CHAPTER EIGHT

“Harada-san,” Thalia said when they got outside. “I don’t want to get my suitcase just yet.”

He nodded, not surprised, then recited the address just given by the hijacker. “You want to check on the house they robbed; you’re worried about the victims.”

She smiled into his eyes, her heart as full with love for him in that moment as it had ever been in all the thousands of years they had known and loved each other.

He did not yet recall her as she did him, but he felt the pull of their history in so many lifetimes across so many worlds. He was being pulled into her orbit, and no longer wanted to fight it.

Just as he began to bend down to kiss her, she spoke again. “It was never called in, was it?”

He shook himself, mortified at what he had been about to do.

“Not that we have on record,” he replied. “Let’s go.”

***

The home belonged to a well-off family, judging by its size, well-kept exterior, and meticulously landscaped front garden. There were no lights on, but Thalia thought she detected a slight glow from deeper inside the house.

“Should we go and knock?” she asked.

He nodded. “It might scare anyone inside, but it’ll scare them less than anything else we could do.”

Thalia felt foolish once he had stated what should have been obvious. “Of course,” she agreed, and followed his lead.

When they arrived at the door, however, he preferred that she handle their approach. She knew this was a test of her empathic abilities, diplomatic prowess, and psychosocial understanding. He waited with an air of challenge for her to impress him with her Otherworldly Expertise.

She knocked thrice, loudly.

“I could have done that!” he hissed at her. She grinned up at him.

“But I did it as an Expert,” she teased.

“Tch,” he said, shaking his head but unable to completely smother a smile. It struck him that she shared remarkable similarities with Seizo’s personality. Perhaps that was why Seizo was so drawn to her.

As for himself, that was less clear.

His thoughts were interrupted by Thalia’s sudden drop onto one knee.

“Hello?” she called. It amazed him how versatile a tool her voice was, contrasting this new and gentle tone with the terrifying minor-key harmonics in her interrogation-room voice. “Please open the door. We’re from the police, and we want to help you.”

Just in case she was misjudging the presence on the other side of the door – assuming there was one – Harada put one hand on his katana and stood ready.

A small, frightened voice replied. “If you’re police, show me your card,” it demanded, trying hard to sound brave.

“I don’t have one yet, because I’m new,” she explained. “But this is the Vice-Commander, and he has his.” She looked up at Harada, who took out his professional ID and handed it to her. She held it up to the window of frosted glass beside the door, through which she knew the child was looking.

There was a long pause followed by the sounds of locks being undone. Thalia handed Harada’s card back. When at last the door opened, a small, dirty face appeared and blinked at them with huge, frightened eyes.

“You really are the Vice-Chief,” the child said in awe. “Ha’da Tes’ya, you’re here, at my house?” The child lisped Harada’s name, but did so with reverence.

“You have a fan,” Thalia said to him, smiling.

“Yes, I’m Harada Tetsuya,” he replied to the child. “We just heard that you and your obaa-san might not be all right here, so we came to check on you.”

The child stuck out his thin chest, hero-worship filling his eyes as he replied in the stoutest voice he could manage, “I’m ok, Vice-Chief sir. I’m strong.” Then his voice wavered and his face fell. “But Obaa-chan, I don’t think she feels good. She won’t wake up. She only drank water one time.”

“May we come inside?” Thalia asked. The child blinked back tears and nodded, opening the door wide for them. “Thank you. I’ll look at your Obaa-san, but first I need to look at you, okay?” she said, knowing the child was bewildered. He could not be much older than four, she thought, her heart aching.

“Will it hurt?” he asked, his big eyes widening.

“It might, sweetheart, but if it does, just tell me and I’ll stop,” she said. The child looked frightened.

Harada squatted to eye-level with him, but addressed her first. “The electricity isn’t working; perhaps the lines were cut. You won’t have much light.” She nodded, her jaw set in a grim line. He turned to the child. “You can be strong and let Thalia-san look at you, right? She won’t hurt you if she can help it.”

The child stiffened his spine and nodded. Thalia examined him quickly but carefully, working her way up. She found no broken bones, but his right knee was swollen, and he had many bruises on that side of his body.

When she reached his face, Harada saw her features go rigid, though she was careful not to change her expression. She glanced at him, and he took the hint, moving over to see the area she was inspecting. The left side of the child’s face was badly bruised, and there was a lot of dried blood where it had trickled from his ear after he had been hit.

“Does your head hurt?” she asked. He shook it in a negative. “How about your ear? Is it making funny sounds, or hurting?” To this he nodded.

“Hurts,” he said. “I can hear, but it sounds funny.”

Thalia smiled at the child, but Harada could feel her anger swiftly rising, and knew it was a good thing for the hijacker that he was not in her presence at that moment.

“We’ll get you some ear medicine for that, and you’ll soon be good as new,” she promised. “Now, can you show us where Obaa-san is?”

He nodded and led them down a dark corridor. The moon was at this date three-fourths full; otherwise it would have been difficult to see anything. They went into a large room on the right that opened into a parlor. Thalia could make out a figure lying prone on a low couch against one wall; the child pointed at it, looking up at her with beseeching eyes.

Thalia put her hand on the boy’s head as she passed him on her way toward the couch. Harada gave her space, and kept the boy away as well. He did not have a good feeling about this.

Thalia felt for a pulse in the carotids, but as soon as she touched the cold skin and felt the stiffness of rigor mortis she knew it was too late. She looked up at Harada and shook her head.

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Harada turned the boy away from his grandmother’s body and asked, “Does anyone live here besides you and Obaa-san?” He was already certain of the answer, but wanted to make sure.

The boy shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. Harada spoke gently but firmly. “I think you already know what Thalia-san must tell you; now is a time for you to be very brave.” The boy clung to his hand, but nodded.

Thalia knelt and faced the bereaved child. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Akitano Daishiro,” he said, tears already trickling down his cheeks. He was so young he had not yet lost his baby fat.

“What a strong name!” she exclaimed. “Daishiro-chan, I am so sorry to tell you this; your Obaa-san did not want to leave you, but she got hurt, and had to go to the next world sooner than she thought. She will not wake up again here.”

The child trembled, trying to be strong. Harada remembered how terrible this was for one so young, and also knelt beside him, turning the boy to face him. “Daishiro-chan,” he said, “A strong man knows when to cry. There is no shame in crying when you miss someone you love.”

“Do you cry, Vice-Chief?” the boy asked, his little chest heaving with suppressed sobs that he was still trying hard to swallow.

“Sometimes, yes,” Harada said. He looked over and saw Thalia’s lower lip tremble, one tear streaking silver down her face. “I want you to stay with Thalia-san for me; she’s sad too, and I need to make a phone call.”

Little Daishiro nodded; when Thalia opened her arms, he fell against her and began to sob. She held him close, cupping the back of his head as if he were an infant, soothing him with soft sounds.

Harada placed a call to Chief Kato, who sounded grim at the news, although not surprised that they had gone ahead without bothering to mention it to anyone.

Thalia picked the child up and carried him to the kitchen, where she got him to drink some water and washed his face very gently. He told her he had eaten nori and senbei since Obaa-san got sick, and she saw telltale packages littering the house. He was hungry, but there was nothing left here.

She went outside to look at the moonlight, flowing soft and silver over everything. It comforted her; she rocked the little boy in her arms, letting him be very young again.

Harada joined them, and though he ached to put his arm around her, he restrained himself. “Let’s approach the neighbors and find out what, if anything, they know,” he suggested. “They might be aware of relatives who could take the boy in, if nothing else.”

Thalia nodded; the child was exhausted from days of fear and solitude with very little food. He was falling asleep on her shoulder, and she did not wish to disturb him; she turned so Harada could see his sleepy little face, mouth open, drooling on Yamamoto’s jacket. She looked up at him in appeal.

He shook his head, knowing what she was asking. “I can’t leave you here with him alone, just in case,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll ask them to speak quietly,” he added.

She nodded and they went together toward the neighbor’s home across the street. A middle-aged couple lived there, near retirement, their children grown; they were alarmed to greet the Shinsengumi on their doorstep, but could not enlighten them as to the events of three nights before, having been out of town themselves at that time.

Their first concern, understandably, was their own safety. This had never been a high-crime area, or they would never have moved here, they explained at unnecessary length, as if living near a crime scene were a faux-pas at a dinner party. The wife asked several probing questions under the guise of concern for the family, but her eyes were avid, her tone hungry for details to feed to the gossip mill.

“Does the child have relatives you know of who can take him in?” Harada asked, without much hope.

“Then, his Obaa-san” – the woman gasped, not finishing the thought.

“Is dead, yes,” Harada said, a little tersely. People like her annoyed him; pretending to all the right feelings, then going off and feasting on gossip about other people’s suffering for the next week like a vulture.

“They rarely had visitors that I noticed,” the husband said. “I’m afraid we can’t help you. We didn’t know them except to say hello to.”

Harada thanked them for their time, and turned to find Thalia already walking away, back toward the carriage.

“Enough for now; he can stay with me tonight,” she said, having also been disgusted by that woman’s obvious appetite for other people’s tragedies.

“Are you sure that’s the best idea?” he asked.

“Do you have a better one?” she replied, not in a challenging way, but as a genuine question.

“Perhaps we should take him to a hospital,” he said. “I know you’re a qualified medical professional, but you already have a lot on your plate. They have beds there as well as staff to care for him until we can locate his relatives.”

Thalia shook her head. “This child is sick with grief and exhausted from fear. A hospital will only frighten him even more. You’re his hero, we’ve established trust, and where would be safer for him than Shinsengumi Headquarters? Let me take care of him for now,” she said, her voice soft with sorrow.

He looked at her, amazed. Was this the same woman who less than two hours ago had frightened a hijacker into pissing himself?

“Thalia, try not to get attached,” he advised, not noticing he had slipped into intimate use of her name.

“Why?” she asked.

“You’ll get hurt.”

“Grief is the price of love; that’s not a reason to avoid it,” she said, looking into his eyes. He did not know what to say; he had spent most of his life avoiding it for that very reason.

Sirens split the air, volume increasing with proximity, and the next moment two more police carriages rounded the corner.

“Take him back to the carriage; I’ll get everything set with the investigation, and then we’ll go get your things,” he said. She nodded and turned toward the sleek police carriage, still holding the boy like an infant. He was asleep, though his chubby little arms curled tight around her neck when she shifted his position.

Harada stared after her, reflecting on difficult subjects.

What would have happened, he wondered, if he’d known someone like her when he faced his own childhood tragedy? How different would he be today if someone had shown him such tenderness?

His older half-brother, Yuuichi, had loved and protected him to some degree, but at a high cost.

Tetsuya had been the son of a mistress, born after his land-owning father’s death. His mother died of tuberculosis before he turned five years old; Yuuichi became the patriarch of the Harada family at barely twenty years old, and had then defied society’s conventions, taking his illegitimate half-brother in and raising him in the midst of the family that hated him for being proof of their patriarch’s weakness.

Tetsuya could remember early schoolroom lessons, the students limited to his brother’s two young children in addition to himself, in which he had been made to repeat: “I must make up for my father’s sins,” 500 times before he was permitted to eat his lunch each day. Sensei had been very harsh with him, claiming when his methods were questioned that only pain and discipline could make a warrior out of a bastard.

Life had never been easy, but Yuuichi’s love and support sustained little Tetsuya, until one night a fire spread throughout the family compound. The official story was that brigands took advantage of the chaos to attack, but Tetsuya later suspected they had been hired by family members, because instead of going after valuables, they had come after him, a ten-year old bastard child of no value to anyone. Yuuichi got between him and the knife-slash intended to kill him, and had been blinded.

That was the first time Tetsuya’s Fury seized him, and young as he was, he had grabbed a blade and slashed with incredible brutality at both brigands’ faces until they were nearly unrecognizable – taking vengeance for his brother before anyone knew it was happening.

No one would look at him after that with anything but fear and loathing. The demon child, he was called, the bloodthirsty boy; ‘Razor’ was his new nickname, because that was the blade he had used in his rage; you could not go near him without getting hurt, everyone said.

And however Tetsuya looked at it, although Yuuichi made more time for him personally, he had also allowed the rest of the household apart from Sensei to shun him, starting from that night.

This boy was different, Harada reminded himself, coming out of his reverie. This boy was unspoiled, still innocent.

Even Thalia Cairde would not accept the Demon whose battle furies began in childhood, and were so notoriously violent that just the sight of him had once caused an entire squad of bandits to surrender without a blow falling. She used her anger to protect, not to kill in a blind rage.

Whatever he thought he remembered, however close he might feel to her, he had to recall who he was; and that person would never have the right to stand at her side. He would only tarnish her brilliance, bringing her down into his pit of blood and tears.

He turned away; the other officers were approaching.

***

When he came back to the carriage, Thalia was asleep with the boy in her arms, though she had shifted him onto her lap so he was nestled against her instead of strangling her. He reminded himself that this was the kind of simple, beautiful thing he protected, without making the mistake of trying to attain it for himself.

Thalia woke when they arrived at the hotel, but Harada persuaded her to stay in the carriage, give him her key, and let him get the suitcase. He had to assert his authority to the indignant desk clerk, who insisted there was an outstanding bill due to the huge wild animal she had brought in, but in the end he managed to get her things together and drag the monstrous purple suitcase downstairs, cursing under his breath. Thankfully she had not unpacked much, but it still took him just under half an hour to get back outside.

She and the boy were gone when he got back to the carriage. His heart dropped into the pit of his stomach, and he went into full red alert, though he was not sure what he was afraid of. He scanned the area nearby, searching for anyone or anything suspicious or out of place; searching for an old Shinsengumi uniform on a petite redhead with an even smaller child in tow.