"Wait, so a demon told you that it's looking for me?" I asked, making sure I heard that right.
It was stupid ask but I needed to buy time to process the monumental pain in the ass this was becoming.
Suzume's eyes were on the pulsating knot in her hand. "Yeah." she simply replied and then swayed.
She looked worse than Keita did right after I punched the water out of him. The thing she was holding seemed to be draining her energy. Suddenly she let out a low whimper and collapsed to her knees.
I dropped to my knees beside her. "Okay… And how exactly did it do that?" I asked, peering into her eyes and hoping for an answer but she didn't answer. I reached out carefully, placing a hand near the knot. "Let me take it from you." I said firmly.
She hesitated for a split of a second, her hands trembling but she slowly extended it toward me and I grabbed it.
The moment my fingers closed around it, a shock of emotions slammed into my consciousness. It wasn't exactly a memory but I could feel it's fear. The demon warping the apartment wasn't trying to trap us in here, it was protecting itself from something far worse.
I dropped the knot and it landed on the moldy carpet.
"You felt it, didn't you?" Suzume whispered, clutching my sleeve. She was barely able to stand. "The demon that was changing this apartment… you felt its fear too?"
"Yeah." I said, my voice shifting before I even realized it. "We have to find Keita and get hell out of here, now."
Suzume rose to her feet, slowly. We moved out of the room and into a hallway that mercifully stayed stable. We kept close to the wall, listening for anything that moves.
We didn't have to search long, just when we rounded the fourth corner, we stopped dead. The scent of blood there was all over the place.
And a few feet ahead, Keita was there. Or what was left of him. He was pinned to the wall by a dark spike that had driven through his chest and exiting from his back.
There was several more holes on his body. His katana lay on the ground, snapped in two. And his blood was everywhere.
Suzume's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh no…"
Suddenly, from the darkness behind Keita's corpse, a tremor of movement started. The demon who had been warping the apartment stepped into the light.
I recognized it instantly from the emotions I had felt when I touched the knot. The creature was elongated, its skin was translucent black and it's eyes were twin points of terrified light.
It was holding something like a jagged shard of bone, dripping with Keita's blood. It turned its panicked eyes from us to the dead man, then back to us. And it raised the shard, clearly deciding that if it couldn't hide, it would eliminate witnesses.
The demon shot forward but aiming right for Suzume. It moved faster than the six-armed one.
And before the creature could cross the distance, before I could step in to defend her. It's body was split into pieces in an instant. Dozens of diced pieces of black flesh fell to the floor, slowly dissolving into gray ash.
I blinked and suddenly, we were outside, back in the real Old Ridgemont Apartment lobby.
Keita's body still hung there though, pinned to the real cracked wall.
Suzume and I stumbled back, gasping and reathing hard. Cause right before us, kneeling on the floor was another demon.
It was impossibly tall, muscular and it's skin was white. The body was covered in intricate black markings. There was no doubt in my mind, this was the demon that terrified the others.
The demon slowly lifted his head, its eyes sweeping over Keita's corpse, Suzume and finally settling on me. "Knyazhin." it whispered.
Suzume whimpered, falling back against the wall.
The demon offered a small human smile that did nothing to hide the darkness behind it's eyes.
"Ah." the demon said. "It seems my entrance was a bit… startling for your liking. I apologize for my rather… theatrical efficiency." He gestured lazily at the pile of ash that was once a powerful demon. "Though... in my defense, he was quite rude."
I was instantly caught in a loop of thoughts. This was a whole different class of monster. One wrong word or move and I knew with sickening certainty that I would end up that demon.
The demon simply tilted it's head, it's eyes intensely focused on me. "You don't know who you are yet, do you?" It said.
Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the demon turned it's back on us and vanished.
My mind blacked out for a moment. Knyazhin? Growing up, I was forced to learn an ancient language, my uncle telling me that it had been in our family for generations and every Yamada blood needed to know it. I never perfected it, viewing it as useless archaic nonsense. But I knew enough. And what that demon called me was My Lord.
"Kenichi! Kenichi, talk to me!" Suzume's voice was calling from a distance, cutting through my thoughts.
I snapped back and the sight of Keita's body slamming back into focus. I looked at Suzume, her face streaked with tears.
"He's dead." I said stupidly, stating the obvious.
"Help me." she choked out, already scrambling toward the dead body. "We have to take Keita's body out of here."
I didn't argue, in this line of work, the first thing you learn is that the dead demand respect and immediate retrieval. The body was a colleague and a casualty of the job.
I walked toward Keita, grimacing as I had to yank the dark spike from his chest and the wall. It retracted with a gruesome shuck sound, leaving a craterous wound and splashing dark blood onto the floor.
"Get his legs." I instructed Suzume, who was already fighting back tears to be useful. She nodded silently, grabbing Keita's ankles. I took the bulk of the weight, slinging Keita's torso over my shoulder.
We walked out of the ruined lobby and back onto Colrado Street. The blue light of dawn was beginning to break over the city skyline, the sun was almost up.
I opened the back door of my car and carefully settled Keita's body across the seat. And then walked around, sliding into the driver's seat.
My hand instinctively reached for the cigarette pack in my jacket but then I remembered and when I was about to lash out I spotted a slightly bent cigarette sitting on the dashboard.
I snatched it desperately fast, lit it with the car's sputtering lighter and inhaled deeply. It didn't fix the demon problem but it atleast killed the headache.
Suzume slid into the passenger seat. She stared out the window, her face drawn and she turned to me. "What will we say killed him?"
I took another long drag. "We tell them nothing. We just drop him off and tell them the Captain will explain the paperwork later."
The drive to the was silent. And when we got there we delivered Keita's body to the duty officer there, gave the terse instruction about the Captain and left.
Next, I drove Suzume home. She stepped out of the car, looking decades older than she had twelve hours ago and disappeared into her front door.
I drove the rest of the way to my apartment. Once inside, I didn't bother changing my blood-stained clothes. I walked straight to my bed, sat on the edge and buried my face in my hands.
I sat there for some time, the phrase Knyazhin was screaming in my head. But eventually, exhaustion won. I leaned back, hit the pillow and slept.