It was a tall, broad-shouldered man, who might’ve been quite handsome if not for his slouching posture, cantankerous expression and the ridiculous-looking ensemble he was wearing—a mismatched Western-style suit and cap, with tennis shoes, tinted sunglasses, leather driving gloves and a comically-overlarge umbrella slung over his shoulder. He looked very much like he’d gotten dressed in a dark closet, pulling on items to wear at random. 

Despite his wild tousle of snowy hair, he didn’t look much past thirty. Prematurely grey? Reiko wondered, peering at him. Reiki-wielders tended to look younger than they were, though there was no aura detectible from this man at present. Reiko simply assumed that he was one, given the context, as he cast a surly, mistrustful glance in her direction.

“All finished up?” Lady K asked pleasantly, almost affectionately.

The wild-looking man scoffed. “Yeah, yeah,” he grit out, the words leaving him as little more than a gravelly growl through his clenched teeth. “I’m finished, anyway.” Brandishing his umbrella at her rather like a sword, he said, “Maybe you can talk some sense into ‘his highness,’ because he damn well never listens to me.”

“Now, now,” Lady K said, sighing good-naturedly, “you know that’s not true.”

The man scoffed again. “Whatever. I’m outta here. Fucking pisses me off…”

Still grumbling, he clapped his umbrella to his shoulder and started off down the hall in long angry loping strides. Flashing Reiko an apologetic smile, Lady K hurried after him, catching him by the arm.

“Let me see you out at least,” she said warmly, as Kirara chirped from her shoulder.

Still gruff, but much less harsh, he glanced down at her and said, “Okay, kiddo.”

Later, it would occur to Reiko to wonder exactly how this wild-man could have left the premises, when there hadn’t been any other vehicles in the drive beside hers. Apart from his use of the word ‘kiddo’ to refer to a woman who barely looked ten years younger than himself, Reiko didn’t have time to wonder over much of anything, as Lady K and the wild-man exited the hall, and from the open doors at her back, a voice called out in a sort of hushed, stage whisper—

“Oh good, she’s gone with him. That’ll buy me some time.”

As Reiko turned around, a very handsome and amiable man stood in the open doorway, grinning past her in bright-eyed mischief. He was similar in height and build to the wild-man, and his aura was similarly suppressed, but this was about where the similarities between them ended. His shock of jet-black hair neatly framed his fine-boned ivory face, which might have looked haughty and cold except for his expression of fey, boyish charm. He was finely dressed as well, in traditional Japanese attire—his midnight haori patterned with a fall of interlocking silver crescents at the left shoulder.

Like Lady K, he had an ageless quality about him. Whether he tended toward old or young was impossible to say. Though it’d been some years since Reiko had last seen him, he was exactly as she remembered.

Another trick of glamor in this illusory place?

Grinning broadly still, the gentleman glanced to her. “Nice to see you again, Reiko-chan. You’ve grown like a weed since last we met. What’s it been now, two years, three…?”

“Eight almost, Ouji-sama,” she replied, inclining her head. 

She’d been twelve years old when she’d accompanied her father here, for the first time, shortly after her brother Kei’s untimely death—no doubt to be tacitly presented as the new taijiya clan heir. Blinded by her grief at the time, Reiko could see now that she’d been too distracted to pay much attention to the strangeness of this place—and its denizens.

“Eight years,” The Prince said, whistling under his breath. “Whew, how the time flies. Well—won’t you come in?”

“Hai, Ouji-sama.”

She followed The Prince into the audience chamber beyond. With its raised dais, crescent drapery and martial decor, it had the air of a throne room, though there was no throne present—just an inverted triangle of plush cushions arranged on the tatami floor with a table between the top two and bottom one. 

A mounted pair of crossed katanas occupied a peculiar place of prominence on the far wall. This struck Reiko as odd because of how plain and even battered-looking this pair of swords seemed compared to everything else. To the naked eye, the katanas were indistinguishable from one another, except for one detail—a blue tasseled cord woven through the hilt of the left sword, and red tasseled cord woven through the hilt of the right sword. 

Silver platters of Western-style confections had been laid out prettily on the table. Most of the treats were untouched. Casting another surreptitious glance down the hall, The Prince snapped the sliding doors shut with a nigh-imperceptible flick of the wrist. He ushered Reiko mannerly to her seat and plopped down on one of the cushions opposite her. Without delay, or any pretense at ceremony, he began to gobble up the remaining sweets between them like a starving dog.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said winningly, dribbling crumbs, “but the lady of the house never lets me eat sweets like this. Says they make me ‘manic,’” he added around a mouthful of chocolate pastry, with a glint in his eye which did look a tad overbright. “The only chance I get to indulge like this is when guests are around—especially him, that grumpy old goat. She rolls out the red carpet to try to sweeten him up. But for me, the love of her life? Not a chance.” Belatedly, he offered Reiko a chocolate ball, dusted with chocolate dust. “Truffle?”

“No, thank you,” Reiko said—though she’d barely uttered a syllable before he’d scarfed it down post-haste.

Licking his fingers clean, he crooked a waggish smile at her, asking with a keenness of intuition so sudden and striking it startled her—”I gather you’re not all that thrilled to be here, are you?”

Reiko stiffened where she knelt. “I—that is…under the circumstances—”

He barked out a short, chipper laugh. “Please, Reiko-chan, don’t feel the need to qualify it for politeness’ sake.” With a little wink, he said, “My skin’s thicker than it looks, I promise you. I’m just curious as to what you’re really thinking, that’s all.”

Reiko relaxed a little. “To tell you the truth, Ouji-sama, I’m frustrated on two counts.” Huffing, she said, “One, that my father feels the need to rope you into our clan business from the outset, as though we can’t handle difficult matters for ourselves. And two, on a more personal level…Well, I know he’s sent me here as his representative, or ‘future face’ of the clan, and I resent it. I’m not interested in succession, or politicking—I just want to keep our streets safe for normal humans, and give trouble-making spirits their due.”

After a moment, The Prince nodded. “I appreciate your frankness, Reiko-chan. It takes courage to be forthright under pressure, and your willingness to do so speaks to your character.” With a furtive twist of lip, he added, “I hope you’ll trust me when I say that I understand what a particular burden familial obligations can be. And I guarantee you personally, on my honor, there’ll be no undue interference in your affairs from me or mine. You have my word.”

An almost palpable clarity accompanied this last statement—like the tolling of a bell, just at the edge of her perception. It gave Reiko the uncanny sense of an oath of adjuration, a binding spell of command.

But over whom, exactly?

Suddenly, The Prince canted his head to one side, as though he’d either heard something Reiko hadn’t, which was highly unlikely, or else some other cue of habit or circumstance had alerted him. Grasping up the only platter which still had desserts in it—a pile of small, cream-colored bean buns—he tipped it at a slant down the neck of his haori, into some hidden shoulder or sleeve pocket within.

A few seconds later, Lady K entered the room on padding footsteps. The Prince bowed to her, beaming a radiant, beatific, lady-killing smile. Elegant brows drawing together, she crossed over to him. Kneeling down gracefully onto her cushion beside him, she grazed his sleeve, and a bean bun rolled out into his open palm. His fingers had barely curled around it when she gave a deft flick to his wrist, breaking his grip and plucking up the bean bun from him all in one fell swoop.

“Shit,” The Prince muttered, as the bean bun sailed out the open window into the lake beyond, and he was forced to surrender the rest.

While he sat defeated, Reiko relayed for him and Lady K the particulars of the Class A nefarious youkai case. A few times, at the some of the more grisly details, The Prince grew so deadly serious that his eyes seemed to flash redly in the refracted rays of the setting sun. Some trick of the light, Reiko could only figure. 

After this, it was more of an open discussion between the three of them, in which Reiko, to her pleasant surprise, received a great deal of information to sift through, some of which might be useful to the extermination mission at hand. By and by, the discussion concluded. Reiko was just about to stand to leave when a niggling thought arrested her.

Looking into The Prince’s stormy blue eyes, which reminded her so strongly of Higurashi’s, she found herself saying, “There’s something else, Ouji-sama, if you and Lady K can spare the time.”

Genially, he said, “Of course, Reiko-chan.”

She went on to tell him and Lady K about the traveling salesman Higurashi—how she and her clan kinsmen had stumbled across him during a ghost-hunting mission, how he’d displayed strong but untrained reiki-wielding abilities, and how despite being an everyday husband and father, he’d been tailing her ever since, desperate to moonlight in this world of theirs.

“—His name is Higurashi,” Reiko said in chagrined conclusion. “Higurashi Sato. And I suppose what I’m asking is, what should be done with him? A raw miko nosing about haphazard is bound to get himself and his family targeted at some point, and he won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

The Prince and Lady K shared a brief, inscrutable glance.

“You could induce amnesia,” The Prince suggested.

‘Inducing amnesia’ was a practice taijiya routinely employed in these civilized, modern times. A potion was administered to normal humans exposed to supernatural phenomena, to prevent them from going mad from the encounter.

Reiko shook her head. “Inducing amnesia is a risky prospect in reiki-wielders. Higurashi’s nature’s so stubborn I worry that even if it was successfully administered, he’d just find his way into trouble again down the line, in his ignorance.”

The Prince smiled, the look in his eyes unfathomable to her. “Then my advice to you is, give him the benefit of the doubt. See if he has the mettle and fortitude to withstand the test of time, and then, Reiko-chan, then together we shall see…”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

That’s it!! Hope y’all enjoyed this mini-series <3 And now, on to the rest of the The Pact…

Series Navigation

<< The Pact Side-Stories: Ghost-Hunter Nakamura, Part 3