"Enough rambling, enough of the mystical mumbo-jumbo. Spell it out for me — what exactly is our romance like?"
Tomie's brows drew tight, her beautiful eyes narrowing, and the candlelight dancing in her pupils carried a flicker of something dangerous.
"Your story began in the rubble of a fallen Tower. The Fool set out on a road of no return, walking it backward, and a Wheel of Fortune knocked out of alignment left the two of you unrecognizable."
The fortune teller gathered up the tarot cards and lifted her head to look at Tomie, a faint curve at the corner of her mouth. In the dim candlelight that smile looked unfathomable, and an air of mystery clung to her whole body.
Her voice was soft, like wind drifting in from somewhere very far away.
"If you want me to state it plainly: the two of you are a terrible match."
The moment the words landed, the air in the room seemed to congeal.
Amamiya Rin's eyelid twitched.
How to put it? He thought the fortune teller was telling the truth. Wasn't his relationship with Tomie exactly what the cards had described?
The thing was, truths came in two kinds: the ones you say out loud and the ones you don't. She ran a fortune-telling parlor, for heaven's sake. What was she thinking, hitting a customer with something that ugly? Genuine ability or not, a shop whose main draw was love readings had no use for genuine ability.
Amamiya Rin delivered the critique silently, entirely unruffled.
"I'll allow you to say that again."
Tomie's expression didn't change. Same face as a moment ago, same eyes. But Amamiya Rin could feel it clearly — the pressure rolling off her was mounting at a rate you could practically watch.
It wasn't his imagination.
The temperature in the room seemed to be dropping and rising at the same time, a contradiction that sat badly on the skin. The life force field of a genuine powerhouse turned her anger into a stoked furnace, physically disturbing the movement of the air around her.
Amamiya Rin wasn't the only one who noticed. Across the table, the fortune teller registered the shift in the air too — and the pressure pouring off Tomie.
Should she keep talking?
The fortune teller hesitated. The woman in front of her seemed to be more than just an immortal body.
"Didn't you hear me? I said I'd allow you! Say it again!"
Tomie leaned in across the table, her eyes vicious, staring the fortune teller down from above.
Under the weight of that glare, irritation flashed through the fortune teller's eyes.
So she was more than an immortal body. She still wasn't a witch with real power. Just a big, brawny Muggle — so what if she was strong?
Annoyed now, the fortune teller answered without softening a thing.
"Your romance will run into trouble after trouble. Together, all you'll do is torment each other. Better for you both to separate sooner rather than later."
Her voice stayed soft, her tone full of concern, as though she genuinely had their best interests at heart.
A vein stood out on Tomie's forehead. She raised her right hand, and then—
"CRACK—!!!"
The sound detonated in the cramped little room.
The solid wood table split clean down the middle, jagged splinters bursting from the break, fragments flying everywhere. The crystal ball rolled off onto the floor, spun a few times, and came to rest against the corner of the wall. Tarot cards scattered across the ground. The candles toppled from the shock.
The room went dark.
Only the light leaking through the gap in the curtains remained, barely sketching out the silhouettes of the three of them.
Tomie stood up.
In the dimness her frame looked enormous, the line of her shoulders drawn taut, the muscle in her arms swelling faintly. She was a volcano a breath from eruption, and the pressure she gave off filled the room until breathing felt impossible.
"So you're good at fortune-telling? Then did you see this one coming — whether you'd get beaten up today?"
She looked down at the fortune teller and bared a savage grin. That beautiful face was frightening now, the lines of muscle in it hard enough to be called brutish.
The smile vanished from the fortune teller's face. She shrank back without thinking, her body strung tight as a fully drawn bow, wariness and shock crossing her eyes. Those eyes that had been playing at profundity a moment ago — the pupils contracted sharply.
Tomie's sudden explosion had genuinely startled her.
A solid wood table shattered by a single slap. If that much force came down on her instead, she'd end up no different from the table.
Damn it. She'd picked a fight with the wrong sort.
Outwardly the fortune teller said nothing, but privately she was cursing her luck.
There's a saying: when a scholar meets a soldier, reason gets you nowhere. Running into a brute like this was exactly the same.
"All right, don't do anything rash. Love fortunes are just entertainment. There's no need to hit anyone."
Amamiya Rin reached out and caught Tomie's arm, stopping her before she could walk over and beat the fortune teller senseless.
"Entertainment? If it really were just entertainment, one beating would be the end of it."
Tomie turned her head toward Amamiya Rin, displeasure written all over her face, her chest heaving like an enraged panther's.
Because this wasn't entertainment at all.
She and Amamiya Rin both knew this woman had the real thing. Those words just now — the Tower, the Fool, the Wheel of Fortune — had read their shared past straight out of the cards. That wasn't the sort of thing you could invent on the spot, and there had been nothing vague or hedged about it.
"So what? She wasn't wrong, was she?"
Amamiya Rin said it mildly, his hand still around her wrist.
Tomie's eyes went wide, and she glared at him, indignant.
"This is our fate. We're destined to spend our lives side by side. Whatever trouble comes, fate will keep us bound together, forever. Living or dead, nothing can separate us."
Amamiya Rin lifted his head and met her eyes. There was no deliberate sentiment in his voice, no performed tenderness. He simply stated it, flat and plain.
"She read our relationship through her own lens, but isn't that exactly what we are — a cursed bond? Even a very bad cursed bond is still the life neither of us would throw away over a few words from a stranger."
The words carried almost no emotional rise or fall, and his eyes were a lake without wind on it, not a ripple. Yet that dull, matter-of-fact statement of what they were to each other sent color creeping into Tomie's cheeks. It started at the base of her ears, spread slowly upward, and finally left even her neck tinted a faint pink.
"You… you jerk…"
She started to say something and found her mind completely blank. So she stamped her foot instead.
"BOOM!"
The impact split the floor tiles in several places.
"So annoying! Who asked to hear any of that?!"
Tomie turned her face away, the tips of her ears red enough to bleed, her voice going soft with flustered embarrassment. The fierce tone was still there, but all the pressure had drained out of it.
"Why can you just come out with things like that so easily? Something so — so sappy — doesn't it embarrass you at all?"
Why would it? He was only stating facts.
No — not only stating facts. He was also handing back to Tomie the very words she had once said to him.
Amamiya Rin's mind was still water, untroubled by a single ripple.
Behind the two halves of the broken table, the fortune teller watched all of this with an expression complicated enough to suggest she'd swallowed a live spider.
She hadn't been hit, but somehow this felt worse than being hit.
"Sorry about your furniture…"
Amamiya Rin took out his wallet, pulled five ten-thousand-yen notes from it, and held them out to the fortune teller.
The fortune teller narrowed her eyes, then smiled. She reached out with her right hand, fingertips brushing the bills, but she didn't take them right away.
Her fingers slid along the edge of the notes and closed gently around Amamiya Rin's hand, one fingertip tracing a line across his palm, neither too light nor too firm.
The movement was slow, deliberately suggestive.
"You really are a gentle man, sir."
Her voice came out soft and sweet, as if dipped in honey, her pupils glistening damply in the dim light as she gazed up at Amamiya Rin. Their eyes met, and something about that liquid tenderness struck him as off.
Had he… overlooked something?
"Still…"
The fortune teller let out a small sigh, her eyes brimming with care and worry.
"It must be exhausting, having such a violent girlfriend. Managing her moods, cleaning up the messes she makes. A man as gentle and handsome as you deserves to be treated properly."
Onii-chan, your girlfriend won't beat me up if she finds out, will she? Not like me — all I'd ever do is feel sorry for onii-chan.
As the fortune teller finished speaking, an inexplicable phantom voice went off in Amamiya Rin's head, and his face went slightly strange.
And in that same instant, the temperature in the room jumped several more degrees.
Tomie's face was still red, but the embarrassment had turned to fury.
Her eyes narrowed on that right hand resting against Amamiya Rin's palm. Her jaw tightened. Her knuckles cracked as her fists clenched.
"You bitch! Are you ever going to stop? I've been putting up with you long enough!"
Before the words were even out she stopped bothering about how Amamiya Rin might feel, seized the fortune teller by the arm, and hauled that small body off the sofa the way you'd lift a chick by the scruff.
"THUD—!"
The dull impact cracked through the cramped room. Tomie slammed her flat onto the floor, her back striking the splintered wreckage of the table, and the pain screwed her whole face up.
"That hurts!"
She curled up with a cry, then raised her head — eyes rimmed red — and gave Amamiya Rin a pitiful look.
"Hey! Are you deaf?"
Tomie crouched down, grabbed her collar with one hand, and hauled her upper body off the floor.
"I have been putting up with you for a long damn time."
Tomie brought her face in close — close enough for the fortune teller to see the rage burning in her pupils, that beautiful face wearing an undisguised snarl of malice.
"Wake up, you ugly cow. You've been throwing yourself at him nonstop since the second we walked in. Do you think I'm blind? With a face like that nobody would take you if you paid them, and you've got the nerve to come on to Rin right in front of me? Have you no idea what you are?"
"I'm not… I didn't…"
Every trace of the mystique she'd worn at the start of the reading was gone. Tears stood in her eyes as she protested, wounded.
"Still putting on an act? In front of me? Don't you know I'm the expert in this field?"
Seeing the look on the fortune teller's face, Tomie let out a snort of laughter.
Ever since she'd started building muscle she had stopped using the Tomies' seduction techniques, but in front of her, the fortune teller's little tricks were like showing off swordplay before a grandmaster.
Playing pitiful? Playing helpless? They'd run those moves on Amamiya Rin more times than anyone could count.
"That's it! I know what I overlooked!"
Amamiya Rin clapped his hands together as it dawned on him.
Seduction. That was it — seduction. From the moment he'd walked through the door, the fortune teller had been using some special method on him. But his entry-level Dhyana method was the White Skeleton Visualization, and after so many years of practice, with his mental power deepened besides, not even Tomie's charm could stir his mind.
Which was exactly why he hadn't sensed a thing, even though the fortune teller had almost certainly been using some kind of power on him.
Amamiya Rin studied the fortune teller thoughtfully, in no hurry now to stop Tomie's rough handling of her.
"So it isn't only the ability to read fortunes. There's real supernatural power too?"
Divination on its own could be called a skill, or just another phenomenon of this world. But charm magic was no longer a matter of mere technique.
Amamiya Rin simply pulled out his notebook and started leafing through it.
A few pages in, his gaze caught and held on one of them.
"Found it."
The Divining Witch. From the Junji Ito short story Tomio. The key character is a mysterious witch who runs a fortune-telling shop — a bitch, to borrow Tomie's phrasing — who likes to seduce handsome men. That, of course, is only the surface. What the witch actually wants is the handsome man's head.
She possesses a particular magic, or rather a curse, that uses her own hair as its medium to lay a beheading curse on a man. Once he puts on the high-necked garment she has woven from that hair, the collar contracts a little at a time as the hours pass, until it strangles clean through his neck.
But because of the curse, a severed neck won't kill him. Even with his head off his body for a short while, putting it back is enough.
"…I'd almost forgotten there was a piece of grotesquerie like this…"
Amamiya Rin turned it over in his mind.
Looking at the entry recorded in his notebook, he thought of someone else, and a flash of insight lit up in his head.
Fujino Terumi. Could this curse apply to her situation?
Or, put another way — was there some connection between the curse of The Hanging Balloons and this fortune-teller witch's curse?
Amamiya Rin lifted his head and looked around, his gaze settling quickly on the corridor that led deeper into the building.
If his records were accurate, once this witch had taken her target's head, she kept the man's head hung up and preserved in a sealed room.
Human heads hanging in midair — it was impossible not to make the connection to The Hanging Balloons. Well, the two weren't necessarily related. A manga artist's inspiration has its limits, and curses or other effects delivered through sound turn up in plenty of Junji Ito's stories.
____
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