A/N: I'm going to be totally honest with you guys, I completely forgot about these one shots. I wrote the first draft of this chapter last Thursday, then forgot about it until about an hour ago. It's a bit more rushed than I'd like, but I want to post it today, and I'm honestly not sure if I'll have any time tomorrow to improve it. Besides, some of these ideas are even a bit strange already. I got chapter 1's white cat prompt from a Halloween website, and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a black cat, but I spent five years hiding my black cat every year on Halloween, and I don't feel like encouraging the superstitious people out to kill them. Anyway, sorry for any errors, OOCness, typos or just overall crappy writing. I hope you guys like this chapter, and I'll be back next Wednesday with part three :)

For the lack of a better word, Reiji Kizaki was a nonbeliever. He didn't believe in any kind of higher power guiding life, and he didn't believe that there was an afterlife. People made their own decisions, and they controlled themselves. When they died, it was the end, no heaven nor hell awaited them. No angel would appear at a human's prayer, and no god brought the seasons that shed cherry blossums and rained snow. It was all science and the spin of the earth.

Along with his lack of belief in a higher power, Reiji also spared no thought to the supernatural. He didn't jump at shadows, and he didn't spend his nights with his blankets pulled up to his chin to keep the vampires away after a horror movie. He didn't think that the dolls held in the arms of little children during a walk around town would come to life at night as evil beings bent on luring curious kids to their deaths. The streaks Reiji saw out of the corner of his eye were just someone moving, not a ghost looking to tear out his soul. For Reiji Kizaki, supernatural beings were all myths, and a waste of time. They were something to sigh at and forget. He was not afraid of things that did not exist.

It was Reiji's strength and his lack of fear in just about everything that made him the perfect candidate for Defense Duty shifts after 11pm. Neighbors could strike at any time, regardless of whether it was daylight or night, so someone always had to be watching. Due to that, at 11pm, Reiji was headed out the door into the dark October night on his way to Defense Duty.

The air outside was cold, very cold, much more so than during the day. Reiji was wearing a sweatshirt over his long-sleeved shirt, but it did little to ward off the freeze that crawled through his veins. As he walked, his breaths turned to tendrils of faded white fog in front of him. He ended up picking up his pace a bit as he headed toward Border HQ and the Forbidden Zone, just to warm up a little.

Just a few minutes into his walk, though, Reiji saw someone turn the corner to his right. He saw just the flash of a silhouette exiting an alley and turning onto the road that Reiji himself was walking on, but the person was headed the other way. Curiosity born from his lack of anything to do, as well as suspicion over who would be out so late at night, won over Reiji's mind, and he turned to look at the person who he'd just seen. However, there was no one there.

Puzzled, Reiji stopped, eyeing the stores near the alley. They were all closed, and there was no way the person had gone the twenty yards between the alley they had emerged from to the next one on the street in the mere two seconds it had taken Reiji to look behind him. The whole incident was unrealistic in nature, and with a small shake of his head, Reiji chalked up the whole thing to hallucinations due to lack of sleep, and he continued his walk.

-000-

Time seemed to be moving oddly slow as Reiji passed the halfway point between Border HQ and Tamakoma, which happened to be a coffee shop that Rindo frequented on days that he had meetings with the other executives. Reiji himself had never been there, and he was just wondering if they had anything good on their menu when he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye again.

This time, Reiji turned to look behind him quickly, and thought he saw the train of a white dress flowing in the wind, just before his eyes were met with an empty street. He furrowed his brow is suspicion. His walk was only getting weirder and weirder. If he kept seeing things, he would need to take a longer nap before his nighttime Defense Duty next time he was assigned to it.

Reiji had only turned back to face forward and taken one step when he suddenly heard an ear-splitting screech. It echoed through his brain, causing a wave of pain. As he tried to clear the fog that the paralyzing sound was forming in his mind, Reiji noticed that the scream sounded like it was coming from the alley next to him, and it held the same tone throughout. Then, suddenly, it stopped.

Reiji rubbed his head as his face relaxed and his eyes opened fully. The pain in his skull faded away, allowing him to focus more on his surroundings and staying on his feet. He looked around for the scream's source, but saw nothing. He then backed up a few steps and looked down the alley he had just passed, which was where he was sure the scream had come from. The alley was dimly lit by the nearby streetlight, but not much illumination was needed to see that the space was completely empty. Reiji frowned. The noise had definitely come from that allley, he was sure of it, unless he had just imagined the whole thing, but that seemed just a bit more farfetched than the thought that someone really had been there.

More confused than anything else, Reiji continued walking toward HQ, only to stop as a memory struck him out of the blue. It was October, the month of Halloween, which had caught the attention of Yuma. The Neighbor boy had gotten curious about the holiday, and Osamu and Chika had spent the whole day showing him myths and legends and explaining how the whole thing worked. One of those things that Yuma had been shown was the legend of the Banshee. The Banshee was a death omen from early times in the European area, which would appear before someone and scream if the person was soon going to die. After hearing it's screech from the videos Yuma had watched, Reiji had silently dubbed the Banshee Konami's long-lost twin.

The thought had been amusing earlier, but after hearing a similar screech when it was almost midnight as he walking down the street to go spend five hours defending the city from creatures from another dimension, thinking about Konami's Banshee-like qualities was no longer fun at all. It wasn't that Reiji was convinced he would die or anything. He didn't jump to conclusions like his gullible teammate, let alone believe in Halloween lore, but the situation was still a bit peculiar.

The stone cold logic part of Reiji's mind that wasn't at all affected by all that had happened, decided that maybe some woman had been attacked nearby. Even though he risked being late to Defense Duty by going off course, Reiji activated his Trigger, then jumped up onto the rooftops to investigate.

However, after five minutes of combing the surrounding area, Reiji turned up nothing. Either he had imagined everything, or whoever had screamed was far away. Regardless, there was nothing he could do to fix the problem. In the end, Reiji found himself actually hoping he was hallucinating, because the thought of failing to protect people, just as he had failed to protect his student in the Second Invasion, was a heavy burden of guilt that he didn't want to feel again.

With a silent sigh, Reiji returned to the street, where he deactivated his Trigger and continued walking.

-000-

When Reiji reached the Forbidden Zone, he tracked down an exhausted Arashiyama and tired Tokieda. The latter had simply had an early morning, while the former hadn't slept in almost 48 hours, and was running on fumes. Arashiyama stilled smiled though, when he saw Reiji, and drew on his last reserves of energy to smoothly switch out with the man.

"There's been no activity in the past few hours, Reiji-san, so it might be pretty slow tonight," Arashiyama informed after Reiji activated his Trigger. The man nodded, and was about to send the two teens in front of him on their way when he remembered what he'd heard earlier.

"Arashiyama, did you happen to hear a really loud screech about twenty minutes ago?" Reiji asked. It had been loud, and Reiji didn't doubt that it could have been heard so far away when the city was as quiet as it had been.

Arashiyama fixed Reiji with a confused look, cocking his head to the side like a dog.

"No?" he said, though it was more like a question. Reiji nodded.

"I guess I was just imagining things.." he muttered to himself, gaining another confused look from the younger captain in front of him.

"What?" Arashiyama asked, not understanding what the man in front of him had just said. Reiji shook his head dismissively.

"I'm just a little tired. You should get home, though. You look like you're going to pass out on your feet," the man advised, steering the conversation in a different direction. Arashiyama nodded, flashing Reiji a smile.

"I will. Stay safe, Reiji-san," Arashiyama said, before he turned away and headed toward HQ with Tokieda. Reiji watched the two go for a moment, then he turned and started to walk, only to stop after his fourth step.

"He who hears a Banshee screech is doomed to die, and only he will hear it..." Reiji recalled the phrase from Yuma's videos. Arashiyama hadn't heard anything.

A gust of cold wind hit Reiji straight in the face, and the man shook his head. He would definitely take a longer nap before Defense Duty next time. Imagining things would just make it harder to focus on work

A/N: Is it even possible to scare Reiji...