CHAPTER 7: DAIMYŌ

Then, like he was reuniting with a lover, the samurai took the other two blades from the rack, got to his knees, and lay all three of them on the floor in front of him. He performed a similar kowtow to the swords, holding it for several long minutes, then sat up and began running his hands down sheathes and blades in unmistakable reverence, speaking to them softly in Japanese. Getting the gut feeling she was witnessing something incredibly private and personal, Shannon’s face reddened and she started picking at stray yarn in the expensive Persian rug.

Eventually, the samurai was standing again, grasping the swords in a fist. “You said you could get this off of my neck?” he asked, touching the old-looking steel collar.

“Um,” Shannon said, remembering the glowy-eyes-of-death. “I’m sure you could find a power-tool that would work just fine in the shop. I really have to go turn off my war machine. If I don’t, it’ll explode.”

He frowned at her, then down the hall at the stairs. “Explode.”

“Oh yeah, baby. Big ball of fire. Kaboom.” She spread her hands outward. “You just can’t leave stuff like that unattended, even for a minute. Might set the house on fire.”

He gave her a long look. “I have sworn my sword to you by the laws of Bushido. I will manage your war-machines now.”

“Oh, uh, I know,” Shannon said. “I just need to go shut it off. Was gonna lob some fire, but you stopped me right before I could get the hood open and start flinging the burning oil.”

He grimaced. “There’s no need for that now.”

“Right,” she said, nodding. “So let me just go shut it off before it hurts somebody, okay?”

He gave her a long look like he didn’t quite trust her, but then glanced at the stairs. “I will come to the door to watch you. And I warn you, girl, I am fast.”

Not as fast as a Dodge, she wagered.

But he nonetheless followed her down the stairs and stepped gingerly over the broken glass and out onto the front porch, eying her war machine with great trepidation. He’s got experience with burning oil, she thought, with glee. Then, like she was approaching a very dangerous beast, she took a deep breath, opened the door of her car, sat down in the seat.

On the porch, she watched the samurai’s hand tighten nervously around his sword.

Shannon threw the Dodge in reverse, and peeled backwards out of the driveway, flinging gravel up onto the porch. She saw just enough of his face to see him register surprise before she twisted in a 3-point turn, rammed the car into drive, spun the wheel, and hit the accelerator to the floor.

Turns out, she probably shouldn’t have hit the accelerator to the floor, because in gravel, she spent more time spinning her wheels than actually going anywhere, and a few seconds later, a samurai sword came down through her engine-block and her car gave a startled sputter and died.

Shannon stared at the now-lifeless car, then at the sword, then slowly lifted her head to look at the scowling Japanese man on the other end of the blade. Nonchalantly, he yanked his sword free, wiped boiling oil and engine grease from the blade using an ornate cloth, and slid it back into its sheath. Then he walked around to her window, to lean down and look at her through the broken glass. “So should it be the table or the rack?”

Shannon cringed away from him.

He learned further against the door-frame and flicked a piece of broken safety-glass off of the open window. Meeting her eyes, his gaze was deadly when he said, “Or maybe the beam and spreader-bar?”

“Sorry,” Shannon whimpered.

“I told you I had a proposition for you, Shannon Meeks.” He sounded more than a little irritated. “By now, even your mindless feminine nature should have understood I don’t intend to harm you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Who the hell are you calling mindless?”

He gestured at the Dodge Dart, which was even then beginning to send up little puffs of steam and smoke through the brand-new exhaust vent he’d created with his blade. “I gave an oath of loyalty and you tried to run,” he growled. “Do you know how shameful that is for me?”

“An oath of…” Suddenly, Shannon remembered fidgeting as he put his forehead to the floor at her feet. “Dude, no.” She swallowed, hard. “Look, no offense, but you creep me the hell out. And it’s not just ‘cause you’re naked and you ran down my car and put your sword through the engine-block. Your eyes were glowing. And you’re a guy. I got a thing against guys. They kinda make my stomach turn, okay?”

He gave her an amused grin. “Oh? Why’s that?”

Suddenly, she had a flash of a memory, very brief, of needing help with her Geometry homework one night when she was in middle school and opening her parents’ door to find her father’s naked hips thrusting against the rump of a helpless, sobbing woman, folded over an A-shaped frame that held her arms and legs in place. “Oh fuck,” she whispered. She remembered watching him yank those weird fangs out of her sides and bellowing at her to shut the door and come back when he ‘wasn’t busy.’ “Oh fuck,” she said again.

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Masaaki squatted beside the car and gave her a considering look over the rim of the broken window. “You’re pale.”

“I don’t feel so good,” she said softly, trying to force that memory back to the cellar from whence it had come. Unfortunately, with the first memory wrenched to the surface in her parents’ suite, the mental room that she’d used to secure all those nasty occurrences had stubbornly reappeared in a visible corner of her mind, and she knew there were more where those two had come from. A lot more.

Her shrink had told her this might happen. That she’d had some weird repressed memories of something, keeping her from wanting to get close to a guy. The shrink had postulated that she’d been sexually molested as a child, and she had given Shannon her card, saying that if any of those repressed memories ever ‘resurfaced,’ to call her immediately so they could talk about it.

Nope, sorry Nancy. Just walked in on my parents a few times. Noooo big deal.

“What’s wrong?” The naked Japanese man started fumbling with the latch to her car door, sounding concerned.

“Oh God, just go away for a few minutes, okay?” She pushed the locking button.

Masaaki hesitated, frowned at her, frowned at the button, and then she watched the cogs in his mind turn as he unlocked it.

Monkey-see, monkey-do, Shannon thought, ridiculously. She tensed as he worked the latch with a click and pulled the door carefully open, revealing his squatting, naked, muscular body on the other side. Then the bands of metal on his arms and legs sparked a memory, and again, she was inundated with a flood of images she would have much rather left buried.

A girl, kneeling on the bathroom floor, wrists bound to her ankles, a leather leash draped over the towel-rack as her parents showered. She’d turned to give Shannon a terrified look over her shoulder through the steam filling the bathroom, her pupils shaped like barbells. She’d had the stubby tips of horns growing from her temples. She’d been utterly naked, and younger than Shannon now, and there’d been a bowl placed on her knees under her chin, a small cut in her throat.

Dreams, Shannon thought, horrified. Those were dreams. She’d even told her shrink some of her ‘dreams,’ further confirming her shrink’s assumption that they were some twisted mental reflection of some other horror, buried beneath.

“I’m really sorry what they did to you,” Shannon said. “Really really sorry.”

He continued to squat beside her in the gravel of the driveway, meeting her eyes. After a moment, he made one of those dismissive Asian grunts and shrugged. Then he bent and picked up a jagged piece of crushed granite and began rolling it over in his big fingers. “You said you could get the collar off?”

Shannon swallowed, hard. Just the glow from his eyes had hurt…

Without looking at her, he said, “What better way to stop a vampire lord from claiming you than to have a full-blood yatagarasu as a manservant?” It almost sounded like a plea.

Shannon winced. “Uh.”

Slowly, he looked up at her, tightening the stone into a fist. “You’re unwilling to take it off.” He didn’t sound surprised. He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching her. “It is because I had to chase you, isn’t it?”

“The glowy eyes didn’t help,” she squeaked, cringing into her seat.

He made another rough Japanese grunt. “Eventually, you’ll learn to trust me, wan-ko.” Then he sighed and dropped the stone. “Until then, I will live with your decision.” Like she had told him he would wear Nikes instead of Reebok. He glanced over his shoulder toward the gravel road in the distance, which an old truck had just rumbled down. Probably belonging to the drunk neighbor with the yard full of sled-dogs a few miles up the mountain. Though Shannon had never actually been on the property, she had seen the truck with the double-layered rows of dog kennels, and had heard the dogs howling in unison on too many occasions to count.

“This is the twenty-first century,” Shannon babbled. “We don’t have manservants anymore.”

He twisted to face her again. “You do.” Like he was mentioning she had jet black hair and creepy pasty gray-white skin.

“Uhhhmm.” Shannon cleared her throat uncomfortably.

“So,” he said, picking glass pieces from the Dart’s floorboards, “now that you seem to be thinking straight again, what would you have me do?” His eyes flickered to her face a moment before dropping to the glass again.

“Excuse me?”

“What do you want me to do? Clothe myself, find us food, drive my tantō through my belly…”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Shannon demanded.

He carefully picked up a square of glass from the running board and peered at it, turning it in the light. Then he glanced up at the front window of the car, then back at the glass in his hand. “A samurai without a daimyō is merely a rōnin. An honorless criminal, not worth the dust he walks on.” He took a deep breath, and she heard the tremor as he let it out. “My last daimyō sold me to a Third Lander to pay his gambling debts. I am hoping you will be different.”

“Daimyō?”

He continued picking at glass. “Master.”

And then Shannon remembered something she’d learned from that cranky old Japanese teacher, when he’d ranted about the honor of the samurai, and how present-day, ingrate American teenagers had the honor of diseased cockroaches in comparison. How a samurai swore complete loyalty to his lord, and would do anything for him, including kill himself, happily, should the lord show the least disapproval.

“Oh fuck me,” Shannon thought, seeing that tenseness in his shoulders, the anxiety in the man’s hesitation. Then, even as his eyes were widening, and before he could take that as an invitation, she said, “You have to do what I say?”

He stiffened and his fingers stopped moving on the glass. Very slowly, he looked up at her. “My honor is stained enough that, to disobey, after so soon making my oath, and I will have to repair it with my sword.” Very grudgingly, he said, “Though there is much more to being a daimyō that I will have to teach you, yes, at the crudest, most basic level, I do have to do what you say.”

Shannon swallowed, hard. “Are you serious?”

He gave her a flat brown stare. “I am naked before you, still wearing the shackles of my previous imprisonment.” He flicked the glass away. “Do I have any reason to lie?”

“Odin’s balls,” Shannon whispered.

“What would you have me do?” he repeated. And there was desperation in his eyes, a need to have her agree to his service.

“Go inside,” she blurted. “Go sit on the couch and watch TV or something. Stay there until I come to get you. Let me think.”

His face fell, and for a moment, she thought he would ignore her. Then, grunting, he got to his feet, made a strange flat-backed bow, and walked back to the house.

Just like that. After chasing her around the yard and house like a madman, he’d just walked off. This could not be happening. Shannon stared at the door, which he shut behind him, then at the road. She was pretty sure that if she wandered off now, he wouldn’t follow her.