Chapter 21: Delectable Diversions

Seeing he was utterly serious, Shannon sighed and dropped her head into her hands, looking out over the inlet. She thought about going out to get a burger, then remembered that her new buddy the samurai badass who cut people open with a fancy sword while she was sleeping was a vegetarian. “You up for a salad?” she asked, as a compromise.

“I’m not hungry right now,” Masaaki said. Indeed, he made a face and looked like she had asked him if he would enjoy bathing in raw sewage.

And, immediately, Shannon knew why. She had just scared the shit out of him, and here she was all ready to top off her latest meal with a nice big burger, while he was probably still feeling like puking his guts out with terror because she was eating his soul just like seven hundred years of brutish bastards before her. Smoooooooth.

“Uh,” Shannon said, “I’m not too hungry. I can hold off a couple more hours.”

Oh, even better. Remind him she was sitting there digesting him, and oh, by the way, I can wait a couple more hours, thanks.

Clearing her throat, Shannon said, “Thanks, Masaaki. For whatever twisted reason you did it, I really appreciate you helping me.”

He grunted without looking at her. Then, heaving himself to his feet, he offered a hand to her. Shannon, who didn’t need any help getting to her feet, took it anyway. As she stood, Masaaki watched her almost shyly. “I would like to walk a little ways?” He gestured at the seemingly never-ending expanse of gray shoreline, which followed the edge of the forest back to the mouth of the Knik River thirty miles away. Shannon had never walked further than that—hadn’t really cared to because the scenery was pretty much the same.

Then she realized that he was standing there, waiting for her permission to go further.

“You don’t need to ask, Masaaki,” Shannon grumbled, embarrassed that she had a Who-Knows-How-Old samurai immortal asking her permission to walk along a beach.

He gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement, then turned and started walking. Shannon fell into step behind him, until he stopped suddenly, looking down.

“Look.” He pointed at impressions in the sand.

Shannon eased around him on the narrow sand-ledge to get a clear look. “A little black bear. You can tell by the way the front toenails dig down and make little points. Grizzlies’ claws are mostly flat, so unless they’re walking up a muddy bank or something, the claws don’t show.”

He peered at her. “Grizzlies? Bear?”

“Uhhh,” Shannon said. “Think panda.”

He gave her a flat look. “I know what a bear is. We have them in Japan. Up in the mountains. And brown ones on the bearded barbarians’ island of Ezochi.”

“Oh.” Shannon winced. She actually hadn’t considered that Japan would have bears. “Yeah, grizzlies are bear. Big brown ones.”

He grunted and glanced up at the woods. “They are common, here?”

“Well, sorta,” Shannon admitted. “I see a lot of them when I’m out at night. They’re mostly nocturnal. Think they figured out people are their loudest and craziest during the day, and they can pretty much go unmolested if they sneak around eating garbage and digging through coolers after dark.”

“I hope to see one,” Masaaki said, with obvious longing. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been outside…” He bent and plucked a cotton-head from one of the Arctic Cotton plants. Turning it in his fingers, he sounded painfully hopeful when he said, “Do you have cherry trees, here?”

Shannon grimaced. “Uh, no. Well, I mean, they brought a few up from the Lower 48, so if you drive through the cities, you’ll see some here and there, but they’re not natural, no.”

He sighed and dropped the cotton head. “So what other animals do you have?”

Which led Shannon on a long lecture about moose, foxes, wolves, eagles, ducks, geese, swans, sheep, goats, rabbits, squirrels, martins, and every other Alaskan animal she could think about. By the time they got back to the car, Masaaki had made her promise to take him hiking three times a week, until snowfall.

That afternoon, and for the next four afternoons following, despite the fact that they’d just been assaulted by a vampire lord—whatever the hell that was—Masaaki insisted on having her drive him to every dojo in Anchorage, Eagle River, and Wasilla so that he could observe the classes. Of the dozens of possibilities, he chose nine. The wizened old kendo master and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo in Eagle River, a karate dojo, an Aikido dojo, and a judo dojo in Wasilla, and another karate school, a Tai Chi studio, a Shaolin Kung Fu dojo, and something called ‘bojutsu’ at an Okinawan kobudō dojo in Anchorage.

By the time she had finished driving him around to his appointments, Shannon’s head was spinning. “Couldn’t you just pick two?” she cried, after he had made her sign both of them up for the three-year program in all nine of the schools. By the time she’d finished paying the dues and buying their uniforms and equipment, they had to eat at the local Mexican restaurant on her debit card, because she’d run out of cash.

“I mean,” Shannon said, over her enchiladas, “Why the hell do I have to take the classes with you? I’m a nurse.” Then she hesitated. “Well, at least, I was going to be.”

“A samurai is always learning,” Masaaki said, shoving her new karate gi across the table at her. “As will you. First class begins in twenty minutes. Get ready.” He went back to picking at his beans and rice.

She stared at him. “We just signed up this morning.”

“And we will take our first class this evening,” he said, stuffing a mouthful of refried beans—sans cheese—into his mouth. “Now go.” He jabbed his fork at the restaurant’s bathroom door.

Muttering, Shannon went off to do as she was told.

Masaaki, as it turned out, looked even better in a karate gi. Shannon felt herself staring at him as he strode out of the men’s restroom.

The first big hiccup of the first night came when Masaaki refused to remove his swords for practice.

Very softly, the instructor said, “Will you please remove your swords and leave them by the door, Mr. Yatagarasu?” With a shy smile, the martial arts master gestured to the mat-covered of the dojo and said, “This is karate-practice, not sword-practice.”

To which Masaaki politely replied, “No. A master does not leave his swords at the door unless he is visiting the shogun. Are you the shogun?”

Shannon groaned, and would have taken her face in her hands and run from the dojo if there weren’t two dozen other people in the room with them, surrounding her, all of whom were watching the yatagarasu standing beside her as if he had grown horns and a little goatee.

But the instructor cocked his head slightly and gave Masaaki a considering look. “A master of kenjutsu? Which school?”

“My own,” Masaaki said.

For a long moment, there was a pause as the instructor seemed to consider him. “Will you come up here for a moment, Mr. Yatagarasu?” Then he waved Masaaki to leave his position beside Shannon and come join him at the front.

Masaaki grunted and did, strutting up like he owned the entire damn building. Shannon wanted to just curl in on herself in horror.

Once he was standing at the front, the instructor said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Yatagarsu, but for liability purposes, I cannot allow an untrained man to wear weapons in my class.” And he reached for them.

Masaaki had the katana out and pressed against the man’s throat, and his wakizashi rammed against the man’s stomach in an instant, his wakizashi disappearing through the man’s gi. “Never touch swords that do not belong to you, heathen!” he snapped. “Do you want to lose your head?”

“Masaaki, no!” Shannon cried, instinctively taking several steps forward.

But the instructor was grinning, not screaming. Indeed, where Masaaki’s sword-tip punctured the instructor’s gi, Shannon saw no blood. Still grinning like the Cheshire Cat, the instructor made a little nod of approval—carefully, with Masaaki’s blade against his neck—and said, “He may keep his swords.” He took a step back and gave Masaaki a bow.

“I wasn’t asking for permission,” Masaaki grunted, sheathing his weapons and returning to his place in formation beside Shannon. From then on, Shannon could feel the stares of the entire building as karate practice went on as if Masaaki hadn’t just assaulted the teacher with deadly weapons that he continued to wear at his belt. Shannon grimaced and kept her head down, feeling the flush in her ears as she awkwardly bumbled her way through the basic kicks and punches, the samurai at her side, sweeping through them with effortless ease.

Then, when it came time for sparring, there was another hitch.

“My daimyō will spar with no one but me,” Masaaki growled, when the instructor tried to pair her up with another white-belt. “She has a horrible, infectious disease that I have worked out an immunity to. I will not risk her other classmates to it.”

Shannon’s mouth fell open and she turned to stare up at Masaaki in horror.

The instructor’s brow raised slightly, but in the end, he just shrugged. “I do advise she finds other sparring partners eventually, because to learn with only one person would simply disable her when it came to fighting others.” Then he let Masaaki drag her off into a corner and begin critiquing her fighting stances while she did her best to flail at him with her hands and feet.

The third hitch came toward the end of the night, when the blackbelts paired off in a corner, two against one. Masaaki stood up suddenly, watching, ignoring Shannon and her pathetic attempts to hit him completely.

“Masaaki, what the hell?” Shannon demanded.

“Stay here a moment,” Masaaki said distractedly. Then, to her dismay, he walked up and interrupted a 3-way fight and said, “That is what you call mastery? The shogun’s club-footed daughter could kick better than that.” Then he went up, grabbed one of the startled blackbelts by the leg, lifted it higher and to the side, twisted his body with a grip on his shoulder, changed the angle of his foot and, as the boy teetered there, walked around him like he was inspecting a horse.

To which, a few minutes later, the instructor called a halt and Masaaki was at the front of the class, demonstrating ‘curiously ancient’ kicking techniques for the class…which he finished up with a sparring match against the three blackbelts while the entire dojo watched.

Fuuuuuck, Shannon thought, trying to sink into the padded floor of the studio and disappear. She didn’t even want to be associated with him. She just wanted to die.

“Don’t worry,” Masaaki said, once they were back in the car. “I’ll help you, daimyō. You’ll learn.”

“I feel like a bumbling ape next to you,” Shannon gritted. “Thanks.”

“I’m rusty,” was all Masaaki said.

“You took on three blackbelts,” Shannon snapped, irritated at his arrogance. “And won.”

“One of them hit me,” Masaaki said. “Several times.”

Shannon narrowed her eyes. “That was the instructor and you hit him back, you ass.”

“When I am back in practice,” Masaaki said, “I will fight six, and none of them will hit me.” He said it with such authority that Shannon believed him. Thoroughly. “Besides,” Masaaki said, “Blackbelts are stupid. What does a blackbelt mean, exactly? When I was in Japan, there were no blackbelts. Men either were samurai or they were apprentice. Those who had been apprenticed the longest were at the front of the class, as an example for the others. A blackbelt means nothing, daimyō. Which is why the instructor had me demonstrate. I wear a white belt, but I could have killed him. A black belt is just that—cloth and dye. It is a person’s bearing and knowledge and discipline that wins a battle, as everyone in that dojo discovered today. Cloth means nothing.”

As much as she thought he was being a pompous prick who was taking over her life with nine different forms of martial arts—in addition to the instruction in the sword he told her he planned to give her—Shannon decided not to argue with him.

That night, they drove back to Shannon’s parents’ house for more cash. Masaaki had her pull off the road at the base of the mountain and made her wait in a secluded spot in the woods while he went back to the house with two empty duffels. When he returned, the duffels were full and he had a disturbed look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Shannon asked, eying the duffels.

Masaaki dropped his burdens unceremoniously at her feet and pulled a slip of paper from where he had tucked it in his belt. “This was on the door, daimyō.”

Shannon’s heart began to pound as she flipped open the paper and read the note.

As your parents’ successor, we offer a continuation of our previous arrangement with your sire. Delectable diversions, to satisfy your every delight. Sold for a fair price. We currently have four different products available that should appeal to you. Meet at the base of Highland Road at 1:00am on Friday the 15th to examine them. ~The Five Realms Trading Company