Bound Together (4 page)

“Unwise.” The dark figure was turned away from me, but I knew it was addressing me directly. “If you had not challenged us, we would have allowed you to live.”

The sword-wielding man was no longer standing, either. It became increasingly clear to me that the black flash that nearly knocked me flying had been directed at the swordsman, not at me. I could smell the sharp metallic tang of blood in the air, mingled with the lingering acrid scent of gunsmoke.

The dark man strode toward the fallen swordsman, clearly intent upon finishing the job that he'd started with whatever weapon he carried that created those black flashes. The girl was crouched over the swordsman, shaking him desperately.

“Your impulsive actions have inadvertently aided us. We will reward you with a merciful death.”

I knew the threat was directed at me. I'd caused a distraction by interrupting their battle. I gave the dark man the opening he needed to fell his opponent. And now, because of me, the girl would die, too.

I couldn't let that happen. The shaking in my hands suddenly subsided along with the fear, replaced only with fury. Rage fueled my movements, rage at the dark man, anger at myself for my own stupidity. I rushed forward in a dead run, feeling the blood and adrenaline coursing through my veins, setting them afire.

My words came out in a roar of defiance. “No! Leave her alone!”

The dark figure didn't respond with words. There was another black flash, this time aimed at me. I felt a soul-chilling sickening feeling as something indescribably corrupt washed over me, almost dropping me in my tracks. I felt intense pain as the attack, whatever it was, opened up a series of deep slashes on my right arm. Blood poured from the wound, hot against my skin, but I ignored it.

The girl looked up at me, astonishment overriding the resignation in her eyes. I tried to collapse into a combat roll, but ended up simply falling to the ground instead. My chin and knees slammed into the cold laminate floor, but I ignored the pain and took hold of the dead man's sword.

The hilt felt oddly warm in my hands, tingling against my skin as if it had been charged with static electricity, but I was only very faintly aware of it. I had no idea how to use the weapon properly, but I didn't need to. The dark man was already almost on top of me as he rushed forward.

I could see his face for the first time.

It wasn't a man's face, or even a
human
face. The face was flat, blank. No ears, no nose, no brow ridge, nothing. Empty of features—except for eyes. Dozens of eyes of various sizes, shapes and colors. Some resembled human eyes. Others looked like animal eyes. There was a single eye in the center of the faceless head, a vertical pupil with an angry reddish-gold iris that looked very much like the eye of a snake.

The black flash nearly blinded me with negative brilliance. I was close enough that I could tell the dark man wasn't even armed, that he was somehow producing the blasts of whatever from his hands—which were also covered in staring, blinking, darting eyes.

I don't know how I managed to even stay functional. What I was seeing couldn't really be happening, wasn't even within the realm of possibility. If I hadn't been so fueled by adrenaline, anger and self-reproach, I don't think I would have been able to resist.

The corruption washed over me, but didn't seem to sink in like it did the last time. I felt the sword in my hands start to tingle. The thin strip of the blade's edge started to glow as if the steel was being heated for forging. First cherry red, then yellow, then brilliant white, but I could feel no heat.

“Strike it down! Hurry!”

The girl's voice sounded pure, high and bell-like. The resignation in her eyes was gone, replaced with something that looked like hope. The command was almost a compulsion; I felt my body reacting, thrusting the glowing blade outward.

The dark man tried to parry the strike, but the angle was all wrong despite my ineptitude with the scavenged weapon. The tip pierced his flesh and drove deep into his gut, his own charge driving the blade through his body. There was a horrible keening shriek, an unbearable cacophony that I
felt
as much as heard, but I held on, driving the blade deeper into the creature's eye-covered body.

Waves of heat roiled off the blade, but I couldn't feel them. The sword's edge was glowing more brightly than the sun; I couldn't even look at it without pain. The body impaled upon the weapon seemed to writhe and contort, collapsing in upon itself. I yanked the sword back viciously, ripping it from the dark man's torso with a spray of black gore that smoked as it hit the floor.

Stumbling backwards, I tried to keep hold of the sword as best I could, but my attention was completely riveted to the horrible spectacle in front of me. The dark creature just
folded up
, its body just crushing down into an irregular sphere, as if a giant invisible fist took hold and squeezed.

The ball of filth and corruption exploded, consumed within a sphere of black incandescence. It spread outward and I could feel a cold, clammy and crawling sensation envelop me. Whatever profane substance made up the creature's form was expanding and spreading, smothering me, sapping away my anger, my adrenaline and leaving behind intense feelings of crushing despair.

I was dimly aware of the girl, her hands spreading wide as a shimmering, soothing golden radiance washed over me. It was the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness.

flowers

My eyes flew open and I sat bolt upright in bed, drawing in deep breaths. I was in my apartment, in my own bed. My phone was sitting on the charging mat; I picked it up and woke the device from sleep. It was almost four o'clock in the afternoon. Somehow I'd managed to sleep most of the day away.

A chill ran down my spine as the memories of the nightmare I'd just awakened from came rushing back to me. I felt cold, clammy. Sweat clung to my skin. I could still remember the nightmare almost as clear as if it had really happened. Usually my dreams were pretty elusive and tended to be fragmented, the fleeting memories dissolving completely as the day wore on.

This time was different. I rarely had nightmares. Most of my dreams were benign stuff, usually pretty weird stuff when my brain wanted to check out for a while. Occasionally I had dreams about my family. Rarer still were the pleasant sort of barely-recalled sexy dreams where I'd wake up and find both my thighs and sheets damp. But nightmares? I hadn't had any since I was little.

Well, I wasn't so little anymore. Twenty-nine didn't feel that old, though. I didn't feel much like an adult most of the time. I had the usual adult problems, adult bills, adult job and adult responsibility, but I didn't feel different, really. Maybe it was just so slow and subtle a change that I just wouldn't notice it.

“Maybe it's just because I'm alone,” I murmured, to no one in particular.

It was a possibility. Being single and uninvolved with anyone wasn't exactly unheard of at nearly thirty, but it wasn't especially common, either. I wasn't that interested in other people. I didn't even have many friends. Marisa was the last person I even touched in a manner resembling anything intimate. I'd never had sex—yeah, almost thirty and I never once got into it with another person, male, female or otherwise. I had no desire whatsoever to have children. I didn't care. I wasn't interested.

Being alone wasn't so bad. That's what I tried to tell myself.

I tossed the sheets aside and got out of bed, but stopped before I headed for the shower. Something felt off,
smelled
off. I sniffed the air and my nostrils were filled with the very faint scent of sweet flowers. That wasn't a normal scent in my apartment. I didn't wear perfume and I hadn't had fresh flowers in the apartment in years.

“You're awake.”

To say that I was startled would have been a big fucking understatement. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard the voice from behind me. Lilting, clear and bell-like and unmistakably feminine, it was a voice that had been etched into my mind by the nightmare I'd just awakened from.

I whirled around and stood face-to-face with the girl I'd seen in my dream. My jaw dropped and could have hit the floor if it wasn't attached to my head. Unlike in my dream, I could see her much more clearly in the fading late-afternoon sunlight.

She was a little shorter than me, perhaps by a few centimeters. Her build was slight, like mine, and she was clearly fit but still had a soft, exaggerated feminine look to her. Her hair was sort of wavy, faintly red-tinged gold in color, and she had a lot of it. Her eyes were large, expressive and had irises so intensely green they didn't look real.

The girl was dressed in a sort of simple red yukata that left her legs mostly bare, appearing to be cut high with freedom of movement in mind. She didn't wear any shoes, likely because she'd taken them off; I could see a pair of simple cut-silk flats neatly lined up next to my own shoes near the front door.

I stood there, staring at her, mouth hanging open, and she just gazed back at me, pensively, not speaking. I had no idea what the hell was going on. It took my mind several long moments to process what I was seeing, because I just noticed something that was even more bizarre than anything else so far.

The girl had fox ears.

Huge
fox ears, covered with fur the same color as her impressive mane of hair. The ears twitched, swiveling to and fro as they adjusted to catch the faintest sound. A swishing of red-tinged gold behind her. Of course, she had a fox's tail as well. The tail was long, almost extending beyond her knees, and very fluffy. The tail's volume increased toward the tip and then tapered down to a point; this point was slightly more pale than the rest.

I must've gone into some sort of brain lock, because when I tried to speak, nothing coherent came out of my mouth. The clarity of my memories of the nightmare seemed to deepen even further as I stared like an idiot at the girl.

“Yes, I'm real,” the girl stated, answering the question I tried to ask. I blinked and noticed that my hands were shaking again, quite violently this time. This was just too out there. I stumbled backwards, falling back on the bed, but the girl walked slowly around and held something out to me.

It was my pack of cigarettes and lighter. I took these things from her hand and somehow managed to pull a smoke out of the pack. Lighting it proved to be a little more difficult with hands that shook so much, but I managed. I took a long drag and slowly blew out a plume of smoke, the familiar sensation calming me a little.

“Are you all right? Do you feel any significant pain?”

The girl's question was innocent enough, but I had no idea how to answer it, not even in the slightest. I was not okay. I was confused, I was scared, my hands were shaking and I didn't know what the fuck was going on.

“No... no, I'm not okay. I'm really not okay. If you—if you're here, really, right there in front of me, then that nightmare I had—”

“It was not a nightmare.” The girl looked at me sympathetically with those huge, eerily green eyes. “Please, rest. Your body absorbed a great deal of miasma. I was able to cleanse most of it, but you will be weak for a time. I will make tea.”

I held a hand up. “No, no, I'll make it. Just let me get my bearings a little first.”

The girl tilted her head quizzically. “Why?”

“Um, it's my apartment. Just stay there and I'll make some.”

“Why would you make tea for me?” The girl stared at me, seeming to be utterly stumped by the idea that I might get up, go into my own kitchen and make a pot of tea.

“Well, you're in my home, so that makes you my guest, I guess,” I said, dumbly. “Isn't that the nice thing to do?”

“I... suppose. It is a
very
small home, and I see no servants, so I would take the task on myself. You must rest until the miasma has left your—”

I was starting to feel the need to control something,
anything
, reach a fever pitch. At least I could make tea in my own apartment. “I can get up and make tea. I'm capable of
that
much, okay?”

Ignoring any further protest from the weird fox girl, I got out of bed and walked into the kitchenette. I filled a battered old teapot with water and set it on the stove, turning the flame on to high. A few moments later the water started to boil, so I cut off the heat and dropped a few grocery-store teabags of Earl Grey inside. It wasn't the best—I was more a coffee drinker, usually—but the girl mentioned tea, so I made tea.

I poured the tea into two cups and handed one to the girl. She seemed genuinely surprised—hell, more like thunderstruck, now that I think about it. Hesitantly she accepted the offered beverage and sipped at it slowly.

Her vulpine ears seemed to convey a great deal of emotion, because they drooped slightly in a way that seemed to match the pink flush that formed on her cheeks. I really had no idea what the hell that meant, but at least my mind was actually starting to work properly now after the initial shock.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and motioned for her to sit next to me. The weird girl just blinked, her tail's slow swishing suddenly halting.

“Don't you want to sit? It feels weird for you to be just standing while I'm not.”

The girl blinked. “Is that permissible? I don't wish to offend you.”

“If it was going to offend me I wouldn't have offered,” I replied, annoyance creeping into my voice. I sipped at my own tea, the floral and citrus notes in the tea helping to clear my head a bit. The weird girl walked gingerly toward the edge of the bed and sat down, her fluffy tail curling around and wrapping around her waist to rest atop her lap.

“So,” I began, unsure of what to say.

“How are you feeling, Master?”

I gawked at the weird girl. She was getting even weirder by the minute. “What do you mean, 'Master?'” I demanded.

“I'm sorry. I will explain.” The girl's voice sounded deeply and formally apologetic, almost to a ritualistic degree. I still didn't know what was going on, but her attitude was so deferential and submissive that I couldn't help but wonder.

“Last night, my Master and I were sent to investigate the scrying of two thousand-eyes summoned by a rival family. The seers determined that such creatures would be used to perform a high-stakes theft of information. We tracked the creatures to the Records & Licensing Agency building and engaged them in combat.”

“Wait—this 'thousand-eyes' thing, that's what I shot at? That's the thing I stabbed with the sword?”

“Yes.” The girl sipped at her tea and I watched as the blush on her cheeks intensified. My eyes narrowed suspiciously; there was definitely something going on with this weird fox-eared girl. I mean, beyond the obvious fact that there was a weird girl with fox ears in my apartment telling me that the nightmare I had was actually
real
and I actually
did
spend the evening fighting a man-shaped monster
made of eyes
.

Yeah, all of that was pretty fucking strange, but besides all that, the girl seemed to be deeply affected by the simple offer of tea. I didn't really know what to make of that. I didn't know what to make of
any
of this.

“The thousand-eyes were much more powerful than my Master expected,” the girl continued. “He defeated one, but its companion overpowered my Master. I fully expected the creature to destroy me as well, but that did not happen. You intervened.”

“I—I shot that thing twelve times,” I blurted. “It didn't even budge him. It was like I did nothing at all.”

The girl nodded. “Specters can't be killed through ordinary means. Only warriors armed with a Relic can defeat them permanently.”

I already guessed that much. The memory was crystal-clear in my mind: the glowing sword, thrusting it through the body of the dark man. The creepy, oily coldness that expanded outwards and the explosion of corrupt darkness that sapped my energy and emotions and dropped me like a sack of wet rice. Yeah, sure, I remembered that much, far more vividly than I ever wanted to.

“When you took the Relic into your hands and used it to slay the specter, it became anchored to you,” the girl continued. “I cannot exist in the world without a source of mana, and my Master had been killed. I could not heal the wounds that the thousand-eyes inflicted upon him, as they were much too severe.”

My eyes widened. “Wait, what? Rewind just a bit there; what do you mean, you can't exist without a source of mana?”

“I am the spirit of the Relic, in the form of my former Master's sword. I was created from the invocation of purified quintessence and imbued within the blade during its forging, to grant it the power to destroy spirits permanently.”

I tried to parse this, but it wasn't making any sense to me. This was some kind of folk legend shit here, the sort of thing my mother not-so-secretly believed in. This kind of stuff didn't really happen, did it? I mean, I guess it did, since it happened to me and now there's this weird but cute girl with fox ears and tail in my apartment talking to me about hunting demons or whatever.

“Okay, so let me get this straight. You need someone to, um,
wield
the weapon you're imbued in so you have the energy necessary to stay alive?”

“Not to stay alive, but to manifest in physical reality.” The girl finished her tea and set the cup down gently on the nearby table. “Without a Master to supply me with astral energy, I have no choice but to remain dormant within the Relic.”

The parsing troubles weren't really going away. “Right. Well, let's change gears a bit here. What's your name?”

The girl blinked, surprised. “I do not have a name.”

“Wait, how do you not even have a name?” I demanded. “How did your Master get your attention, or call for you, or whatever if you don't have a name?”

“I am linked to my Master's spirit through his bond with the Relic. If he wishes to summon me, I will come. There is no need for my Master to speak to me directly in order for me to aid him.”

“Okay, well, that's going to stop right now, then.” I drained the last vestiges of my tea and lit another cigarette. “Apparently I'm stuck with you? This Relic thing you keep talking about, the sword, it's permanently attached to me?”

“Not physically, but it is an inextricable part of you.”

“Okay... but you can think for yourself, right? I mean, you aren't a direct extension of my will?”

“I can make decisions of my own will. Such a level of independent thought was deemed necessary so that I might be more effective in fighting against specters. Allowing my Master to focus on combat without needing to divide his attention to direct my actions offers a significant advantage during battles.”