Dreamlands (28 page)

Both Keno and Fuse looked young and scared, not someone you FELICITAS IVEY

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usually found hunting monsters. She knew this. She also fucking knew that her husband had screwed up and didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to blame it on me or someone else. She wanted Wolf to tell her it was all right and that she could take Murphy home.

“The
Hakkenshi
heal fast,” Fuse said. “And I helped him. What mother wouldn’t?”

“You aren’t his mother,” Mrs. Murphy said waspishly. “You look like his sister.”

“I am older than I look,” Fuse said. “What do you know of your husband’s dealings?”

Mrs. Murphy shook her head. “I refuse to believe that these two children are part of this.”

“Keno’s been our fucking prisoner for years,” I said, because she wasn’t going to get the luxury of thinking that her husband was perfect and didn’t get his hands dirty. “Didn’t you know that? Or Murphy never mentioned that he grabbed a fifteen-year-old hacker because the kid got into the wrong fucking cookie jar? That he called him a gook and worse? That he told everyone the kid was open season, so long as he could work afterward?”

“Jim wouldn’t!” Mrs. Murphy protested.

“He did,” Wolf said softly. “And we let him. So we aren’t that much better.”

Mrs. Murphy sat down shakily on the bed next to Keno’s. I was sorry she was getting a few shocks about her husband, but she must have known. She knew that you weren’t squeaky clean when you did the messy fucking job that we do.

“Why?” she asked.

Wolf looked uncomfortable, and I felt sorry for him. He liked the Murphys; he was like a son to them and babysat the grandkids for them. They had become the family he had left behind.

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“I am one of the monsters that your husband hunts,” Fuse said gently. “I am neither a child nor human.”

“You never hurt anyone,” Keno protested. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I never thought of anyone or anything I met there as a monster.” He had lost it if he was willing to admit that. The Dreamlands had been crawling with the damned things, from the guys I had hung around with to the damned Reavers. I liked them, but I always knew that they weren’t human. Wolf looked at him with pity.

“
Junge
―”

“Tamazusa-sama saved me from the Hákarl and Heiseg.

Samojirou-sama took care of me after Heiseg hurt me. They were kinder to me than anyone had been for a while. I wasn’t scared there. I hadn’t been not scared since you took me from my dorm room.” Wolf folded. The kid was talking calmly and rationally, and if it was true, then he should be with them. Be with the demons. Because after what just happened to him here, I didn’t think the monsters were the bad guys. Fuse was smiling at him, and Mrs. Murphy looked confused.

“But… he’d never. I know about what he does when things aren’t going well. Wolf, we would never do this to a child!” She pleaded with him. “He isn’t a violent man! Something must have been done to him for this to happen!”

Fuse looked at her with pity. “Your husband was very rude to me and the others for the short time that I had met him. I do not know how Tamazusa-sama dealt with his rudeness the week that he was with her. I would have thought she would have shown him the error of his ways.” Wolf and I glanced her way. I knew that was what had happened to Heiseg; he had pissed Tamazusa off for some reason. But was it because of Keno? Or because she was PMSing that day? Or had she decided that Murphy wasn’t worth the effort to turn into JELL-O?

Mrs. Murphy just looked confused. “Jim has only been gone a day! He called me when he got back. I was surprised that the mission had been that short.”

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Wolf shifted nervously. “The mission was on for five days. We spent four nights in that place. They didn’t try to hide it.”

“What about that?” I asked Fuse. “I was told that Keno had been there for a couple of months when I asked about it. Because of that, I didn’t think that it was him.”

“Time moves differently in the Dreamlands,” Fuse said smoothly.

I was thinking she was pulling a fast one on us, because she was starting to sound like Samojirou. But this wasn’t something she really had to lie about either. “It is faster or slower than what is in the real world, depending on where you are.”

“So we’re going to worry about Tamazusa breaking in here soon?” I asked her.

Hell, I couldn’t think of any way of stopping her. No one really knew enough from last time, even with the brain dives, to figure out how she had gotten in. Was it with or without that bastard Heiseg’s help? Or was she able to just come and go as she pleased? And if that was true, why hadn’t she shown up here before? If it had been with Heiseg’s help, would either Keno or Fuse let her in this time? Would Fairinox, if he thought he could get something out of the deal? Was Keno a bomb, and he didn’t even know it? Would he let Tamazusa in and forget he had done it?

Fuse shrugged, unconcerned. “The lady keeps her own counsel, even from Samojirou-sama. I have no idea what she will do. But I know my family will rescue me. They will be angry. It will be deadly.” Her eyes shifted to Keno. She looked relieved for a second. That made me feel strange, not that I believed what Keno was telling us was true. I wondered why she was missing one of her kids and if she knew the reason why. I was thinking that it was yes. But I also saw how alien she was for a second, how old she was for a moment, even if she looked young enough to be my daughter.

I was about to ask her about that when McGann walked into the room, looking pissed. I wondered what had blown up now.

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DREAMLANDS

SAMOJIROU

INUYAMA DOUSETSU was living on the far side of Nippon, isolated from most everyone. The man was not the most social of creatures, given to brooding most of the time. And that was when he was at his most pleasant. Inuyama had hated me ever since the death of his half-sister. Not that he had known the girl or that she hadn’t tried to kill herself shortly before that. It was just another grudge he could hold onto and brood about.

Yatsufusa hated me for a different reason. I made his wife laugh, and we had spent a number of years together unchaperoned. He had been on his own quest searching for their lost pup, accompanied by one of their other sons. Fuse and I had been alone. If it weren’t for the fact that my tastes were well-known, I doubted that it would have been allowed. Yatsufusa had always been uneasy about his relationship with his lady. I, in some of my unkinder moments, had compared it to a modern Western fairy tale I had been told of called
Beauty and the
Beast
. Not that it should have mattered, because in this place, appearance was nothing. The body was an illusion for most of those who were here, because none of us were human anymore. We still had the same wants and needs we had in the real world. Yatsufusa’s love for Fuse wasn’t as pure as it should be, but that didn’t mean that it was not deep and true.

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However, while most of those here were clothed in illusions, they were of the human sort. Yatsufusa was too proud to be anything but the beast he was, the instrument for Tamazusa’s curse along with Satomi’s weaknesses. He would not appear to be anything than what he was, a dog. Because of this, many who did not know him thought him to be nothing more than a pet instead of her consort, that he was a lesser thing because he didn’t speak or have hands. When I was with them, there were those who thought Fuse was my consort instead of simply a friend.

Yatsufusa simply tolerated me for his wife’s sake. I had killed a number of beings who insulted her honor by thinking that she was or would be untrue to her husband because she was with me. They were mostly strangers from other lands in the Dreamlands that we had wandered to while she was looking for the spirit of her lost son, Inuzaka Keno.

We had searched far and wide, from the crowded cities to the barren wastelands, disappointed because we found nothing, even after chasing down the endless rumors about him over the decades. Keno, because of some twist of the curse or vengeance of a
kami
, had never been in the Dreamlands until my lady had gated his avatar here to safety after what had happened with that fool Heiseg. Decades Fuse and I had traveled together, searching for my heart’s desire. She had thought I accompanied her because of some mad penance. It wasn’t until the end that she had found out the truth. It had shocked her.

Keno and I had been lovers since shortly before he had destroyed the Makuwari Clan, disguised as a dancer called Asakeno, a woman.

He dressed that way to hide from his enemies, allowing him to gain vengeance for the death of his father, who had been killed by Makuwari Dai, the head of the Makuwari clan. While Satomi’s armies had gathered across the Kanto plain, we had met in secret, aided by the chaos of the times and the fact that Satomi used Keno as an assassin to eliminate his enemies.

It was during the last battle that Keno, along with Inuyama, found out who and what I was by that time―an
oni
. It was then that my lover had to banish me to release the control I had over the armies battling Satomi, filled with demons and undead, destroying the enemies of the 209

DREAMLANDS

Clan thoroughly. Keno should have killed me and didn’t. I learned later that he continued to serve Satomi as his pet assassin until the old man was dead. Inuyama was the only one who knew his secret, and he took it with his to his grave, decades later. The man was humorless and callous, but he knew how to keep a secret.

We all arrived at Inuyama’s house, a simple structure isolated in the forest. I was surprised that two of Fuse’s sons chose a life of isolation, Inumura being the other, even with his wife here. I was also surprised that his wife tolerated it. But she had known her husband and his habits while they had been alive, and she probably wasn’t that lonely with the company of her household and the other
Hakkenshi
to check on her.

Inuyama was in the back, along with Inuta and Inue. Yatsufusa paced restlessly, stopping when we entered into the garden back there.

They all leveled hateful looks at me.

Yatsufusa growled, and I fell before him on my knees, humbling myself before him. “I failed to keep your lady safe.” The low growl he gave made the hair on the back of my neck rise.

“My lady pledges her aid to you, to help recover her. Those who insulted her in this manner have become her enemies.”

“What happened?” Inuyama growled.

“Those from the real world gated to my lady’s lands, ignorant of the danger here,” I began as I sat back on my heels. “She had been in contact with one from there, but he was a fool. He attempted to open a gate in the real world to here, not knowing the care needed, and let loose upon his own people the Hákarl that hunt in the wild. He enjoyed the fact that they fed upon his own people. My lady killed him and escorted Sakura-chan back here, because he had been a prisoner and abused by those people.”

Yatsufusa growled and looked at his sons. Even I could sense the frustration off of him. I knew that he felt trapped and helpless, as I was.

“You can follow him into the real world. I cannot,” I said, desperation tingeing my voice.

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“There is more,” Inukai insisted.

“Sakura-chan is the avatar of your brother, Inuzaka Keno,” I whispered. “That is what I was keeping from all of you.”

“And from him also,” Inukawa added.

“I did not want him to know,” I whispered. “He had no knowledge of who he was.”

“Or what he had been to you,” Inuyama snarled.

“What?” Inue howled, echoed by the others.

“He and our brother Keno had been lovers during the entire war,” Inuyama said. “Even so, Inuzaka did his duty to our grandfather and banished him to end the war.”

“Our punishment was to be separated in the Dreamlands,” I continued. “Centuries apart for the moments of pleasure that we had enjoyed.”

“You dressed our brother as a whore!” Inue screamed.

Inuta, his uncle, grabbed him and hit him on the back of the head.

“He treated Sakura-chan with honor. It was a good move, since I doubt that Keno-chan would have understood that he was one of us.

Samojirou-sama was protecting our brother.”

“Not that
our
brother ever needed protection,” Inukawa quipped.

“Cold bastard that he was. Sakura-chan seems like a nice boy. I would have never known it was him.”

“You lady mother is with these people, and I fear that they will not treat her gently,” I said. “Not from what I had learned from my Sakura-chan. They are stupid in their hate, it seems, thinking that we are all no better than barbarians.”

“Let us go to your lady, and we will ally,” Inusuka said. “I know that this is neither of your faults. You would not have otherwise put yourself into our power so easily.”

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KENO

MCGANN walking into the infirmary scared me. She always had scared me, from the first time I had woken up in that holding cell. I got this hollow feeling in my stomach when I realized that she was angry.