(I did not create and do not own Ouran High School Host Club. I am not a manga-ka. No-one would want me to be a manga-ka. Everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.)
"No. Absolutely not. My good, sweet, innocent daughter going to a hellhole like Ouran High School . . . ?"
"I toured the campus. It's very nice," Haruhi offered, as a sop to justice.
She didn't expect her father to notice. He didn't.
". . . packed to the rafters with boys of demonic charm who'll pursue my dear Haruhi and steal her heart. They'll devour you like a petit four! How will I ever tell Kotoko what happened, when she asks why I didn't care for our darling daughter?"
"I already sent in the transfer form."
Only Ouran High School had the libraries and teachers for what she needed to learn. Haruhi knew there was some risk. The rich bastards could turn on an outsider for no reason at all, and her family was more than enough excuse. She just had to keep a low profile and study hard.
The first week went well. The only times anyone noticed her were to sniff or look affronted, until the afternoon every library and study room turned out to be noisy, busy and crowded. Moving farther and higher into the building, she spotted the Fourth Music Room on a floor map. It was off on a top floor by itself. Somehow she knew it would be quiet, and solitary, and she needed to be there.
She would have recognized a clumsy summoning, but it was expertly cast. The glamour ended as she crossed the room's lintel. Haruhi felt the energies of a pocket-realm around her, but the heavy silent doors swung closed on their own. When she threw herself back she fell against them.
She knew what she'd see when she raised her eyes. She just didn't know what forms they'd take.
The room was incongruously bright. Linen cloths covered dainty tables, set among chintz upholstered seats. On a sideboard china and silver gleamed. The array of six handsome (too handsome, her instincts warned) human boys was worse than the monsters she expected. It left her imagination free to embroider their true forms.
The blond seated at their center was dressed as a Goblin King from some fantasy movie, with irridescent eye shadow and white fur and crystals and sequins. He was the one who'd set the spell. From halfway across the room Haruhi felt powers of attraction and seduction roiling around him. She took several steps away from the door, past a vase on a narrow stand, and she stopped herself.
The dark boy standing behind the king had found the only shadows in the sunny room. Glasses hid his eyes as perfectly as a mask. His powers were colder, command and coercion and probably truth-telling as well. A skull headed silver pike rested against his shoulder and black bat-wings arched behind him, so he looked like a messenger of death.
On the blond's other side was an even taller boy, dark and somber. A wide-bladed sword hung at his side and his face was painted like a temple guardian. Pointed ears and an arrow-tipped tail turned the blond child on his shoulder into an imp. Haruhi tried to keep from shaking. She was doomed. Only the greatest powers manifested as small and cute.
"That's no hunter. What's a boy doing here?"
"I bet our king messed up. Again."
The last two boys, with little red horns and black pitchforks, sat back to back in perfect symmetry. Haruhi recognized them. The Hitachiin twins were in several of her classes. She'd really thought they were human. Here and now the swirl of chaos around them was obvious.
"Tell them it's not my fault, Mother," the tall blond whined.
"Men can be profitable customers also," the dark boy said. "Fujioka Haruhi . . . ."
Suddenly the blond was right in front of her.
"Welcome to the Ouran High School Host Club, where young women with too much time on their hands can spend pleasant hours away from the mundane world. Or boys too, of course. What type does a commoner like? Do you want the company of our little devils, Hikaru and Kaoru?"
The twins clasped hands and grinned at her. Other Ouran students might not have seen the edge of mocking cruelty. Haruhi stepped carefully backward.
". . . scholarship student, poor as dirt . . . ." the dark boy droned.
". . . Or Morinozuka Takashi, the strong and silent type, or the little boy type Haninozuka Mitsukuni . . . ."
"I like to eat cake! Do you want to come and have some cake with me?"
The boy (who was not, of course, as young as he looked) held out a plate of cake decorated with marzipan apples. The temple guardian took a step forward and bowed to let the child slide off his shoulder. Haruhi backed up again.
Was there a chance of escape? Her disguise of not-worth-looking-at seemed to have held. The boy in the shadows slid his glasses up his nose, and the light flashed off them.
". . . motherless, without connection to any of the powerful families . . . ."
". . . or shadow type Ootori Kyouya, or perhaps . . . ." The blond stepped too close to her again. ". . . enchanting type Suou Tamaki! Am I your type, Fujioka Haruhi?"
"I'm trying to find a place to study. I just want out of here!"
A quick finger-rune behind her back checked for wards on the door. She didn't feel them. She might be able to get back out. Even if the hosts followed her back to the human realm, she'd have more power to defend herself.
The vase rocked as she backed past it. Haruhi steadied it with one hand . . . .
Life-force screamed and mourned, stored like scraps in a refrigerator to be devoured later. This wasn't a vase, or not just a vase. The girls who came to the Host Club for tea and cake . . . were not the only ones feeding.
Ouran's students hadn't gone out of their way to make a scholarship student welcome. Haruhi didn't expect it. She dodged their malice or boredom, mostly, and felt amused contempt for how they wasted their advantages. She couldn't leave them to sicken and die though.
Instead of one step back through the door Haruhi went sideways, knocking the vase from its pedestal. Bright fragments fountained out of it. She stepped smoothly back after that, but the door was shut. The shock of its wards was like lightning. (She had reason to fear thunderstorms.) Haruhi screamed and fell forward.
". . . last daughter of the Fujioka line of demon hunters," Ootori finished.
The fountain winked out spark by spark. The last of the light glinted from Ootori's glasses, showing who set traps within a trap. Haruhi crouched in the dark. Two voices spoke together, changing from human to something other, and the human laughter was worse than the other.
"She's a girl after all . . . plain and poor and badly dressed. Silly demon hunter . . . can't hunt us now. Can't kill us . . . can't get away. You're our toy now . . . fun to hunt . . . and kill . . . and eat. You shouldn't have come to the Host Club . . . shouldn't have come to Ouran. Shouldn't have been born . . . since you're going to die . . . die . . . die."
Haruhi stood, pulling a dagger from the waist sheath hidden by her heavy sweater. The blade shone. As she called up power her short hair shifted and spread, coiling across her shoulders and down her back. She expected claws from the dark, but the hosts gave her time to summon a ring of protection.
One twin still looked human, but the same face grinned from something mantis-like behind him. Morinozuka swelled twenty feet high, with a raised sword like a roof-beam. Haninozuka's face went sharp and pointed, and tails like a fox lashed behind it. Suou's perfect features stretched to monstrosity as a predator's jaw thrust forward and his eyes turned gold.
"Perhaps you know the saying, if you don't have cash pay with your carcass?"
The way back was closed, unless the hosts chose to open it. She might take down one demon or even two, but not six. Behind the hosts a table cloth had slipped, that covered not a table but a block of stained stone. And Haruhi heard the rustle of tentacles.
She had no time for grief or regret. Her hands, one armed and the other open, moved from gesture to gesture. The binding rose like ribbons about her. The ring of protection flickered, forms she didn't care to watch pressing against it. She pushed up a sleeve of her sweater and sliced across the flesh.
The blade flushed red, and then it was too heavy to hold. She let it fall. The ring of protection vanished like a bubble.
"Mother, your daughter is coming to see you," Haruhi said in the dark, and then she let herself fall also.
(Not the end of the story, I promise!)
