A Curse Upon Thee 3-8

The rear axle was complaining, suspension a few decibels short of a scream as Finn cranked the steering wheel of his kei truck. Every single pebble on the pavement was almost enough for Finn to feel it right against his most sensitive set of cheeks, a massage chair that was entirely unnecessary.

Either way, that didn’t stop him from making a hard left, half-bald tires dragging across the cracked concrete of the depot. The gate guy had waved him through without bothering to check ID, the man not even glancing over at the tarp. It was a lack of care that Finn himself had stopped giving a shit about three trips back.

You’d think they’d bother more about security. But apparently, the Devil Materials Depot didn’t give much of a shit themselves in the first place. Whether it was an issue of safety or security, the slab of grey concrete squatting on the corner of Minami-ku seemed just fine being the slaughterhouse fortress it was. 

He wasn’t particularly sure if Japan really had an issue with terrorism in the first place but, at the very least, he didn’t have to deal with any security theatre.

The kei went around the side of the lot, Finn driving past van after van with company names painted on sliding doors before he backed the tiny truck into the loading zone proper. The rearview mirror did the majority of the work for him there, Finn unable to see out the side window due to a pair of overstyled platform boots taking up space on his dash.

“F-feet.” The flatbed bounced, Finn jarred with it even as he kept his eyes up and attention focused on a quick parking job. “Feet.”

“What?”

“Boku is comfortable.”

Finn’s lip curled up as the car finally came to a proper stop, eyes dropping from the mirror to Mal’s face. “...Jibun, odotsukataharu n ka?”

The smile slipped and Mal’s feet dropped with it, a knuckle sandwich to the forehead enough of a threat. “...what I thought, mmm.”

With a twist of the key, Finn killed the engine — white truck giving him one last shudder as the engine gave out. Silence lasted for barely even a second before the sound of industrial fans from the depot droned loud and entirely proud as Finn shouldered his door open. Ngh.

His nose wrinkled on its own, an Olympic pool worth of bleach hitting him hard and coating the back of his throat with chlorine atop the sweet rot of copper. “Jesus…”

“You say that a lot.” A pair of nine-buckle boots hit the gravel as Mal hummed a song he didn’t know by his side. The purple fabric of her dress swished around, the girl already twisting her open parasol as it shielded her from the Kyoto summer sun. “Who is this Jesus?”

“That’s…” His soles crunched against loose bits of gravel, Finn rolling his shoulders to pop the tension in them. His jacket still pulled tight against his skin, stiff cotton underneath it dragging against the patchwork of dull pink burns that still itched like a motherfucker. “...that is an interesting question.”

And one that was as theological as they came, given what he’d been fighting these last couple weeks. A good answer would be long, careful and especially educational. …no.

“Finny!” An oddly melodic squawk sounded at his back as he walked off. “Stop ignoring me!”

It was already too late for that, Finn already making his way to the back of the flatbed as the heavy rolling doors of the loading bay rattled upwards. Three receiving workers walked out into the damp air, each one all wrapped up in full-body white meat-processing suits; complete with respirators, aprons, heavy gloves and clear plastic visors pulled down over their faces.

He doubted the respirators were on for anything more than safety reasons, the men probably already used to the stench after however long of working here. Far too used to it, especially given that they didn’t even blink at the sheer size of the half-ton lump under the blue plastic and bungee cords.

The one in front walked past him, heavy rubber boots slapping the concrete, and lifted the corner of the tarp. Finn caught a raised eyebrow for a second and a half before the worker dropped it and held up two fingers toward that open rolling door. 

All of a sudden, three became five and a sixth followed right after, the last one sitting pretty as he chugged forward in a rusted and stained forklift. 

…still not used to this shit.

Not the Devils, of course.

The Devils lined up close enough with what he knew that he’d barely missed a beat after running into his first one. Nah, it was what the after that always got him.

Curses were kind enough not to leave anything behind, all the gore and guts going with them after an exorcism. Sometimes there was a smear left over, or residue on the walls, for a couple days at least, but any blood left behind was always somebody else’s.

Sure, if a Curse had gotten hold of something physical and shoved it in its gullet, you might find that in a pile after the fight but once you broke one, it just went.

Devils left bodies, though.

Heavy bodies.

Messy bodies.

Bodies that got weighed, cut open and priced.

And those bodies… well, they came with paperwork.

“Form.”

A clipboard was clapped to his chest, Finn taking it without a word or a glance back.

It was the same short form he’d handled himself the last half-dozen times he’d brought in something bigger than his arm, a cheap ballpoint dangling from a little metal chain.

Devil Name (Suspected). That was easy enough, considering the Devil had been kind enough to roar it in his face at the start of their fight. Meathook. For some ungodly reason, names were pretty important to Devils and the whole organization around them, Finn still not entirely sure why. Hunter name?

Phineas Connor McHale was scratched on the paper in messy romaji before his eyes snapped down to the next box. Approximate Time of Kill?

Almost three hours ago, so… Finn scribbled a hasty 2:28 PM, making his way through rest of the document just as quickly as the workers unhooked the bungees and ripped the blue tarp back.

The Meathook Devil sat there, body next to its head; a half-ton of raw red muscle stapled together around the industrial hooks that served as the thing’s ribcage. Moderate damage to the body was a box he checked off, notes in the margin getting the simple ‘fire (extensive)’ and then…

Finn glanced back over at the corpse before adding, ‘decapitation’ just in case they couldn’t figure that one out themselves.

The forklift stood chugging as five of the workers did their part in dragging the corpse off the flatbed, all of them grunting and groaning before they had the thing secured. The head came last, the ugly pig-gorilla face secured in a clear plastic bag.

Finn handed the clipboard off to the last worker walking by, a yellow carbon copy ripped off it and handed back to him. Another worker pulled a plastic zip-tie from one of his deep pockets and looped it through a section of the Devil’s ribcage, pulling tight as a little yellow tag with a barcode dangled from it.

Market value.

The burning wasn’t gonna help his pay, of course. They’d docked him every time he’d been here himself, generally because Finn kept handing over things that were at least a quarter turned into charcoal.

Which was… fair.

Unfortunately, fire was about eighty percent of what he had to work with now. Maybe Devils need to stop being so flammable, how ‘bout that? Despite it all, he’d take the docking.

Even for the Meathook.

Especially for the Meathook.

The last one Finn had taken down was some hundred-legged bug monster as big as he was, the thing holed up in an apartment block back in Fushimi. That Devil had gone for a cool four-twenty and, considering the Meathook was a bigger and heavier bastard than anything he’d killed and hauled up so far… Half a mil, easy. Maybe six.

“There you are.”

Huh? Finn’s eyes widened as he turned. “...Tendo-san?”

The woman was a couple dozen feet back, just by a pillar; her black suit and black tie hanging a hitch loose and more than a little wrinkled, but that was no different than usual. As she walked over to him, that scar across her pale face stood out — that thick line stretching from one side of and over the bridge of her nose a perfect way to pick the tall woman out of a crowd.

Finn pushed off the trunk and took a step her way, sole stomping the blacktop. “Was starting to figure you wouldn’t show.”

“I said five, didn’t I?”

“Yeah…” Finn tilted his head at that. Not like you stuck to that before, though. As many times as she told him to meet her here, more often than not, she was pretty much a ghost by the time he arrived.

It was almost like the woman enjoyed being a voice on a phone pointing him places. At the very least, he had to wonder if she just preferred preparing his paperwork, considering that was the majority of what she seemed to do.

“You…” At his side, Mal ceased the spinning of her parasol; posture suddenly straight as an arrow. If anything, it matched the sharpness of her glare — daggers aimed out of those eyes at the fixer. “You’re here.”

Tendo-san offered the girl in the purple dress a tight pull of the lips, the expression almost a smile if you looked close enough. “Observant.”

Her voice was as flat and serious as when he’d met her eleven days back, the first Devil he’d ever seen jumping at him behind a pachinko parlor he’d been in the middle of breaki—

Well, what he was doing wasn’t as important as the too-many armed gremlin that jumped him from behind a dumpsters. Finn hadn’t even had the time to to set up before a Curtain before it went for his eyes.

A few seconds later, Finn’s hands were smoking and the monster was a pile of guts on the ground and all Finn could do was stare around him, wondering really hard why the guy sweeping up outside had given him a thumbs up and then gone back to sweeping.

Before he could figure out how in the hell, a scarred-up woman in a suit had walked up to him out of nowhere and asked, just straight up, if he was looking for some more work as a Devil Hunter.

A ‘private Devil Hunter’, specifically. 

A hell of a question when Finn had nothing close to a goddamn idea what a Devil Hunter even was; the prefix — private or public — meaning even less to him than the title.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t gonna look ignorant in front of a pretty older lady, so he’d answered with a ‘yes.’

A tentative ‘yes’, but still a yes.

Two weeks later, and Tendo was the reason why Finn wasn’t committing any more B&E’s to keep him and Mal fed and watered. She knew where the Devils were and made sure to give him a call to clean up after them, and even helped him out with finding an apartment.

Not to mention his cute little kei truck.

Since then, Finn had found out a bit more — even down to the fact that Devil Hunting could be done with the government; those ‘public’ guys she’d brought up before. ‘Public Safety’ was apparently the specific term which was… accurate.

Tendo-san didn’t want to talk about them much, though, the woman apparently a fixer on the freelance side from what Finn could figure out. Still, something about the picture… Hm.

“Index Three, huh?”

Finn looed up at Tendo-san, the woman rolling a cigarette in between her fingers and a lighter nowhere to be seen. “...uh, yeah.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, confusion sliding into a smirk as they went to talking shop. The Devil Disaster Hazard Index — Akuma Saigai Kiendo Shisū — had been a little sheet Michiko had given him to read over, apparently made by those Public Safety guys and meant for privates like him. “Yeah.”

Dry as it was, it was definitely useful. “Felt like one at least.”

“Hm.” The woman tapped the unlit cigarette with one finger. “That’s a rare solo kill.”

“Solo?” Mal’s head snapped around, the umbrella coming down off her shoulder. “I was there too, scar-face.”

Tendo looked back at her for a second, before her attention slid back to Finn.

“Yeah, I did it solo.”

Mal’s cheeks chipmunked, the girl going back to spinning the umbrella with more force than at all necessary as she muttered something Finn was pretty sure was about his air.

“Something that size…” The fixer clicked her tongue. “Usually gets a team on it. Three, maybe four people. Not bad, McHale-san.”

“Well…” Finn couldn’t help the smile on his face, thumb wiping under his nose. “I’m just tough like that.”

Tendo’s eyes trailed him up and down. “Seems like it.”

Satisfied with the compliment and the lack of homework from the fixer today, Finn glanced around the loading dock and found himself blinking. What the…

People’s eyes were on them.

On Tendo-san, specifically.

A dozen people all around, almost all of them hunters from the weapons on their person, went from looking to not looking the second the suited woman glanced around herself. Why the…

For a second, he wondered if it was because she was a woman in a building probably full of guys with weapons but that… No… That didn’t hold either, when there were plenty women around them — at least four others he could make out just milling around, armed to the teeth like everyone else.

And it definitely wasn’t that the fixer looked weird or anything, not with Mal standing right there in a purple dress, booted up to her shins and spinning a lace parasol.

So, it is Tendo, then. Finn fought the urge to frown. Maybe they want more jobs too. Before he could voice the weirdness, the woman turned away from him as her phone went off.

The fixer stepped away, just six-seven paces; her answer just two syllables. There was silence for another short while, and then she responded with something else short and was already on her way back before fifteen full seconds passed them by.

“One-point-two.”

Finn blinked slow for a second, the number not quite clicking as it left Tendo-san’s lips. “...a million?”

“One-point-two, yes.” Her attention slid over to the open door, the rendering yard visible from where they stood. “Likely would have been a good bit more, but someone apparently took the head off it and burned it up.”

…wonder who that could be? Finn shrugged that off, head too far off in the clouds at the sound of 1.2 million yen.

“Soo~ooo….” Unfortunately, a head full of purple hair pulled Finn right back down at it popped up right behind him, a familiar chin resting on his shoulder. “How much is thaaa~aaat?”

All his willpower came in handy as Finn fought off a sigh. “Enough to eat at that fancy barbecue place for a week.”

As he expected, that was enough as the sound of two palms clapping fast together came from behind him right after Mal left his shoulder. “Yay!”

"Uh-huh." And just like that, she was back to the umbrella, muttering to herself about beef and all the expensive new things she would buy. Finn turned back to the depot and stared at it, blue eyes trailing smoke as it went higher and higher from the stacks. The place looked odd the more attention you paid to it, a giant corrugated warehouse that looked like someone had stuck a regular office building to the front of it and went ‘good enough.’

A giant shrug of a design, honestly.

“Curious about the depot, huh?”

Finn looked over as the fixer finally pulled out a lighter. “I mean… kinda? I just bring the bodies here and get paid, but…”

“You’re not very curious, McHale-san. You know that?”

Rude. Finn blinked, the non-sequitur coming out of nowhere. “...I guess?”

With a flick of her wrist and a smirk, Tendo finally lit the cigarette she’d been fiddling with, lighter pocketed again as smoke went sideways off her. “These depots are pretty common, the bigger ones nearer the cities. Just where they do what they do with Devil bodies. Process them, sell the parts usually.”

“To who?”

“Companies. Researchers. Contractors, occasionally. Rich people.” She took a drag from the cigarette. “Part of being a gray market means there’s always someone looking to buy.”

Gray…? Finn nodded along, not fully sure what that meant.

Apparently, Tendo-san could read his face better than he thought, as the women barely hid a smile as she spoke up again. “It means it’s technically illegal.”

Finn frowned at a half-dozen bodies in all white winching another dead monster onto an industrial scale under a ceiling full of fluorescents. “Then why is it here if it’s illegal? Like illegal like the way what I’m doing is illegal or—”

“You don’t worry your pretty little red head about the rules or the law.” She took another drag from her tobacco-stick. “Just leave that to me, McHale-san.”

I mean, my hair is pretty. But that also wasn’t much of an answer and Finn said as much a second later.

Tendo-san simply shrugged. “I didn’t say it was.”

…great.

She smoked for a second longer before a little laugh escaped her and she gave him the rest of it, a simple story about how the government had tried to shut it down but that was never going to work when normal people still wanted devils dead; whether by themselves or anyone who could handle it as quickly as possible.

Eventually everyone of those people ended up with bodies and the government had to give up on stopping it, if only to avoid giving the Devil black market too much power.

“So… better to know where the Devils are being sold, track it and get their first pick on anything worth having.” Finn nodded slowly. “Am I close?”

“Very.” Tendo-san tipped ash onto the blacktop. “You forget heavy taxes too.”

Yeah, that tracks.

“Not like I care what happens to them.” Another drag lit up the end of the cigarette a bright orange. “Long as a Devil ends up dead.”

True. Blue eyes trailed over a dancing Mal and back to to the rendering yard again. “So, what actually happens to them? When they die?”

Tendo-san looked at him like he’d started babbling. “...you’re looking at it.”

“No, I—” Finn sighed, one hand waving out at the doors. “No, I get that. I heard that Devils are like immortal, though. How do they come back? Just pop out of thin air or something?”

The cigarette left Tendo’s mouth, smoke trailing out of those lips for a second or two longer. “It goes back to Hell, of course.”

Of… of course? Finn blinked back at her, struggling with that. “It what?”

Hell’s real? As dumb as that question sounded out loud, considering he’d been hunting Devils for half a month, Finn had been well aware these things weren’t real horny demons like in the Bible. For one, none of them had recoiled every time the words ‘Jesus Christ’ had left his lips so there was that.

“They die here…” Tendo waved the cigarette before pointing it down at the ground. “Then they go back to Hell. They die there, then come back to Earth. Eventually.” She shrugged, cigarette returned back to its place between her lips. “You didn’t know that?”

“...I’m a bad listener.”

“...Mm.” Tendo blinked slow. “Just think of Hell as a Devil recycling center where…”

The fixer kept talking, mouth moving around her cigarette but Finn wasn’t even paying attention anymore as he rolled the word around in his head. Hell.

It was a place.

A real one, with things that lived in it and came out of it. A whole other world, one you could get to and — more importantly — one you could get back from.

“McHale-san…”

It took Finn too long to realize Tendo-san was looking at the massive grin on his face.