Chapter three Lost

Search for the last ray of light, when all is lost.

"How are we going to find him in this maze?" Hiei was demanding. Skye glanced at him with mild surprise, surprise that he had said so much at once. She shrugged noncommittally.

"You don't need to."

She pushed past the garden fence into Kurama's room, and found Tai in there too. He looked worried for his new friend, and Skye could see why.

Kurama's fever had risen, despite the willow bark tea, and he was sleeping. "What happened here?" she asked gently. He shook his head fearfully, and she listened to his mind instead, which was telling her that he had been sleeping all night and well into the afternoon.

"He isn't going to wake for more than a few minutes. You had best go back to your room and read. Have you read any of the books by Guinivere Collins? No? You should, they are very good." She herded the man out of the room, and closed the door, locking it.

"You're a Miko, can't you do anything to heal him?" Yusuke's voice betrayed nothing but impatience, but she decided to avoid any thoughts that came with it.

"The healing a Miko will use does nothing but accelerate time's passage on the area being healed, no that does not cause the person to age. If I accelerated time with him, I'm willing to bet the fever would kill him. Seizures come when one has had a bad fever for a while, and we'll see that anyway, but those are dangerous too, if they're moving too fast for me to help. In shorter words, my answer is no." Bare irritation showed through her voice, a sign of the strain, which she knew surprised Hiei.

"I'm sorry Mother…I should have told you…" All eyes turned to see Kurama mumbling under his breath. Skye touching his hand pityingly, and she heard Hiei realize that she did, after all, care.

"He doesn't know where he is." she told them sadly. "His eyes and ears are showing him a different place, perhaps a different time as well."

She stood, straightening white robes that had stained at the knees from caring for him. Her violet eyes were blazing with an anger that she would not otherwise show, an anger for no human, but for a disease that would do this to a proud fighter.

"There will be others, like WindStorm, and VineRose, perhaps others, with this disease. Many dead, many needing care, not just your one Kurama. We'll need to open a new wing for this, epidemics are terrible. I am sure something this catching will have started one."

Without another word to the other two, she strode purposefully from the garden room. Neither would follow, she knew, so she left the world others called Mikai, after the Mikos that ruled it, from another door, one into Vinerose's village.

As soon as she moved through the door, she heard Vinerose, the village Miko, coming for her. Her eyes flashed will irritation at being interrupted.

"Twenty-one sick, four dead, but I cannot put them in Mikai's nearby hospital because I do not run it, and they would not let me in." Now her eyes were angry, but her words were still calm and emotionless.

"I am sorry, Vinerose, that was a terrible mistake. The secretary involved was let go of. I have come to see how many are sick, and to bring them with me." The older Miko nodded with slight pleasure.

"Wingthorn, if we do not stop this epidemic soon, all of the villages nearby will be empty." the older woman told her tiredly. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

"No, and neither have any of my ancestors. This is bad, we may need to ask the Wolf Stone." The Wolf Stone was a yellow stone carved into the image of a wolf and supposedly would answer one question every hundred years. Skye firmly believed in it, but she knew she was one of the few.

"You! Why won't you get over your superstitions? First you tell me you're a WolfSister, now you're bringing in your Wolf Stone?" Vinerose's voice was heavy with scorn. She tossed graying black hair over her shoulder irritably.

"The Wolf Children race is not a superstition, or a myth. That much, I can prove." Her calm voice was dangerous now, and she could see Vinerose was almost willing to believe her on her word alone, but she had to prove it.

"I'll believe it when I see it." Vinerose told her grimly, sticking to her belief, even when she no longer truly believed it. Skye shot her an exasperated look, and shifted.

Are you happy now? The white wolf said to her, mind to mind, in a voice that seemed to growl angrily. Are you done being a fool, or need I further demonstrate? By the slump of Vinerose's shoulders, Skye decided she could shift back. So she did.

"Satisfied? Good. Help me take these poor ill people to the ward. I'll tell Kinara to prepare the ward." Vinerose gave a curt nod, and then hesitated.

"Wingthorn, it doesn't feel like a normal disease. It feels…I think there is a human hand to it."

"A cultivated disease?" Skye spun to say sharply. Vinerose nodded, her authority returning. Skye's brow furrowed in deep consideration, before sighing. "Lets get these people to a safe place first."

"There was sickness in WindStorm before it began here, and it was about a week ahead too." the older Miko was telling her. "It's not just there either. SummerSong has it too. That's where it started. Half of SummerSong is dead, Wingthorn, and the Summersong herself included. It's called BriarVoice now. The new Miko, Summersong's daughter, is unsure of herself, though. I am worried."

Skye sighed, and closed the door to the new ward, which was already occupied by twenty eight sick, from both WindStorm and VineRose. WindStorm had been terribly unlucky, many had died, the eight here were the only survivors. They would see SummerSong- no, BriarVoice- next.

She had been right, an epidemic had begun.

Skye stopped suddenly, her hand poised just a hair's breadth from Kurama's door. "Did you say Su- BriarVoice is half dead? That village is huge! Hundreds reside there! Resided…"

Vinerose nodded sorrowfully. "It's that bad. There are more than three hundred dead to this disease. Maybe in Ningenkai it would be nothing, but we all know Makai has so few people in comparison. Three-hundred and Sixteen alls told."

316 dead.

Skye swallowed hard, her face pale, and opened Kurama's door, to see Yusuke jump to his feet in relief.

"He's had a seizure. I didn't know what to do, I was hoping you'd come back." She had never seen Yusuke look so lost, not even in the memories she had accidentally, unwillingly, stumbled across.

She checked Kurama's fever, and found it as bad as ever, maybe even a little worse. His lips were chapped from it, and his skin pale, almost gray. She pinched the skin on his hand, and it sank back slowly, so slowly.

He was dehydrated. She picked up a jar of willow bark tea she had already prepared, and tried to make him sip at it, but he just choked. If she couldn't get liquid in him somehow…she didn't want to think about it. But she thought it anyway.

He would die.