The Dark Divide (14 page)

Pete studied his brother for a moment, recognising the look in Logan’s eye. He was bursting to tell him something, at the same time feeling insufferably smug that he knew something Pete didn’t.

‘What are you going on about?’

Logan pulled another photograph out of the envelope and slammed it dramatically on the table in front of Pete. ‘I lifted
this
frame from the footage we shot at the golf course yesterday morning.’

Pete stared at the photo, not sure what he was supposed to be seeing. It was a blow-up of Kiva Kavanaugh’s Bentley, parked under a tree near the rough opposite where the action had taken place last night — just before someone fired shots at Ren Kavanaugh and he had vanished into thin air.

The trunk of the car was open. Kiva’s chauffeur was standing at the back, looking over toward the car park where the press had gathered
en masse
.

Pete leaned in closer. ‘Is that …?’

‘Looks like,’ Logan said, grinning.

‘Jesus.’

‘
Now
do I get my exclusive?’

‘I have to show these to Inspector Duggan,’ Pete said, gathering up the photos. ‘Now.’

Logan nodded. ‘I’ll get my coat.’

‘I didn’t say you could come.’

‘No chance those photos are going anywhere without me,’ Logan told him as he snatched them out of his brother’s hand. ‘Do you want to tell Mamó we’re leaving, or shall I?’

‘You tell her,’ Pete said, figuring he was better off with Logan on his side than working against him. ‘You’re her favourite. What about the redhead?’

‘Who? Tiffany? I’ll give her a cab fare home.’

Pete raised a curious brow, smiling. ‘So she’s not the future Mrs Logan Doherty, then?’

‘Hardly,’ Logan laughed. ‘When I finally get married, she’s going to have a brain that’s not pickled in champagne and nail polish remover. The lovely Tiffany has only three topics of conversation, I’m afraid — me, me and me.’

‘So why did you bring her home to meet the family?’

‘To impress Mamó. And keep Mum off my back about grandchildren.’

Pete wished he’d thought to do the same. ‘You sleeping with her?’

‘No, Pete. We share a mutual love of needlepoint.’

He grinned. ‘Ask a stupid question …’

‘It’s okay,’ Logan assured him. ‘You can’t help it. You’re the stupid twin.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Which one of us got the why-haven’t-you-met-a-nice-girl-and-given-me-grandchildren lecture tonight?’

Pete bowed to his brother, conceding defeat. ‘Point taken. You are the smart one.’

‘The good-looking one, too,’ he added, sliding the photos back into the envelope. Then he picked up the steaming cup of whiskey-laced tea. ‘I’ll meet you out front. We’ll take the Porsche. It’ll be faster.’

‘You only want to do that because with me in the car, if you get pulled over for speeding, you think I’ll get you out of a ticket,’ Pete accused.

‘Better make sure we don’t get booked, then,’ Logan said, fishing his keys out of his pocket with his free hand and tossing them to Pete. ‘You’re driving.’

CHAPTER 14

The following evening, after Ren spent an interesting — if entirely wasted — day, being shown around the Ikushima fireworks factory, he was invited to dine with the family. This time, however, Aoi insisted on escorting Ren back to his room after dinner. Namito didn’t seem to mind, saying he and Daichi had business. Masuyo claimed she was tired and intended to seek her bed, and ordered her younger granddaughter to do the same.

That left Ren with only Aoi for company and the distinct feeling that this was some sort of set-up.

They crossed the raked sand of the courtyard, following the white path made of different sand to the rest of the yard. Ren didn’t know what it was, but it felt grainy underfoot and seemed to reflect the firelight from the torches spaced at regular intervals along the path.

Somebody, Ren decided, had spent a lot of time lighting torches and raking this yard, to keep it looking so pristine.

He shivered a little as they stepped down from the wooden veranda of the main house. With the setting sun all the warmth of the day had gone. It was the onset of autumn and hadn’t been a warm day to start with. Aoi saw him shiver and looked at him with concern. ‘Are you cold,
wagakimi
?’

‘You don’t have to keep calling me “my lord”, you know,’ Ren told her. ‘Ren will do fine.’

‘It would be disrespectful,
wagakimi
,’ she replied.

‘But much less annoying,’ Ren replied in English, certain she would have no clue what he was saying.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It would please me if you called me Ren.’

‘Not Renkavana?’

‘No. Just Ren.’

‘Very well. If you insist … Ren.’

‘
Arigatou gozaimasu
.’

‘You are welcome,’ Aoi said, smiling up at him. ‘We of the Ikushima would do anything to please one of the
Youkai
.’

‘Why is that?’ He was curious, having given up trying to convince anybody in this reality he was an ordinary human. ‘Your neighbours thought I was
Youkai
. They called me feral and tried to slit my throat.’

‘That is because of the Empresses,’ Aoi explained. ‘They have decreed all
Youkai
be killed on sight.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, wondering what the Faerie in this realm must have done to piss off the Empresses so badly. ‘Your
Obaasan
, Masuyo, said that last night. And she has a point. If the only people who can use magic need
Youkai
blood, it’s a bit silly to run around the countryside eradicating them all from your realm.’

‘The
Konketsu
are very protective of their bloodlines,’ Aoi shrugged, as if it were nothing to be surprised about. ‘They fear
yabangin
blood polluting their pedigrees.’

It sounded more as if they were breeding dogs than magicians, with all this talk of bloodlines and pedigrees and being polluted by feral Faerie. ‘But
Konketsu
would have to be part-
Youkai
anyway, wouldn’t they?’ he asked. ‘If they’re using magic and Masuyo is right that you can’t wield it any other way?’

Aoi nodded. ‘Of course.’

That brought up a tricky question — despite the fact he’d been here more than a day, and his hosts were treating him like royalty. ‘So how come you’re feeding me, instead of feeding me to the hounds?’

Aoi glanced around, as if making certain they could not be overheard, before answering him in a low voice. ‘There are some among us who believe the
Konketsu
are corrupt.’

‘Some like the Ikushima?’

She frowned. ‘Please, do not say that — even in jest.’

Hey, you brought it up
, he was tempted to point out,
and you haven’t killed me. Yet.
But he kept the thought to himself. Aoi was being remarkably forthcoming, and he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise his chance to discover how he might find one of these
Konketsu
, because he was going to need one of them to open a rift for him if he ever wanted to get home.

‘I’m sorry. What do you mean by corrupt, exactly?’ Ren had a mental picture of dark-robed magicians lurking in alleys, taking kickbacks for working black-market spells — which would have been fine if it meant all Ren had to do was bribe the right wizard.

He was certain the truth was going to prove far more troublesome.

‘They are supposed to share the magic, but they don’t,’ Aoi explained, her anger apparent in her tight whisper. ‘They hoard it for themselves. If one is not of the Great Families, it’s almost impossible to find a
mahou tsukaino sensei
prepared to do anything for the rest of us. Unless you’re willing to pay dearly for it.’

‘Is that why you don’t have a magician here?’ Ren asked. He wasn’t sure that was it, but he needed to know if they were holding out on him. For all Ren knew, the solution to his problem might be sitting in one of the many outbuildings scattered around the compound, meditating on the price of rice in the paddy fields, or whatever magicians did for fun.

Aoi shook her head, her expression so forlorn he didn’t doubt she was telling him the truth. ‘Not since Ichirou died, and that was before Kazusa was born. I barely remember him.’

‘And you’re not one of the Great Families, so there’s no
Konketsu
?’

She nodded. ‘
Obaasan
says it’s a trade tactic as old as time. She claims it’s why the Empresses ordered all the
Youkai
killed. The rarer a thing is the more valuable it becomes.’

The old girl might have a point, Ren thought. If magicians were thin on the ground, you could charge quite a bit for magic, something that would prove difficult if there were Faerie about, doling out their wizardry for free. But the information left Ren with a dilemma. Aoi and her family had sheltered him, fed him, and kept him safe from the Tanabe, and while he was grateful, he realised they lacked the one thing he needed to escape this reality.

There was no polite way of telling Aoi that. And even if he did, what good would it do? The people who had what he needed to get home — the Tanabe — were determined to murder him on sight.

The most frustrating part of it all was that Ren
knew
how to open a rift. He could draw the knowledge from his brother’s memories. But he couldn’t do it without the right tools. In Darragh’s world, they used carved jewels — rubies — to open the rifts, and the stone circles to focus their power. What he lacked was a ruby, any way of finding a suitable one, or the faintest idea about how to carve the magical symbol for his reality into its depths.

That was a skill owned by the
sídhe
and one they had never shared with the Druids. It was, he supposed, their way of maintaining some control over who could go rift running.

He was about to ask Aoi if she knew of any other way to open a rift — besides dealing with some hideously expensive
magician on the take belonging to a clan who wanted to kill him on sight — when a yell went up from the main gate. There followed a shouted exchange too fast for Ren to follow between the guards along the top of the wall. A moment later, Namito and Daichi burst out of the main house, unsheathing their
katanas
as they ran.

‘What’s going on?’ Ren asked, as other doors opened around them and other men ran toward the walls, arming themselves as they ran.

Aoi summed up the situation with a glance and then grabbed Ren’s hand. ‘Come with me.’

‘Why? What’s happening?’

‘We are under attack. Quickly, you must hide before they see you!’

‘Is it the Tanabe?’ he asked, wondering if they were attacking because of him, how they’d known he was here. Did they have spies in the Ikushima compound, just as the Ikushima had spies in theirs?

‘Of course it’s the Tanabe,’ Aoi told him impatiently, taking him by the arm. She was trying to pull him away from the gate. ‘They —’

Her words were cut off by a massive concussion that shook the ground and knocked two of the Ikushima samurai off the wall.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Ren asked, as he staggered against the force of it. It felt like an earthquake and sounded like a bomb had gone off.

‘Chishihero,’ Aoi said.

‘That was magic?’

‘Of course. Now please, Renkavana, you must hide.’

‘No way,’ he said, shaking free of her grasp. ‘I want to see this.’ A whistling noise sounded somewhere behind them as he turned and ran toward the wall, scrabbling up the nearest
wooden ladder until he was standing on top, amid a cluster of samurai in various states of undress. As he reached the top and looked down over the huts clustered outside the walls, the whistling noise turned to a loud bang and the night was banished by a blinding flare that exploded in the sky overhead, exposing everything for a good hundred yards around the compound. The occupants of the huts were nowhere to be seen. They’d either managed to get inside the walls or were hiding in their houses.

Beneath the wall in front of the village, the Tanabe forces were arrayed.

There were forty or fifty of them, all mounted, all carrying bows that at this distance could have hit every man standing on the walls. That the bows remained slung over the warriors’ shoulders was probably a good sign. They were attacking, but they weren’t going for a bloodbath.

At least, not yet. Not until Chishihero had done her thing.

Ren spied her at the head of the troop with Hayato at her side. She was busy folding something. Probably another magical concussion grenade. The mastiff, Kiba, sat calmly at the side of her horse, waiting for the command to attack.

A moment later, Chishihero looked up, finished with her folding. The flare was fading fast, so Ren couldn’t make out what she’d fabricated, but he felt it. A split second before the next blast of magical energy slammed into the gate, the
origami
shape disintegrated into a shower of confetti. Ren felt the magic surging.

He was almost knocked off the wall by the force of the explosion.

The Ikushima men picked themselves up and remained standing like a row of proud sitting ducks, waiting for the next blast and for Chishihero to blow them off the wall.

Ren scrambled to his feet, pushing his way along the wall until he reached Namito. The young warrior frowned when he
saw Ren, pushing him behind Daichi so he could not be easily spotted from the ground. ‘You must hide, Renkavana,’ Namito warned. ‘It is you they have come for.’

‘Screw that,’ Ren replied in English, as another flare exploded overhead. Then he asked, in his almost fluent Japanese, ‘Why are the Tanabe warriors just sitting there? And why aren’t you fighting back?’

‘It is high treason to interfere with one of the
Konketsu
when they are working,’ Namito explained with a shrug. ‘Once Chishihero has finished her —’

‘You’re going to sit here and wait for her to finish bombing you? Dude, she’s trying to blow your walls down!’

The young man shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do,
wagakimi
. Chishihero may work whatever magic she pleases. The battle proper cannot commence until she is finished.’