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stake—Siegfried’s index finger—was dyed red halfway down the shaft.
    He dragged the thin corpse over next to Siegfried and clapped his hands together. “Well, that takes care of that. Except that suspicions are bound to be aroused if he goes missing too.”
    Gento tapped his temples, jarring loose a fresh thought. “It is strange. The man I was before would have been imprisoned by those eyes of his. The schooling of my family is bearing fruit.” A fierce new light blossomed in his own eyes. “Could I pull it off? What only the Aki clan was rumored to be capable of?”
    Posing these questions aloud, he raised his hands.
    Minutes later, the door to the locker room again opened. The thin man and the giant returned. The old man and the small man were gone. The suit didn’t spare them a second glance.

Chapter 4
    Azusa woke up to a slap on the cheek. The face of the man delivering it was only a foot in front of hers. A filthy, beastly face, partly covered by the long hair falling across his temples and chin. The same man she’d encountered in the ruins.
    In the dim white light, she could see other people behind him. A middle-aged man and woman. A teenager.
    Azusa recognized the woman from the convenience store. The man must be her husband. The kid must be theirs. She scanned her surroundings. They were in a tunnel ten feet high and ten feet wide.
    The pale green concrete retaining walls and the dull luster of the steel pilings caught her eye. She had expected to find a tunnel somewhere around here so she wasn’t that surprised.
    “Since you aren’t asking, you must have some idea of what we are doing here,” the man said in a raspy voice. Hyota. “Which means you are here at Aki-sama’s bidding.”
    “Yeah? Well, if you know what he’s bidding, let me know,” Azusa answered evasively. “What’s with them?” she asked, indicating the family of three.
    “One of Demon City’s infamous evil broods. I’m sure you have heard of them. Total strangers that call themselves a family while sharing no blood in common.”
    “One of them—” Azusa started despite herself.
    Evil broods were a phenomenon rarely found outside Demon City, total strangers who came together to form a “family” unit and then prowled the precincts of Shinjuku in the guise of true blood relatives while committing every kind of heinous crime.
    They took over a location for at least two or three months, sometimes up to two or three years, as they carried out their crimes. Becoming part of the neighborhood and everyday life, nobody suspected them in the least.
    When the authorities started getting suspicious and poking around, they would decry the dangers obviously lurking about, and move to a new “safe” place, where they would again take up residence as a “normal” family for several years.
    In some cases, the old man playing the grandpa would drop dead of old age. There were records of formal funerals being held.
    A group would dissolve fairly quickly after completing a job, with the various members splitting off and organizing new “families” of their own.
    The truly scary thing about these “evil broods” was how the players became their roles in both body and soul. That they should alter their characters and personalities to fit the new family profile was hardly surprising. But there were documented cases of skeletal structure, physiognomy, and even fingerprints changing.
    A man became the boy in the literal sense of the word. It could be attributed to a kind of psychological need to fit in, along with mutual self-hypnosis arising out of a perverted shared consciousness. But in Demon City, the immediate conclusion was that something supernatural was going on.
    At any rate, by means fair and foul, it seemed that Hyota had hired them for the ostensible purposes of digging holes and running a convenience store.
    “If you and Aki-sama have nothing to do with each other,” Hyota said coldly, “then I suppose you would have no