I'm always apologizing for how long it had been taking me to update, and today is no exception! Thank you for being patient, musical practice is getting long now that we've had so many snow days XP Another one today! Well, hope you like! Read, review, enjoy :)

Kiku kept surprisingly calm for someone I had just confessed one of my secrets to. All he did was narrow his eyes a little and ask, "What sort of abuse do you mean?"

I fidgeted. Even though I had played this off as something I could barely remember, it was still clear in my mind. Ever since I had been about six, it had been my father's daily routine to wake up, do something to my mother that caused her to cry, have some alcohol, and then come after me when he was drunk. When he got to me… it just depended on his mood what he did. If he was just angry, he would beat me until he started laughing and then pull me down with a string of insults that had me wishing he had just chosen the other thing he did instead.

Instead of telling him all that though, I settled for the much less elaborate, "Every kind."

He closed his eyes, rubbing his temples slowly in a perfect circle, as if he were trying to see my future or something like that. "There's so many here… all the darkness is giving me a headache, especially after I asked you about your father. Do you hate him?"

Did I hate him? That wasn't a question I'd ever been asked before and I'd tried not to think about what happened at all, so… I didn't really have an answer prepared. And it would be difficult to say that I didn't despise him, even though I clearly should have. "I… don't remember him much," I told him, wanting to drop this.

I watched him as he started to look all around nervously, like there was something there that only I didn't seem to be able to see. Softly, he whispered, "I will help, but I have to get them to listen to me. Nobody wants me to help you when we have bigger things to do…"

I knew he wasn't really talking to me, but it made me remember when Yao, Sadiq, and Kiku had had that chat when they thought I was unconscious. I hadn't understood a word they'd said, but had gathered that they all seemed to be a part of the same group, one that someone named Ivan was the head of. A ghost fighting cult? I could see Sadiq doing something that weird…but didn't really seem like something someone as shy as Kiku would be in. Yao was questionable since I had only met him one time when he'd come into the restaurant looking for Lovino.

"Bigger things?" I asked, making sure my voice was perfectly curious.

He seemed to realize what he had muttered a little too late, and looked over at the clock, checking the time as an excuse not to meet my eyes and to probably come up with a reason to leave. Not that it wasn't really late; it was almost midnight now. Maybe he really did have something to take care of at home… like that dog he had. But I didn't want him to go. Even I could tell that when he was around, the darkness was lessened by a good amount. It was like he kept it bay. If he left, there would be no more light for me.

"It's getting late, I really should…" he started.

I interrupted him, trying to not to sound overly hopeful. "Well, you can stay in my guest bedroom. If you would like to."

He was taken aback by the offer and stumbled on his words. "Well… I suppose that… I do need to…" With a deep breath, he tried again. "That would be nice, thank you."

Now it was my turn to be surprised by him. I hadn't expected him to agree to stay with me at all, but yet here he was, saying he would. Wordlessly, I got up and showed him to the extra room that hadn't been used since I had inherited the place. The bed was perfectly made and there wasn't a speck of dust on anything, not because I had cleaned it, but because my mother had always kept it sparkly clean and when she had died, no dust dared to form on anything I owned. I felt a little nervous letting him in here, since this was actually my parent's old room, but it was Kiku, so… I was sure he would respect everything.

The cats had followed us in and made a huge clump on the bed as I showed him around the room, explaining all the pictures and small things I had collected in here. They were of my mom, mostly, and me. My dad was in a small few of them, from before he had gone crazy. We actually looked like a happy family in one of them, a family picture right when I had just learned to walk. There were no dark circles under my mother's eyes, no fury in my father's expression, no bruises on my sweet, innocent face. It was the calm before the storm I had never seen coming.

Kiku cleared his throat. I looked up from the photo, not realizing that I had gotten lost in it until I saw the worry on the Japanese man's face. His eyes were dark, concerned, and he had put a hand on my shoulder that I barely could feel. Sighing, I put the frame back down onto the dresser I had taken it off of and glanced back at him, feeling a little strange. Maybe I was getting that "flu" that everyone else at work had gotten. Or maybe it was the fact that he was touching me.

I resisted the urge to take his hand in mine and pull him into me. Instead, I just headed toward the door, giving him a smile. "Goodnight."

His face turned red and he turned away shyly, murmuring, "Goodnight," before I left and headed to my own room, a few of the cats following me out.

"You did WHAT?"

I opened my eyes slowly, groggily, the loud, booming voice echoing through my house and waking me up. That certainly hadn't been Kiku. In fact, it had actually sounded like… There was a chorus of "shhs!" and I knew there was way more people in my house right now than there had been when I had gone to bed. Concerned, I shot up and pulled on some pants, hoping that it wasn't a burglar or something that I might have to fight. Sneakily, I crept into the hall, avoiding all the squeaky floorboards perfectly as I found my way over to the room I had left Kiku in.

It was immediately clear to me that the voices were coming from his room.

"Damn it, Kiku! Now we're going to have to get Ivan involved, all just because you, for some reason, feel it's okay to tell that idiot everything!"

Yeah, that was definitely Sadiq.

"I'm doing what I feel is right, regardless of what you all might believe," Kiku sighed, the headache clear in the tone of his voice.

"Pfft, yeah, only because you're in love with him," Sadiq growled furiously, his voice full of stabbing accusation.

The room was quiet for a moment. Then, there was a tentative, unbelievable, "No, I'm not…" from Kiku's part, and the whole room erupted in so much noise, it was impossible to distinguish voices.

I thought I could depict Yao in there, which made sense, but I also could have sworn there were some of my co-worker's yelling along with everyone. It sounded like… well, everyone who had been sick that day… Maybe they had missed that day because of a cult meeting? But then why had Sadiq shown up at work? And I was faintly sure that Lovino was involved, but he had been at work too. It didn't make any sense in my head, no matter how many different ways I looked at it.

"Can we just GET BACK TO THE ISSUE AT HAND?" an unfamiliar, loud voice boomed in the best whisper he could manage.

He had sort of sounded German.

"Right, aru! Kiku has started betraying us! It won't be long until he tells Heracles and messes everything up," Yao stated, sounding grumpy.

Kiku interjected, his voice as soft and polite as ever. "But I won't betray you. I just want to help Heracles with the demons as quickly as I can and move on. If I accidentally say too much, we can just have Ivan erase his memory."

"You'd be willing to risk all of his memories for the sake of ridding him of demons, aru? You know that Ivan won't just take out his memories of us. And besides, getting rid of demons takes years! If you don't get rid of them properly, they just come back angrier! You'll have to make Heracles face his innermost demons by himself, which means you'll have to TELL him about us, aru! Telling a mortal is against Ivan's rules! You'll be betraying us for the sake of one man."

I froze in my spot on the wall. Telling a mortal? What did that mean? Was that implying that…THEY weren't humans?

"Hai, I'm aware of this. But you've all been lucky; everyone you care about is part of the group and not mortals. None of you have ever had to think about saving them from demons, because we don't HAVE demons."

Sadiq laughed. "The perks of not being human! Look, if you just let him deal with this crap himself, I'm sure he'll be fine. Besides, it's strictly against Ivan's rules to date mortals anyway, so why don't you give up on Karpusi?"

"I-I don't want to date him, I want to save his life! He can't deal with this himself, because it has gotten so bad that if I leave, the demons will kill him! That is the only reason I agreed to stay the night here. I can't just leave him here to die, like I've said, because… there's something different about him. And I need to figure out what that is before it's too late. What if he… is it possible for him to be one of us but not know it?" Kiku's voice was uncertain, unnerved, and worried.

Was this really all my fault?

"Not unless he can see the demons that are attacking him," said the unfamiliar German voice.

I could hear a rumble of disapproval from the crowd of people, as if me being one of them was entirely unwanted and an annoying thought. I pressed in closer to the wall, trying to hear better what some of them were saying, but getting no words in particular. Just as Kiku started to talk again, explaining that I couldn't, but may be something other than what they were, I felt a small pressure against my leg and almost cried out. Peering through the darkness up at me was Jingle, rubbing against me and purring his motorboat purr. It seemed louder than usual in this quiet hallway, and I prayed that they wouldn't be able to hear it in the room.

Dashing my hopes, everyone fell silent. I took a hesitant step back into the shadows, wondering if I'd be able to make a break for it, when the door opened and Kiku stepped out, picked up Jingle, looked pointedly at me, and re-entered the room. It was clear what his eyes had been saying. Don't move a muscle; stay here. He wanted me to listen to what they were saying.

"Look, aru, there's only one way to determine whether he is or isn't one of us, or something else supernatural. That's calling Ivan in!" Yao explained, rather forcefully.

"Again with the Ivan business…" Sadiq muttered, to which I was sure he earned a death glare from the Chinese man in the room.

Kiku made a small noise before asking, "If Ivan came and Heracles was, indeed, a human, what would he do to him?"

For about the fiftieth time, the room quieted. The German was the one to break the silence this time.

"That's easy enough. He'd kill you both on the spot."