Prisoner of War
Part Seven: Help
She could hear the search party combing the area for her. They were looking everywhere. Except the woods—not a single guard came near the woods.
Weird. Good, but weird.
From her vantage point in the treetop, Calai could see part of the fortress's courtyard; it was crawling with guards.
And not the liquor sponges that had been watching her before, either.
Calai leapt down from the tree with the intent to get as far away from the fortress as she could. But something stopped her.
Or rather, someone stopped her.
"Oh God, not you again," she said, taking a step back from the yokai before her. "You've really got to stop stalking me. It's not polite, you know."
Hiei was thoroughly unamused. "I thought I told you to get to the other side of the woods."
"You did," Calai said. "I figured you'd have somebody waiting for me there, and I really didn't want to die so…yeah. What's it to you anyways?"
"You'd best leave if you don't want them to find you."
Calai raised an eyebrow. "What? They'll kill me if they find me, right? Just like you tried to kill me last night."
The fire yokai didn't reply.
"Yeah. About that," she said. "Why did you miss? It would've been an easy kill."
"I meant to miss."
"I figured. What made you decide to let me live?"
"It's not too late to change my mind."
Calai put her hands up in mock surrender. "Okay, you don't want to talk about that. You could've just said so. So do you have a reason for finding me or did you just want one more chance to threaten me?"
"You need to get away from here," the yokai said.
"As if I didn't know that. It's not that easy, you know?"
"There's a safe house once you get through these woods. None of the others know about it. Go there."
Calai raised an eyebrow. "How do I know you're not just sending me to a death trap?"
"I didn't kill you before."
"Well, no—"
"I haven't tried to kill you since we've been talking."
"Fair point. Alright, I'll go to this safe house. Do you know who runs it?"
"Some old acquaintances of mine."
Voices reached his ears as Hiei finished this statement. "You need to go. Don't expect me to save your ass again."
"Damn woods…" Calai mumbled, attempting to brush the dust and brambles off of her tattered and dirty clothes. After muttering a few choice obscenities to clear her temper, the human closed her eyes trying to recall the directions to the safe house.
Oh, right. The damn yokai hadn't given her directions.
"Way to be vague," she said, crossing her arms across her chest in frustration.
"Hey, you lost?" a masculine voice asked, coming perilously close to giving Calai a heart attack.
She turned abruptly to the direction on the voice and saw a young man about her age with brown eyes and dark hair studying her, eyebrows raised in curiosity.
"I asked if you were lost," he said smirking.
"Well… I guess I am," Calai admitted. "I was told that there's a safe house near here. You know about it?"
The young man's smirk grew slightly more pronounced as he answered. "Yeah, I know about it. Follow me; I'll show you where it is."
The safe house would've been better titled as a safe shack—it looked nearly uninhabitable.
But, as the cliché goes, beggars can't be choosers.
Especially beggars with search parties after them.
The young man led Calai inside the building, past dozens of other humans, into the center room of the house where two other men sat at a table, appearing deep in discussion.
"Yo, guys," the young man leading Calai called as the two of them approached. "We got a new one."
Both of the other men looked up at Calai and the young man with expressions of curiosity.
"Where'd you find her, Yusuke?" one of them—a handsome man with green eyes—asked the young man standing next to Calai.
"Outside the woods," Yusuke replied. "You got a name?" he asked Calai.
"Calai," she said looking around the room. "Um… nice place you got here."
"It's not much," the green eyed man smiled. "We do what we can. My name's Kurama, by the way. And that," he gestured to the third man, "is Kuwabara."
Calai nodded politely to Kuwabara, before looking back to Kurama. "Nice to meet you guys."
"Before we let you know anything else, Miss Calai," Kurama said, rising from his seat at the table, "Could you please tell us how you found out about the safe house?"
Calai's eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Kurama smiled. "We ask everyone who comes here. Just to make sure the wrong people don't know where we are."
"That makes sense," Calai said. "Actually, a yokai told me about this place. He said that you knew him."
Yusuke frowned. "That's new. Who was he?"
"His name's Hiei," Calai replied.
Kurama, Yusuke and Kuwabara exchanged looks of apprehension.
"Hiei," Kurama said. "You're sure that it was him?"
"Yeah. Works for Mukuro, favors a katana, total pain in the ass. Hiei."
"That can't be good for us," Kuwabara said; Kurama and Yusuke nodded in agreement.
End Part Seven
