CHAPTER FIVE

Yahiko stomped into the Sekihoutai leaders' meeting. Since their war with the Meiji, Sagara rotated the meeting place of the monthly meetings. They met in the basement of a nightclub this time, Sanosuke's choice. Yahiko always thought the rooster-head must've owned stock in the place because he was there so much. Stupid vampire.

The noise penetrated even to the basement, and its dull, pounding accompaniment would've given Yahiko a headache if he could still have them. As it was, he already had aches all over his body from where bones were still knitting themselves back together after his fall.

Six faces greeted him when he opened the thick metal door and stepped inside the room. The Sekihoutai leaders were seated on folding chairs around a rectangular table.

"Yahiko. Report?" Captain Sagara didn't waste any unnecessary words as Yahiko shut the door behind him and leaned against it wearily.

"I found the vampire living in the Sierra Nevadas, but it wasn't her. Some human has been going around killing those women."

Sagara was silent a moment, thinking, then he lifted his eyes to Yahiko's and asked, "Name?"

Yahiko shrugged, winced as the movement pulled at his still-healing scars, and said, "I didn't catch her name, I was too busy fighting her."

A ripple of amusement fluttered around the faces of Sagara's men.

"You look like hell, Yahiko." Keisuke, a big vampire with sideburns, guffawed. "What did she do to you?"

It pissed Yahiko off. "She didn't do all this. I fell off a cliff."

"You fell?" asked Yuji, polite disbelief in his tone. Tetsu, Yuji's best friend, raised an eyebrow sardonically.

Scowling, Yahiko admitted, "She knifed me first then shoved me off it."

"I've just got to meet this girl!" Keisuke muttered in admiration.

"Yeah, well you're out of luck because I didn't catch her name, and the next time you want to get rid of her, you'd be better off sending Battousai than Keisuke." Yahiko told his captain angrily.

The others laughed until Sagara quieted them by raising a finger and tapping on the table meditatively. "Tell me more about her."

Yahiko took a few steps away from the door and stood at the end of the table by where Sagara was sitting, addressing him and pointedly ignoring the others.

"She's…weird."

Sagara's eyes narrowed, intrigued. "How so?"

"She kept growling at me."

The brown haired vampire sat up straighter in his chair, then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Growling?"

"Yeah." Yahiko blinked a bit at Sagara's interest. "She kept accusing me of killing the humans too."

"How old was she?"

Yahiko knew Sagara meant vampire years, not human ones, and thought back. "She seemed young – ten or maybe fifteen years a vampire."

Keisuke moved in his chair, about to make a snide remark about Yahiko's age, but subsided when Yuji tugged on his sleeve and shook his head. Yahiko saw their interaction, but glanced back at Sagara when the captain spoke.

"What did she look like?"

Yahiko shrugged again before remembering that it hurt. "I dunno. Like a girl. She was short," he glared at Keisuke, daring him to compare the girl's size to his own short stature. Keisuke simply lifted his hands in surrender, so Yahiko continued.

"She had short hair and bangs. She was kind of scrawny looking too." He finished airily, so they wouldn't think he'd thought she was pretty.

Sagara leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "If she was one of the Meiji vampires they'd have already dealt with her." He said reflectively, then his gaze sharpened and he continued. "Send upstairs for Sanosuke. He knows all the newer vampires in Southern California."

"Yeah, 'cause he keeps trying to win money off of them." Yahiko muttered as Winston, the latest recruit onto the Sekihoutai leadership team, got up from his chair to go fetch Sanosuke.

Winston reminded Yahiko of the Beach Boys, all blonde haired and blue eyed, except that his eyes were the cold, emotionless orbs of a long time vampire. Winston had been turned back in the late 1800s, and had been an actual cowboy, but he refused to talk about those days. Yahiko was determined to wear him down eventually. He found Winston's taciturn, deceptively relaxed manner to be the ultimate in coolness.

Within minutes, Winston returned with Sanosuke following. Captain Sagara greeted him, and quickly filled him in on what Yahiko told them about the girl vampire.

"Sounds a bit like the last one Katsu turned before he died." Sanosuke said. Katsu was one of the first casualties of the Sekihoutai's war with the Meiji when they'd tried to take over Sekihoutai territory. "I thought she'd be dead by now."

"Why?" asked Sagara.

"She ran off before Katsu or I could fill her in."

Sagara frowned. "Katsu didn't tell her anything before he changed her?"

"Uh, long story."

Sagara waited.

Yahiko could tell Sano didn't want to tell the story, but Sagara's silence demanded it. Reluctantly, Sano admitted that the girl had been drugged when Katsu took her home and that she didn't remember anything he'd told her, so she freaked out the next morning and ran. By the way Sano kept glancing over at Yahiko, stopping in the middle of the tale, then starting again, he figured Sano was editing the story a lot. It burned him up. He wasn't a kid anymore. He knew how vampires like Sano and Katsu liked to seduce their blood suppliers. Though how any woman could fall for that stupid rooster head's lines was beyond him. Scowling, he waited for Sano to finish.

"So what you're saying is," Sagara began slowly, "the girl ran off with no real knowledge of what it means to be a vampire. So all she knows are things from movies and books?"

"Yep."

Yahiko stopped scowling and thought back to his conversation with the girl. "That means she thinks we kill the humans we drink from?" he asked incredulously. Well, that explained why she'd called them both monsters.

Sagara nodded. "Damn that Bram Stoker." He muttered, as all the vampires around the room nodded their agreement.

Turning suddenly to Yahiko, Sagara asked him a question. "You said she growled and accused you of killing humans. Did she say if she'd ever killed one?"

Yahiko shook his head. "No. She said she'd never drunk human blood. I didn't believe her, but…"

"So she's feral."

"Huh?"

Yahiko staggered forward as Sanosuke smacked him on the back of the head. "Feral, Yahiko. Don't you know anything? A vampire who drinks only animal blood becomes like an animal eventually. They lose all their human qualities and have to be put down like rabid dogs or they'll give us away."

Yahiko recovered from his stumble, whipped around and glared at Sanosuke. "She's got more humanity than you, you rooster head. How could you just let her go off like that without telling her anything?"

"Break it up, you two." Sagara's quiet admonition stopped Sanosuke from a comeback, so he contented himself with scowling at Yahiko.

"Yahiko."

Yahiko wrenched his own scowling face away from Sano and looked back at his captain. "Yeah?"

"I want you to go back and get the girl. She's the only one who's seen the real killer. Already there are vampire rumors on the Internet about these bodies. If the legitimate press gets hold of evidence that the girl exists, even if she isn't the killer, we're all in danger."

"You want me to kill her?" Yahiko kept most of the dismay he felt at the thought out of his voice, but he was all too aware of Sagara's probing glance as the older vampire answered.

"No. Not yet. We need her to help catch the killer."

"But the killer's a human!" objected Yahiko.

Sagara's eyes clouded. All of a sudden, he looked tired. "I know, and usually we leave human crimes to the human police, but there may be more going on here than meets the eye. We've got to stop these killings before the rumors get out of hand. We have enough to worry about without the threat of exposure."

Something about the way Sagara said it sent a wave of concern through Yahiko. It wasn't often that Sagara looked harried.

"Come on," Sanosuke tugged on the back of Yahiko's shirt. "I could use your help out there on guard duty." The team leader who chose the meeting place of the month was also responsible for safeguarding it.

Yahiko glared, but stomped up to the metal door, opened it, and walked through.

Sano paused a moment to stare at Sagara, a challenge and a question in his eyes.

"Give Yahiko a month, then go after him. If the girl has really gone feral, kill her."

Sano allowed a brief smile to grace his lips. Katsu was recovering from the burns the girl caused when the Meiji attacked the Sekihoutai. If he'd been up to full strength, he might have made it.

"Fine, but just remember, the next meeting it's Keisuke's turn to do guard duty." Sano smirked at the big vampire sitting at the back of the table.

"Looking forward to it." Keisuke taunted back at him. "I'm planning our next meeting in a decent place that doesn't have folding chairs."

"Wuss," Sanosuke called out amiably on his way out the door.

OOO

Two metal blades, one short, one long, crashed together hard enough to cause sparks.

They fought in a clearing half way up the side of a mountain, with boulders all around, studding the treeless alpine meadow. It took Yahiko almost a month again to find the girl, and when he had, she'd jumped him.

Breaking contact, they leapt apart. The moon was bright overhead, and bathed the white rounded boulders with an eerie glow. They looked like the top of skulls protruding up from the ground.

The girl took two steps backwards, crouched, and jumped up and to the rear, landing on top of one of the boulders. "Why aren't you dead?" she hissed.

They'd been fighting for over an hour, the girl retreating, and Yahiko pursuing. She was fast, but he could keep up with her, and without the advantage of fighting in caves she was familiar with, the girl wasn't that difficult to corner.

Yahiko kept his sword between them, tensed for her to jump down at him. "You didn't use a stake, and you didn't take my head off. Of course I didn't die."

The girl, he still didn't know her name, jumped off the boulder, but not down towards Yahiko. Instead, she landed on a smaller rock to her right. Yahiko moved to his left to keep facing her.

He took another step, and lost his balance as his left foot plunged through the grassy sod and into a shallow narrow fissure with water at the bottom. It was one of those streamlets that carried melted ice down the mountainside, and he'd just discovered it the hard way.

"Now you die."

He heard her mouth the words, and barely got his sword up in time. Her knife clashed with his wakizashi blade, sliding down it to the tsuba, that rectangular piece of metal separating the hilt from the blade. She tried to knee him as she struck, but he moved unexpectedly, dropping his other foot into the fissure instead of trying to climb out of it, which would have knocked his balance further off.

As her knife blade met his tsuba, he straightened his arms suddenly, knocking her hands against her chest, throwing his full weight into the blow.

She staggered back, and when she did, he struck, slashing across her middle with the tip of his blade, drawing blood. He'd heard his wakizashi scrape against her ribs, and knew the cut must be painful.

He jumped out of the fissure and pressed his advantage, continuing to slash back and forth, herding her backwards. He didn't give her time to think, only to react. With her left arm pressing against the wound in her torso and her right clutching the knife, she was in no position to defend herself properly.

So she attacked. Waiting until one of his swings was at its far end, she aimed for the bicep crossing his body and lunged forward.

Yahiko saw it coming, and skipped back a step, twisting his blade downward at an angle over the bicep she wanted so that his face was framed in a perfect triangle made by the blade on one side and his bicep and forearm on the other two.

It was called the rainbow block, and it had one great advantage. Once the enemy had committed their forward motion and the blades touched, all you had to do was angle your blade downward, and the enemy's weapon slid toward the ground along your blade.

The next logical move was to whip the blade around and take your enemy's head off while they staggered forward, off balance, but Yahiko didn't want to kill her. Instead, he whipped his blade around, keeping the metal tip pointed in the air, and brought the hilt down on the back of her unprotected neck.

She dropped to her hands and knees, stunned, and tried feebly to raise her knife. Yahiko kicked it out of her hand. She fell flat, and rolled so she lay on her back, hands held protectively in front of her.

Seeing his chance to immobilize her so she'd have to stay still and listen to him, Yahiko threw his blade into the ground tip first and dropped on top of her.

Seizing her wrists, he pulled her hands apart and forced them into the grass on either side of her head. She struggled like a wild thing, frantically trying to buck him off and raise her arms from where he'd imprisoned them against the grass.

It didn't work, and eventually she gave up trying.

"Now, will you listen to me?" he asked, aggrieved that he'd had to endure her version of a bucking bronco ride.

"Just kill me so you can go back to killing humans," she spat the words at him, making angry noises in the back of her throat and pushing her wrists one last time against Yahiko's hands.

"Look, I don't want to kill you, and I don't go around killing humans. I need you to help me find the real killer, that guy who keeps dumping the bodies."

She stopped grimacing and looked at him, really looked at him in the eyes.

Her eyes were brown, with little golden flecks in them, and they were staring at him with a dull, defeated curiosity.

"What do you care about the humans? They're just food to you."

Yahiko frowned. "It's not like that. Some of my suppliers actually beg me to bite them," he bragged. So what if it was only that one time? The human girl had actually said 'please' that time, so that counted as begging, didn't it?

"Liar."

He supposed he should be insulted at being called a liar, but the way she said it, so hopeless, so despairing, tugged at him.

"Don't you remember when you got bit?" he asked curiously. He remembered when Battousai bit him. He was already in pain all over from being shot several times, but when those fangs broke his skin this curious warmth spilled out from the spot, and a sense of well-being. It was kind of like how one of his friends at school had described being high.

"No." she answered.

Yahiko blinked. "Oh yeah, you were drugged. I remember now. Sano told me. Look, I know you might not believe this because of what happened with you, but humans don't have to die or turn into vampires just because we bite them. Some actually like it. You don't have to drink them dry, you can make do with just a little blood."

Something in the girl's eyes sparked, and then died. "I don't believe you. I became a vampire when I was bit, and I the hunger nearly drives me insane every time a human comes near. If I ever started to drink, I don't think I'd be able to stop."

"Why not bite them then, and find out?" Yahiko asked flippantly, not wanting to let her know that Katsu had fed her his blood while she was unconscious. Something told him that she'd be even more pissed off about that. If she asked later on how she'd turned, he'd tell her, but not now.

A look of horror, revulsion, and longing crossed her face. "Don't say that! I refuse to do anything that horrible to another human being."

Yahiko relaxed his upper torso, which he'd held at arm's length above the girl in case she tried to bite, and moved his face closer to hers. "You're not a human being anymore." He held her gaze, watched the defeat cross her features.

"Who is Sano?" she asked quietly. "Is he the one who did this to me?"

"No, that was Katsu."

Her face clenched up and her brow furrowed. "Katsu," she repeated, letting her eyes drift past his shoulder into the starry night sky.

"If you're thinking of getting revenge, forget it. Katsu's dead." Her gaze snapped back at him, and he continued. "Sano's the one who woke you up the next night."

"Sano." The name came out as a snarl.

"Yeah, yeah, I hate that annoying rooster head too, but forget him. We've got a killer to catch."

Yahiko rolled off her and grabbed her knife, handing it to her hilt first.

She stared at it stupidly for a moment, then took it from him, sitting up, and clasping it firmly in her right hand. "Why are you giving this to me?"

Engrossed in yanking his wakizashi out of the ground and checking the blade for knicks and scratches, Yahiko didn't bother to turn around as he answered.

"I beat you. I won; you lost, so you owe me one. It's a vampire rule. I could've killed you, you know." Yahiko said, making up the rule as he went along. It's not like she'd know any different. He wondered if she believed that ridiculous legend about vampires turning into bats. Hmm, probably not.

There was a silence, so Yahiko looked over to find the girl still sitting where he'd left her, her head bowed over the knife she held in front of her, the hilt cradled in the palms of both hands and the blade pointed at her chest. The dark of the vampiric blood staining her tank top made the glistening blade stand out against her body in sharp relief.

"Hey, what's your name?" he asked her, not liking the stillness. It almost looked like she was going to stab herself like Juliet in that play he'd had to read in high school.

She raised her head. "Tsubame."

"I'm Yahiko." He sheathed his blade abruptly, thrusting it behind him in the sheath strapped to his back. "Let's go find a serial killer."

He stepped over to her and held out his hand.

Tsubame hesitated, then gripped the hilt of her knife in her right palm, and took his hand with her left, allowing him to pull her up from the ground.

Yahiko turned his back on her, and started off down the mountain. He took two steps, three, then four. There was only the quiet of the evening at his back, and then, a footstep, and another. She was following him, and for once she wasn't trying to stab him in the back.

Yahiko smiled and kept going.