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The black specter floated across the ruins of the middle of the city. It had no features to speak of, save two unblinking, shapeless eyes and an appetite unending. It rode along the currents of the wind, lost and hurting, and ripped away happiness as if it could cram such things down its inky gullet and satisfy its craving for humanity and compassion by stealing it from others.
The sky should have cried at the sight, surely- it should have cried at the first signs of spring swiftly being snuffed out and turned to ruin beneath the mantle of such unadulterated hatred and hurt. But instead, the clouds looked to the pale, frigid, and quiet moon to turn their insides into something less sympathetic- something white and soft like the fur of the rabbit sitting in its craters, like the rice flour it ground out was falling from the heavens and down to the earth like a veil for the dead.
Keiji Mogami, the creature drenched in a death made into his own Hell, passed through the snowfall and over the city of Seasoning. His breath was ice and rot as it frosted the windows of the buildings he passed by, and should any pane of glass have the misfortune of reflecting the shell of what Keiji Mogami had been in life, it cracked and shattered into merciless shards.
Broken sidewalk and ruined buildings turned back into civilization as the spirit passed over it block by block. Skyscrapers lined with glowing bulbs and businesses cowering beneath street lamps like children with flashlights chasing away the night thinned out into apartments and convenience stores. Keiji Mogami passed through them all, the snow at his heels eclipsing the city like an inverted moon throwing white over a blackened sun.
His shadow fell over the entrance of an alley between two apartment complexes, and a cat yowled out into the night. The voices of four kittens followed suit with pitiful, tiny cries as the air grew colder. Keiji Mogami lingered, hungry.
The wind blew again, this time with a flurry of snowflakes held in its frigid grip. The kittens curled closer to their mother, who reached down with her head to tuck her children’s paws beneath their stomachs.
Keiji Mogami turned away, until another cry rang out from the alley and a fifth kitten, this one smaller than the others, pulled itself out from the gutter running down the side of the building across from the rest of his litter. He cried out again and toddled forward on clumsy, cold paws. Three more steps, and he fell forward onto his face. The wind beat down his attempts to get up, and pulled at his fur while it stole the warmth from his body. Another staccatoed plea escaped from his mouth, but that was all.
The mother blinked once at her baby’s struggle, and then turned away to warm her other children while her runt froze in the first real snap of winter’s arrival.
And so, Keiji Mogami reached out with his hands made of darkness to collect their selfishness and their lives, and add it to that of the demons and lost souls rattling around inside him. The mother’s eyes widened and her whiskers twitched at her reaper, but a moment too late, and the four kittens at her side fell still and silent without a struggle.
The last kitten lay in the road, quivering, as the snow slowly erased the dark solid of its fur.
Keiji Mogami circled around it, a wolf surrounding a lamb.
He was interrupted.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” came a man’s voice. “It’s creepy, back here. Gives me a bad feeling- besides the fact that it’s cold. Looks like my landlord’s gonna have to get over his no pets rule just for the night, huh?” The man’s shoes and pajama pants stuck out from beneath his winter coat as the moonlight framed him. “C’mon, you guys, this isn’t the time to make me come find you. It’s really damn cold,” he muttered, and punctuated the statement with a vigorous swipe of his cupped hands down his shoulders and arms.
Keiji Mogami joined the deeper shadows of the building, the black kitten wheezing at his feet, and watched.
“See, this is why dogs are better. They come when they’re,” the man spotted the family of corpses gathered near the side of the alley. “Oh,” he said, kneeling down and reaching out to touch them.
The mother fell over, her eyes still wide open.
“Shit,” the man said, checking the kittens and then pulling his hand away like he had been bitten. “....They’re still warm, even.”
Another gust of wind sent a chill through the air, almost as if to defy his statement in Keiji Mogami’s stead.
After a moment, the man closed the eyes of the mother cat, and stood. “But,” he counted something under his breath, and stopped at four, “there were five. The black one. Where’s the black one?” He whirled around, and his footsteps stuttered when his eyes fell on the raised lump in the snow where the final member of the litter lay, the shadows cast by the moonlight lapping at its heels.
The man hurried over to it, and fell to his knees as he scooped it up from the blanket of snow.
It twitched in his hands, and then cried. The man wiped the moisture from its fur, and then pulled it into his jacket.
“Shit,” he said, his hands gently moving over the kitten’s body as he pulled it into the collar of his sleeping shirt. “Shit.”
Then, Keiji Mogami’s presence enveloped him with the moving shadows.
As the darkness grew, the man’s hair stood on end without the wind’s help, and slowly, slowly, he craned his eyes upwards to meet the glowing, piercing eyes of Keiji Mogami glimmering back down at him.
“Shit,” the man said again, trembling along with the kitten in his arms.
“What are you doing?” Keiji Mogami asked, his voice like that of the earth hissing from the depths of a cave. “What will you do with that animal?”
The man stood up, tremors shooting up and down his legs, and grit his teeth. “I don’t know. Let it follow me around and feed it ramen, milk, and takoyaki.”
“I know you,” Keiji Mogami continued.
“And I think I knew about a guy with your name, once,” Reigen said, his wide eyes following the black spirit. “But you’re not that person. We have nothing to do with each other.” Then, for good measure, “Please go away.”
“Don’t you know that this is the way the world works? By using the weak for the gain of the strong? That creature is going to die anyway.” Keiji Mogami took a step closer.
Reigen took a step further away, and eyed the friendly light hanging over the front of his apartment complex.
“Running will not save you,” Keiji Mogami said. “Nothing is safe from my evil, because my evil is that of the world reflected back toward itself. I am inevitable.”
Reigen’s hands ran over the kitten huddling against his chest. “I admired someone with your name, a long time ago. He was a somebody.” He frowned. “Now, you’re this.”
“I am what your Shigeo will become,” Keiji Mogami answered.
“Mob’s not like you.”
Keiji Mogami’s laughter echoed into the night. “How would you know? You’ve never been in his position. You are nothing like him- you’re a user, and he is the used.”
Reigen grinned, and then shivered. “So you think that’s how it is?”
“Fool. I know that is exactly how it is.”
The snow collected on Reigen’s orange hair as if to mark the eternity that passed by beneath the light of the moon, but fell through Keiji Mogami as if time were nothing.
The kitten mewled, and Reigen closed his eyes as he stroked it. “Are you going to eat me, or possess me, or whatever it is you do?”
The moon held its breath as the wind lifted the snow from Reigen’s shoulders and hair.
“No,” Keiji Mogami said. “Not until Shigeo Kageyama sees you for what you are.”
“He already knows,” Reigen blurted. “He always knew.”
“Does he?”
“I don’t feel like repeating myself.”
Keiji Mogami melted into the shadows, and overtook them. “We will see, won’t we?” His eyes glinted yellow, like the slitted eyes of the mother cat had in the moment of her death. “If that’s the difference.”
Reigen carved footprints into the snow as he journeyed back to his home, his gaze locked onto Keiji Mogami’s the whole way to the pool of light illuminating the snow and stairs standing behind him, and then all but ran into his waiting apartment.