Bound Together (9 page)

“You aren't defenseless, Karin, and neither am I.” Misaki's voice was calm, low and soothing. Now the tables were turned; I was in the unfamiliar and scary situation and she was in her element.

“Can you tell where it is?”

“It's... below us and to the west, maybe about a hundred meters.”

I nodded, expecting this. Beings that monstrous in appearance wouldn't be able to simply walk around the mall without a care in the world. I didn't really think a bunch of evil spirits actually
cared
what humans thought of them, even their alleged masters who bound them with magic circles and made deals for power. I was pretty sure they weren't stupid enough to walk around openly, though.

Even if ordinary people with ordinary guns couldn't actually kill the thing, the bigger the commotion got, the more likely AEGIS would show up, or maybe another independent spirit hunter. Well, there
was
a hunter here, so the specter was out of luck on the whole remaining hidden thing.

The Tsukimura clan be damned; as far as I was concerned, Misaki owned herself. Whether she drew power from my soul or whatever, I categorically refused to
own
Misaki or let anyone else claim ownership over her. Letting out a deep sigh, I dug myself out of shitty thoughts and focused on the more immediate problem.

“What do you want to do?”

“It's just going to follow me,” Misaki pointed out. “It can feel my mana the same way I can feel the miasma leaking from its physical manifestation. We have to destroy it here, before it has enough time to change tactics.”

My eyes widened in shock. “Here? With all these people around?”

“We need to find it before it tries to possess a human.” Misaki finished her tea and stood up. I didn't know they were capable of such a thing, but if she was as worried about it as she sounded, we really didn't have much of a choice.

“It's getting closer,” she warned. “It doesn't know it's been detected yet, but that will not last for much longer. I think it's in the utility sub-level.”

“Shouldn't be any witnesses down there.”

The two of us turned and started walking toward the nearest hallway that led back into the employees-only area of the mall. Trash cans were lined up in the empty corridor. I didn't see any security cameras in the area, but that was likely to change once we descended further into the restricted access area.

“There's a freight elevator here that accesses every floor of the mall.” I pointed at a shutter at the end of the hallway. Unlike the pedestrian elevators used by the shoppers to go from floor to floor, this one was much larger and the shutter was painted with a flat industrial gray instead of the regular bright brushed metal finish.

“We need to hurry,” Misaki implored. “The specter just stopped moving. I think it knows that its quarry has been roused.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes and no. It shouldn't try to possess someone if it no longer has the advantage of stealth. When possessing a mortal, the specter can't invoke its powers directly, in exchange for becoming much harder to detect.”

I pressed the elevator call button and beckoned for Misaki to join me inside the lift as the doors opened. “That doesn't make any sense. Wouldn't it
want
to become undetectable if it was found out?”

Misaki shook her head. “I already have a fix on it. Even if the specter were to possess a human, I would still be able to track it, but it wouldn't be able to use magic to fight or defend itself so long as it was inhabiting a body.”

“What happens to a person who gets possessed?” I suspected I knew the answer already. Misaki's haunted expression answered my question well enough before she opened her mouth to speak.

“The specter's spirit displaces the person's consciousness,” she explained. “It is not something that can be reversed or cured. Once a specter takes over, the person who once inhabited the stolen body is dead, even if their physical form still lives on.”

The elevator doors opened and revealed a reasonably well-lit corridor. The walls were dark, unpainted concrete and the floor was some sort of sealed, slick material that wasn't great for traction but was easy to keep clean. As I'd guessed before, the utility sub-level looked deserted.

“It's not moving,” Misaki noted. “This type... it's a lesser specter, not as powerful as the thousand-eyes type and nowhere near as smart. I think it's trying to ambush us.”

I shot her a disbelieving glare. “It's a little hard to ambush someone when the people you want to ambush knows where the fuck you are.”

Misaki made a sharp runic gesture with her fingers and the air around her body shimmered briefly. When my vision cleared up enough to see again, her fox ears were back and swiveling around to catch sounds, her tail swishing slowly, the fur sort of standing up a little on end.

“You look much better when you aren't hiding them.” My absent-minded comment elicited a giggle out of Misaki at the exact moment I realized I'd just said that aloud. I felt a little warmth in my cheeks, certain I was blushing again. Fuck, look at me, I'm acting like a lovestruck teenager when we're supposed to be hunting a nightmare abomination.

Misaki's expression became all business. “We're getting close. Be ready to strike the specter down after I tear down its defenses.”

Instinctively I knew that if I wanted the sword, the Relic, all I had to do was think it into being. It was a part of me now, bound to my spirit. No matter where I went, the Relic would come with me, hidden away inside. I imagined the Relic in my hand, picturing the gentle yet razor-sharp curve of the blade that could kill monsters.

Without fanfare or even any visual indicator at all, I felt weight and solidity form in my right hand. My fingers wrapped around the sword's hilt and I brought it into a sloppy guard position, my hands positioned at the top of the hilt and just above the pommel.

My skill with a sword could best be summed up as mediocre, and that's being overly generous. Most of my knowledge of fencing came from watching too many samurai dramas and the occasional epic fantasy flick. If I had to fight against an opponent actually trained to use a sword, they'd carve my ass up within seconds.

Specters didn't use swords, though, and really all I had to do was cut their core or whatever. It was a team effort: Misaki would use her spells to whittle the thing's defenses down, then I'd move in for the killing blow. It figured that she'd be the one doing the bulk of the work; as if I needed any more reason to feel uncomfortable.

Misaki stopped mid-stride and held a hand up. I opened my mouth to question her decision, but closed it just as quickly when I noticed how odd the shadows ahead of us looked. They seemed to dance and warp as if the sub-level was lit by flickering torchlight, rather than modern ultra-efficient LED arrays.

I understood now; the specter was hiding within the shadows, likely still trying vainly to carry out the planned ambush. Misaki, of course, was having none of that shit. She drew forth magical flame from empty air. Two huge, roaring balls of explosive elemental might engulfed her hands as she delivered her challenge to our opponent.

“Your ambush has failed. Come out and face us, specter!”

defilement

The specter certainly came out and
faced
us.

I somehow managed not to drop the sword when the monster emerged from the shadows, black clouds of stinking miasma billowing from beneath. Now the dark eyeball-man from before was disturbing enough, but this specter was on a whole new level of fucking disgusting.

Floating in the air, suspended on a shifting cloud of miasma, was a disembodied head. Not just any head, of course—no, this awful thing had to be something out of a bender-fueled nightmare.

The head's flesh was dead-pale with sickly blue and green spots. The cheesy, rotten meat that covered the head was littered with leaking sores and pustules. A great shock of greasy, filthy black hair extended back like a disgusting tail. A neck stump extended a few centimeters from the base of the floating head's skull. Black blood and maggot-like worms dripped from the neck stump.

All of that was gross enough, but the worst part about the head was it had three faces, all appearing to come from a different person. The central face was missing its nose, torn off and leaving the hollow nasal cavities of the skull underneath visible.

Misaki didn't seem to be put off by the thing's absolute hideousness. The smell alone was almost enough to make me vomit, but Misaki's eyes were narrowed into emerald crescents. Her attitude had completely shifted and she rushed forward, launching a great blast of flame at the floating severed head.

The monster let out a cacophonous roar of pain and rage. The sound was so incredibly loud that it felt as if an icepick had been driven through my eardrums. Misaki was shouting something at me, but I couldn't hear over the ringing in my ears.

The specter opened its mouth and spat foulness at me. I dodged and Misaki countered, bringing up a golden shimmering barrier. The disgusting missile splattered against the wall of force. I made the mistake of looking at it as it fell and instantly regretted it as I recognized the mangled remains of a huge leech, at least a dozen times larger than the natural creature it resembled.

“It is a pestilence specter,” Misaki told me as she backpedaled and blasted the thing with flame again, which wasn't doing anything good for the smell. Rotting flesh is bad enough
without
being set on fire.

I could barely hear her with my ears, but her words seemed to echo back through my mind, likely due to the bond between us. “What does that matter?”

“Very stupid but quite powerful. Don't let any part of it touch you.”

I stared at Misaki, frustration and disbelief plain on my face. “How am I supposed to get close enough to cut it, then?”

Misaki traced an intricate pattern of red-gold light suspended in the air. I felt a warm, tingling pressure envelop me with a shimmering golden aura. Somehow I instinctively knew the spell she'd just cast was a very potent defense that would allow me to shrug off several miasma blasts as if they were water.

It was a good thing she did it, too, because the specter gave up trying to spit huge maggots at me. A familiar black flash distorted my vision, but the pain, despair and creeping lethargy that came packaged with it before was absent. The golden shield absorbed the damaging effects of the miasma, dimming just a touch as the dark energy slowly ate away at the power sustaining the barrier.

I raised the sword up into a high guard and stepped forward, bringing the blade around in a powerful diagonal slash that utilized the momentum of my entire body. The blade's edge glowed bright yellow-white as the Relic's killing power awoke. It was hardly a skillful strike, but the pestilence specter was both not using a sword of its own, nor did it even have arms to hold one in, and thus could not possibly parry the blow.

The slash took the floating head across one of its faces, but the cut was shallow, my swing slowed as if it had become embedded in a mass of sticky fluid. Black blood welled from the cut and dripped to the ground. The monster howled and redoubled its attacks, sending wave after wave of miasmic blasts at me, but it was futile. Misaki's barrier held up even under that withering assault.

Misaki launched another great blast of fire, sending the monster reeling back on the defensive. This bought her enough time to inscribe a series of intricate flowing runes. Nothing seemed to happen at first, but the effect of Misaki's spell became apparent when the miasma cloud beneath the floating head demon started to lose its soot-black hue.

The pestilence specter appeared to stumble as it floated, which was some really weird shit because it didn't have legs. The miasma that was keeping it aloft and maintaining its physical defenses was being compromised. I realized that Misaki's spell was drawing the corruption from the fog.

“Cleave the core in two!” Misaki cried.

I lunged forward, raising the blade high above my head and bringing it down with all the strength I could muster. The edge of the Relic blazed like a line of molten metal as it came slashing down. Misaki's purifying spell continued, building in strength, dispersing even more miasma as the sword sliced through the creature's disgusting form.

With the specter's miasma weakened, the blade went through easily. White-hot enchanted steel vaporized rotted flesh and crumbling bone. I briefly saw the interior of the creature's skull, containing not a brain but a clotted, condensed mass of tangled and twisted miasma. I drew back in a half-spin to gain momentum, and threw a powerful but fast horizontal cut that split the writhing core in two.

The pestilence specter let out a terrible rattling shriek as the two halves of its core wilted and faded to the dull gray color of ash. The cloud of thinning miasma dispersed almost immediately and the split skull of the monster fell to the ground.

A small pile of gray ash was all that remained of the creature. Misaki walked over to the ash pile and slashed a series of short, jagged sigils with her finger. A tremendous bolt of lightning arced from her outstretched left hand and into the pile. I shielded my eyes from the explosion of fierce white light, trying to blink away the bright spots that danced in my field of vision.

“The specter has been permanently destroyed,” Misaki announced. As my vision cleared up, I wasn't surprised at all to see that she was right. There was no trace of the pestilence specter; not even a speck of ash remained.

I raised the sword's blade up to peer at the edge. It was still flawless, perfect as the day it came off the blacksmith's anvil. The potent astral energies imbued into the weapon rendered it virtually indestructible and impossibly sharp. I relaxed and let the weapon hang loosely at my side.

“Are there any others nearby that you can feel?”

Misaki shook her head. “No. There are none within the range of my ability to sense. I can perform an invocation that will let me seek out specters within a much larger radius, but it wouldn't be wise to attempt here.”

“You're right,” I said, glancing back at the corridor where we came in. “We need to get out of this place. We're not supposed to be here.”

“You're damned right you aren't supposed to be here!”

I whirled at the sound of the unfamiliar and angry masculine voice. Shit. Someone
had
been down here. I glanced at Misaki, gauging her response to the sudden turn of events. Maybe we'd get lucky and the worker hadn't actually seen anything.

Misaki's eyes narrowed and her tail lashed as a man dressed in work coveralls came out from around the corner nearby. He had a mobile phone held in one hand, but I couldn't tell if he'd made a call on it or just happened to be holding it while down here for whatever reason.

Well, this was certainly awkward. I was still holding the Relic. The longsword had a blade that was eighty centimeters in length alone. The hilt added up with the blade to give a weapon that was over a meter long. Not inconspicuous in the slightest. I wished I could release the Relic's physical form, but if the sword itself was bad enough, making it
vanish into thin air
would be even worse.

“Who the hell are you? What are you doing down here, and—” The maintenance worker's eyes bugged out as he noticed Misaki, her fox-like ears and tail clearly visible even in the dim lighting.

Misaki turned toward him and started walking. I opened my mouth to protest, trying to hold the Relic in such a way that it would appear less threatening, but it was pretty hard to make a sword like this seem innocuous.

The worker's eyes widened in fear. “Don't c-come any closer! O-or I'll call the police!”

“Cut him down if he tries to run,” Misaki stated, her voice flat and more cold than I've ever heard it. My eyes widened in shock, but only for a moment as I realized that Misaki was using the threat to keep the man from bolting.

I guess I'd have to trust her. I lifted the blade and dropped into a guard stance, holding the sword ready in the most menacing way I could. It wasn't even a very effective stance, but the maintenance worker wasn't likely to know that.

“N-no! Stay away, monster!”

For the briefest of moments, Misaki's expressionless mask fell, replaced with the barest hint of pain. I wondered if she had received the same sort of reception from other humans throughout her life. She quickly mastered her feelings, though, and continued to move closer to the worker.

Spell-flame blazed into existence on her right hand and drew itself out into a burning rope. I felt my confidence faltering a bit as I saw that flame. Was she going to kill the man simply because he saw something he shouldn't have?

The spell-flame shot forth and wrapped around the man's body, but no smoke rose as the flames made contact with the man's coveralls. Misaki's tail lashed as she bent the fire to her will, tightening the magic-fire-rope until it bound the man's arms and legs tightly.

“S-stay away!”

Misaki gave him a sad smile. “Don't worry; you won't remember any of this.”

Her fingers traced a long series of jumbled, chaotic symbols in the air near the bound man's head. I had a pretty good idea what she was going to do, because the spell was potent enough that simply staring too intently at the runes she inscribed was causing my thoughts to muddle and my focus to fray.

The worker's eyes fluttered closed as Misaki finished her invocation. She dismissed the spell-flame, the fiery rope winking out as if it had never been. My head cleared instantly and I was astonished to discover that the man's coveralls showed no sign of damage.

“He's only asleep,” Misaki explained as she eased the sleeping man down, propping him up against the wall of the corridor. She took a moment and placed two fingers against the inside of his wrist, checking his pulse.

I released the Relic's physical form. “How did you—no,
what
did you do? With the fire and everything. For a second there I was worried you were going to kill him!”

Misaki shook her head. “The spell-flame is completely under my control. It will only burn what I wish it to burn. I only wished to restrain him long enough to erase a portion of his memory.”

“So that's why you told me to cut him if he ran,” I reasoned.

“Yes. I wasn't sure I'd be able to stop him without injury if he attempted to flee. In a few minutes, he will awaken with no memory of his encounter with us.”

Satisfied that the man was unhurt, Misaki stood and walked back to my side. She motioned toward the elevator door. I met her eyes, my expression grim, only to see the same sort of expression on her own face.

“They're not going to give up,” I murmured, certain that I was right. “They're just going to keep throwing these fucking things at us, and they only need to get lucky once.”

“I know. I'm sorry, Karin.”

I patted Misaki's shoulder lightly. “There's nothing for you to apologize about.”

“But I allowed you to be bound to the Relic—”

“Which I picked up of my own free will,” I cut her off. “
I
made the choice and now I have to live with the consequences. I could have run, I could have just left you there to die. I chose to protect you, knowing that I might die in the process.”

Misaki turned away. “You didn't know. There was no way you could have known about any of this, that I wasn't just some human bystander who had been inadvertently caught in a dangerous situation.”

“It didn't matter. You were in trouble.”

“House Tsukimura will continue to send specters to try and recover it.” Misaki's tone was ominous. “They will not stop until they have the Relic again. Without the sword, they are at a significant disadvantage. Lord Isao will make the recovery of the Relic the entire clan's top priority.”

I took Misaki's hands into mine and gave them a reassuring squeeze. The despairing look in her eyes seemed to melt away as I gazed into them. She seemed to gain strength from my confident expression, even if it was mostly feigned.

“Then we will make it our top priority to ensure they fail.”