Dreamlands (27 page)

Mason and Wolf crowded around the bed and stared at it. Wolf frowned. “I have one that looks like that on my right shoulder,” he said, sounding confused.

Fuse turned and stared at him, looking very angry. Mason and Wolf stepped back in surprise. “I assume that you spent time in the
onsen
with Samojirou-sama also?”

“Fuck, what is the problem?” Mason asked. “You don’t like the fact that we take baths?”

“Samojirou-sama,” Fuse said quietly, “does not play the Game.

Not like his lady. Over the centuries we have been friends. I would have thought that he trusted me. I know that because of the past and the hate that he has no love for my father or my consort, but I did not think that he would not tell me this.” She laughed bitterly. “But it also is that I never asked him.”

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DREAMLANDS

“What the fuck are you talking about, lady?” Mason asked.

Fuse shrugged. “You three have the same birthmark. How common is that?”

“A lot of people have birthmarks,” Wolf said.

Mason frowned and tilted his head one way and another, staring at my shoulder. “It looks like mine, if it was on one of you pale guys.” Wolf stared at my shoulder and slipped off the T-shirt he was wearing. I wanted to hide under the blankets, but I looked at his shoulder. It was like looking in a mirror, his birthmark looked like mine, just on a more muscular shoulder.

“Where’s yours, Mason?” Wolf asked him.

“Above my ass… butt,” he said, glancing at Fuse. I was amused that he was trying to watch his language around her. From what I could figure out, he didn’t even do that for McGann. Then it dawned on me what he had said.

“You were naked with her?” I squeaked.

Mason blushed, I swear. “Hey, the tech wanted my clothes. It was Nina, and I stripped before I really thought about it.”

“Mason-san was very kind and worried about leaving me alone. I assure you that he was a gentleman. And it is not like I have not seen something like that before,” she protested. “I did have a brother.”

“I thought that Keno said that you had a large family,” Wolf said.

Fuse smiled and shrugged. “I do. I have eight sons.” Mason and Wolf stared. I knew she looked young, and that orange thing made her look tiny and helpless, which didn’t help.

“She does,” I said. “They’re all going to be coming for her, and it isn’t going to be nice.”

“Not all,” Fuse said sadly. “One had been lost to me for centuries, but I have found his avatar.”

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“What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck is an avatar?” Mason asked. Okay, I didn’t think that anything or anyone would stop him from using that word, even if he was trying to be polite around people.

“I told you, but there is so much that you would not understand.

My family, my consort and my sons, are part of the Dreamlands because they were heroes in a time that needed them. They defended my family’s honor, even when they did not have to, since my father had no honor,” Fuse said.

“Try us,” Mason said. “We ain’t as dumb as we look.” Fuse smiled. It was an odd smile, like she was his big sister and he had just done something really smart. “It was a time of war. The capital had been burned a generation before, and the land was in chaos.

It lasted for over a hundred years.”

“The start of the Warring States era was the Onin War, when the capital was burned in the fighting. After that it was deserted and thought to be haunted in the empty areas,” I explained. “Japan had been ruled by an aristocratic elite before the war. It was then controlled by the Shogun and the warrior class. Eventually the Tokugawa would impose order, control the emperor, and isolate Japan until Perry and the Americans forced it open.”

“Before the Tokugawa,” Fuse continued, “it was a time of magic, filled with fantastic feats and bravery that have been unmatched since then. The Tokugawa suppressed much of this, and it only survives as tales one would tell children or as legends. No one believes that it could be real.”

“What the fuck happened?” Mason demanded.

Fuse looked uncomfortable. “My father held Awa, one of the ancient
kuni
that is now called Chiba, near Tokyo. He won it by the strength of his arms. Before him, it had been held by Samojirou-sama and Tamazusa-sama, who had stolen it from a samurai called Jin-yo.

My father attacked their castle, using peasants, tricking his way in.

Samojirou-sama killed himself rather than submit. That is when he became an
oni.
”

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DREAMLANDS

“A what?” Mason asked.

“You’d call him a demon,” I said quietly.

Mason shook his head, and Fuse continued. “Tamazusa-sama he found in the women’s quarters. She pleaded her innocence and blamed the entire incident on the dead Samojirou-sama. She is beautiful and knows how to use that to her advantage; she had been trained to do so.

My father believed her and promised that she would go free. But one of my father’s men protested his decision and claimed that it would make him look weak to release her.” Fuse looked embarrassed. “My father was a weak man. He broke his promise to an innocent woman and sentenced her to death. He beheaded her in the courtyard as if she were a common criminal. She cursed him and embraced the darkness to become what she is now.”

“What did she say?” Wolf asked gently.

Fuse looked up at him. “She said that his descendants would be beasts, because he was a man who could not keep his word. He scoffed at her curse.”

I wondered why this sounded familiar and if this was part of what Samojirou had been keeping from me. I knew that it was important, but I wasn’t angry with him for keeping secrets. Samojirou was a man who would keep secrets and that was simply part of who he was. Besides, if they had told me this before, I didn’t think I would have believed them, even knowing that I was the only human living on Tamazusa’s estate. If the samurai hadn’t been demons like Samojirou or Tan’yu, then they were some sort of spirit, like the maids. Yukiko had said once that she was a flower spirit, which was why she enjoyed working on an estate filled with gardens.

“Years later, Awa was under famine. I was to be married to Kanamari Daisuke, a samurai of my father’s, the son of the man who convinced my father to kill Tamazusa-sama. My father asked for help, and we were invaded by our neighbors, the Anzai. Tamazusa-sama and Samojirou-sama were their allies, even if they were
oni
and of the Dreamlands. The Anzai army was filled with monsters and
oni
. They defeated my father’s army, and all looked lost. But it was not, because of my consort, Yatsufusa. My father in jest offered him his heart’s FELICITAS IVEY

200

desire for the head of the Anzai general. Yatsufusa gave it to him. After his destruction, the army fell into disarray and left our lands.”

“And you guys got married,” Mason said.

I guess she had mentioned this to him before. But Yatsufusa was the name of the dog that was with her all the time. Was she talking about what I thought she was talking about? Why wasn’t I shocked?

Fuse nodded. “My father did not think that he needed to keep his word to the family dog and so didn’t.”

“What the fuck?” Mason shouted. “You and a dog?” Wolf looked a little shocked too. Fuse opened her mouth to say something, but I talked over her. I knew this, even if I didn’t know how.

“Their union was blessed by a priest. They lived together for a year in a cave in the wilderness of Awa until they were found by Kanamari and he killed them. It had been a union of their spirits. With her dying breath, Fuse slit open her stomach and released the spirits of the children she had been carrying, so that their spirits would not turn into
oni
. Eight sons, one for each bead, for each Confucian virtue on her rosary, were the spirits she released. A year later, boys began to be born to families whose name started with the kanji
Inu
, or dog.

Satomi’s grandsons were beasts, fulfilling the curse that Tamazusa-sama made,” I said.

“We ain’t Nips,” Mason said, gesturing between himself and Wolf. “And I think that you are nuts if you believe this.”

“So why do we all have the same birthmark?” Wolf asked.

Fuse shrugged. “It was a time of magic. And after my sons’

deaths, the magic lived on in their line. The avatar, their spirit reborn in one of their descendents, was marked with the sign of the house of Satomi, a peony. Usually it meant nothing. But once in a while, the avatar was called upon to do wondrous and heroic things. My descendants were scattered over the centuries as the world changed.”

“So you think that we are avatars of your sons?” Wolf asked.

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DREAMLANDS

MASON

KENO dropping that bombshell wasn’t something I expected. He seemed to think that it was normal to have a dog and a chick having kids. But the more that I thought about it, while it was freaky, so was being able to turn someone’s insides into JELL-O with a word or hanging around with demons that made Miss Manners look like a crack whore. Keno probably had lost it, and that was okay, because he was back with us now. We’d take better care of him; maybe I’d get him to my place on the weekends, and he’d get better. Or at least Wolf and I would get the sharks to stop circling him.

But I noticed how good he looked. More muscular. Not built, but he had gained something swinging a sword. Before, the kid always looked wasted, and I wondered if it was because he had been scared most of the time. Would he go back to being like that? Were a bunch of fucking demons better at taking care of him? Probably, because I doubted that either Tamazusa or Samojirou beat the crap out of him for information or fun like Murphy just did. More than beat, from what I heard, not that he looked like it now. The bruises were fading to an ugly yellow―something that shouldn’t have happened for a week or so.

I didn’t like it, and I glared at Fuse. She had done something to him. She was shaking her head and looking sad and proud at the same time. “You remember,” she said to Keno.

Keno looked at her, confused and scared. “Not really. Bits of the story. But I always thought that there was something more, another reason that Samojirou-sama was nice to me.” She beamed like she was his mother and he had brought home a straight-A report card. They both looked like they should be in high school, not prisoners of a weird organization. “What do you know of Samojirou-sama?”

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Keno blushed. “He likes me. He’s been very good to me.

Samojirou-sama wanted me as his companion, and we talked. I studied a lot, anything that I wanted to after a while. We went places.” Wolf frowned. “He dressed you as a woman! He called you by another name―”

“He told me why,” Keno replied. “It wasn’t like he just told me that my name was Watanabe Shiro. He told me that I was called Sakura because names have power. Because I reminded him of a flower.” Wolf looked like Keno had just punched him in the stomach. We had papers that said that Watanabe Shiro was Keno, not that he had ever used them. Kid hadn’t needed them because he never left the underground section and hadn’t seen the sun in years, not until last year when Wolf managed to charm McGann into letting him take Keno outside once a month. I’d tried it before, and Murphy had shot me down. So this Samojirou guy taking him places must have fucking thrilled him. Suddenly I felt more like a shit than usual when I thought about Keno.

“That’s so gay,” I muttered, the last bit he said sinking into my brain.

They all looked at me in confusion. Things got worse then, because Kate Murphy walked into the place like she fucking owned it, trailed behind by one of the security guys. He looked grateful when Wolf waved him off and ran back to his station. No one wanted to mess with the boss’s wife.

Kate Murphy was known as Kate to a special few and ma’am to the rest of the crew, including me. She looked good for her age, since I’d never guess that she was a grandmother, looking at her. No lines on the face and a good figure, with no grey in her hair, but I always thought that was because she was coloring it. Mrs. Murphy used to be part of the medical section before she ended up taking care of her grandkids, Sean and James. Her daughter-in-law had been killed in a car accident, and their father was in the Army, so she got the job. We never got along because I didn’t always watch my language around the little ones and something about bussing the kids to public school, not that it mattered, since they were enrolled in Catholic school.

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“What happened?” she demanded.

“Need-to-know, Kate,” Wolf said tiredly. “And you don’t need to know everything that is happening with your husband.”

“He told me that he can’t come home for a couple of days and that I should drop some things off for him,” she said. “Then I get a call from little Caitlynn McGann asking me if Jim had ever had issues with his temper or trouble from his time in the Army. What’s going on? And don’t give me need-to-know, because I know too much right now about this place!”

“Jim―” Wolf started.

“Tell her the fucking truth,” I interrupted. The little Caitlynn comment made my brain hurt. I got the bad mental image of McGann in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and pigtails. Scary and hot at the same time; better than her in just whipped cream, better than her in a French maid’s outfit. Sue me because I’m a perv, but it would be worth getting my brain scrubbed by McGann to see her like that. “Murphy decided that beating the shit out of someone was a good way of getting information. Not that he did it himself; he had a couple of other guys do it.”

“You?” Mrs. Murphy sneered.

“He has honor,” Fuse snarled back, coming to my defense. “He would not hit a woman.”

“My Jim would never!” Mrs. Murphy screamed.

“He struck me and took me prisoner!” Fuse answered in a quieter tone. “And then ordered the beating of Keno, because he defended me.”

“Wolf?” Mrs. Murphy asked. She didn’t want to know. I didn’t blame her. It wasn’t something you wanted to know about the man you were married to. “Please.”

She was looking at Keno and Fuse. She had been a nurse, so she could tell Keno was looking a lot better than he should, if the beating was recent. It had to be recent if Murphy had just gotten in trouble.