height.
The assassin cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “Body armor? You?” He smirked. “O ye of little faith.” He took aim at Makoto’s throat and pulled the trigger.
The shot went wide, but only because something grabbed the assassin’s ankle and pulled. Hamaya. He’d recovered from whatever the assassin had done to him. It was a feeble effort—the assassin kicked his foot free almost instantly—but an instant was all Makoto needed.
The assassin fired a third round and a fourth, but Makoto got his shot off first. His assailant grunted and dropped to the floor with a bullet in his hip. The double-tap meant for Makoto’s skull cracked two holes in the crown molding instead.
Makoto strode forward, firing alternately from each pistol. One shot obliterated the assassin’s right hand. The next shattered his shin, where to his credit the man was reaching for a little double-barreled derringer in an ankle holster. Makoto allowed the assassin to draw his derringer, take aim, and fire.
The first bullet hit him in the belly, well off center. It felt like a white-hot knife in his gut. Makoto staggered back, then resumed his forward stride. “I told you before,” he said. “I have foreseen the hour of my death. It is not yet at hand.”
The assassin’s eyes widened. Blood bloomed like a red poppy blossom across the belly of Makoto’s white robes. It joined the first wound, which seeped through the stole and the over-robe just over his heart. “No,” he grunted through gritted teeth. “No armor—”
“None. I have no need of it. You cannot kill me, for I am the light. What use are bullets against a being of light?”
The man pointed the gun at Makoto’s face—at his father—and pulled desperately at the trigger.
The derringer’s second shot was a misfire.
Makoto laid down his weapons, knelt beside the man who tried to kill him, and took him by the hand. With a sympathetic smile he raised the double-barreled mouth of the derringer to his lips. He kissed the muzzle as if he were planting a kiss on a baby’s forehead, then laid the weapon back on its owner’s chest.
The assassin stared at him in awe. One tear rolled down his cheek. Makoto nodded and smiled. The man had seen the truth.
A misfire was a dangerous thing. Sometimes they never went off. Sometimes they did, and there was no telling when. It might well have fired just as Makoto was kissing it. The bullet might still go off, but now it was resting on the assassin’s chest, aimed at the underside of his chin. More to the point, the kiss was a tiny testament to the power of Joko Daishi. Two bullets had struck him. Both should have been fatal. Their combined effect was to slow him a little. A third round should have killed him but simply refused to fire.
“You are rationalizing,” said Makoto. “You are thinking about the caliber of your little palm pistol. You are wondering whether my priestly vestments are thick enough to serve as a bulletproof vest of sorts. Neh, my child? You seek reasons. Answers. These are the fetters of rationality.”
The assassin shook his head. “You’re insane.”
“Ah. Perhaps as insane as your paymasters insist, neh? Perhaps I am so deranged that in my delusions I can fail to perceive even my own pain. How, you are asking yourself, how does he still live? But I have told you already: your bullets cannot kill me. This is not my appointed hour.”
He pressed the derringer to the assassin’s chest and willed heat into his hand. Ki began to flow. “Fear not,” he said. “It comes soon, my son.”
When the misfired bullet went off, it filled the narrow stairwell with thunder.
Makoto reclaimed the two silenced automatics, handed one of them to Hamaya, and helped his lawyer and worshipper descend the stairs. “We must go,” he said.
Even as he said it, the condo’s front door flew open. This time it was not assassins; it was the concubine-nuns of Joko Daishi, eight of them, all dressed in diaphanous white. They flooded the room in a panic, except for one. One of them was calm.
“Daishi-sama, Daishi-sama,” the women wailed, paling at the sight of his blood. They cloyed to him like iron filings to a magnet. Except for one.
She had a derringer exactly like the assassin’s upstairs. The.22 Magnum round popped like a firecracker when she fired it into Hamaya’s shoulder. His pistol cartwheeled across the floor. As he fell, the concubines flew into a panic. Some