Chapter Twenty-Six: Biastophilia:
March 2nd, 2010.
5:00 a.m.
It's an all-day
rain today. To be specific, it's going to be an all-day sun shower. Tsuzuki
groaned he looked out the doorway.
"What's the
matter, babe?" Anna asked from their futon.
"Look!" her
lover complained. Anna lifted her head and looked out the doorway.
"Oh, it's a sun
shower," she said.
"Exactly,"
Tsuzuki groaned. This ruins all of my
plans today! Now what am I going to do? The shinigami paused when he heard
laughter. He turned to see Anna smiling at him with her head propped up by her
elbows.
"You know what
that means?" she asked. Tsuzuki tilted his head.
"What?" he
asked.
"It's a kitsune
wedding today," she said. It took Tsuzuki a moment to get what she was saying.
"Oh!" he said.
With that a new ironic idea came into his head. His eyes lit up as he put it
altogether. That just might work, he
thought.
---------
April 8th, 2010.
7:30 p.m.
Tana and Tatsumi
set up work at a tea house to discuss the case. He showed her all of the
pictures. The secretary observed her face as she looked at each one.
"Well?" he
asked. Tana looked up.
"Just as I
thought," she said. The therapist turned the photos to him. "Your killer is
playing cupid in their mind." Tatsumi raised an eyebrow at her.
"Care to
explain?" he asked.
"Alright," she
said. "Your victims have been straight couples so far, right?"
"That's right."
"Look at how
they are posed." She pointed at the pictures.
"What
do you see?"
"They all look
intimate in a sense," her old friend replied. "You have one pair holding hands.
The woman is sitting in the man's lap in this one, but I don't get the one with
the apple."
"Ah," Tana said.
"Are you familiar with the fall of man in the Christian Bible?"
"Vaguely,"
Tatsumi said. "That's the one where the woman eats the forbidden fruit after the
snake tempts her to, yes?"
"Correct," she
said.
"But why go
through all of this?" he asked.
"My guess is an
intimacy issue," Tana suggested. "But, I will need more to confirm. In the
meantime, I got Anna's data on her kitsune that you sent me days back."
"And?" Tatsumi
asked. Tana set down her cup.
"I would chalk
it up to unneeded concern on your part, to tell you the truth," she said. "But
judging on what you have described to me prior to you discovering Tsuzuki's
marriage to Kimoto-san and the results I have seen, this is a code red to them
and us." Tana looked at him dead-on in the eye.
"Has the mother
began to feed?" she asked.
"Not my
knowledge," Tatsumi replied. "So that's why you said no sex for a month for
them."
"Exactly," Tana
replied. "Until you have full information on the mother, Kimoto-san can't be
intimate with her husband."
"Worst case
scenario, Anna-san could seriously hurt Tsuzuki unintentionally," Tatsumi said.
"Exactly," Tana
summed up. Tatsumi pushed his glasses.
"Well then," he said. "This case just keeps turning into a bigger headache with each turn." He planned to get a certain loli demon for using a spell on him to stop the summons on Anna when he had the chance.