Chapter Eighteen

Monster

The Changed Cat Spirit carried Nekohiko on her back as she swam through the star-studded sky. The winding road from Red Stone to Sai was no more than a silk thread below. Nekohiko watched the ground scud by, but since the world in Spiritside was so bleak with the shifting hues of eerie, there wasn't much to see that he hadn't seen in his previous life.

In many ways, it even brought back memories.

The town of Sai slowly drew into focus on the phantom horizon, and the Cat Spirit canted toward it. Its massive form landed on the street floor as gracefully as a butterfly on a leaf. Now the Cat Spirit towered above the empty, spectral buildings, quirking its fur and shaking one of its paws as most cats do when they touch something unpleasant.

Nekohiko hopped off her back and to the street. His cat nose high in the air, he sniffed, trying for a scent of a specific Spirit Binder. All Spirit Binders left a trail of their prowess and the Binding method all across the Spiritside. And since there weren't too many accomplished Spirit Binders in such a remote place as Sai...

Nekohiko honed onto Daichi's trail. The White Grove Inn in which Daichi was said to be lodging, didn't smell like him but a certain tavern a few buildings away, did. Ah, nights in a bumbling town. Of course the man was in a tavern, drinking. Maybe even helping himself to a prostitute while he was at it.

How perfect.

The Cat Spirit studied Nekohiko's movements with an erratic turn of her head as if contemplating whether she enjoyed him as is, or whether she would prefer to toy with him in some other way -- like a cat with a mouse, for instance.

Nekohiko completely understood the sentiment. He wasn't exactly that entertaining to her. And Spirits, especially such spurned ones as Changed Cats, had notoriously short tempers.

"Cat Sister," he meowed. "I was killed by a man, and swindled off my hide." He arched his furry back so that Cat Spirit could attest he was speaking the truth. "If I enact my revenge upon him tonight, will you drink his blood with me?" He went in for a rub of his head against the Cat Spirit's tender paw, then added after great consideration and shame, "Meow?"

And before she could reject the proposition, he scurried away, loping along the grey streets. The dark gust of the Spiritside wind brushed across Nekohiko as he abandoned the Spirit Cat's proximity and he emerged into a vivid, garish, drunken merriment of a night.

Music and dancing and conversations on all sides overwhelmed him with how sudden the change was from the monotonous hush of the Spirit world. The pulsating jellyfish lights drifting under the ceiling blinked from beyond the doors of the large tavern hall with a rosy glow. In it, smoke and cooking smells hanged in the air heavily.

Nekohiko twitched his whiskers in distaste, then weaved into the bead-curtain doors and past the feet of people wandering in and out of the establishment. When he caught an occasional glance directed at him, he meowed innocently, then hurried out of the way.

Daichi sat on the floor in the middle of the room by a large table and a few friends, chatting. Scooping pickled plum shreds from a bowl, sipping their wine from the cups quickly filled to the brim again. Even a couple of easy women on the laps of some of Daichi's friends, although he himself sat alone.

"The Utsuro King is sure a merciless bastard. He'll wear you out into a husk if you let him," one of the men was telling Daichi, almost draped over the table.

Nekohiko crept closer, biding his time, listening in on the mumbly conversation.

"I bet I'd be drinking if Utsuro and Hira Kings made a letter-courier out of me," the other man with a prominent mustache blared. "Drink up. Your job will kill you, you know."

"I know." Daichi rolled intoeasy laughter and overturned the rest of his radish slices into his mouth. Chewing, he splashed his wine as he waved his hand around. "Here's to King Hira Okinaga and that eternal splinter up his ass -- King Utsuro Sakai!"

Nekohiko smiled inwardly. "Being a letter-courier of a King is a far more satisfying job than being a bodyguard of an Emperor," he said, loud and clear, from beneath the shadows of a neighboring table. "Especially if you fail at it so tragically, mmm, Royal Bodyguard Daichi?"

Daichi's back tensed up as though he was struck by what he'd just heard. His friends squinted at the animated crowd in the tavern, trying to distinguish from where Nekohiko's voice had come. Even the old lady by the table who sat closest to Nekohiko's cat body, swiveled her head, spooked by some young man's voice coming so clearly from within her vicinity.

Nekohiko scampered into the deeper shadows under the tables but never letting Daichi's face out of his sight.

Daichi slowly turned to the crowd behind him.

"Who said that?" His voice was hoarse.

But all he saw were the flushed and delirious grimaces in the crowd. Nobody paid him much attention, and nobody seemed of the age the odd voice's owner must have been.

One of Daichi's drinking buddies tapped his wrist and raised a wine cup. "Drink up, drink up! You said a toast -- it's bad luck to not drink it up straight away."

"Yeah," one of Daichi lady friends echoed. "Here's to Kings! And here's to the Supreme Divine Emperor, too!"

"...though I always wondered about that," the mustached friend of Daichi's asked, hiccuping. "Weren't you an actual Royal Bodyguard of the Emperor at some point? No other reason for Okinaga to give you away to another person, was there?"

"Briefly." Daichi put his empty cup on the table. "His Majesty Abihiko didn't need me after the Usurper was executed. So my service ended almost as soon as it began."

Um.

Did he just... completely ignore Nekohiko's short "reign"? Was Nekohiko not even a person worth mentioning?

"Ah yes, seems so." Several of the friends nodded with solemn expressions.

He could hardly believe his ears. Not only did Daichi not mention him, nobody else seemed to notice.

Indeed, in his lazy days of reading historical records about the current issues, Nekohiko had never seen a single reference to himself. But he thought it meant that people didn't pay attention to something so tragic and brief. Yet now he was more and more certain that people simply didn't know who he was -- or his name -- or even the fact that he'd been their Emperor for a few short minutes in between the Usurper's reign and Abihiko's.

His existence had all but been erased from public knowledge.

Fury bubbled within him. Nekohiko took a deliberate run for the gathering and sprang on the table amidst the wine jars and toppled cups. Daichi had only now eased back into a better mood after the shaken paleness that Nekohiko's yell had evoked in him.

"Hear-hear!" Another of Daichi's friends searched for a bottle but found Nekohiko instead. "Oh, a kitty."

A few unsteady hands groped air past Nekohiko as though intending to stroke him but Nekohiko avoided them all. He only stopped when he reached Daichi's side of the table. Teary-eyed from the last cup he'd downed, Daichi gave Nekohiko a dazed smile and extended his hand to pat him as well.

"Here, kitty, kitty," he murmured. "You also understand me, don't you? All the businesses between Kings and between Emperors..." Daichi sniffed, disturbed. "The vilest businesses in the world."

"Here -- a piece of my fish," Daichi's friend barged in with a smelly chunk of smoked flakes he poked at Nekohiko's face. "Eat, you little furry bastard. It's free, just because you're damn cute."

Nekohiko ignored everyone. He stared at Daichi with a certain rigidity claiming his spine and his limbs. Anger. Bitterness. Feeling wronged -- to such a degree -- he almost didn't care to wait till Daichi was alone.

He wanted this man to pay. Here. Now.

How could he not? Daichi, with his simple and honest face and easy manner that let him save random kids from the ghouls on the streets of Izumo town all those years ago. And how many times had Daichi jumped in front of Nekohiko's body later, when Nekohiko was already a youth?

...and then, to do nothing. To allow Abihiko to slice his throat like it didn't mean a thing?

Through strain, Nekohiko opened his mouth in what would be a sneer but of course his cat's face didn't show it well. His body rumbled with purring yet he didn't close his eyes in pleasure, still locking gazes with Daichi as though in some intense message of hatred.

Daichi's eyebrows crinkled up but he was too inebriated to suspect that the cute cat before him implied anything murderous by that look.

"Damn cat, so picky!" one of the women by the table said, then slapped Nekohiko's butt with her hand. "Eat what you're given, stupid cat. Or are you some kind of a fancy royal cat, to look down upon our offerings?"

Nekohiko jumped into Daichi's arms and rubbed his head and side against the man's chest as though trained to do that. Both Daichi and everyone else by the table froze, stunned, but then erupted in guffawing the next moment.

"The kitty likes you, Daichi! And you said you aren't getting any sweet girls tonight! There's one throwing herself at your arms already!"

Daichi laughed heartily from the stomach, too, but when he tried to press Nekohiko to his chest, Nekohiko slipped out and walked away, hiding beyond the table neighbors and the clangor and ruckus going on in the tavern. He was too bored to simply wait till Daichi was done feasting, so he prowled around the room, seething with resentment.

His cat eyesight allowed him to perceive even the slightest motions on his periphery. He quickly found a few skittering cockroaches and mice in the shadowy rafters of the main room of the tavern. He wasn't busy catching them for too long before he'd gathered a couple of fat, crushed roaches in his bronze-toothed mouth. Majestically, proudly, he sauntered back to Daichi's table and dumped the dead insects right into the man's wine cup.

Daichi jerked his hand back from the cup, visibly distraught. One of the nearest women who was picking through the plate in the center squealed and wriggled toward one of Daichi's friends, pointing.

"Eew! Ewww, that's disgusting! Take it away, take it!"

"Stupid cat," some drunk man told Nekohiko slurrily and raised a hand to strike him.

But Daichi stopped him. "It's just a stupid cat. It wants to share its meal, nothing more." He smacked the cockroaches off the table nonetheless. "No reason to punish it."

Nekohiko sat a few feet aside from the table, only peering back over his shoulder at Daichi. The people at the table prodded and swatted at him several times more and Daichi exchanged more lighthearted comments with them but one by one everyone at the table forgot about Nekohiko. Or pretended to forget.

Nekohiko clearly saw that Daichi became unnerved by how motionless and unblinking Nekohiko was, staring at him. But what could he do? This was only a cat and a harmless-looking one. So far, at least. As all people did when stray animals hanged around them for no reason, Daichi simply ignored him from that moment on.

Nekohiko went out the door and climbed on top of the building opposite the tavern. He curled down on the roof in full sight on the tavern's exit and everyone who came in and out of it.

It didn't take long for Sai's nightlife to finally start dwindling down. People and Bound dummies still occasionally passed underneath Nekohiko's hideout, but rarer. The drinkers had escaped the tavern in droves and bouts but when Daichi came out at last, he was alone and he didn't dally around the small smoke stall on the side. He patted clean his governmental hat that looked like it had been sat on, then pushed it onto his head as he slowly picked his stride to go in the direction of White Grove Inn.

"Daichi! Catch!" Nekohiko cried out, following close by on the roof.

Like a man hit with a horrible realization, Daichi stopped. From beyond the shingles, Nekohiko saw Daichi's throat bob as he swallowed, turning his head back.

"...excuse me?" he asked a wasted passerby who stumbled along the same street. "You said something?"

The drunkard only giggled incoherently, shaking his head. Daichi shook his robes straight and gave the street and the other people on it a thorough look. But nobody was watching him, and nobody was close enough to have cried out at him.

"...shouldn't have drunk. Hearing things..." Daichi hurried again down his path. He kept glancing over his shoulder and up the windows of the buildings around him, clearly distressed.

Nekohiko enjoyed this. He'd used the exact same tone and words he tended to when he'd been alive. His and Daichi's relationship hadn't been very close but the man's and Abihiko's had been. And when Abihiko had wanted to share a drink or a small sum of money with Daichi, he tossed him jars of wine and bags of coins while crying out in the same sweet voice, "Daichi! Catch!"

And Nekohiko had picked up that habit after a while, singly to mirror Abihiko's easy friendships with everyone around. It worked so well now as a means of torture, didn't it?

"Daichiiii..." he whispered, trailing after Daichi's fast pace down the street. "Where is the Emperor you left dying in a pool of blood? Where is the boy you swore to protect?"

The sound must have been ghastly and faint enough that Daichi couldn't tell from which side it came. And if he had heard it at all or if it was all in his head.

Nekohiko reveled in it. In the fact that Daichi was clearly tormented by the familiarity of his voice -- which only proved:

Daichi knew he'd done something wrong. He felt guilty.

He knew he'd made a huge mistake.

Soon Daichi rushed into the entrance of the White Grove Inn, rubbing his forehead with his hand as though from a splitting migraine. He and the innkeeper traded some inconsequential words but Nekohiko was already on his way scaling up the roof tiles to get to the window from which, earlier, he'd sensed only the feeblest essence of Daichi's Binding.

The night sky was magnificent above him and as he propped himself onto the window sill, he looked off in the distance where the enormous shape of the Cat Sister lounged over the roofs of some of the tallest buildings in Sai. Other town Spirits stirred through the town's spaces -- shingle Spirits, chimney smoke Spirits, drunkenness Spirits, Lascivious Spirits -- but none of them had as great a presence as the Cat Spirit summoned by Nekohiko for a bloody sacrifice.

Most Spirits tended to only grow in size when directly prayed to or promised something particularly vicious in their honor. Nekohiko noted that Cat Sister's tail was twitching in aggravated waiting. He didn't have much time for dawdling, did he? If she didn't receive her sacrifice soon, she might as well attack Nekohiko for having tricked her.

The room beyond the window glowed up with a firefly lantern Daichi brought in. Nekohiko shed all his concerns about the Cat Sister and focused solely on Daichi's big shadow moving over the floor.

The man left the lantern by the door and sagged by the wall, crushing his head in his hands. He was whispering something to himself. Mumbling, shaking his head.

Nekohiko cautiously crept forward to hear.

"...monster, monster... he was only a monster," Daichi muttered, breathing fast. "There was no other way... we had to do it... Spirits forgive us... We had to."

An odd confusion swelled in Nekohiko. Yet he wasn't certain of what Daichi was talking about. His paws lighter than a feather touch, he stepped inside the window frame, doubling down to slither in under the shutter screen.

"...but he was barely a minute out of being a child, too, wasn't he?" Daichi laughed to himself hollowly, then suddenly scrunched his eyes and rubbed them with his calloused hand. "And we swore to protect him... if only we knew the true horror behind what he is..."

Nekohiko stopped, instantly cold.

So he was actually talking about him? About his murder?

And the way he'd just used to describe him -- an innocent sixteen-year-old who hadn't done a single wrong thing in his life, not even killing anyone once? -- was to call him a "monster"?!

"Hello, Daichi," Nekohiko said. "Keep lying to yourself about what you did. And why."

Daichi's face lost all color as he snapped to the window. His hands froze before his face. They trembled.

"Who--" he said, then understanding dawned on him, slow and tortuous. "No... that's impossible. You cannot be here. You--"

"I am not exactly here," Nekoiko ground out, his fur bristling across his body. "I am dead. Did you forget?"

"No," Daichi laughed hoarsely as though solely to himself. "Impossible... impossible..."

"What's impossible? This is the body of a pretty common cat, Daichi. What is so impossible about it?"

Daichi scrambled up against the wall. If at first, all his bloodshot eyes were showing was loss and staggering fear, as his heaves grew, so did his resolve. So did his own fury, glinting in his eyes.

"But of course," he suddenly said with a deranged rigidity in his undertone. "I understand... Of course a wretch like you would come back to haunt people."

Nekohiko's eyesight suddenly shifted view to a predatory focus on Daichi and Daichi only, so enraged he felt. He could bet that his cateye pupils now looked pure black and wide and burning like all cat eyes did when the animals were furious.

"Come again?" he purred. "I thought I misheard you just now."

Crazed, tired laughter erupted out of Daichi's mouth as he turned to the table on which his bags lay. Among them, a sword.

Nekohiko inched alongside the opposite wall, cautious. Let him get the sword, sure. Why pretend this could go peacefully and that Nekohiko would only get to interrogate the man about the reasons for his assassination?

However, Nekohiko didn't abandon hope. Truth. He wanted it even more than revenge. Truth, and explanations.

"Why?" he said, trembling. "Why did you do it? Why did you allow him to do it?"

Daichi glanced at him, either shocked by Nekohiko's question or simply mocking. "Why what, monster?"

"Why did you people murder me?" Nekohiko said, refusing to let anger overwhelm him. "And who are you calling monster, murderer?"

"We weren't murderers," Daichi told him, a shaken smile still widening on his lips. "We were liberators. We were heroes, and the greatest hero of all was he. Abihiko, our last hope."

...

What... the hell was this even?

Hero? Liberators? Nekohiko felt as though doused with ice water.

"Keep telling yourself lies, Daichi." His heart squeezed inside him with terrible doubt and worry. He had no idea what this man was talking about, but he knew it was all a lie. Nothing he knew about himself or his past would make sense otherwise. "Keep justifying the murder of the innocent. Does that make you sleep better at night?"

Daichi's laughter was a croak, and a chilling one.

"I'll sleep better only when you die once and for all..." Abruptly, he grew quiet, hands clasping firm around the hilt of his sword. "Demonic Emperor Nekohiko."

Queenfisher

Sorry I was late with publishing the chapter! I was busy trying to make the new cover that would reflect the darker tone the book takes from this moment on (the original cover is a bit too fluffy for it and doesn't fit!).

In any case, just wanted to say that Nekohiko is NOT an unreliable narrator. What he knows, he relays fully in his POV. So he IS actually confused by all of Daichi's "you had it coming for ya" statements.