Chapter Eight

“You religious folk fascinate me,” said Remilia, still doing circles around me in the darkness. “With your spirits and sins, angels and demons. You call that which you love God and that which you hate Devil. What if one person’s God is another’s Devil? I suspect that’s why holy wars are waged. My God is better than your God. Your Devil is worse than my Devil.”

I gripped my gohei with both hands, but knew it was useless. I was trapped in the dark with a vampire. She was faster and stronger. I had a lame leg. I was so dead.

“This happened to you, Reimu Hakurei of the Hakurei Shrine. You needed something to call Devil, and I was the most convenient thing. As you learned more about me, I became Scarlet Devil, since red is such an evil color. After my strongest servant defeated you, you despaired. You counted yourself lost. But, behold! Here comes a wide-eyed youkai child who you can trust. She offers a way out of your plight, asking nothing in return. A glorious salvation this seems to be, until she reveals herself to you. What horror! Your savior turned out to be the embodiment of Scarlet Devil!”

Remilia liked to talk, I could tell. I had to use that, had to buy time. Maybe I could think of something. I wished Marisa were with me. She could have talked this vampire right into a corner, but I wasn’t so clever myself.

“So you were nice to me just so you could betray me?” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, now inches from my right ear. I felt her hot breath on my neck. I yelped and turned around, swinging my gohei at her. It swished through empty air. She laughed, hee-hahaha! now somewhere behind me.

“Too slow!” she said.

She could have bitten me just now, could have sucked off a pint of my blood and been gone before I realized it. My blood could have been hers any time since opening the cell door on Marisa and me, especially when carrying me up the stairs. Her mouth had been right next to my neck.

There had to be a reason, even now, that she was holding off.

Keep talking, I thought. Had to keep her talking.

“You’re wrong about me,” I said. “I’m a miko. I don’t believe in dogmatic gods or devils.”

“Oh, sure you do,” said Remilia. “Whether your deity is the god of Olympus, the god of the Nile, the god of Abraham, or the kami of nature, it’s all the same.”

Just as when I had faced Rumia, my enemy wanted me afraid, wanted me to cower. It wasn’t just my blood she was after. My emotions must flavor it somehow, made it sweeter. She was letting me ripen.

If that thought wasn’t horrible enough – to a vampire, maybe drinking blood wasn’t just a meal. Maybe it was orgasmic. Taunting me from the darkness might be Remilia’s version of foreplay. She would get more and more excited until she couldn’t hold back... and then she would take me.

For her, ecstasy. For me, death.

Keep talking! Think!

“It’s not the same!” I said. “Unlike Western religions, my faith doesn’t cast guilt on everyone. We just try to live in harmony with the forces of the world, and do more good than harm.”

“And how is that different? Some spiritual entities are good, others are bad. You try to be good, and try to avoid being bad. Whether or not you observe a patriarch in the sky is superficial.”

“I... guess? Why does it matter?”

“Because, my dear miko, I hope to make you realize the depths of your foolishness. It’s the smallest favor I can do before your demise. Will being a good person make you immortal, Reimu?”

“What? Of course not. I’ll die someday no matter how I live my life, but I’ll still strive to be good with the time I have. Life isn’t meaningless just because it’s finite.”

Remilia laughed again. It sounded like a teacher’s weary chuckle in response to her student’s naivete, Hee-ha-ha. It made me cringe to hear that noise in Remilia’s little girl voice.

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “Insomuch as it’s possible for anything to give your life meaning, mortality itself does. Do you believe in an afterlife? Transcendence or eternal heaven once your physical body dies?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to focus on the here and now.”

“I beg you to consider it, Reimu. What if your mind and heart persisted for hundreds or thousands of years? What would that do to you? Who would you be centuries from now?”

“I won’t live that long, so it doesn’t matter. What point are you getting to?”

“It matters.”

These last two words came from a few steps in front of me, where Remilia now stood. I couldn’t wholly see her, but her eyes shone bloody red, a pair of hot embers in the dark.

“It matters,” she repeated. “You didn’t know it before today, but you’re surrounded by people who are struggling with that exact problem. Some of the most powerful beings in Gensokyo, people you’ve never heard of, people who rarely trouble themselves with human affairs – they’re old. We’re old.”

“H... how old?” I said.

“Old enough to have seen the cycles from without and to have experienced them from within. Old enough to have studied morality, to have rejected it, to have tried to redefine it... and to have failed.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“I know. Consider this a gift, Reimu. If you were to live for even a few more decades, a normal human lifespan, you would experience the bare beginning of this. Now you’ll never have to.”

“You’re not helping anyone,” I said. “It’s just murder for your own gratification. Besides, what if there is an afterlife? Then you’re just sending me to immortality early, and I’ll still have to cope with existing forever.”

“If that’s the case,” she said, “then you’ll probably meet an authority figure, an afterlife judge. Someone who painstakingly details everything you did right or wrong in the mortal world.”

Remilia’s eyes flashed. For a split-second, the glow of her eyes let me see the gohei in my hands.

“If you meet such a judge,” she said, “relay my defiance.”

I grit my teeth.

“Do it yourself, hag.”

---

Remilia screamed. Grryaaahh!

I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I had to imagine her face twisting in rage after I threw a petty insult at her. Something hit me in the chest so hard that it knocked me flat on my back. My head thumped back against the carpet. It was hard to breathe, as if there was a weight on my chest.

I realized – Remilia had tackled me. She now sat with her knees on my ribs. The flaming-red rings of her eyes were mere inches from mine, filling most of my vision. Her breath was hot on my face. One of her hands had found the back of my head and dug into my hair, holding me in place.

“You are nothing!” she yelled point-blank into my face. “Your human morals are nothing! Creation itself cursed us with this existence, so we’ll do what we must! I send you to God as my declaration of war.”

Her eyes dipped down beside my ear. The moist warmth of her mouth was at the crook of my neck. My muscles tensed as she bit me, but there was no pain. Her saliva was a natural anesthetic.

I could feel the blood leaving me. She was drinking.

---

It’s strange how facing death instantly grants the same clarity as a lifetime of fervent meditation.

I was about to die here, with a vampire sucking the literal life out of me... but I wasn’t afraid.

I had dismissed Remilia’s attempt to justify her murderous intent, so had I told her off... but I wasn’t angry.

I should have felt injured, harmed, my ego bruised that she would dare to attack me... but I wasn’t proud.

A couple of days ago, I knew youkai as mere animals, household pests. Youkai were a reason not to stay out at night. After leaving my shrine with Marisa, I met several of them with intelligence. Not always mature intelligence – some of them were childlike, but still.

Higher-level youkai, I now realized, weren’t entirely different from me. They were people.

This vampire on top of me, sucking blood out of my neck, was a person too. She had power and a sharp wit, but her smarts were as much burden as blessing. They had led her to certain ideas she couldn’t cope with.

I sympathized. It’s hard when you demand answers, but the answers are the exact opposite of what you needed to hear. I felt bad for her.

Remilia moaned. She lifted her mouth from my neck and made a hacking noise, as if she had been drinking the sweetest wine that suddenly turned to vinegar. She looked down at me, uncertain.

“What are you doing?” she said, wiping my blood from her lips. “You’re supposed—”

This was my chance. She’s stronger than me, but I still weigh more than she does. I bucked my body under her, tossing her off me. She fell aside, rolling onto the carpet. I could only see by the glow of her eyes, but it was enough. I gripped the top of my gohei in one hand, swung it towards her as hard as I could.

Remilia held her hand up to block. My gohei broke on it. She yelped, more in surprise than pain. The wooden staff snapped in two pieces, peppering wooden splinters onto her dress. The bottom half spun off somewhere into the room, but I kept the top half in hand. The paper streamers danced in the red light of her eyes.

I remembered the way vampires died in those stories. Fittingly, my gohei was a religious symbol, a miko’s equivalent of a Christian cross.

I jumped onto Remilia, straddling her between my knees. She could have broken me in half from this position, and she was fast enough to wriggle away, but she didn’t. Using both hands and all my upper body strength, I jammed the broken end of my staff into her chest as if I were planting a flag. The jagged wood pierced her dress and her skin. I felt it tear through the tough tissue between her ribs.

Remilia’s back arched. She coughed hard, spitting up blood. Whether it was my blood or hers, or some mixture, I didn’t want to know. She convulsed for a few seconds. Then her body went still. The light in her eyes went out. I was in pitch darkness again.

I got off Remilia. I was shaking too hard to stand up, so I fell back onto my butt and scooted away. I tried to catch my breath.

“Did I… did I kill her?”

As if in answer, a flash of light burned my eyes. Remilia’s body glowed like a hundred angry lamps, lighting the whole observatory red and blue and every shade between.

Her eyes snapped open, blazing like little bonfires. She sat up and looked down at the piece of wood stabbed through her torso. She grabbed it with one hand, yanked it, pulled it free with an arc of blood drips following. She tossed the stick aside.

She looked up at me. She bore her teeth, her face wet and red.

“You killed me.”

---

I was frozen. Even if I had my wits together, I couldn’t have gotten away. Remilia was on her feet. Then I was on my back, with her on top of me again. I had no strength to resist. The light coming off her was enough to hold me still. The glare from her eyes was worst of all.

Remilia wiped the blood from her face, drying her self on her sleeve. Then she brought her face down close to mine. Our noses almost touched.

“I regret,” she said.

---

Her body failed. Her glow died out, and her eyes went back to ordinary red. She collapsed on me, her head resting on my chest.

I looked down at her, wondering what had just happened. Then I realized I was looking at her. I could see her, even though her magic glow had gone. The observatory was no longer pitch black.

I looked up through the glass dome ceiling, and saw the sky. The full moon, no larger or redder than usual, shone halfway through sky. A million stars twinkled. It was just like any beautiful night in Gensokyo.

I smiled. My eyes welled with tears.

“I did it. I cleared the mist.”

The night sky was so lovely. My heart sang and wept at the sight of it. I lie there for a long time, staring up at the shimmering expanse.

There, with a possibly-dead vampire using me as a pillow, exhaustion overcame me.

I passed out.