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Natori Shuuichi’s telephone is ringing.
It’s his landline, not his mobile - the number that not even his agent has. The landline he keeps around, impossibly, because he never quite managed to summon the energy to set up a burner cell. The telephone is his father’s, technically; one of many objects taken from a home that was his before his mother died, and then abruptly wasn’t. He has shed them along the way, these objects, most of them functional and unwieldy and ugly in that mid-’90s sort of way, and all of them insidiously heavy. An appliance gifted to an acquaintance here, an item dropped at a secondhand shop there. The landline stays. The curling ringlets of its yellowing plasticine cord keep him tethered to that modest house a lifetime away, with its flowerbeds, with its gardenias Natori was not allowed to touch and wouldn’t dare to, even now.
“Someone is going to die tonight,” says the voice on the other end of the line. Of course it is Matoba Seiji speaking.
“How did you get this number?” Natori is well-versed in quick recovery.
“I looked you up in the phonebook.”
“I’m not listed in the phonebook.”
“Someone is going to die tonight.” Matoba Seiji pauses - annoyed, Natori thinks, that he isn't taking the bait. “How soon can you be in Kyoto?”
. . .
Natori is livid.
Overfamiliar. Forward. He barely knows Matoba Seiji. There was the manor incident, and the orchard, and there were...the times before that. Regardless, he does not know Matoba Seiji, insomuch as Matoba Seiji can even be known, which Natori suspects is very little. He’s correct: there are things the woods and the water do to a person. Being unknowable is learnt rather than caught, more a lesson than a virus. Still. Power and influence are not so easily metabolized.
Natori is livid. He thinks of Matoba’s voice over the phone, one-dimensional and matter-of-fact. Matoba speaks with a surety that carries, though his voice is never louder than parlour volume. Silky and absolute, he dispenses threats and advice, the former thinly-veiled and the latter unsolicited.
Someone will die tonight. Truth be told, Natori is caught off-guard by the statement (of course he is, Seiji is counting on it), but refuses to give Matoba the small satisfactions: tremble, waver.
Matoba opened with that line, Natori knows, because he’s banking on Shuuichi’s curiosity. It’s working: Natori is not livid at home, he’s livid and standing just outside Tofuku-ji Station in his second-best tux (it is a very nice affair, but not his nicest), having just come off the Keihan line and checking his wristwatch, which is a very nice wristwatch.
“Don’t sulk. We’re going to a party.”
Matoba comes up behind him, and has slipped his arm into the crook of Natori’s elbow. Attack dog smile, feline posture. Natori shakes free of him.
“You’re late.”
Matoba tips his head back to stare unblinking at Kyoto Tower. It rises up through the city and disappears, its disc obscured in clouds. “We’re late,” he corrects. “It’s not of consequence. This is the sort of party we can afford be late to.”
With a reputation like his, Matoba can afford to be late to any party he wishes. He could be late to his own funeral, and the nōkanshi and guests would apologize for arriving too early. Natori does not say it, but he feels his smile pull taut.
Matoba is dressed like a dead language tonight: wine-colored suit, split lip.
“Who hit you?” Natori lifts Seiji’s chin with an index finger, and Seiji allows it, leans into the touch grinning.
“That’s a bold assumption, Shuuichi-san.”
He turns, something erratic in his gait, and whistles for a nondescript black car. He does not deny the accusation, and Natori tucks this observation away for later.
. . .
He hasn’t ridden in one of the Matoba clan vehicles before. The experience is new to him. The windows are so heavily tinted, he can hardly see out. Not windows at all, really. It’s a bit like being submerged in water.
The way Matoba looks at him makes Natori feel...crowded. His expression, at once sly and scrupulous. The car’s leather seats creak faintly under the weight of claustrophobia, despite supporting only two passengers. It is here, in the muffled interior of this submersible, that Matoba explains the situation in less-than-meticulous detail.
The clan is known to take on corporate assignments, from time to time. It is one of their greatest and most consistent sources of revenue. One company in particular - a tech giant which will go unnamed - regularly commissions the Matoba to provide access to information normally well beyond its reach.
“A kind of spiritual market forecast, if you like,” Matoba smirks. “Businessmen are a superstitious lot. I’ve said so before.”
“Divination.”
Matoba nods. “Blessings, too. Ward off ill luck, misfortune. They pay handsomely.”
Only this time, all is not well. Someone from the company is going to die tonight. It is written many times over in bone and smoke and cracked turtle shell and embers and probably in other things, things that would unsettle Natori’s stomach to dwell on. There are rumors about the Matoba clan.
The car pauses before a traffic light, and the world is cast in crimson. Natori raises a hand to the window, trying to make out pedestrian shapes from the warping forms outside, blurred and fuzzy behind dark glass.
“Have you notified the company? Contacted the CEO, something?”
“We’re on our way to, yes.”
Natori’s head whips around. “It’s awfully late for that, don’t you think?”
“You think this wasn’t deliberate?” Matoba’s tone is all measured mirth. “Think how convenient it is, that the prediction landed on the night of the annual company soirée. Think how difficult it would be, to protect fifty people in fifty seperate locations if the party was, say, cancelled out of alarm.”
Their car has slowed to a halt.
When the door peels open with a resounding pop, Natori is greeted by the sight of a winding, stepped path leading up through a tiered arbor. A mansion looms above, probably a rented space. Bereft of kin, it’s the sort of place people visit to take wedding photos.
It’s Matoba who leads the way. Heels of his dress shoes clacking on asphalt, he practically twirls over to the staircase, takes a little leap onto the third step.
“Alright.” Natori comes to a standstill at the foot of the stairs, hands in pockets, refusing to play. “Someone’s going to die tonight. Are you in high spirits because you’re here to prevent it, or because you’re here to watch it happen?”
Judging by the speed at which Matoba’s brows shoot up, Natori knows it is an unspeakably brave question. The night air is very loud.
Matoba parts his lips ever so slightly, like he's going to say something, and stops. He goes striding off in the direction of the house, leaving Natori to flounder in his wake.
. . .
Exorcists can typically be divided into categories. As far as Natori Shuuichi is concerned, categorizing people is impolite at best and offensive at worst, and he generally spends a lot of time feeling guilty for having already done so.
He is at least comforted to think that in the years since his debut in exorcist circles, the number of categories into which his colleagues fall has decreased significantly. When sixteen-year-old Natori had looked at the world, he saw upwards of eight types of exorcist: there were the traditionalists, the amateurs, the people who were in the business for financial benefits and the people who were in the business for ideological reasons. There were hereditary exorcists, who did their work because they felt obligated to carry on the family business. There were hobby-ists and full-timers. There were people who specialized in urban exorcisms and rural exorcisms and everything in between. There were people who had the misfortune of inheriting a particular skill set and hadn’t known what else to do with it. And there were people who, just like Natori, had latched onto that skill set, had used it like a key, or a train ticket, used it to get out.
Now, six years later, Natori wades through any crowd of human practitioners and their shiki and wonders which group they belong to: dangerous or otherwise. These are the only two categories that make a difference, Natori has realized somewhere along the way.
The last time he attended a party with Matoba, the night ended in crisis: in the cloak room of someone’s landed estate, with his knee wedged between Matoba’s legs and Seiji’s teeth at his throat. This is no different than hiding under the table after pilfering sweets, only now Natori is implicated, liable.
Glinting incisors, pale wrists, hideous grace. Soft inquiry, after Natori’s - health? Career? He doesn’t recall. The scent of hydrangeas drifting in through open windows, ceremonial wine. It had not taken much. He let his hand drop to Seiji’s thigh, and the jaws of fate snapped closed around them, wicked and deadly silent - the air didn’t move. And so Natori has tipped the scale from transactional non-alliance into something else, and will bear the consequences.
Ah, but.
This is not that kind of party.
Someone will die tonight.
The main hall glitters. This is not the ancestral wealth sometimes displayed at exorcist gatherings, grandiose yet understated. This is the flashy kind, the kind that can’t be left to speak for itself, a glamour that Natori has become intimately familiar with: new money, masquerading as old. The interior decor is predominantly Western-style, though the outside of the house is decidedly Japanese in its architecture. Bouquets of spider lilies sit in blown-glass vases, and crystal chandeliers hang like sunken ships over the chattering guests.
The security guards bow for Matoba at the door, and let Natori through after him without a backwards glance. They make it to the center of the room without being accosted, and Matoba stands for a minute, taking in their surroundings in a slow full-circle turn which no one seems to notice.
Natori realizes that this might be one of the first parties Seiji has attended where he isn’t widely recognized. The exorcist community is small, secluded. In it, Matoba is known and feared and desired. Outside of it, he is barely anyone at all - simply another affiliate, important enough to snag an invitation but only just. Is this the reason for Seiji’s...precariousness, tonight? Natori doesn’t know what else to call it, but the Matoba heir is different, frantic. Excitable, like someone removed the iron rods from his spine and replaced them with elastic.
“Where to begin?”
Matoba rotates thoughtfully, chin-in-hand.
The cut, a dark score down the center of his lower lip. Natori has to tear his eyes away.
“I don’t feel anything,” he says. “I don’t see anything, but maybe you will.” Matoba’s single eye is worth three of his, Natori knows. He lifts a fluted glass from one of the passing waitstaff and sips experimentally. Sparkling white.
“Perhaps,” Matoba says. “Perhaps not.”
“Ah, not sure I follow.”
“We don’t know that the threat is otherworldly. It could be anything. We’re just here to make sure it’s not something we can stop.”
Natori feels cold. It must be the air conditioning.
“If you suspect foul play, we have to call the police. We should call the police right now.”
Matoba smiles, a jackal again. “And ruin such a nice party?”
Natori thinks he might suffer an aneurysm here and now. “Someone’s going to die.”
Matoba tilts his head, a doll-like motion. “The business of the clan is to protect humans from ayakashi. Protecting humans from each other is beyond our responsibility.”
Natori wants to know who hit Matoba. He’d like to buy them a drink.
“What did you bring me along for?”
Matoba’s laugh is short and light, but behind it something burns bitter, the usual veneer of scalding politeness cracking for the first time that evening. “For your scintillating camaraderie?”
Natori’s left fist is clenched inside the pocket of his trousers. The other holds the wine glass so tight, it runs the risk of cracking. “I don’t take kindly to being accessorized.”
Matoba shrugs, his voice without color. “Rail at me all you want; I know it doesn’t matter what I do. You will make a villain of me either way.”
Natori’s had enough of this. Two can play at shock value.
“Right,” he says, taking a pointed step back. “Then why waste your invitation?”
. . .
Natori wanders through the milling crowd in search of another drink. He finds one.
Even with his glasses on, he doesn’t catch anything out of the ordinary. At a loss and drifting, he decides to make his way over to congratulate the chief operating officer, a stout man decked in appallingly bright colors for someone who supposedly runs a corporation.
We haven’t been introduced. It’s a deplorable greeting, disrespectful to boot, and Natori pauses just outside the circle of admirers to compose a better one.
I’d like to congratulate you formally on your recent… Matoba never told him what the party was for. Damn.
On you recent success? Natori turns his brain upside-down trying to remember what the company actually does, and comes up empty-handed. He’s poised to enter the fray when he overhears something curious: a young woman (someone’s Plus One; she’s a bit too shabbily dressed to be an employee) speaks, clear and bright. What she says is, “My condolences,” and “I’m sorry for your loss.”
The throng stills, goes quiet.
“Condolences? You must be misinformed.”
“I’m sorry, I thought…”
Her voice melts away and the conversation springs back to life just as abruptly as it died, the chief’s baritone uncomfortably sunny.
. . .
Natori can eat here. He can drink.
When exorcists convene, Natori spares passing glances at the refreshments table, standing always like a lonely altar at the far end of the room. He’s made a habit of never eating at those gatherings, and he is not alone in his logic - many people don’t. Hunger is a powerful force, but paranoia is greater still. Most of the food is gobbled up by shiki whose masters are either benevolent or not paying attention.
On a usual occasion, Natori’s stomach grumbles at the sight of tea cakes, cut into neat wedges and laid out on polished trays. He doesn’t touch a thing, knowing Hiiragi will berate him later for not eating when he had the chance.
Not so in this place. Here, he loses track.
Aimless and left to his own devices, Natori catches sight of Matoba not far off, speaking to a couple. His hand is clasped around a half-eaten hors-d’oeuvre, a strawberry stuffed with cream and skewered on a toothpick. There’s a spot of cream at the corner of Matoba’s mouth, and Natori watches his tongue dart out, lightning fast, to catch it.
Natori feels suddenly (violently) like a voyeur, and forces himself to look at his watch.
Woods and water have their ways of changing a person - he has seen them at work in Natsume Takashi. But that is perhaps a poor analogy: power made the boy gentler, where it has only made Matoba distant, sharpened him around the edges. Natsume feels, does so often and arbitrarily, feels for strangers, feels for creatures even. But Matoba is at the opposite end of that spectrum, removed from others in a way that frightens Natori, when he chances to look too closely at Matoba’s manner. He is more polite than he used to be, and that is sinister enough, Natori reflects. This is not the Seiji of his youth, who loitered outside his high school to wait for him to get out of class.
Something in him, some latent feature, turned on when his father passed away; the death flicked a switch that in him was always there to begin with.
In a moment of astounding, uncharacteristic self-awareness, Natori realizes that Matoba would frighten him less if he wasn’t so damned good at his job, and downs the rest of his drink in one go. Fortunately, there’s another waiting for him on the windowsill.
“Pardon my intrusion.”
The woman approaches wearing a green dress. The elegance in her bearing and the way she’s done her makeup suggest early thirties, but the lines that run the length of her brow suggest older.
“Have we met before? You have a familiar face.”
Natori swallows the impulse to lie. “I’ve been in commercials.”
The woman squints, and manages to look very beautiful doing it. “Wait. You weren’t in Melody of a Heavy Heart, were you?”
Natori chokes on his champagne, feels the sizzling heat of bubbles in his nose.
“I was,” he admits, wiping at the corner of an eye. It was one of his first movies, made direct-to-TV and truly deplorable. “I don’t know if I should be flattered that you remember that, or offended.”
The woman smiles. Enchanting. She has dimples.
“How could I forget? It’s one of my favorites. Absolutely incomprehensible.”
A bang slashes through the room, and Natori drops to his knees instinctively. What made him do that? The atmosphere in this place is going to his head; must be.
At the nearest table, a waiter pours fresh champagne into glasses, foam frothing out of the bottle’s neck. The woman in the green dress is looking down at him, concern and a hint of suspicion in her eyes.
“My apologies,” he says, and straightens. “Nerves.”
The woman’s shoulders rise and fall; a slow intake of breath. “You know,” she says, “gunshots don’t echo.”
“Is that right?”
She nods, pearls winking at her earlobes. “What you hear when a gun goes off is a small sonic boom. The blast breaks the sound barrier, you see. Fireworks don’t do that.”
“Neither do champagne corks, I expect.” Natori laughs easily. “What’s the occasion, by the way? I wasn’t filled in.”
The woman’s face...darkens for a moment. The lines around her mouth deepen. “Oh, all this, you mean?” She glares up at the chandelier. “One of our executives is not well-liked. He’s trying to buy our favor, I’d imagine.”
Behind Natori’s sternum, an alarm bell rings just for him.
“Well, he’s certainly bought my favor,” he says lightly. “Have you tasted the canapés?”
There is a slight shake of the lady’s head. “I’m not hungry,” she says, and sounds hollow. In a flash the look is gone, replaced by that warm, amiable gentility. “Your friend seems to be enjoying himself.”
On the opposite side of the room, Matoba is surrounded by people in crisp lounge suits. Natori cannot hear their laughter - the din is too great - but he can see the line of Matoba’s mouth lose its firmness, watches as he throws his head back to cackle at some joke, face awash in frenetic pink. One of the assembly hooks an arm around his neck, and Matoba does not seem to notice. Odd.
“We’re not friends.” Natori’s voice makes so little impact in the uproarious chatter, he can’t be sure he said it out loud.
“Pardon?”
Someone else - another suit - closes a hand around Matoba’s knee, and Matoba flinches, but recovers himself a little too quickly. He does not pull away, or push off.
“Could you excuse me?” Natori asks, but he's already moving, parting the crowd here and there when necessary. After all, he’s sure Seiji has had quite a bit to drink, and he doesn’t like the look of the man with the sideburns.
. . .
“Are you out of your mind?”
The night is thick and heavy, and the balcony is a welcome respite from the frigid splendor of the air-conditioned ballroom, where Natori has recently tossed half a glass of something fizzy onto a man of (probable) importance and stature.
“You’re drunk.”
“You’re drunk.”
Matoba sits perched on the balcony railing, his back to the garden, legs crossed at the ankles. Natori stands, pitched forwards, elbows leaning heavily on the safety rail, and watches the distant tower blink red through the summer fog.
“We need to figure out who it will be before the guests disperse for the night.” Matoba’s face is still flushed, but his voice does not waver. “After that, it’ll be impossible.”
Cicadas screech in the garden below, a warm-weather hum that signals rainfall later.
“Shuuichi-san? Are you listening?”
A fight was avoided in the ballroom, but narrowly. Natori’s never been in a fight before, not with a human opponent at least - but he’s learnt enough from watching his stunt double to master the basics: thumb outside the fist, not in it. The tower blinks, vanishing behind moving clouds only to reappear again.
“What’re you---? Oh.” Matoba casts an irritated look over his shoulder. “A terrifically ugly thing, isn’t it? A shame. I hear this used to be a very beautiful city.”
“I like it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”
Natori is overcome by the embarrassing and irredeemable urge to make Matoba beg - for something - for anything. His eyes stray once again to that split lip.
What he says is, “This is futile.”
“Alright.” Seiji won’t meet his gaze. “Go home, then. I won’t stop you.” So casual.
The cicadas scream. There’s no moon tonight, but Kyoto Tower glows in its place.
Natori’s hands - they worry him, sometimes. They wander.
Sometimes Natori brushes his knuckles across Matoba’s cheek, traces that ridiculous eyepatch - silly, unnecessary really, he’s sure Matoba only keeps it around for novelty. Sometimes, when Natori leans in for a kiss, he wraps long fingers around the pale column of Matoba’s throat, applies pressure. Sometimes he splays those fingers - delicate and sure, he knows this because admiring lovers have told him - across Matoba’s mouth, pushes them in to feel Matoba’s tongue swirl around the pad of his thumb. Natori’s hands worry him. What they do is bloodsport.
Now, he pushes off the balcony railing and lets those hands drift to the back of Seiji’s neck, to the slight curve of his waist in that awful wine-colored suit. Matoba closes the distance between them and Natori presses his tongue to Seiji’s split lip, presses until he tastes blood.
It’s a long time before either of them speak, and it’s Matoba who breaks the silence.
“If you thought you were defending my honor back there, you’re doing a poor job of it now.”
Abruptly, sounds: the swish of a velvet curtain being moved aside, the creak of a door being opened, the rush of roaring voices. A beam of light slices through the dark just to the right of Natori’s shoulder, landing on Matoba’s single unmarred eye. He blinks, affronted, lashes lit in gold.
“Ah, so sorry!” Someone has stumbled out onto the balcony. “Chilly in there, didn’t mean to, er, interrupt---”
Natori steps back, offers Matoba an arm to lean on as he dismounts from the marble bannister. “No apologies necessary. We were just leaving.”
The man is young, surprisingly young, junior to most of the employees in attendance: off-white suit cast in a blueish pallor as he stands backlit in the threshold. Natori halts midway to the door; he’s seen this man before, standing beside that young lady in the secondhand dress, holding her hand when she gave her condolences--
“Actually,” Natori breaks off to gather his thoughts. “This is a presumptuous question, but I was told - that is, I heard one of the executives paid for the entire event. That can’t be true, can it?” He affects an easy laugh. "I mean, this must have cost a small fortune, eh!"
Matoba shoots him a look of mild interest. Beside them, the man smiles.
“Ah, a presumptuous question indeed.” He drains his glass and, to Natori’s surprise, keeps going. “Extravagant, don’t you think? This place, I mean. He paid for it, all of it, it’s true.”
Natori treads carefully. “The venue is beautiful.”
“Beautiful enough to cure a man’s guilt?” The employee swirls his glass as if there’s something in it. Inebriated, Natori thinks, waiting.
“He killed a girl. Lovely girl. Not directly.” The man staggers, leans heavily on Natori for support. “Got her knocked up and wouldn’t help her after. She jumped off the roof last month.”
Natori doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.
Matoba fills in the silence. “She worked with you?”
The man nods. “That guy...Yuka-san didn’t even want to sleep with him.”
The glass lilts from his hand and Natori fumbles to catch it before it shatters on the tile patio. He heaves the man over to the railing, where at least he’ll have something to lean on.
The man immediately slides to the floor, where he assumes a sitting position and narrows his eyes. “You’re that guy from TV. I didn’t recognize you with the glasses on.”
Matoba touches his shoulder. “We should go.”
“You think he’ll be alright?”
Matoba gives the slouching man a once-over. “He isn’t vomiting. He’ll sober up soon, I think.”
Dust motes float lazily in the column of light, before the door shuts quietly, drenching the balcony in darkness again.
. . .
The party draws to a close well past midnight. The waitstaff busy themselves with putting out the trash, piling garbage bags high along the street behind the manor and catching cigarette breaks where they can. Rats skitter in the gutters. The combined efforts of one Natori Shuuichi and one Matoba Seiji have proven next to useless.
They stand now in the garden at the foot of the hill, watching guests depart in groups of two and three and one, having failed to detect even the slightest whiff of either murder or the supernatural. No curses, no miasma, no demons, no ghosts.
Well, Natori amends.
Perhaps there is a ghost at this party, but it’s not one even exorcists have the power to dispel.
He kicks discontentedly at the loose gravel that lines the footpath, the soles of his shoes scuffing.
“I walked into a doorframe.”
Natori looks up. “Eh?”
“You asked, before.” Matoba shrugs, deflated and leaning against the leg of a wooden flower trellis. The lilacs hang in clumps around his head. “I walked into a doorframe. It’s not a very good story. The one you imagined was more...eventful, I’m sure.”
Despite himself, Natori smiles. “It was.”
Bang.
Natori doesn’t even notice the first gunshot. His brain writes it off unconsciously as the cork from a champagne bottle, or a rogue firework.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Silence? A few, blissful moments (seconds?) of it. A scream splits the dark in two. Down by the roadside, a commotion unfolds.
. . .
By the time the exorcists make it to the cul-de-sac, the police are already on their way, sirens wailing.
The body of a minor executive officer lies broken at the side of the road, not two feet outside the front gate. Soon to be outlined in white chalk, if daytime television is much to go by. The corpse lies face-down, and the impression an onlooker gets is distinctly that of a suit. Nothing more, nothing less. When he closes his eyes, all Natori sees is the suit: no body, no man at all.
Nearly fifteen people in the immediate vicinity of the scene, and not a soul is present to witness the crime. Funny, that.
Natori hadn’t planned on spending the early hours of the morning being questioned fruitlessly by law enforcement, but considering the whole sordid excursion began with a proclamation of death over the phone, he really isn’t sure what he ought to have expected.
After the interviews, Matoba buys him coffee. It’s the least he can do; Natori insists. Matoba also buys him an early breakfast at the all-hours diner across the street. The customers seated at the tables around them gawk through the windows, press their noses to the glass trying to catch a glimpse of the homicide case on the other side of the road: the police tape, the men in uniform, in latex gloves. It’s exciting; sensational.
The exorcists keep their heads down and eat in silence.
Under normal circumstances, Natori finds Matoba’s kindness frightful, won’t suffer that uncanny pleasantness. But here, in the hollow light of daybreak and the smothering neon from the diner sign, Natori feels only desire and a strange, grudging kinship. After all, Matoba may be the better exorcist - but they’re both pretty bad detectives.
Natori has a theory, to be sure, but-- well. Better to let the police handle this sort of thing.
The scent of lilacs is thick in the air.
Across the street, blood gleams on the pavement.