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After Seimei told Hiromasa that Twinleaf, his flute, had belonged to the demon at Suzaku gate, he would go play there sometimes, and the demon would play with him in the guise of a man—albeit a guise Hiromasa saw through. Hiromasa was proud of himself, mastering his fear enough to stand in a demon’s company willingly. Where his servants saw only a man, Hiromasa—thanks to Seimei opening his third eye—could see the human illusion, but also the spindly, pot-bellied blue demon underneath as he cavorted on his flute. Hiromasa was sure his growing bravery around demons would make him more useful to Seimei than at first, when he could only cower in fear.
Riding home in his ox cart from the gate after dusk one night, Hiromasa felt a chill creep up his spine. He lifted the screen and looked out on the dark, empty streets. There was nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. Still, his body grew tenser and the hairs on his neck rose and quivered. Something was coming, he thought—but what?
Hiromasa heard his servants shout, and the ox cart stopped. “A demon!” one shouted. Someone screamed, and then the sound of retreating footsteps echoed into quiet. Hiromasa whipped back the screen and found himself abandoned—with a demon approaching.
The ox stamped nervously, but seemed unable to see the hunchbacked green creature with long, sharp claws that swayed toward them, its hooked nose and huge ears poking from its curtain of black, oily hair. “I smell human,” it muttered, sweeping its head from side to side.
Hiromasa knew he should run, but it was too late—the demon was close. It would catch and eat him if he jumped from the cart, and Seimei would be cross because Hiromasa hadn’t sense enough to run sooner. His death would make Seimei cry, too, and the thought pained Hiromasa despite the teasing he’d done.
He thought of the demon at the gate and looked again at this demon’s big ears. Seimei loved his flute playing, as did Tsukihime, Susa, and the demon at Suzaku gate. Perhaps this creature, too, would like his playing, and spare him if he played a tune for it?
Hiromasa gulped. “Help me, Seimei,” he prayed, hoping against hope that Seimei would hear him even miles away. Then he began to play.
It was a sad song, a haunting melody born of the moment, with a hopeful undercurrent Hiromasa wove in through shorter, happier notes. The demon swayed to a stop steps from the screen when Twinleaf’s first notes fluttered into the air. Its wide ears twitched. Its face lifted, parting the curtain of its hair. It wore a sickly smile on its red mouth, and its large eyes were closed. It stood still as death, listening, as Hiromasa played his hope for daybreak.
They were frozen thusly for what felt like hours, Hiromasa’s throat parched and tongue dry, his eyes heavy with fatigue but his body coiled tight with adrenalin. He couldn’t play the night through, he couldn’t start the ox cart on his own, he couldn’t run away, and still the demon wouldn’t move but for the twitching of its ears and the twitching of its lips as it listened. Hiromasa wouldn’t stop to lift the screen to see more clearly than through the meshed threads.
Suddenly Hiromasa heard clanging. He wasn’t sure how long he’d played, but the sound startled him to a stop, and the demon’s head twisted into a snarl. It raised its clawed hands and stooped back into its swaying crouch. Its nose sniffed. Hiromasa’s eyes strained as he stared through the screen, and the clanging grew closer. Perhaps help was on its way? Perhaps Seimei had come through!
“Get away from him!” a familiar voice cried. Hiromasa’s servants had returned! Hiromasa heard the crackling of torches, saw bright lights approaching with many footsteps.
The demon snarled. The sound snapped a shiver through Hiromasa’s body. “I can’t eat all of them,” the demon growled, “but I can eat the man who played music like a demon!”
Hiromasa quailed only for a moment. The next he dropped his flute into his robe and grabbed the dagger he hid under the ox cart pillows. He would meet death bravely, with honor. Seimei would be proud of him, he hoped.
The demon ripped off the screen, balancing on the edge of the cart with feet that looked like hands. Its claws scraped the air in front of Hiromasa’s neck. Hiromasa shouted and swiped at it with the dagger—
—but before Hiromasa’s knife could hit, the demon shrieked, black eyes and red mouth wide with horror, and hurled itself from the cart to the ground. It landed on its face, caught itself up on its four hands, and ran like a beast into the night, wailing and shrieking as it vanished down the dark streets.
Hiromasa’s servants arrived a few moments later with a small crowd of guards to find Hiromasa’s hand still raised, dagger still thrust outward, mouth wide with horrified confusion. As his servants praised the gods for Hiromasa’s safety and groveled with shame for their abandonment, Hiromasa felt a wash of weariness, the flush of fever rising in his head.
Suddenly his body was not his own, like another presence was inside him, using his mouth and sitting him straighter, waving his hand imperiously. Strangely, Hiromasa felt no fear at this possession. “Take us to Abe no Seimei’s house immediately, then take a message home for me,” his mouth ordered. His hand reached for a curtain that was lying on the ground, then dropped to his lap. The mysterious presence left him. Hiromasa sank into uneasy sleep.
*
Hiromasa woke in Abe no Seimei’s house next to a bundled stack of familiar under robes. A pretty shikigami adorned with white lotus on her robes noticed him and smiled from the next room, left the robe she was sewing with her two shikigami companions, also sewing, and padded away out of sight.
Hiromasa frowned and wiped his face. There was a damp cloth on his forehead, and another on his neck. He was naked but for a loincloth under the thin sheet that covered him. He blinked the muzziness of his thoughts into a semblance of order, and sat up, putting the cloths in a bowl of water near him with a third cloth draped over its rim. “Where are my clothes?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
Familiar steps shuffled behind him and set clean robes beside him with a whisper of white sleeves. “Please close the screens so I can dress,” Hiromasa asked the helpful shikigami.
“Won’t you need help?” Seimei’s voice rumbled just over his shoulder.
Hiromasa jumped. “Seimei!”
Seimei laughed, crisp white sleeve hiding his mouth. Hiromasa turned, tucking the sheet closed behind his back and pulling the front over his chest. “I thought you were one of your servant-gods!”
“I am not,” Seimei informed him, still grinning fox-like as he closed screens to wall off the room from the shikigami peeping in over their sewing and giggling.
“What happened? Why am I at your house?” Who undressed me? Hiromasa did not ask the third aloud, and neither did he relinquish the sheet when Seimei unfolded his under robe for him on top of it. A man of Seimei’s station helping Hiromasa dress wouldn’t be proper. And the thought of Seimei seeing Hiromasa all but naked here in daylight was embarrassing. Even in…other circumstances…Hiromasa would still be embarrassed, albeit more eager for impropriety.
“What do you remember?” Seimei asked, taking Hiromasa’s robe and dropping the opening over Hiromasa’s head.
Hiromasa flushed and quivered as Seimei took first one arm, then the other, in his warm hands. His fingertips barely brushed Hiromasa’s sensitized skin as he folded, tied, and arranged Hiromasa’s under robes around him, then coaxed Hiromasa to stand so he could smooth them down and begin the next layer. Hiromasa forgot Seimei’s question, and his own, at Seimei’s careful attention, and his own hyperawareness of Seimei’s movements around him.
When Hiromasa was properly dressed, and Seimei seemed satisfied, Seimei bid him sit and shikigami brought food and cushions, and put away the sleeping mat. A brush appeared in Seimei’s hand between one shikigami and the next, and Seimei sat on a stool behind him and touched Hiromasa’s head.
“You shouldn’t do this,” Hiromasa said, sighing into the touch.
“You slept for three days,” Seimei told him, and pulled the brush through Hiromasa’s hair.
“Three days!” Hiromasa hunched forward and whipped around to face Seimei.
“Hiromasa,” Seimei said sternly.
Chastened, Hiromasa turned back around. The brushing resumed. “I don’t remember coming here.”
“You told your men to bring you here,” Seimei said.
Hiromasa remembered the strange possession on the road. “I didn’t tell them,” he told Seimei. “I did, but it wasn’t me that was speaking.” Hiromasa frowned. “I don’t know how to describe it. Did a spirit possess me?” He thought of foxes and frowned. He didn’t think they possessed men though—only beguiled them.
Seimei’s brush paused, then resumed. “You keep interesting company,” he said carefully after a few moments. “I’m sure it did you no harm. Had you not come here that night, you would have slept for much longer.”
“Why did I sleep so long? I wasn’t sick before…” Before the demon attacked. Hiromasa remembered feeling woozy after the demon ran away. Had it cursed him?
“Although the demon could not harm you directly,” Seimei told him, still brushing soothing strokes through Hiromasa’s untangled hair, “it was full of unclean energy, some of which passed into you. The shock of so much made you sick. While you slept here, I could drain it away. You are purified enough to return to court now, and your home has not been tainted.”
Hiromasa was touched. He wanted to commemorate this kindness with a poem. Something about warm white fur and careful teeth, soft fingers, kindness like dawn. “Thank you, Seimei,” he said when at last he found his voice. “Truly, you are a good man.”
Seimei snorted, gathered Hiromasa’s hair in four firm strokes, and twisted it into a topknot. “Only to you,” he teased, and slid Hiromasa’s hat onto his head.
Hiromasa wondered, but didn’t ask, just which meaning Seimei intended with those words. Instead they laughed together, and Seimei sat across from Hiromasa, and they ate.
Late that afternoon, on the veranda, when Hiromasa was deep into a jug of sake, he told Seimei he had frightened off the demon with his dagger—wasn’t that strange?
Seimei hid his grin with his sleeve, then sipped his sake. “Strange indeed,” he said, lips still twitching with barely contained mirth.
“Oh!” Hiromasa’s eyes widened and he pointed with his cup. Then he smiled beatifically and set it down. “I knew you’d help me somehow. What did you do?” Then it occurred to him: “You could have cast your spell before it lunged for me, Seimei!”
“It wasn’t a spell,” Seimei told him, and motioned to the shikigami sewing in the main room. “Did you not wonder why your all under robes are here in my house?”
Hiromasa flushed. Seimei had seen all of his under robes? Oh—and dressed him. And probably undressed him too, although Hiromasa was too ashamed to ask. Sake would help. He drained his cup and set it back down roughly, as ready for the answer as he could be. “Tell me,” he said, pretending to be brave.
Seimei eyed Hiromasa up and down, evaluating, as if he knew Hiromasa’s fear and thought it amusing. “I heard a tale from a traveling monk,” he said when Hiromasa’s brave face was about to fail him. “He knew a man who saw a demon parade late at night. Though the demons wanted to eat him, they ran away in fear. A faithful servant had been sent a dream, and sewed the Sonsho Darani into his robes, and so the demons couldn’t touch him. The parade scattered for fear of the sutra. The man fell ill nearly immediately and slept for many days afterward, but he lived. Or at least, that is what the monk claimed.”
“But Seimei,” Hiromasa said, “none of my servants told me of a dream.”
Seimei refilled his cup and Hiromasa’s, sleeve held delicately away from the small table—and bowed head conveniently hiding what sounded like his grin. “I stole the under robes you wore that night as they dried a week ago to test the sutra.” He put the jug down and pinned Hiromasa with his fathomless eyes. “A man who plays music with demons should be careful,” he said, though after a moment his lips twitched and his eyes danced again. “It seems the monk’s story may have been true,” he said, and sipped his sake.
Hiromasa gazed resolutely at a budding tree near the far wall of Seimei’s garden. “But Seimei, why could I not order my own servants to do it?”
Seimei gave a slight nod. “You could.” But he gave no orders for the shikigami to stop.
Hiromasa darted a look back at the smiling trio bent over his robes. “So…” he trailed off hopefully. It would be a relief not to have his underthings strewn across Seimei’s floors like…like… Hiromasa’s cheeks heated. There was only one future in which such impropriety would be acceptable to him, and Seimei seemed oblivious to that. He thought of Seimei brushing his hair, his careful attention to Hiromasa’s modesty and comfort as he helped him dress. Hiromasa’s ears heated too.
“Yes?” Seimei’s expression was innocent.
Hiromasa frowned at him. “Seimei!”
Seimei shook his head to show confusion, then delicately sipped from his cup. “Does my care displease you?” His eyes pierced Hiromasa over his sake.
Hiromasa swallowed and looked away, sure his face was red as a camellia by now. “No,” he said softly.
“Do I embarrass you, Hiromasa?”
“Seimei! Of course not!” Hiromasa glared at him. “You’re being cruel. You know what I mean.” He crossed his arms.
“Do I?”
Hiromasa huffed and continued to glare.
After a long pause, Seimei relented. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said.
“Thank you.” At last!
“I should sew the sutras myself. They might be more powerful that way.” Seimei set down his cup and nodded resolutely before rising to his feet.
“Seimei!” Hiromasa sputtered, scrabbling to his knees and barely managing to grab Seimei’s sleeve as he passed. “Seimei, please!”
Seimei stopped and looked down at Hiromasa.
Hiromasa took the moment to fist his hand into the sleeve he’d caught, and take up the pristine tail of Seimei’s white hunting robe in his other hand. Desperate, he spouted off the first reason he could think of that would not also embarrass him. “That is work unbefitting a man of your station!” he nearly shouted.
“Hm.” Seimei cocked his head in consideration, making no move to extricate himself from Hiromasa’s grossly improper hold. “Perhaps you’re right. An onmyoji should do an onmyoji’s work, not a servant’s.”
Hiromasa sagged onto his heels with relief. “Yes, Seimei. Exactly. You understand.”
“Oh, I understand.” Seimei bent over Hiromasa then, presence seeming to enfold him, a powerful man pinning another like prey with far-too-knowing eyes. “An onmyoji would use his fingers to paint the sutra onto your skin. That is what we’ll do. Shall we go, Hiromasa?”
Those familiar words had never been more welcome or terrifying, but Hiromasa felt heat rush through him anew at Seimei’s sharp, vulpine grin. When Seimei dragged him to his feet by the front of his robes, Hiromasa felt that grin down to his toes and hid his face in Seimei’s shoulder, breathing deeply until he mastered himself just enough. He nodded resolutely at Seimei, shy smile trying to push past his cheeks and into the air, like the fluttering joy he was hard-pressed to contain. “Yes, Seimei. Let’s go together.”