Chapter 5

Before

The rhythms of Hiei's life took on new form.

Whenever his path took him past the crossroads inn, he found time to stop in. There were constants to his visits: a table he favored, the drink he chose (shochu—always), a half hour spent soaking in the bathhouse. But Nozumi… She was a variable.

The third time he stopped at the inn, she was nowhere to be found. Not even phantom traces of sandalwood lingered in the tavern's cramped spaces, and so he drank his fill, washed the filth from his skin, and departed, content to pass the night in the canopy of the Woods. He told himself it was her loss, not his, but he lingered at the edges of the forest the day after, watching the crossroads, waiting for any sign of her. None came, and by noon, he turned for home, out of time, the Brotherhood's newest target calling him back.

A mere week later, he returned.

The moment his boots crossed the threshold, he spotted her, leaning against the bar, chatting with a demon who was all bravado, all rumbling laughter and flexed biceps. Unbothered, Hiei slung himself into his table and propped his feet atop a chair. She'd seen him enter (he'd noticed the flit of her eyes toward the door, even if she'd been quick to look away), and soon enough, she crossed to his table.

Her hair was up, swept off her neck, but loose strands framed her face neatly. His fingers twitched, itching to tangle in those locks, to push them back behind her ear so his lips might glide across her jaw.

"What'll it be?" she asked.

"Shochu."

She huffed a soft laugh. "Is that all you drink?"

"So what if it is?"

She walked backward to the bar, spreading her hands wide. "Wouldn't hurt to broaden your horizons. Just say the word, and I'll craft you something better than straight shochu. Promise."

He didn't take her up on the offer, but it made no difference. When nightfall came, they tumbled into her bed together, and it was just as he remembered, just as it had been on his first two visits. Her flesh warm against his, her scales supple and velveteen, her lips intoxicating.

In the morning, sunlight slipped through the curtained window, painting her sleeping form in buttery light. He rose on an elbow, studying the way her scales melded into her flesh. Snakeskin-like patches stretched across her shoulders and collarbones, curved over her hips, and ensconced her wrists. The scales were soft to the touch (the palm he smoothed along her hip confirmed that), but he could feel their protective strength, and in the dawn light, they looked almost multi-faceted, their surfaces flecked in shades of gold and auburn.

He withdrew before she stirred, slipping from the bed and pulling on his pants. He'd done up his belts and tugged on his boots without disturbing her (or so he'd thought), but when he reached for the door, fingers caught his waistband. A sharp jerk pulled him back a step, and the whine of metal revealed that she'd drawn a knife from his belt.

He whirled, catching her wrist, but stopped when he realized she hadn't drawn the knife on him. She blinked at the blade, clearly still befuddled by sleep. "I've been looking for this," she said.

"Hn." With his free hand, he pried her fingers from the hilt and returned it to his belt.

"Hey." She sat up properly now, her bed-mussed hair loose around her cheeks, and thrust out a palm. "Give it here."

"I overpaid my first night," he said. "This makes us even."

"I don't think so."

He stepped backward, edging for the door.

"Hiei!" she said sharply, and his name on her tongue set him aflame.

In a split second, he stood at the edge of the bed, his hips between her thighs. He leaned down, his teeth catching her ear, his tongue running up its shell, before he murmured, "Let me keep it."

Her hands bunched in his shirt. "Thief," she breathed.

He grinned. "Yes, but you already knew that."

She pushed him away. "Fine. Keep it. But only for now. I want it back someday." She flopped back into the bed, one arm draped over her eyes. "Now disappear like I know you wanted to—before I change my mind."

He did as bidden, beating a fast retreat down the stairs, through the tavern, and out into the burgeoning day. All the while, his thoughts drummed a frantic rhythm, turning her words over and over. I want it back someday.

Someday.

As if she was certain whatever had begun between them was more than a fleeting thing, more than an ephemeral tryst that might soon end. As if many opportunities to return her knife lay ahead. As if she wasn't yet tired of his company.

As if she might actually desire more of it.

For a time, he tried to stay away from the inn, tried to prove Nozumi wrong, but trying and succeeding were different beasts. Sometimes, when leaving the Brotherhood, he'd travel south instead of north or he'd trek miles out of his way to the east or west before turning northward, and yet, no matter how his journey started, he always ended up at the crossroads. It was as though his world revolved around the tavern, as if a whirlpool current that drew him always to its center had joined the ebb and flow of his life.

He lost count of his visits to the inn.

It wasn't long before he realized Nozumi's presence was as reliable as a coin flip. She may be there, waiting at the bar, her hair done up and her scales glistening, or she may not. Her uncle began to recognize Hiei, and on days when she wasn't around, he'd give Hiei a sly shake of his head, confirming what Hiei had already sensed.

Nozumi's sister, though, was not so keen on him. She was like a rattlesnake, trying to drive him away, always rattling, always hissing.

On a hot dry night, as Hiei left the Brotherhood, he stopped at the inn, eager for a night in Nozumi's arms. The clan's last raid had borne little fruit, and he was departing his brothers worse off than he'd arrived, a few ill-placed bets having thinned his purse. He needed a win. (And sleep. So much sleep.)

But Nozumi wasn't there.

Only Sueko greeted him when he stepped within. He nearly turned on his heel, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Thoughts of the inn had gotten him through the last few days, and even if the evening wouldn't end in Nozumi's bed, he needed a few hours here. A strong drink. A long bath. Something to make him feel alive again.

When Sueko stalked to his table, he said simply, "Shochu."

She pursed her lips. "We're out."

His eyes narrowed, and he glanced at the bar, scanning the bottles on shelves behind the counter. She wasn't lying. No shochu. He thought of the night weeks ago, when Nozumi had offered to spin him up a drink, but of course she was missing on the night he might've accepted.

That was precisely his rotten luck.

Fed up, his patience run dry, he snapped, "Where is she?"

"Excuse me?"

"Nozumi. When she's not here, where is she?"

Sueko lofted her head, sneering down at him. "As if I would tell you."

Frustration roiled in his gut, coiling like tendrils of acrid smoke. He detested this girl. Her air of superiority tore at him, wearing him down to the quick. She was nothing but a Demon World mutt. Weak. Common. And yet here she stood, leering at him as if he were the weakling—the joke.

"Tell me," he spat through gritted teeth.

She planted her hands on her hips. "So you can stalk her? As if coming here and taking advantage of her isn't enough?" Scornful, she turned her back on him. He glared after her, enraged, but she never returned.

In the end, he dumped a handful of coins (the last he possessed) atop the table and stormed for the bathhouse. As soon as he plunged into the pool, the water began to steam, and he submerged himself, heat pouring out from his core, raising the temperature until the bath roiled. Only when his own flesh started to protest did he pull himself dripping from the pool. Without drying off, he yanked on his clothes and departed, climbing through a window and landing in the garden beyond, steam rising from his flesh and billowing into the night.

Seething, he took off, running through the dark, pushing his legs to their limit, testing his endurance. Onward and onward he ran. Through the night. Through the following day. Onward and onward.

Until at last, exhaustion won.

Then he slept. For days.

"Would you mind if I…?"

Hiei looked up from his shochu, surprised to find Nozumi standing at the far side of his table. He'd been seated for nearly two hours, and he'd long since assumed this visit to the crossroads inn would end in the bathhouse with no trip upstairs to follow. Apparently, his pessimism had been misplaced.

She knocked her knuckles against the back of an empty chair. "May I?"

He sat up a little straighter. Nodded. "Hn."

"Were you raised by heathens," she muttered, not quite posing a question. That was well enough. He wouldn't have answered anyway. After all, she already knew he ran with bandits. She need not know they'd raised him, too.

Sipping his shochu, he appraised her. Dirty clothes. Wind-swept hair. A smudge of dirt across her cheek. He knew a traveler when he saw one. Which meant he'd been right to assume she wasn't here earlier. (And his pessimism had, in fact, been realism.) Clearly, she had only just returned.

He set down his glass, and she snagged it, downing the rest of his drink in a single swallow. Slumping into her seat, she pulled the tie from her hair and ran her fingers over her scalp, her eyes squeezing shut. He shifted, uncertain of what she expected of him. Never before had she joined him at his table.

They were in untrod territory.

"Hiei," she said, though her head was still tipped back and her eyes closed.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever worked your ass off at something only to fail at it anyway?"

He blinked, nonplussed. "What?"

She opened one eye, peering at him. Then she sighed and shook her head. "Never mind. It's boring." She sat up and turned toward the bar, catching her uncle's eye. "Two more, please, Uncle." Twisting back to Hiei, she propped her elbows on the table. "So. Are you putting my knife to good use?"

No.

He'd never used it.

But if he told her that, she'd likely demand it back. So instead, he said, "Do you really want to know?"

She blanched, color draining from her cheeks, and (unintentionally, he suspected) her gaze drifted toward the back wall—and the gravesite beyond it. In all his months coming here, she'd never once spoken of their first night together or the loss she'd been grieving. He'd learned nothing of the demon who lay at rest in the back garden, and while he doubted it had been a lover, as taking a new bedfellow the night she put her former one to rest didn't seem like something Nozumi would do, he couldn't say whether they had been family, friend, or something else entirely.

"You're right," she said. "I don't."

When their drinks arrived, she took both directly from her uncle, never letting them touch the table, and said over her shoulder to Hiei, "Come on."

Startled, he stood. "I've not bathed—"

"Don't care. Come on."

So he followed. Up the stairs. Down the hall. To her bed. There, they settled, backs against the wall, glasses of shochu in hand.

He jerked his chin at the maps pinned to the slanted ceiling and asked a question he'd been wondering for weeks. "Why maps?" More questions bubbled on his tongue. Why not art? Why these particular maps? But he bit those down.

She shrugged, her shoulder bumping against his. "I find them fascinating. This inn is on all three of those, and yet they're all so different. At first glance, you might not even realize they depict the same place."

Intrigued, he squinted, studying the maps through the gloom. It took a minute or two (or five) to find the crossroads on each canvas, but he managed it in the end. She was right—each map was unique, the style in which they were drawn telling a particular story. Harsh lines on one. Smooth curves another.

Nozumi allowed him to observe in silence, but she leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder. Her every movement—each sip, each breath—zinged through him. It was like his nerves were attuned to her, charged by her nearness, but he urged his muscles to relax, to ease into the quiet as she had.

"I have a favorite," she whispered ever so softly, as if she were about to admit a great sin.

"Hn?"

"Guess which one."

How was he to know?

His uncertainty must've been obvious, because she prodded, "Come on. Just a guess. It means nothing if you're wrong."

Still, he hesitated. He didn't know her. Not really. There was no way to surmise which map she favored, and even if there were, why would he want to? (Because he was curious. Because he could know her, if he so desired. But he wouldn't admit that, not even to himself)

Warm lips pressed against his throat, right below the hinge of his jaw.

He exhaled, his eyes rolling backward as tension spilled from his body.

"It means nothing if you're wrong," she said again, "but there's a prize if you're right."

That was motivation enough. Knocking back his shochu, he scooted to the edge of the bed and braced his elbows on his knees. His brow furrowed in concentration.

The leftmost map was the one composed of sharp, straight lines. It was all angles and strokes of thin, purposeful ink. He suspected it was exacting in its scale, but there was no warmth in the craftsmanship, and he ruled it out as a favorite.

The center map was more lively. The cartographer had worked with multiple inks. Black for the roadways. Red for villages and outposts. Green for the forests. Blue for water bodies. The color work rendered the map like a vibrant, living thing, but it was almost frenetic, too many accents causing the rest to lose their impact. Still, he didn't rule it out as he turned to the last map.

It was the smallest of the three, not quite two feet in width, and there was an artistry to the feathered brushstrokes that the others lacked. Hiei was no art expert. In fact, he could count on one hand the number of paintings he'd paid any mind to (and even then, only because he'd been debating which to steal), yet he was certain the maker of this map was as much an artist as a cartographer. The world they'd rendered might not be exact, but he wanted to crawl within its dream-like expanses and stay forever.

If that wasn't art, he wasn't sure anything was.

Nonetheless, he felt the heat of Nozumi at his back and the ghost of her lips on his neck, and he decided he couldn't risk the wrong answer. Scooting even closer to the maps, he scoured their every inch, looking for any clue that might tip the odds in his favor.

Left to his own devices, he might've sat there for hours, but the mattress shifted and her fingers tugged at the hem of his shirt, and in his next breath, he was shirtless. She pressed against him, her tunic missing, too.

"Guess, Hiei," she breathed into his ear.

Fire bloomed in his gut, and he ached to spin around and pin her to the bed, but he gave the maps a final once over. Then he jerked his chin at the map on the right, the one with the smoothest edges, as if someone had run their fingers over the canvas hundreds of times. "That one."

She reached around him, her talons working his belts free. "Well done."

As her lips pressed to his neck, he tipped his head back, his eyes falling shut. A grin wrested control of his mouth, and he purred with self-satisfaction as she eased him onto the bed and slipped beneath the sheets. A single kiss upon his inner thigh revealed the reward that was to come, and he melted beneath her touch—confident this was precisely where he was meant to be.

It was nearly four weeks before he next journeyed to the crossroads inn. The Black Brotherhood had gone on a tear, raiding three villages in three consecutive nights, and he'd remained among them for a full week, riding the high of three jobs gone well, relishing the coin he'd brought in after months of thin pickings.

It was the longest he'd gone between visits, and the ache of his time away was twofold. He missed the press of his flesh against Nozumi's, and he longed for the deep sort of sleep he could only achieve in her arms.

He was eager for his table, for his shochu, for his bath (and then, he was eager for her), but as he stepped off the road and headed for the open tavern door, he spotted movement in the back garden, and instinct diverted his course.

The garden was as it always was. Slightly overgrown. Full of blooming flowers. But this time, it wasn't empty.

Nozumi knelt at the grave, her head bowed nearly to her knees. She was silent, not crying, not even breathing heavily, and yet… he felt it. Grief like she'd exhibited the night they met.

Not so long ago (four months, to be exact), he'd have turned and walked away. Her grief wasn't his problem. It was her fault for loving someone, for letting them carve out a space in her heart they'd one day leave empty. He need not help her through it.

He need not.

And yet.

It wasn't something he thought about. It wasn't something he planned.

One moment, he stood in the thick grass, observing her. The next, he stepped over the fallen rock wall and crossed to her side. He did not kneel. That he would not do. But he cleared his throat, gently so as not to startle her.

She blinked up at him. "Hiei?"

He kept his focus on the gravestone. "Who were they?"

He heard the catch of her breath, saw her head turn back to the grave from the corner of his eye, watched her fingers brush across the name carved in the marker. "My brother. Hideo."

"How did you lose him?"

Her answer was a long time coming. He waited, listening to the wind in the trees and the distant notes of a shamisen drifting from the tavern. A dozen means of death crossed his mind. Illness. Battle. Execution. All the horrors of the demon plane. All the ways lives ended every day. Yet, when at last she spoke, he wasn't prepared.

"The Black Brotherhood murdered him."

Hiei's blood froze in his veins, gone as icy as that of his monstrous Koorime ancestors.

"We buried him the first night you stayed here. They'd killed him two days prior. For sport. Because he'd wandered too far into their woods." Her hand curled into a fist against the tombstone. "Because they're monsters."

Hiei blinked. Once. Twice. Forcibly beating back his surprise. He hadn't been with the Brotherhood then, off on one of his solo travels, desperate for rest away from their traitorous knives, but he was certain that didn't matter. His brothers had killed hers. Whether he was among them when they did it was irrelevant.

She thought him a Bloodied Sword. He'd imagined that it made no difference which clan he ran with, but he'd been wrong. If she knew the truth, she'd never speak to him again.

He couldn't bear that. Losing her. Losing this.

Someday, he'd tell her. Just like someday he'd return her knife. But not now. He wasn't strong enough to do it now. Instead, he knelt, his knees pressing into the loam beside hers, and when she reached for his hand, he let her seize it.

AN: Crossing my fingers y'all feel that Hiei remained in character this chapter! Writing a version of him that's falling (dare I say) in love is a fun challenge. Leaning into his unreliable tendencies is very, very enjoyable.

Big thanks to those who left comments last chapter! You make my week!