The Demons of Chiyoda

By Laurence Raphael Brothers

Occult private eye Nora Simeon, and Eyre, her uncannily pretty boyfriend, are on another case on behalf of the Commission, the secret organization that controls financial sorcery in the Americas. This time they're hunting down an investment-bank sorcerer who cracked when passed over for promotion and used a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mirror World Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781987976847

Laurence Raphael Brothers

Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist with five patents and a background in AI and Internet R&D. He has published over 40 short stories in such magazines as Nature, PodCastle, and Galaxy's Edge. His noir urban fantasy novellas The Demons of Wall Street, The Demons of the Square Mile, and The Demons of Chiyoda are available from Mirror World Publishing.To learn more about the works and world of Laurence Raphael Brothers, you can follow him on Twitter at @lbrothers or visit his website, laurencebrothers.com.

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The Demons of Chiyoda

Nora Simeon Investigations #3

Laurence Raphael Brothers

E-BOOK EDITION

The Demons of Chiyoda (Nora Simeon Investigations #3) © 2022 by Mirror World Publishing and Laurence Raphael Brothers

Edited by: Robert Dowsett

Cover Design by: Justine Dowsett

Published by Mirror World Publishing in March 2022.

All Rights Reserved.

*This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales, events or persons is entirely coincidental.

Mirror World Publishing

Windsor, Ontario

www.mirrorworldpublishing.com

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-987976-84-7

This book is for my mother, my first reader, and for my father, who inspired me to write.

CHAPTER 1

Technically, it was Entering but not Breaking. Eyre had charmed the superintendent out of the spare key to apartment 4-G, and with the aid of a bit of machine oil I was working it slowly into the lock to avoid making any noise. We were in the fourth-floor corridor of a red brick apartment building on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing, Queens, a pleasant working-class neighborhood with plenty of trees and quiet side streets. Someone was cooking a pot roast in a nearby apartment, and the aroma was reminding me I’d skipped lunch tracking down this address.

I’m ready, Nora, Eyre said. My blue-haired assistant was poised, crouched at my side, waiting for me to get past the lock. I tried turning the key. Slowly...slowly...I could feel resistance, but it wasn’t stuck. A millimeter at a time and— something clacked loudly. Fuck. The deadbolt must have been spring-loaded.

I turned the doorknob to clear the latch and slammed the door open with my shoulder. No chain. Eyre darted inside as soon as the gap was wide enough, and I followed an instant later, backing him up with my gun drawn. There was a time early in my career when I would have called for some Commission heavies and a staff sorcerer or two for back-up because come on, there could be an angry demon in there. And a time more recently when I would have gone in alone because fuck it. But now it was Eyre and me. With his slender build and boyish face, my assistant didn’t look like much of a fighter, but I doubted there was any demon who could beat him one-on-one.

This was a renegade sorcerer’s safe house, a VP from Morgan Stanley who’d cracked and gone on a murder spree when he was passed over for promotion, using a demon he’d illicitly summoned for his own private use as an assassin. I was honestly expecting the flat to be empty, the sorcerer not being so stupid as to hide out in town with the Commission after him, but it was possible he was there, and it was possible the demon was there, too. As it happened, both those things were true.

Eyre put the brakes on and didn’t do anything violent immediately, so I paused behind him to take in the scene. It was a barebones one-bedroom flat, a dining room nook by the door, a tiny kitchen off to the left, the dining area opening into a living room, and a short corridor on the right leading off to a pair of doors, no doubt the bedroom and bathroom. No furniture at all, except for some kind of collapsible chrome thing at the back of the living room and— Oh. That was a severed human head on the floor in front of it.

The chrome thing unfolded itself, revealing itself to be a demon after all. The creature gave an initial impression of a high-end Ikea coffee table put together by a demented elder god who’d gotten frustrated with the instructions and never could find a use for half the hex bolts. The demon must have been summoned recently, as they hadn’t had any time to adapt their form from the original jointed assembly of polished metal rods and plates to which their spirit had been bound. Unlimbered, their effect was something like a skeletal centaur with metal bones, except that for a head they had a hinged gripper like a two-fingered hand at the end of a long, segmented, prehensile neck. Instead of hooves or feet their legs ended in sharpened points that made them teeter precariously as they rose from the floor, and two longer armlike limbs of the same sort extended from their shoulders. Though they had some trouble balancing at first, once up on all fours they were stable, even graceful.

Well, Eyre said, this is messed up.

Despite his awesome martial skills, Eyre was far more deeply affected by violence and death than me, so I gave him a glance, but he seemed okay. He was focused on the situation, prepared to defend himself if necessary.

The demon tensed for a moment, reared back as if about to spring, but then they brought their two arms up, crossed them like a violinist, and ran one long chrome limb up and down the other while bowing it back and forth. An unearthly ringing tone played, a little like the sound when you rub your finger on the edge of a wine glass, not at all unpleasant. As the sound rose and fell, sliding smoothly up and down the scale, I realized there was something in the overtones...oh. They were speaking, an ethereal, shimmering voice arising from around and behind the varying note they were playing on their arms.

—come to destroy me?

Not unless you make it necessary, I told them. Did you kill him?

No! Not my master. Only his enemies.

Eyre advanced cautiously, kneeling beside the decapitated head on the floor. The demon made as if to protect it, but then subsided. They extended their long gripper limb and placed it beside the head, caressing its cheek before withdrawing.

That’s him, Eyre said, I think. Carson. Our subject.

If you didn’t kill him, I asked the demon, who did?

I don’t know! Throbbing through the overtones of the demon’s metallic voice, the creature’s agony and sorrow were unmistakable. I was here, he was sleeping in the bedroom. He was going to take me with him. He said we would go to Maru— Maruno— to a place where the Commission could not follow. It was the morning, time to go, to take the train, he didn’t come out, I waited, I waited, and then, and then I went in to see, to wake him up. And then...

The demon collapsed. They just fell to the floor in a heap, looking once again like a mess of chrome rods haphazardly thrown together, only stirring a little, making feeble clinking noises to show they were still alive. Struck down by grief, I guess.

We’d better check the bedroom. I nodded at the creature. What about the demon?

Poor thing.

I wanted to argue the point—the poor thing had killed two Morgan Stanley vice presidents and an executive VP to boot—but this wasn’t the time or the place, so I led Eyre down the hallway to the closed doors.

The bedroom was mostly bare too, a bunch of fancy suitcases stacked against the wall, and on a bed made out of a single mattress, a headless corpse in yellow silk pajamas. The mattress and bedclothes were drenched in blood, and a sigil was painted on the wall in blood.

Whoa, I said, and Eyre swayed, looking gray all of a sudden. I grabbed him and helped him down to the floor before he could faint, crouching between him and the gory sight. I held his hands in mine for a minute till he came back to himself.

You think that demon was telling the truth? I regretted asking as soon as the words were out of my mouth. It was a weak attempt to distract him with a question, but one that couldn’t help but bring the scene back to mind.

Yes, he said, I do. First of all, you could hear how much they must have loved their master. They would have to be way more adapted to humanity to lie about a thing like that than I make them out to be. Anyway, they admitted killing the others, and the bankers were killed by stab wounds, like the demon could make with their— their arms and legs. But the head here was cut off with a blade of some kind. No way that demon could have done it themself.

Someone else was after Carson. Maybe in revenge for the murders?

Maybe, he said. Can’t be sure yet. Look, can you...check out the scene here? Get some photos? I’ll go back and talk to the demon.

Okay. I wasn’t sure why the body should be more upsetting than the head. Maybe the blood? But whatever. I used my phone to grab shots of everything including a good image of the sigil on the wall— but wait, it wasn’t a demon sigil like I thought at first. The smears and trickles of blood obscured the figure, but when I looked at it carefully it seemed more like two Chinese characters to me, or maybe Japanese. I tried Google Lens on it, but the app said, Blood smear? instead of giving me a translation. So much for Artificial Intelligence.

A change of clothes was laid out on one of the suitcases, so I sorted through it. Wallet, phone, keys, two US passports, one for Carson, one for Carstairs, but the same photo in both of them. Both looked legit at a glance. When you’re a millionaire, you don’t have to go with some cheap forgery, you just bribe an official. The Carson passport was seven years old and had stamps from all over the world. Carstairs was issued last year but had no visa stamps. I flipped through the wallet and found nothing useful. License, credit cards, health insurance, and business cards. The phone would take a while to work through, so I pocketed it. After all these years I still felt a little twinge, because taking anything significant from a crime scene was a crime in itself, even though the Commission would never let this particular crime be investigated by the police. I was anxious to get back to Eyre, in case he was having trouble with the demon or his compunctions, so I didn’t bother searching the suitcases; a proper search would take an hour or more anyway.

When I got back to the living room, Eyre was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his hand on the demon’s gripper limb. The demon had recovered to the point of unlimbering their two stabby arms to speak again.

I’m sorry, Eyre said. It’s not fair. I know you couldn’t disobey even if you wanted to. And I’m afraid that won’t matter to the Commission. But if you like, now you’re unbound so I can do a banishing ritual for you to send you home. You’d be safe from any other punishment.

Safe? The demon played a discordant note. No! I won’t go back.

But—

The demon rose once more to their feet, or their pointy things, whatever. I’m sorry, too, they played. You’ve been very kind.

They drew back one of their sharpened quadruped limbs, and as they struck, Eyre rolled out of the way. As the demon recovered from their lunge, he leaped to his own feet. The demon reared up like a horse and came down with their deadly forelegs aimed at Eyre’s torso, but my assistant caught both metal limbs in his hands before they could strike home. Advancing a step, Eyre forced the demon’s limbs apart and back; there was a grinding shriek of tortured metal and both joints ruptured.

Yield, Eyre said, please. You’ll have another chance someday. We can work something out.

The demon still had their centaur-arms free, the ones they had been using to speak, and they could have struck with those, but instead they played, Never.

They uncrossed those deadly arms and pulled them back, but before they could attack again, Eyre shifted his grip to the point where the demon’s chrome spine joined the gripper limb, and pushed down with one hand and up with the other. The creature’s backbone shattered in his grip, and the demon collapsed once more. This time they weren’t moving at all. Eyre had killed a demon with his bare hands, and he was still holding its broken body in his arms, looking down at it sadly.

Fuck, I said, that was awesome.

He shook his head and carefully laid the demon’s now-inanimate components down on the floor. Tragic.

Eyre. They were trying to kill you.

No, they weren’t. They were trying to make me kill them, and they succeeded.

What?

The demon told me. Their name was Perah, by the way. They served two hundred years under an insane lord. Like Raum, the one Émigré told us about. They were tortured, abused all that time, and finally they were summoned by our man Carson. Naturally, they fell in love with him. He was their savior, their god, he gave them a purpose, and he treated them well. Perah was a good assassin. They deliberately left their body unaltered so they could be easily mistaken for something inanimate. And they could have put up a better fight if they wanted to. But...

Well, shit, I said. I guess I was wrong about them. I mean, a demon assassin and they’re pitiable. It’s getting so I can’t hate anyone anymore.

Sometimes I think everyone is pitiable. Look at Carson. Typical asshole banker-sorcerer, right? A slavemaster like all sorcerers, and worse than most because he was a murderer. Not a very smart one, either. And yet he was kind to his demon. Kind enough to make them love him.

I guess. Come on, I got his phone, the rest we can leave to the cleaners. Let’s get out of here.

What about whoever killed him?

Nguyen might want us to follow up. And then again, maybe not. This job was to find Carson and any demon he might have with him. Mission accomplished, for now anyway.

But I had to admit I was curious. It hadn’t been easy to find this safe house. The job had required a lot of guesses and blundering down false paths, a bunch of online research, some tedious in-person inquiry at City Hall, plus legwork to get the building leasing company to disgorge their rental records. And someone had gotten to him before we did, with the demon in the living room not even knowing what was happening. I was imagining an assassin rappelling down from the roof to Carson’s bedroom to chop his head off with...what? A machete? A sword? It had been a clean cut. And then to leave some kind of message on the wall? In blood? Come on.

Morgan Stanley Internal Security might conceivably have iced Carson if they’d tracked him down themselves before the case got to me. Despite the wealth and privileges demon-summoners were allowed in the secret sorcery divisions of the major investment banks, fraternal murder was beyond the pale. But knowing the Commission was on the case they’d have held back; it would be another rule violation if they interfered. And it was Morgan Stanley who had asked for the Commission’s help in the first place. They wouldn’t have drawn those characters on the wall, either.

A black and white logo Description automatically generated with low confidence

CHAPTER 2

We got out of the apartment building with no problems and walked together from the pleasant tree-lined residential neighborhood through the bustling commercial heart of Flushing to pick up the #7 Express at the Main Street subway station. Since it was mid-afternoon, the train was almost empty for most of the ride to Manhattan. I could tell Eyre was unhappy, way more than I was, which made me unhappy too and anxious to boot. I mean, okay, the grief-stricken demon felt it better to kill themself than to be banished back to their home plane. That was a legitimate tragedy. But the poor thing had murdered three people on orders, and there was no way they could go unpunished. Also they’d forced Eyre to kill them, and that pissed me off because he hated violence despite being so good at it. But I was pretty sure something more than that was affecting him, something I was too stupid to see.

And yet I