The Nicholas Linnear Novels (238 page)

And she slid from her finger the emerald ring Senjin had given her on the day after he had murdered Jeiji, her lover.

“This is a tanjian emerald,” she said. “It is the only thing my brother ever gave me. He presented it to me on our birthday, but it was never mine. I suspected it then. I know it now.”

Nicholas took the ring with its glowing stone set in platinum, and in that moment he felt what Shisei felt: the power of the Demon Woman.

Turning gracefully as a woman, as Shisei herself would, he went out of the entryway, up the stairs, to look death in the face.

The energy of
kokoro
washed over Senjin, laving him as a mother bathes her infant. Once, he felt another presence at
kokoro,
the center of things, and he reached out almost languidly, already almost a god, exerting godlike power, and the other presence disappeared.

It was Nicholas Linnear, Senjin knew, who had withdrawn when Senjin himself had reached out with the steel coils of his will to embrace
kokoro.
Now that he had successfully cut Nicholas off from the central energy of Tau-tau, Senjin was assured of complete victory.

Senjin sat up. The reverberations at
kokoro
rang in his mind, in his body, setting them to vibrating. Even the tanjian elders at Zhuji cannot milk
kokoro
as I can, he thought. They were afraid to try, afraid that too much pressure on the membrane would cause it to rupture, causing limitless chaos to fill the world. I do not have their fears. I use
kokoro
as I see fit.

He reached out with his mind to enfold Shisei as he had done with
kokoro,
so that she could join in the exhilaration of this victory. He wanted her here, had called for her to join him because now was the time to reclaim the present he had given her: the tanjian emerald he had set into a ring for her.

Shisei had been its guardian without knowing it. When he had stolen it just before he had left the tanjian village of Zhuji, he knew that he must not keep it—at least not initially. The tanjian elders would have used their powers to trace it had he kept it with him. Shisei had never been to Zhuji, had never learned their Tau-tau. They would not find it if she had it.

Senjin could feel her presence, but he needed to be close to her, to merge with her one last time as she gave him the tanjian emerald. Was Nicholas somehow preventing her getting to him?

He went out of the room with the trompe l’oeil windows. His fingertips were sparking with blue flame only he could see: the power of
kokoro.

Senjin paused at the top of the stairs. He heard the soft pad of feet. He extended his mind outward, felt only a smooth, featureless wall. Nicholas Linnear.

But Shisei was closer. He was smiling as he descended.

Light drifted up to him, indirect but increasing in intensity. Recalling the trick with the mirrors, Senjin prepared himself. Light was Nicholas Linnear’s only ally, and Senjin was determined to strip him of it, to send him hurtling into the darkness before he ended his life.

Light shone on the curving staircase, bathing it as a moment before Senjin had bathed in the energy of
kokoro.
Into this confined field climbed the actor turned actress, the male who was female, the yang turned perfect yin: light into dark.

Senjin, at the moment of his ultimate triumph, the moment he had been anticipating, dreaming about, relishing for so many years, the moment when he would free Zhao Hsia from the infamy of defeat, when, by gathering up the stolen tanjian emeralds and murdering the treacherous So-Peng’s last ancestor, he would restore honor to his family line, confronted his worst nightmare.

The Demon Woman.

She rose out of the light, entangled within it, blotting it out as she approached: dark-eyed face, at once fierce and maternal, erotic and vindictive.

Haha-san’s face.

Senjin screamed or shouted, he did not know which. This was no play that he was taking his intended victims to see, no playacting upon a brilliantly-lit stage where he could observe with fear, loathing, and fascination the visage of the Demon Woman, safe in the confines of the theater, spellbound in the make-believe.

This was real. The Demon Woman, evolved from the mist of the shoreline, had at last come for him.

The shock of recognition lasted perhaps only a second. But it was enough to allow Nicholas to make the first assault, a blinding psychic attack using Akshara, the language of Eternity, taught to him by the tanjian
sensei,
Kansatsu.

Akshara is the center of the universe,
Kansatsu had told him.
It is a silence so whole, so complete within itself, that it contains the entire universe. When one expresses oneself with Akshara there is, in a real sense, no need for language. For Akshara was in existence long before there was a need for language. To employ Akshara is to be one with the universal force.

Still, though Senjin reeled backward on the staircase, his mind ripped by the Akshara assault while he was still paralyzed by the sight of the Demon Woman, he was not destroyed.

As Shisei had intimated, he was already too powerful. And Nicholas knew that he had waited too long, that he had allowed Senjin too much time to gather the forces of
kokoro,
that even Akshara was insufficient to stop him now.

Senjin crashed into the wall of the staircase, whirled down several steps. But now his mind had recovered from the initial shock, and he extended his will like a vise, surrounding the smooth, featureless wall, exerting more and more pressure, pressing inward, inflicting pain, until with a thunderous crash of silence the wall collapsed.

And Senjin was inside Nicholas’s last line of defense, in Nicholas’s mind, the energy of
kokoro
manifesting itself by tearing Nicholas’s psyche apart.

The end was approaching, more rapidly than Nicholas could have imagined. He fell to his knees. His costume ripped, the elaborate wig fell off his head.

He could not breathe, could not move. Thinking was all but obviated by the pressure Senjin was bringing to bear on him. Darkness was descending.

But there was a central core of light that burned in the darkness: a crystal lantern, the essence that Shisei had given him…

Now, come to me, my sister, my twin, my love, thought Senjin. Now is when I need you. The dark, sinuous coils of his will expanded outward, touching the smooth wall of Nicholas’s psyche.

But the wall was no longer featureless. Its vast curving surface was aglitter with the essence of his twin sister. Shisei rose to meet him, and as Senjin reached out, he was met with a swirl of mist and vengeance.

Shisei!
Senjin’s mind cried…

Nicholas’s fingers felt as if they were encased in lead as he fumbled in his pocket. Pain gripped him; he felt his heart thudding heavily in his chest, as if at any moment it might burst.

Then the tanjian emerald Shisei had given him was in his palm, on the tips of his fingers. He exerted the last piece of his will.

And now he felt a power outside himself drawing him and it toward Senjin, faster and faster, as if two unimaginably powerful magnets were about to come together.

They touched…

Within the firelight dancing in Senjin’s mind was a hollowness. He saw her as if from afar, and he knew with a despair that shriveled his spirit that he had been abandoned, betrayed by the creature he had created. His only love. His ultimate nightmare.

The Demon Woman: Shisei…

It was as if the faceted emerald had become a blade, for as it came into contact with Senjin’s chest, it cut through skin, muscle, viscera, and bone.

Blood exploded outward, showering Nicholas, the staircase, the walls. Senjin’s body arched like a bow. His eyes bugged out, his mouth opened soundlessly. Then all light and life went out of him, just as if some divine hand had extinguished the spark.

Shisei screamed, spun around. She held onto Conny Tanaka’s broad shoulders so that she would not collapse. She felt the death of her twin as the earth feels its sun in eclipse.

She gasped once, sharply. She felt ripped asunder, as if she had been eviscerated, a surgeon’s cruel scalpel excising in an instant what had been part of her since birth.

Darkness, the utter chill of an endless night. And then, as miraculous as the emergence through winter’s frozen soil of the first tender shoot, light and warmth returning.

One heart beating thum-thum, thum-thum, instead of two. Silence where there had been shadowy intimations, calm instead of echoes feverishly ringing. Shisei breathed. At last she was released from the dark, metallic coils of Senjin’s will.

“Are you all right?” Conny asked.

“Yes,” Shisei managed to get out. “Now.”

Immediately Nicholas felt the pain inside him lift. The husk of Senjin Omukae, the
dorokusai,
lay sprawled across the stairs, as inconsequential as ash. The dark reverberations ceased.

Echoes, then silence.

Kokoro
was at rest.

T
HE SUN WAS SHINING
in southwest Florida when Nicholas and Justine drove their convertible rental car across the San Marco Drive causeway onto Marco Island.

Lew Croaker and Alix would have met them at the Fort Myers airport, but they were out on their boat, chartered for the morning.

Nicholas turned onto Collier Boulevard, heading for the dock where Lew’s boat was berthed. They went past lavish private homes, surrounded by lush tropical foliage, many with their own boat slips, then condominium developments that fronted the beach against which lapped the warm, gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nicholas pulled into a parking space, turned off the engine. For a time neither of them moved. They listened to the wind in the palms, the crying of the gulls, watched the serpentine sweep of the pelicans as they skimmed the diamond-lighted waves, searching for food.

“Justine,” Nicholas said. “I’m sorry. At the beginning of all this I closed you out. I thought I was doing the noble thing, that I could protect you from what was happening to me.” He took her hand. “But the truth is that I shut you out long before that. I was so happy to be back in Japan that it simply never occurred to me that you could feel differently—that you
must
feel differently. You didn’t know the language, the customs were strange, there were few friends of your sex and age to be made and, most of all, you must have missed home.”

“Nick—”

“No, let me finish.” He watched the salt breeze take her hair, whip it about her face. “Ironically, it was through Senjin that I found you again, that I came to understand the core of our estrangement. But then I betrayed you again. I used you to trap Senjin, to blunt his power, which was growing each hour. I put you in danger. It was a calculated risk, I admit, because I put you center stage in a theater of my own making. But—”

Justine’s hand on his mouth stopped him. The sun was shining in her eyes, turning them a vivid green. The red motes swam in her left eye like points of fire. “Nick, you must know how deeply I love you. Words mean nothing. But you can look inside my mind—I know that now, after the events of the last few days. You can feel what I feel about you.”

She brought his hand up to her mouth, kissed his palm. “I thank God that you’ve told me what happened, and that it wasn’t what I feared. Nick, for a long time I thought you hated me because you blamed me for our daughter’s death.”

“Justine, how could you—”

“Hush, now. Let me have my say. I was afraid of that because of my own guilt. I projected it onto you, and as we drifted further and further apart, the idea got set in my mind. You never knew, because I couldn’t admit it to myself, that I was terrified of having a child. And then when our daughter died, it occurred to me that my fright had somehow killed her.”

She drew a lock of hair off her forehead. “And as for Senjin, you did what you had to do. You didn’t involve me—Senjin did. You just reacted in the only way you could. No one else could have stopped him, I’m certain of that.”

She kissed him hard on the lips. “Now it’s over. There’s a new life inside me. Our child, Nick. And I’m not afraid anymore. I want it as much as I want you. And very soon I’ll need you both, and I know it will be a wonderful feeling.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, felt the strength of his arms encircling her. “How I love you,” she whispered.

Croaker’s boat was just turning past the headland. They could see Alix shading her eyes, straining to make them out. They waved and Alix grinned, waved back.

Ten minutes later, the boat was at its berth. Alix raced down the dock to embrace them both. Lew Croaker was helping his clients off with their catch: an iridescent blue martin.

He looked different, tan and fit. The constant Florida sun had put a squint in his eyes that looked faintly piratical, and his hair was quite a bit longer than when he had been a NYPD detective.

“Hey, Nick.”

“Lew.”

They shook hands, then embraced.

Later, on board the
Captain Sumo,
Lew Croaker said, “We’re a couple of miles out. How about doing a little fishing for marlin? It’s a good day for them.”

Nicholas shook his head. “Thanks, but I’d rather relax another way. I’ve had enough of killing for a while.”

Croaker squinted at him. “You haven’t turned into some kind of freaking vegetarian in Japan, have you?”

Nicholas laughed. “Jesus, Lew, it’s good to see you.”

“Yeah. Well, for a while there I thought maybe we’d never see each other again.”

“Friends are too important to lose,” Nicholas said.

“Hey, buddy, you want to see something?” Croaker dipped into the large cooler on deck, brought out two cans of beer. He tossed one to Nicholas, then lifted the other one in his left hand. The titanium, graphite, and polycarbonate prosthetic the medical geniuses at Todai had grafted onto the stump of his wrist looked like part exotic carapace, part erector set. Croaker had said that at first he had kept it sheathed in a glove, but soon that seemed foolish, especially in a tropical climate.