming animate. She shook her head sadly, her sweat-dampened black hair rattling around her pale face. “Please, Kevin, don’t call the police…”

“
I’m calling for an ambulance,” I told her.

“
Please…!” she cried. Her face contorted with horror. “I don’t want them knowing…!”

“
I won’t tell them about Qilin, I promise.”

She closed her eyes again. She looked exhausted, finished.

Miracle of miracles, I was able to get through. The dispatcher told me to stay on the line, that an ambulance was on its way. She started saying other things to keep me talking, but I turned the speaker off.

“
It’ll be all right,” I told Aimi. “They’re on their way.”

She shifted uncomfortably until she was leaning against me. Obviously, her wounds pained her, even if they did seem incapable of killing her. “Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, panting through the pain. “Don’t tell them about me. Don’t tell them what Daddy did…
please
…”

I looked at the gashes, at all the blood. “What did your dad do?” I said, taking her gently and cradling her against me.