The Vampire Detective – Second Grace

Chapter One – By the Harsh Light of Day

Disclaimer: I own TVDverse. Not the characters. Well, not most of them, anyway.

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

---

By the time sunlight came by way of dawn, the sheer amount of headache reminded Shinichi of the time when he had drunk half a bottle of strong alcohol in the thought that it would cure him for a few hours more that one time. Not to mention that, despite the fact that he was a vampire now and therefore theoretically immune to nearly all types of diseases, a subtle feel of nausea continued to berate him for most of the morning.

So, all in all, it wasn't too surprising for him when, only a couple of steps into the classroom, his arm was caught in a relatively strong grip and he was suddenly being dragged out of the room and towards the deserted music room which, coincidentally, also had no windows, being an inside room.

"Kudo Shinichi, what the hell do you think you're doing? You look terrible!"

Shinichi tried to put on a nonchalant look but failed. The yawn might have had something to do with it.

"It's not fair. It really isn't. I don't know what's going on with you."

"I can deal with this, Ran. I've told you. I –"

"You've asked me to trust you while lying to me for over a year! So no. I don't want to hear your excuses. I know something's wrong with you. Just tell me what's wrong, Shinichi. Please."

He leaned back against the wall, hands covering his face for a moment and running through bedraggled hair that was starting to look more like the thief's than his own.

He caught his reflection in the shiny surface of one of the instruments and shuddered, reminded.

"I cant," he said flatly. It was an old conversation.

"Why can't you?"

"You wouldn't understand."

I don't want you to.

"More like you won't let me!" Shinichi winced. He hadn't thought that he was being obvious. "Won't you even let me help?"

He was on his feet and bearing down on her in an instant, oblivious to the momentary spike of fear.

"NO." The moment was lost into the now uncomfortable silence. Shinichi backed away. "I don't want to do that to you, Ran. Not to anyone. Not ever- " he cut himself off before he could complete the sentence with an unspoken curse. Not ever again.

Ran gave him a long look, but at long last averted her gaze.

"I'm only trying to help. But you won't let me."

"I do let you help."

"No, Shinichi, you don't." She smiled, though a heartbreakingly warm and open smile. "I guess. . . I guess it's just one of those things that make you who you are."

Oddly enough, there wasn't any bitterness in what she said. Only sad disappointment that still marked her face even as she swept out of the room.

Shinichi himself stayed on, staring at the spot where she had been. Words whispered into a room which held a ghost of music in the air.

"I just don't want you to get hurt, Ran."

A hundred different arguments and a thousand different dangers. But he could not protect her from himself.

----

It had been hard, to begin with.

Hard to remember.

He, who had been used to power, to invulnerability, to inhumanity, for so very, very long. . .

It had come as a shock to find out that he had never been alone. Never in all his long years, that short time on this green earth that he had been given, had he been the only one to wish another person dead and see it done. Never the only one to enjoy it.

He wasn't – never had been – alone.

In some people this might elicit horror, terror, self-loathing.

All he felt was contempt, and disgust.

He was more than this, more than them. He had had power!

And then. . .

Then he had come.

His plan had been perfect. Not like the others who were in here with him – perfect. It could have even handled the presence of one or more talented detectives. It had been designed for talented detectives.

And then they had come. More accurately, her. Come, spoiled everything, and not even laid a hand on him to do so.

They had used someone else. Someone young, smart, with knowledge of at least a few of the old ways.

Taken him and changed him.

He knew it was her because it had her touch all over it. Her smell. The wood in the walls and the silver in the bars that kept him in, chained him like iron could not, make him no better, no worse, no more powerful than the others, the petty humans around him.

He snarled, eyes glinting in the electric light, and tested one last time the lock on the door.

Beyond even his hearing, someone walked the halls towards him, and smiled.

---

Up and down, ceiling to floor, chair to chair and wall to wall. Round and round, catch the eyes and let's go off again. . .

Footsteps, crashes, shouts and screams and the whistle of wood through air – all interspersed with the by now monotone drone of the teacher's lesson.

All in all it was a relatively normal day for that particular class of Ekoda High.

"You – you take that back, you . . . you egoist!"

Kuroba Kaito just laughed and dodged with less grace than his night-time persona, but then again this wasn't work. He was playing, and they both knew it.

The class was divided into three parts at any given time; those who rooted for Kaito, those who sided with Aoko, and those who simply watched for the show. Any others soon left, unable to take the craziness. Usually because they were either unable to learn because of the distractions or unable to teach, believing themselves not to be respected after the slightest prank.

Yet those who stayed grew used to the chaos, able to tell the moods of their magician almost as surely as if they could read his face. They could not have helped but notice the strangeness of the past few weeks. Things had gone from crazier than usual, to subdued – almost to the point of things being calm – to tense and on edge in the course of just a couple of weeks or so.

Currently, things were finding a new normality.

For most of the class, this meant watching things as they progressed and making sure that they avoided the firing lines. Keiko, for whom nothing much had really happened, nothing had truly changed – except, perhaps, for a new-found love of Jane Austen novels. Koizumi Akako had stopped draping herself over and around Kaito whenever she had the chance. Now, she only did it when she felt like it. The rest of her time was spent being friendly with the girl currently waving a mop around shouting mild abuse and trigonometry answers and devoting a certain amount of her power to getting a rise out of Hakuba, who had only recently been initiated into her world. Sometimes, both at the same time. Hakuba himself had changed in two major ways, and neither of them instantly recognisable. The first was that he knew, had incontrovertible proof, that Kuroba Kaito was also the Kaitou Kid. Said proof still resided in various places about his house, from the countless DNA samples left lying carelessly about to the miscellany of gadgets, gizmos and bits of spare costume that somehow found themselves in his laundry after a heist. Had it been a year or more ago that this had happened the other boy would have been arrested and likely in prison by now. As things were, he separated the whites, blues and reds, making sure that Kuroba knew that he owed him each time and actively helping Aoko the next day, often in the form of finding subtle ways to trip the magician up in his flight. The second part of his troubles came with names, and Koizumi and Kudo were well and truly boxless. Kudo didn't even have a known blood type any more.

Aoko was undeniably stronger. Whether that was due to her recent experiences, her newfound reason to hit her best friend even harder than usual whenever the opportunity arose or the worrying fact that her friendship with one Mouri Ran had resulted in irregular karate classes (with mop in attendance), no one really knew.

Kaito, perversely, had actually become gradually more relaxed as the days wore on. This might or might not have had anything to do with the fact that almost everyone who he had been most worried about finding out his identity – and subsequently having him arrested and also in some cases hating his guts – was now on his side.

In the middle of a complex yet surprisingly simple-looking manoeuvre, things started to go wrong.

A resounding 'whack' filled the room, narrowly missing its target and making the audience stare.

Kaito, sprawled out on the floor between chairs and tables, blinked up at them in bemused surprise.

Rubbing at his left forearm, he got back up to the inevitable sea of worry and stares.

It might have just been his imagination. It should have been.

But he could have sworn that, just for a moment, long enough to disrupt the flow of his acrobatics, a seemingly old scar had acted up, hurting. . . aching.

Aching like old men who said that old wounds grew sore when the weather changed, and talked of youkai in the woods and ninja between the trees.

Behind the carefree poker face and the instinctive act of harmless clown that he put on for the class that came with it, he found himself start to worry.

---

For the rest of the day, Akako watched him.

It wasn't s though she didn't usually watch him anyway – he was a very interesting person to have in one's class, after all. And that didn't even account for the fact that he was impervious to her unnatural charms, either. Though it was a rather large part of the whole. It made the chase that much sweeter, the thrill and the suspense worth something.

The fact that he was an . . . item. . . already with the Nakamori girl only complicated things a little. A hurdle to be flown over, as it were.

Her red eyes narrowed as she watched him from a distance, stalking the wild in its natural habitat.

He seemed to be perfectly at ease as he temporarily turned Saguru-chan's hair green. Nothing seemed to be amiss when he put his head down and got on with his work, as he surely did do every so often during a day. All seemed well as he told bad jokes in the lunch hall and then later when he openly (if you were classed as one of Those Who Knew) teased Aoko about Kid, pondering the nature of the next heist and barely stopping short of a second mop fight.

Except, of course, for the fact that she, Koizumi Akako, was a witch. Not a simple magician was she, with their tricks and smoke and mirrors. Not even a Magician, one of those who had power in their very blood and being, yet mostly knew not a thing of it. She was a witch, who knew where her power came from thank you very much, and was definitely not afraid to use it. The sheer fact of the moment – the intrinsic knowledge that something was off with the boy – did not in fact need even an iota of power. Not for someone who had seen him with all of his masks torn off, who knew what had happened during those few eventful and full-of-chaos days.

It was the what and the why that had garnered her undivided interest.

As a witch, she was no stranger to the ways and wisdoms of the other ethereal and occult forces afoot in the world. She had long ago made deals with the devil, dined with demons, watched werewolves sing to the moon. Because of this, vampires were also no more fearful for her than tales of bogeymen. They were at points family friends and at other times at the end of points.

She didn't, however, know everything that there was to know. Unfortunately or not, her knowledge was limited in certain areas due to willingness in some parts and ability in others.

She didn't know everything that had gone on that night not so long ago. But she did know that something had happened between the Magician and the vampire.

Fingernails drumming a staccato beat against her desk, she frowned while the teacher taught from the first act of the Scottish play.

---

All in all, it hadn't ended up being a good day for Shinichi.

His fight with Ran had only been the start, which had been followed with various people from his classes taunting them both with accusations that the match made in heaven – or makai, for those who annoyingly called him shinigami for his 'talent' for finding dead bodies and murder scenes – had had a row. The fact that they had – well, it didn't help things any.

His headache had only become worse during the day, sunlight beating down mercilessly even through layers of clothes, vulnerable and exposed skin feeling at points as though it were being sunburned.

He had had to go home for the lunch hour. Nothing else would have saved his temper from his hunger pangs.

Not that it had helped very much. The rest of the day had passed in a coffee-induced stupor which had only served to make his current situation worse. The only fortunate things about it were that he had not lost control of his temper even once, and that the vampiric nature of his blood allowed the caffeine to both work all the quicker into his bloodstream and also dissolve out of it not too long after.

As a result, he was now stumbling homeward, not looking at all himself with a Tokyo Spirits cap on his head to ward of stray sunlight and expecting to be stopped at any moment for his uncanny resemblance to Kid.

He stumbled just outside the professor's, only preternatural reflexes and speed allowing him to keep himself upright. Looked around for anything that might have tripped him up.

Feverish eyes alit on wide brown ones belonging to a little girl of perhaps seven, who had been sitting by the wall next to two other boys. Shinichi opened his mouth in surprise, berating himself for having even possibly forgotten about the kids, before making a quick getaway and fumbling with the key for the gate in its lock.

As he got through, his superior hearing could just about make out small voices carried on the wind.

". . . ne, didn't Shinichi-niisan look upset? I don't think he looked well. . ."

". . . I usually look like that when I'm not very well at all. Like when I've eaten too much eel pie and. . ."

". . . not all about food, Genta! He obviously had a fever of some sort. Otherwise he would have gotten better by now. Because, you know, most medicines don't work on vi- vairo- fevers. . ."

He shivered and shut the door.

If you hadn't held back, began a small, quiet voice in his head that whispered in his ear. If you hadn't held back, then they would still have been there.

He took off his shoes and changed into his house slippers.

There are usually very few outward signs of a person's capability of being a murderer. . .

He walked down the hall, taking his jacket off and putting it on a hook.

You, who is such a good, great detective. What was it that Holmes said?

"Eliminate all other–"

A detective, being as he is, is always only one or two steps away from becoming that which he hunts. . .

Shinichi snarled and turned his head away. He hadn't done it. He knew. Every so often, he would call and hear the thief's voice, he would look at himself, was able to say 'these are the things that I do; are they the actions of a criminal?'. He would look at the many people so concerned about him, who wouldn't likely care. . .

Even if it terrified him.

---

AN: Short, I know. Mostly written in notepad first. The first Holmes quote was from actual canon, and is one of the infamous ones that Shinichi and Holmes often use. The second I couldn't find straight away, so I ad-libbed a little.

Double, double, toil and trouble/ Cauldron boil and cauldron bubble/ By the pricking of my thumbs/ Something wicked this way comes...