Maohden Vol. 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

past glories, and perhaps now surpassed them. But the surrounding areas were left to their own devices, and the residents who lingered there poured their efforts only into their own yards and gardens.
    Look closer, and here and there beneath the moonlight, the silhouettes of a building or two or three could be seen. Beyond them slumbered rows of houses.
    The mortuary on the street bordering West Gokencho was one of them. It’d opened for business just three days before, a two-story building sitting on a sixty square yard plot of land.
    Three wreathes hung from stands in front of the shuttered entranceway.
    A tall, sensual shadow approached the establishment. An alluring woman with short-cut hair, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Practically bursting out of her hot pants and bikini top, she possessed a ripe youth that betrayed the maturity her body otherwise suggested.
    Azusa, the little sister of the reporter killed by Gento Roran.
    “So this is the place. Nothing else suspicious around these parts. But if Setsura said so, there must be something afoot.”
    She’d come here right after Setsura Aki had flown straight from San’eicho to the Shin-Okubo Coliseum. The mention of his name, and corresponding image in her mind’s eye of that comely face, made her blush. She quickly composed herself and turned her gaze toward the street. A tweak to the frame of her sunglasses engaged the night vision sensors.
    “Still digging in the earth behind that convenience store. Awful strange. Hmm, where to start first?”
    After a moment’s thought, Azusa made her way to the big pile of rubble behind the mortuary. Despite her blue ankle boots—the high heels suggesting a bias to fashion rather than practicality—she climbed the bricks and stones without a hesitant step, and without the mound collapsing beneath her.
    A minute later, she was in the midst of the ruins, the remains of a sizeable building. Here and there were the rusty remains of binding and packaging equipment. This was what was left of the Tohan Corporation.
    Azusa looked back at the mortuary. And then turned a hundred and eighty degrees. There was the convenience store where she’d asked about local love hotels that afternoon.
    Azusa had led Setsura to the midwife who’d brought him into this world. But he still hadn’t held up his side of the bargain—namely, spending a night with her. So she’d taken the initiative. That was when a middle-aged lady appeared, her apron turned inside out, and mud where it shouldn’t have been.
    She’d been interrupted in the act of digging something.
    Setsura didn’t react when she’d explained this, and instead had Azusa drive her street buggy all about the ruins. Before splitting up in San’eicho, he told her to keep an eye on the convenience store and the mortuary, and flew off toward Shin-Okubo.
    Azusa didn’t ask why. From the first time they’d met, she’d been transfixed by his beauty. He was more handsome than any man she’d known, an Adonis sent down by the gods.
    Like the moon glittering in the sky, a moon lily glimmering in the grass. And not only that. Behind that indifferent, naive mien, that might even fall for a child’s machinations, lurked a cold-hearted, even gruesome, silhouette.
    He cast a shadow that wasn’t human. It took hold of Azusa’s heart, her womb, her soul, and made her a prisoner of his will. Every time she pictured his face, her hand started slipping south of its own accord and it was her own face that flushed.
    He and Gento Roran had somehow become mortal enemies. This enmity not only involved a struggle for the soul of Shinjuku, but reached into the greater mysteries of their own beings. The midwife had told Setsura that the seal was the key to unraveling it, and the seal was a living person.
    While she’d been pestering the lady at the convenience store for the location of a hotel, Setsura had been on the phone, no doubt touching bases with people who had a connection to the seal.
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