He eyed her with distaste. The Reikei apparition's clothes were tattered from stray cuts of lionsnare and her blue hair was streaky from dried river water. She looked pathetic, defenseless.

Residual energy stirred in his fist. It would be easy to give her a quick death. Without her oar, he knew, she would be stranded in the worst of places in demon world. Hungry apparitions would make quick work of her.

In his other fist, he clenched the jewel he'd stolen from the deceased she-warrior's armor. It was a large pearl, called the Diamond of the River, capable of giving common demons the ability to breathe underwater for periods of time. It would fetch an enormous price.

The jewel was part of his original plan. The girl, however, was a surprise factor.

Kurama had planned on getting to the body before Spirit World's carriers arrived. She'd beaten him to it.

It mattered little. He would think of it as a bonus.

Plenty of demons in the black market sought out girls for slave labor. The fact that she was a Reikei, stranded, would only bolster her price. If Spirit World came calling for retribution, as they no doubt would, it would be the buyer they'd deal with, leaving Kurama with the gold.

"As you wish," he told her.


Botan was swimming in the depths of an ocean gorge, dark and lightless except for the occasional glow worm, floating along stray currents. As far as her eye could see and extending in all directions was black water. Water and nothing else.

But where was the surface? Up above, but what if she was upside down?

Exhaling, she hoped to follow the bubble of air. Instead of an amorphous pocket of oxygen though, a goldfish came out of her nose. Its friendly, mermaid like fins and cheerfully orange scales quickly underwent a brutal transformation, as the tiny fish swelled into a fish warrior in black spine-armor.

"Give me your life!" It gurgled at her in a high pitched voice while its flesh melted away to its spine. The first vertebrae sharpened into a deadly point.

Botan opened her mouth to scream, and water rushed in. She scissor kicked, and yet she wasn't moving. Her lungs hurt…

The spirit apparition sat up straight in bed, taking deep, gasping breaths. Sweet, sweet oxygen.

"Oh look, Kuronue, it's finally up."

Botan was swathed in sheets and covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Along the perimeter of her bed were the figures of four demons of different statures, all bearing the same hungry expression.

One of them, a tall demon whose body looked almost human save for his green hair and tribal tattoos, reached for her arm. "It's a bit scrawny. I think we should cure it."

Cure her arm? But she wasn't sick.

"I'm in the mood for some hot pot. Let's boil it up, and serve it with sauce!" added another one, built like a small rhinoceros.

That one garnered a chorus of laughs, and Botan's stomach sank.

"It" was she. They were going to eat her. Oh, dear King Enma! Where was the exit in this room? A frantic search produced the immense glass-covered hole in the ceiling as the best solution. Then she remembered her oar was a pile of splinters laid to rest in one of the forests at the base of Echo Mountain #6.

She was in the fox demon's lair. It had been a long journey to the isolated underground hideout where he camped. She'd passed out the minute he left her to her room. It was a foolish move on her part to assume the demon lived alone; it was a foolish move to leave her safety to chance.

"I say we spit roast it. Nothing like barbeque on a nice, sunny afternoon." She looked to her left and saw an imposing demon with black hair peeking out of a buckled hat. His well-defined arms had leather bands wrapped around them, and were those wings on his back? All in all, a good bondage slave get-up.

Noticing her gaze, he flashed her a wicked grin, revealing fangs a vampire bat would be jealous of. "Hey there sweetheart, I'm Kuronue."

He yanked her out of bed without warning, and suddenly her nose getting up close and personal with the back of his vest. Hanging over his shoulder, she felt more than saw him turn and walk out of the room through a hidden passageway in the corner. The group followed.

"No!" she wailed. She was so stupid. Of course Kurama brought her back to his evil lair to feed her to his minions. "Don't barbeque me; I don't taste good!"

Green shot Rhino a grin. "Let us be the judge of that," Kuronue told her. She could feel the back of his ribcage vibrate as he spoke.

She thrashed for her life, pounding in a stereotypical damsel-in-distress manner on his back. "Kurama!" she shouted.

"Aw, screaming for its savior," the green-haired demon said mockingly.

Ignoring him, Botan continued as the group turned the corner, and Botan saw that the stone panels of the floor had become white tiles. They were obviously taking her to the kitchens.

"Kurama, you jerk! How could you?"

She gathered her strength and clung on to the edge of the wall. "If your men eat me, I swear, I will haunt you for the rest of your life! And trust me it will be a long, long six-"

Oops. She better not reveal that Spirit World had estimates for each demon's lifespan up in the library reserves.

"Relax. Anger sours the flesh," Rhino nudged her.

Kuronue set her down on her feet, and blood rushed to her head. Before she could get purchase on the tiles to run, he had grabbed her by her shoulders, and the green haired man pulled her off the floor by her ankles.

To her horror, there was vat of hot, boiling water to her right. A Botan-sized vat of hot boiling water. When she was little, she'd always had been told to do her spiritwork, or she'd be eaten alive by bad demons. Now, she fervently wished she was a child again.

"Alright, Hino. And one, and two…" The two began to swing her left and right in a pendant motion. Her body gathered momentum, and she could feel her hair getting caught in the ties on the front of Kuronue's vest.

Spying a kitchen knife lying on the counter, her desperate mind formulated a desperate plot. One whose success depended totally on her timing.

As the swung her away from the cauldron, she quickly twisted and grabbed the knife. Against all odds (namely, the two demons swinging her like a hammock in the wind), she managed to sink it into the bat demon's arm. Alright! Botan one, demons none.

"Ouch," he said, and held her weight with his one, injured arm to remove the knife with another. "You wound me. I thought we had a good thing going."

The wound did not affect him at all; the cut was closed up in front of her eyes. What was it that Koenma was telling her about regenerative abilities and demons B-class and up? Uh-oh. These weren't a lowly band of D-class minions Kurama was leading, after all.

"Quick, Buyou. Salt the water before we toss her in!" Kuronue said with positively glee.

The two demons released her and her body went sailing through the air, headed right for the cauldron. Botan squeezed her eyes shut, preparing her soul for the journey to Reikai. If she could get there, that was.

To her relief, a pair of arms caught her before she could be scalded like a carrot.

"Kuronue, don't be an idiot." The low voice of Kurama sounded from above her. He looked irritated enough to kill something. She'd never been happier to see him in her life.

"Aw, you're such a spoil sport. I wasn't really going to let her boil," Kuronue told his leader as the other demons improved their posture in his presence.

"Sir, you should've seen her face when I said we were boiling her," Rhino told Kurama, and the green haired man's lip twitched. Although still talking about eating her, both demons seemed exponentially less crude than they had been minutes ago.

"I think she liked my roast idea more, Buyou." Green snapped his jaws at her, grinning, and Botan shrank back. No way she was losing a limb to those monsters he called teeth.

She couldn't help but wonder what Kurama thought of his rowdy minions. Maybe he was irritated with them for scaring her? Or even the tiniest bit angry and protective of her? She looked up at his amber eyes.

… Not a chance.

Although his countenance was every bit as bored and unamused as it always was, a glimmer of sadistic pleasure in his eyes gave his real thoughts away. If anything, he looked like he wanted to toss her into the vat, if only to see her burn.

"There are new artifacts in the drawing room to be taken care of," Kurama said, his voice level in a back-to-business sort of way. He set Botan on her feet besides him. Immediately, she took three steps away from the demons and the boiling vat next to them.

Buyou and Hino nodded before disappearing behind a turn in the hallway.

Kurama turned his gaze to Batman, who sighed in a resigned fashion.

"We wouldn't have eaten you, you know," he told her. His wings shifted as he bent down to be eye level with her. He disappeared.

Boton breathed a sigh of relief. After the initial scare of meeting everyone, things could only get better… right?