Merripit House: The Dark Daiyokai
Blood Letter
Higher.
Higher.
Higher.
How did the castle of the Western Lady drift so far upwards?
Sesshomaru came crashing down on the stairs to the courtyard, leaving cracked and shattered stone in his wake. Jenny, clinging to his back, managed to slide off without tripping or otherwise tangling herself in his feet. Without pausing, he unsheathed Bakusaiga and raced up the remaining stairs, hunting for the scent of blood.
This blood he could scarcely remember smelling in his many centuries of life, if ever at all. But he knew exactly who it belonged to.
"Hey, wait up!" Jenny called after him as she attempted to traverse the stairs as fast as him. After holding onto his back and neck as tight as possible the entire flight, much of the strength of her limbs seemed to have diminished. But still she insisted he not leave her behind, and he needed to make sure she didn't accidentally fall over a railing. Not entirely amused by her mortal frailty, he stopped long enough for Jenny to catch up before grabbing her wrist and dragging her along.
The Japanese castle had a distinct air of nobility and authority to it. From the well maintained wood floors and shoji, to the paintings used to bring life to the walls, to the coloring of the building itself, whoever lived here had wealth beyond reason. And the fact that the castle itself floated without rockets or space elevators 30,000 feet in the air meant that this aristocratic person had power like unto Sesshomaru. Possibly even more.
Hanging between pillars and on flagpoles in the courtyard, banners emblazoned with the symbols of his house, a sharp blue crescent moon prominent among them, caught Jenny's eye as they passed by. The fabric showed the effects of age, the colors having faded and the edges frayed slightly, but they still held up remarkably well despite the passage of time. "This is your family's home," she deduced.
"Hn."
"I'm sure your mother will be alright. She's related to you, so I bet she's giving Theda more trouble than she planned on."
At some point, he had learned to not ask how Jenny knew things he'd never spoken of. Humans generally knew so little with their dulled senses — they couldn't even differentiate between human and yokai blood, let alone yokai and daiyokai. And yet Jenny knew in an instant that Sesshomaru had concerns about his mother's welfare. The Western Lady would have a fit if anyone besides him knew that she could bleed like some lowly yokai or worse, human. And if she suspected her only son thought she might need rescuing like a damsel in distress, she would have to kill something powerful. And large. And delicious, probably. Just to put him in his place.
As he entered the castle, he felt like he'd just walked back in time. He hadn't realized just how accustomed to the 21st century his lessons and travels had made him. The wooden panels and columns, coupled with the shoji screens, despite their expensive origin, gave the place an air of antiquity like he might find one of the history museums Jenny had dragged him into for one of her lessons on the history of some country he didn't care about. Instead of the slightly homey atmosphere he'd come to expect from his visits to his mother's castle, he received the distinct impression that from his clothes to the swirl of information in his head to the detective barely keeping up with his pace, he was a stranger to this world already. To be fair to his mother, the reason for that alienation didn't entirely have to do with the passage of time. Even before the battle in Fukushima with Daiichi, he couldn't say he ever felt that much 'at home' when he met with his mother.
The scent of blood grew stronger, but not overwhelmingly so. Sesshomaru's mother was hurt, but not drained. Disturbingly, he couldn't smell her anywhere. Just the blood.
Turning to stop at an unoccupied room, a closet with musty futons and blankets by the smell of it, but actually a small armory full of swords, spears, bows and arrows, he pushed Jenny inside. "Stay here. Stay hidden."
She rubbed her wrist, a spot of purple peeking through her jacket sleeve. Did he do that? Or was that from another scuffle she got involved in? "Alright," she replied.
He raised an eyebrow at her surprising display of cooperation. "Stay here. I won't be able to protect you myself," he warned again.
"I said okay. I got it. Staying put." Crossing her arms, she sat down on one of the chests that probably contained some armor. "Go find your mother."
"You're not simply saying that to make me leave, are you?"
"Go."
Shutting the door behind him as if it would do any good to keep her in or shield her against any fighting gods or daiyokai flying at it, Sesshomaru swept back down the pathway towards the smell of his mother's blood, knowing from his limited experience that Jenny listening to him and staying out of harm's way would not happen.
A speckled trail made of scarlet dots led him to the topmost building, one he knew his mother rarely used except to impress and overwhelm dignitaries and daiyokai. The family had taken to calling it the Throne Room, although it acted more as a display for the power of the entire pack. Every now and again, when the Inu no Taisho or the Western Lady defeated some great yokai or accomplished something worth boasting of, they would casually display the fangs, claws, scales, usurped crowns or claimed mystical weapons in this room. Let visitors tremble in the implied fear of the things the Western Lady could simply take if she wanted to bother.
Sesshomaru entered the throne room, noting distinct spots of fresh blood seeping into the wood floors on his way in. Sitting in the window, with her rich ebony hair pulled up with a pair of jade hair sticks, a black kimono with silver embroidery, and hands soaked with blood, Theda lit up as soon as she heard his footsteps. She turned away from from the scene outside, toying with a jeweled necklace — his mother's Meido Stone — wrapped around her bloody hand. Turning her head just right, the muscles in her face began to twist and move, morphing into a structure he recognized all the more clearly.
"Hello Sesshomaru," she said, her eyes burning with anger despite the kind voice she put on.
"Izanami," he replied with a slightly disrespectful upward tilt of his head.
"Long time, no see. That was a funny trick you pulled, falling asleep for a few centuries so I couldn't find you. Never living with the risk of mortal danger, and never actually dead. But you're awake now."
"What have you done with my mother?" he demanded, venom dripping from his lips. Figuratively, of course. He held his anger back with perfect control.
Barely concealing her own fury, Theda or Izanami or whatever name was appropriate at the moment, began to circle him. "What have you done with Daiichi? I want my son back."
"You know where he is. The vision serpents have told you his location in the Underworld."
For a moment, her mouth gaped in surprise. "How could you know about — oh yes. Jenny Harkness." A half-amused smile flashed across her face. "It's annoying how fast she can unravel a plan one has been assembling for years, centuries even. I've had a lot of time to figure this out, Sesshomaru, while you've scarcely been awake for a few months now. I knew it was you the instant you woke up. I could feel your pulse in the air. But just to make sure, I found a girl named Rin and had her killed. You did not disappoint," she said with a proud smile. "I heard Tenseiga slice through my servants from half a world away, and the men you slaughtered with your poison more than made up for the souls you stole from the Afterlife."
"How dare you," Sesshomaru growled, baring his fangs. His youki swelled, filling the throne room with an oppressive force that Theda shrugged off. "You're a god bound by laws. You're forbidden from using your powers for personal gain."
"Hardly," she corrected, a smirk spreading across her face. "Gods are bound by their own desires. We are our own laws." She ran the back of her hand over his fur pelt, causing it and him to bristle in irritation. Either she didn't notice or she didn't care. "Have you enjoyed slaying the monsters I've been raising? You arrived in Fukushima before I could hit Korea with a Bulgasari. You might have liked that one. My blood expels enough energy to wake up everything in a thirty mile radius while allowing me to see into the Underworld without going there myself. Leaves me a weak, whimpering wreck for a while until I get my strength back. Then it's on to the next creature. But a mother will do anything for her child, especially if it's her only son. Don't you agree?"
Fast as a lightning strike, Sesshomaru's clawed hand snatched Theda's neck, digging into her skin with acidic poison. "What. Did you do. To my mother?"
Not to be outdone, the Death goddess calmly wrapped her thin hand around the daiyokai's wrist and squeezed. The bones that formed her hand stretched, elongating around his arm with points that dug into his skin. His face remained hard as ice, but subtle cracks and pops in his wrist betrayed exactly how strong of a grip she had. And from her relaxed jaw and triumphant expression, she had barely begun to squeeze. With a simple push, she took Sesshomaru's hand away from her neck. Blood dripped down from five puncture wounds on her neck that sizzled and smoked, but soon enough, they closed back up.
Twisting her hold on his arm, Theda forced Sesshomaru to fall to a knee. Only now, he began to pant with the effort of resisting someone who simply couldn't be stopped. As her sadistic smile grew, darkness fell around the throne room, the surrounding walls of the castle, and even the sky outside.
"You think you can cut me into a million pieces and I'll stay down? Your Bakusaiga is nothing but an annoyance to me. Your strength is but a mouse compared to an elephant against the likes of me. Your reticence is noble, but stupid. You should have known you couldn't have hidden Daiichi from me, even in the Underworld." Her body began to distort, her shoulders becoming sharp points in her kimono and her torso thinning to a wound spindle's width. "I know there's a way to release him without you."
"This I truly doubt," he said, his voice calm as a hurricane's eye. "I sealed him myself. Daiichi will never be freed from the Underworld."
Theda's eyes burned as she released her hold on his wrist, leaving a painted red handprint behind. "Such arrogance. You've always been more head than heart, only capable of cold precision. This time, you are wrong."
Retaining his proud posture, Sesshomaru narrowed his eyes. "I did what had to be done. I do not regret my decision."
"Well. Fortunately for me, I know just the being with the power to break the sealing." With a devious grin — made all the more evil by the red seeping into her eyes and the sharp points emerging on her teeth — Theda held aloft the Meido Stone. "Only because I like you so much, I'll give you a chance to save your mother. All you have to do is enter the Underworld."
Raising Bakusaiga, Sesshomaru adopted a fighting stance. "My mother has no need to be rescued by the likes of me. I should think you know that well. However, I demand that you return her Meido Stone."
"And here I thought you loved your mother, rushing up here so fast I barely had time to hide her," she replied, sneering in disgust. "Why else would you demand to know what I've done with her?"
"So she won't embellish later."
She let out a disbelieving laugh. "I'm surprised at you, Sesshomaru."
"No, you're not."
A heavy sigh escaped her lungs. "You're right." Slashing out with one hand, Theda sent long bony fingers, sharpened to pointed ends, at his face and chest. He nimbly jumped away from the spear-like fingers, ducking under a second strike. The bones went from rigid to whip-like in an instant as she brought them down at the daiyokai once again. "I've been generous in my assessments of you."
Sesshomaru could move fast, possibly quicker than even he knew for certain. The bone whips rained down in his direction, growing spiked barbs and shooting off little missiles that lodged in the walls, shredded tapestries, shattered ancient relics and attempted to stab him. But not one strike could land on him. Slightly annoyed, he predicted his mother would chew him out for allowing Theda to ruin her room full of trophies. Moving faster than the light reflecting off him could keep up, he sidestepped a bone spear and swung Bakusaiga upwards at her weapons with a disintegrating blast of green youki.
Shock widened Theda's face right before her body attempted to avoid the wave, but it came too quick for her left arm. The disintegration took out half the room, destroying everything it touched, along with Theda's arm right below the shoulder. Still sleeved, the limb flopped to the ground. The bone spears and whips ceased to strike. Grabbing at the stub left behind, Theda screamed unintelligibly, hardly aware that the entire wall behind her had fallen away. "Bastard!"
"Do not insult my parents so," he growled, preparing for a second attack. "Return the Meido Stone."
Her steaming expression could have melted steel from the way the sky and room suddenly darkened around them. She bent down momentarily to pick up her limb and replace it in its socket. The skin, bone and muscles knit together seamlessly within seconds, leaving only one missing sleeve as evidence of Sesshomaru's attack. "Not until I have what's mine!"
Throwing her arms forward, a massive swarm of crows simultaneously filled the room through the open wall and shot at him in a congealed mass of angry feathers, talons and beaks. Sharp enough to pierce holes in his Kevlar lined suit, they tore at his face, hair, fur pelt and hands with unrelenting ferocity in their attempt to blind and confuse him. The sheer number of feathers and bodies alone made it difficult to even breath, not to speak of concentrating on unleashing Bakusaiga again. He found himself forced to retreat and find better ground.
"You can't run away from me, Sesshomaru!" Theda shrieked after him. But away he ran, out the door, down the hall, in through another outer building with a narrow entrance that bottlenecked the swarm of crows.
Racing through the opposite doorway, Sesshomaru darted down a pathway and toward the courtyard, slashing crows apart with his claws simply to free himself of their grasp. Already he could breath and move more easily, allowing him to slice through a slew of birds with a poison whip. But the effort resembled a sword slashing through a swarm of flies.
"I will have my son!" the Death goddess screamed over the deafening birds. Chasing after him, she seemed to float on a black cloud made of feathers, although she just as easily could have been the swarm itself.
Dashing around a tight corner, he spotted a streak of blonde hair running down the path toward him with a cloud of crows at her back. Although the birds passed by Jenny on their way to attacking Sesshomaru, they didn't go out of their way to avoid her. Even as they rushed him from the front, halting his progress, he picked out the smell of her blood from one crow clipping past her face.
The suffocating swarm of crows grew in size and weight, bearing almost entirely down on Sesshomaru specifically as Theda cackled and directed the murder with wild gestures. Jenny dropped to one knee in an attempt to keep below the birds. With a gun in her hands, she aimed it at the one woman that seemed to have control over this Daphne du Maurier nightmare.
Two shots. The first hit Theda perfectly in the center of the forehead and exited out the back, taking a satsuma-sized chunk of brain matter out with it.
The second was just for good measure.
Theda fell, tumbling forward into the wide staircase before reaching the courtyard. Much of the shrieking of crows dampened, but the infernal birds remained, even with their master down for the moment.
Sesshomaru felt the cutting stop and the swarm around him seemed to relax just enough for him to move. But the birds wouldn't leave. That alone worried him. If Theda could recover from disintegration by Bakusaiga, she certainly could recover quickly from a fatal gunshot wound.
Ahead of him, Jenny's arms flailed around her, attempting to get the crows off her. But they simply clung to her armor and pecked at her arms, back, legs and face out of revenge for Theda, probably. More of her blood hit the air, forcing Sesshomaru to act. Diving through the air, he swooped in and scooped her up with one arm before heading to higher ground. With some squawking, the last of the crows released their hold as the pair flew fast and high.
"I told you to stay hidden," he said through teeth clenched in irritation.
"I heard a loud noise." Her arms wrapped around his neck to keep a better hold of him. Although with how tightly he held her to his side, she needn't have worried about falling.
"Then why did you go towards it?" With his free right hand, he raised Bakusaiga and lashed out at the swirling storm of crows with a disintegrating blast. In a chorus of screams that soon silenced, each bird burst apart, the guts from the ones at the head of the pack splattering on the ones behind them and continuing the decomposition of the entire flock.
"I thought you might want some help," Jenny explained. "I may also have just happened to be in the area."
"Happened," he repeated skeptically. Carefully, he descended onto the grounds of the courtyard, setting her down on the one patch of ground not covered by crow guts. "Forgive me if I don't believe you."
"Despite popular belief and all evidence pointing to the contrary, I don't actually have a death wish." Unzipping her jacket, she slipped her gun back into the holster on her hip. "Did you find your mom?"
"No. Only Theda." He hesitated to resheath Bakusaiga, certain that the woman hadn't finished with them yet. "She took something that belongs to her."
"Then let's go get it back before she comes to." Without waiting for Sesshomaru, Jenny headed towards Theda's body lying in the courtyard.
"Wait," he ordered, going after her.
To his utter shock and surprise, she did. She stopped and turned to him, rolling her eyes at his holding her up. But she listened. "Then get a move on," she complained.
A thick black shadow shaped like a tall, cloaked figure bloomed out from the ground behind her. Emaciated arms suddenly wrapped around her in a chokehold, clapping one bony hand over her mouth. Jenny grabbed the figure's wrists and tried desperately to pull the tightening limbs away, but even though her fingers went white from the effort, they simply wouldn't be moved. She kicked and twisted in its grasp, resulting in little more than bruises on her neck and face. From under a heavy black hood, Theda's face appeared, her eyes red and her teeth's sharp points glinting menacingly.
Sesshomaru raised his sword, preparing to slash at the Death goddess, but Theda dug her fingers into Jenny's skin as she dragged her backwards up the steps, eliciting a scream of pain from the woman that chilled his blood so quickly that he immediately halted.
Theda noticed. Instead of smiling at this surprise hesitation, her face twisted even more into one of fury and disgust. "You care about this woman? More than your own mother?"
Ignoring her unspoken, 'Why?' he snarled at her. "Release her, Izanami. Your quarrel is with me."
"I think not." The hand keeping Jenny quiet disappeared into the folds of the billowing cloak and reemerged in a flurry of motion with the Meido Stone in her grasp. "Let's play a little hide-and-seek, shall we? You can be it."
Cracking like thunder in the sky, the air around them seemed to break apart and separate, forming a circular doorway through the dimensions. The opening showed little of the world past its threshold. Only darkness and barren rock. With no warning, Theda released her hold on Jenny and shoved her face-first through the portal. Letting out a short scream, the woman vanished almost instantly into the darkness.
Sesshomaru stayed put, his right hand gripping the hilt of his sword with pent up fury. He could see Theda's clever, albeit desperately executed by any means necessary, plan. She wanted him to enter the Underworld. But he knew exactly what to expect past this doorway. The Underworld had scarcely been a place that Kohaku could survive the last time he'd traveled there using his mother's Meido Stone. Like Rin, Jenny would not survive. Even so, he refused to act when Death had the higher ground. He would not enter the Underworld.
Not while Theda held the Meido Stone.
The woman — if he could even call her that at this point — glanced between him and the portal, utterly confused. She had made several errors in her calculations. First, that Sesshomaru didn't trust his mother to escape the Underworld herself, if Theda had indeed trapped her there. Second, that he had any motivation to protect Jenny apart from keeping her alive to preserve the location of Ketsugō-kiba. Third, that he would miss a second time.
Looking just over her shoulder, not even giving her the dignity of making eye contact, Sesshomaru casually flicked a decomposing blast at Theda, catching her off guard. This time, as the green flash burst toward her, she barely had time to scream properly before her entire body tore apart due to the blast.
The Meido Stone, sturdier than any normal piece of jewelry, came flying away from the wreckage of bone and blackened fabric. He deftly caught it before turning towards the portal. Whatever Theda had prepared for him to find in the Underworld, he knew he could easily handle. But he had to hurry before the detective's soul became lost for good.
With the exit in hand, Sesshomaru dove into the darkness after Jenny.