Still fuming, Reiko went down the street to the garage. She found her motorbike—tagged Nakamura Ramen – We Deliver—started it up and kicked it into high gear, revving the engine. Peeling out onto the wet pavement with a flash of silver spray, she accelerated and maneuvered with superhuman ease through the bustling city streets, swerving at last to a splashing halt before the Nakamura Ramen Shop. 

She hopped off the bike and passed into the storefront, which like every other business on this street, was in fact an actual front for the various youkai taijiya—or modern-day ghost-hunters—who ran them. As in every large city of the world, this block was a hidden village of sorts, an underground citadel for Reiko and her kith and kin.

“Reiko-chan!” one of the old cooks hailed her from behind the counter, a retired former taijiya himself. “Is the storm letting up?”

At the question, a few of the other customers and staff peeked up from slurping their bowls of noodles or prepping ingredients.

“Not yet, ojii-san,” Reiko replied, peeling off her wet jacket by the door and hanging it up.

“Well, well. You be careful out there.”

“Hai, ojii-san. I will.”

‘Storm letting up’ was a code phrase, one of many employed by the taijiya clan. Although the vast majority of those in the ramen shop at any time were taijiya clansfolk or their associates, code phrases like this were necessary to protect any unwitting civilians in earshot. Asking ‘Has that brood of demonic bloodsuckers been stomped out yet?’ was the sort of question bound to cause a general panic.

Reiko passed behind the bar counter and continued on through a reed curtain into the perfectly normal-looking modern kitchen beyond. Ignoring the tottering stack of ‘to-go’ orders waiting to be delivered, she crossed over to the walk-in fridge, shut the heavy steel door behind her with barely a nudge, and with her breath smoking out before her, pressed her hand to a particular spot between the racks of eggs, meat and produce. 

An invisible square depressed at her touch. A slim dark door slid open seamlessly before her. The darkness beyond would have been total to an ordinary human, but to Reiko’s eyes, it was only a greying of sorts. She entered through the doorway and descended a long flight of narrow stairs, fitted with youki detectors at odd intervals and armed with the latest advances in slayer tech. Worst-case scenario, if all other detainment or neutralization measures failed, the whole tunnel would collapse in a conflagration of black-flamed rubble, utterly destroying the path ahead—if not the would-be intruder.

After passing a battery of physical and spiritual checks, the elevator door at the bottom of this deathtrap chimed opened with a cheery ‘Welcome back, Nakamura-san!’ Reiko smiled as she stepped inside. The elevator whisked her down at stomach-dropping speed, and as the doors chimed open again, she emerged at last into the sprawling, twinkling cavernous space beyond.

This was the taijiya clan’s underground fortress, a secret compound located far below the city of Tokyo. The lobby into which her elevator opened looked like a cross between a newsroom and a space station, with alert feeds rolling and glaring from a vast array of screens and with dark glowing terminals branching upwards and outwards in seemingly all directions. Here and there youkai taijiya strolled about, discussing fiends and arguing tactics, while armored, weapon-bearing others strode purposefully to and from missions. Reiko even saw a small cluster of her kinsmen wheeling along a mining cart’s worth of green steaming carapace and black adamant feelers—a few of them still twitching.

Making a handful of turns from this nexus, Reiko stopped by the laboratory to drop off her own latest gleanings for analysis, though already a grisly pattern of maleficence was beginning to take shape. As she waited, chatting with one of her apron-clad kinsmen who was merrily prising apart the steely jaws of a severed beast head, the results report came back.

Reiko skimmed the report over, her pulse kicking up a notch. This was it—the linchpin to the chain of events she’d been meticulously constructing over the past few weeks of investigation. This wasn’t just a case of rogue hatchlings on a bloodspree. This was a concerted assault.

Just to be sure, she took one of the escalators upward, to the reconnaissance floor. She passed by a massive, atrium-like chamber of surveillance screens, where a gigantic red-pupiled eye suspended from a network of bloody, wired cables scrutinized the footage for known demonic signatures in real-time, at 360 degrees. At the information desk, Reiko put in a request to query the databases according to a set of specified parameters and to chart and tabulate the query output.

With this printed proof in hand, Reiko ascended the escalator again. She passed by the weapons department, the training grounds. She arrived at the topmost floor of the compound, gated by a massive cross of silvery purified naginata, wrested by youkai taijiya and their reiki-wielding associates, off a demon felled some hundreds of years ago. In the vestibule, before the most recent trophies of demonic enemies felled, a taijiya teacher quizzed her after-school students on the various youkai classes and which types of fiends fell into which and why.

“This one is Class B,” a little boy said, pointing. “Shapeshifter non-humanoid. Too dangerous to be taken on solo.”

The teacher smiled. “That’s correct.”

“And this one is Class A,” a little girl piped up before another years-older display.

“Yes, and why?” the teacher prompted.

“Class A are humanoid shapeshifters, ten times more powerful than Class B. Too dangerous for a small group to take on.”

As the teacher nodded, Reiko moved on. Though there were no trophies here to remark upon, there was yet another class of youkai beyond A—Class S, daiyoukai. Too dangerous for a small army to take on. These were legendary demon lords of godlike power, who’d once commanded legions of lesser youkai and warred against one another in titanic, bloody clashes. Like Class A youkai, such as kitsune, they too could assume humanlike forms, and even give birth to demi-human offspring—the dreaded hanyou. But if such beings of legend still walked the earth, Reiko knew nothing of them.

A long gleaming walnut desk delineated the vestibule from the main chambers of the clan headquarters beyond. The secretary smiled familiarly at Reiko in greeting.

“Your father’s meeting with the clan elders, Reiko-san,” the secretary said, gesturing behind them toward a set of expansive double doors, and the taijiya elites who stood guarding them. “But he said you’d be welcome to join him.”

Reiko’s eyes strayed toward these sentinel kinsmen of hers, who in their present capacity met her own eye with piercing scrutiny, bordering on distrust. Even here, in this fortress, precautions had to be taken to ensure that a mind-controlled clan member couldn’t infiltrate the ranks and massacre key members of the clan unawares. Unlikely as this grim possibility was, it couldn’t be overlooked. 

The past was a cruel teacher.

Having just as much desire to avoid a shakedown as she did to avoid this meeting, Reiko said to the secretary, “That’s all right, Misako-san. I’ll just wait for him here.”

About a half-hour later, the double-doors slid open, and the taijiya sentinels dispersed. As the clan elders filed out from the meeting chamber, Reiko used every bit of her training as a sleuth to make herself scarce, even to their trained eyes. But there was no eluding the hawkish gaze of Clan Chief Nakamura.

At last, his tall, broad, silver-haired figure emerged, with the nekomata Kirara, a trusted Class B youkai, perched on his shoulder. Even before Kirara mewled in recognition, the clan chief’s eyes cut to Reiko’s hiding spot behind a bamboo planter.

“Reiko,” he said, the fine lines of his face creasing further as he frowned, “why didn’t you join us?”

Kicking off from the wall, Reiko met his eye and said, “You know why, Tou-san. You might have had my little brother join you instead.”

Chief Nakamura said nothing to this. His eyes slid to the file in her hand. “You have something conclusive to report?”

Nodding, Reiko presented the file of her field findings to her father. She explained the pattern of appearances and attacks, and laid out her broader theory as to the true nature of the fiend behind them. As she spoke, the clan chief’s perpetually wrinkled brow furrowed deeper.

“It’s a Class A youkai, no doubt,” he said gravely at last, clapping a proud hand to her shoulder. 

Reiko smiled at him. Her heart raced in a thrill of mixed anticipation and fear. A Class A malicious youkai hadn’t been taken on by the clan in years. Not since her elder brother Kei’s death…

Kei, who should have been her father’s heir apparent instead of her. Kei, a gifted ghost-hunter like herself.

Her triumph was short-lived as Chief Nakamura went on to say, “Now you can be done with this field case and move on to higher concerns.”

Reiko jerked her shoulder from under his hand. “I’ve told you already I have no interest in being your successor, Tou-san. I’ve trained hard to be a taijiya in the field, and that’s what I wish to be. I’m the best in my cohort. To consign me to a diplomatic position would be a waste of my abilities, you know that. It’s because of that that you want to protect me behind these walls as your heir. But don’t you see you’re going to kill in me the very thing you’re proud of me for?” Tears stung in her eyes. “I’m sorry that Kei died, Daddy. I’m as sorry as anyone. But you should know from how Kaa-san left, that I’ll leave the clan, too, if you push me to it. I mean it. Now,” she said, drawing in a shaky breath, “let’s discuss how to move forward with my Class A case.”

Businesslike, they discussed it. When the topic of ‘reinforcements’ came up, Reiko balked, incensed more than usual after her recent brush with Higurashi.

“We don’t know if we need to drag in outsiders yet, or to what extent.”

“Even so,” her father said, “given the deadly, sinister nature of the attacks, we should at least apprise our key associates of the situation, and perhaps learn what they themselves may know.”

Irked, Reiko said, “Okay, Tou-san. You’re the king of the castle.”

Her father smiled at her. “And you are my emissary.” As Reiko frowned at this, he said, “I want you to go and share these findings of yours with The Prince and Lady K. Consult with them, and see what they have to say about it. Oh, and take Kirara with you,” he added, knuckling the purring nekomata on the cheek. “Lady K would love to see her.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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