chapter 08: in which there is a hotel

Kurama swiped away the last of the blood on his face, checked the mirror one last time, and then headed for the door. His instincts screamed for him to keep on the run, but he knew that Karasu would be expecting that. He'd had the advantage of disappearing, and he wanted to keep that for as long as possible.

Reaching back to fish in his loops of hair, Kurama picked out two hairpins and unbent them. The key to this room had not turned up on the inside, which had not surprised him, but there were many other ways of egress. Unlike the others, he preferred to simply open the lock rather than kick the door down. This way, the door could still be used.

Five seconds later, the door swung open, leaving Kurama free to roam into the hallway. There were several other doors set into niches in the hall, but Kurama felt no obligation to investigate those rooms. The front hall was also empty, though it was the sort of empty that indicated that the business was closed until twilight rather than indefinitely.

The first thing Kurama hit on in the room was the phone. The line had not been severed, so Kurama thought for a minute, then tapped out a number, gingerly sitting on the desk.

"Your call is being redirected to an automatic voice mail system," said a tinny computer voice.

Kurama glared at the phone, then said, "Hi, Yusuke. Wherever you are, your signal isn't good. I hope you're alive and well. I'm alive and working on the 'well' part. Right now I am in...ooh," Kurama interjected, picking up a personalized set of Post-its. "Mary Sue's House of Bishounen Love. They're not here right now, so I'm running up their phone bill and searching their establishment for something other than condoms and heavy sedatives." Kurama opened the bottom drawer of the desk with one toe, gazed inside, then nudged it shut. "Spiky sex toys and pink fluffy handcuffs are in full attendance, it seems. If you pick up this message and you're anywhere near Hiei, would you mind screaming 'what the hell were you thinking?' at him for me? Anyway, I'm not going anywhere just yet, but I'll try and call you again later. Bye now."

Kurama tried ten different numbers in an attempt to get Kuwabara's cell phone. After one too many confused people with Caller ID, Kurama decided that this might not be his first priority after all and instead turned to the front desk for entertainment.

Fifteen minutes of expert searching later, Kurama was sitting cross-legged on the desk again, paging through the appointment book and writing amusing haikus in the margins when he felt it necessary. He was counting the syllables in 'chlamydia' when a figure standing outside the tinted glass door made him look up.

Some vague sense of mischief made him lean over the desk and flip the switch to turn the neon lights over the door on. The figure jumped, but the motion was so carefully controlled that it wouldn't have been noticeable if Kurama hadn't known exactly what to look for. Kurama's eyes narrowed as he uncoiled himself from the desk and started unlocking the door. "What," he said when he flung the door open, "are you doing here?"

"That's the question that I really wanted to ask you," Hiei said, still staring up at the neon sign. "I think my question has more merit. I'm here because Yusuke and I were looking for you. He went to the border and I came here. I think he has a masochistic streak."

"Well, if he did, he went to the wrong place. The fuzzy pink handcuffs and spiky sex toys are here," Kurama told him. "Oh, yes, there was one more thing. What the hell were you thinking!"

"You're talking about my latest attempt at telepathy?" Hiei asked with maddening serenity.

"Yes," said Kurama. "I've had a lot of injuries in my very long life. But I've never had someone telepathically make my eyes start bleeding before."

"I'm just full of surprises," Hiei said tonelessly.

Kurama smiled, slightly unwillingly. "Yes, I suppose you are. You haven't practised that telepathy trick since I did that job for you, have you?"

"And a lousy job it was," Hiei assented.

"It most certainly was not," Kurama said, stepping back from the door and letting Hiei in. "It took Koenma two weeks to twig that I'd nicked his prizes. And Enma never even guessed. He just left, which is a damn sight more than you could have gotten without me, so do stop complaining. You know, I don't think I ever told Koenma just how long ago the job was."

Hiei glared. "And then you just walked out on the deal."

"Of course," said Kurama lightly. "I wanted to, and you couldn't have stopped me."

"I could have," Hiei protested.

Kurama grinned beatifically at him. "Did you? No. But you wanted to. This is beside the point," he added, taking up residence on the desk again. "You said you were with Yusuke. Did he get my message?"

Hiei shook his head. "Not while I was with him."

"Damn," said Kurama. "Wait. You sent him to the border. Why did you do that?"

"He volunteered," Hiei said with a palms-up shrug. "Said something about it being in a greater cause and that I was totally oblivious if I didn't get it."

Kurama blinked. "I don't know what he's talking about either, but I'd like to hear about the fireworks between Mukuro and him when it's over."

"What is this place?" Hiei asked, scrutinizing but not daring to touch the walls and decorations.

"A very cheap brothel, it seems," Kurama said. "You missed me reminiscing about my youth. Or maybe you didn't, since you were in my head only a few minutes later."

Hiei looked like he wanted to be fascinated by anything but Kurama, but wouldn't be caught dead being fascinated by what else was visible to him in the room. "Something like that."

"It would probably be a good idea if we left before business opened for the night. Yusuke is accounted for, but Kuwabara and Yukina are still missing. I don't remember Kuwabara's cell phone number, and I highly doubt that you ever knew it to begin with. You know, there's something that's bothering me," Kurama concluded.

"What?" Hiei prompted.

"After you left Yusuke's house, I saw the news," Kurama said. "These zombies are confined to a fairly small area in both worlds. The hells are open, but the souls that have been released aren't sealing to bodies outside of a few areas. We're getting demons back from wherever they disposed of Dark Tournament losers and the border area that we know of. Humans are showing up undead in this prefecture only. I think that there's some kind of parameter or border that we haven't been told about yet. The thing is, if this necromancer wants to rule the three worlds, he'd need everyone to be the undead, not just a handful of humans and demons."

Hiei looked intrigued. "There is something to ask the necromancer the next time we talk to him. I'm inclined to think that he'll explain."

"Mm. Anyway, if we're leaving here, where do we go? I can't just wander around aimlessly. I don't have that option," Kurama added.

"If you want to find your attacker, it might work well," Hiei said.

Kurama didn't look up. "He already found me in the street out there," he explained, nodding towards the back. "Either he's waiting for me outside or he thinks I went somewhere else. If he was waiting, he probably left when you got here. He likes to talk to me when I'm alone."

"No wandering around aimlessly," Hiei translated. "Fine. Where to?"

Kurama rubbed his hands over his face. "Somewhere that has a phone and some way for me to try and scrub my skin off."

"As I do not spend much time in the human world, I wouldn't know of any places off the top of my head," Hiei said dryly. "Can you be more specific?"

"I don't want to go back to my house," Kurama explained. "Hotel, maybe. I have money. They have satellite TV if you play it right."

"Do I want to know why you'd like to scrub your skin off?" Hiei asked as Kurama got up and went for the door.

"No," said Kurama. "I don't think you do."

It was with some relief that they managed to find a hotel sort of place. There was a gaping hole where the front entrance and first floor should be which had been inexpertly boarded up. It looked frightfully precarious, especially with the long-haired young woman banging awkwardly at nails. As they watched, she swore in a most unladylike manner and pitched the hammer at the boards. Three boards broke and another bit of the first floor crumbled onto the young woman's head. This provoked a fresh round of curses, this time with some additional panic. Some of the relief died.

"What is this, the Leaning Hotel of Pisa?" Kurama asked rhetorically.

"The what?" Hiei inquired.

Kurama grinned. "Someday I am going to give you my textbooks, but for now, don't ask."

"Now he tells me."

"Well, at least it'll probably be relatively empty," Kurama mused, eyeing the young woman fumbling for her hammer in the wreckage.

"There's a point," said Hiei.

"The question is, empty of what?" Kurama continued. "The living or the dead?"

Whatever Hiei's response might have been was lost in the ratchet of a shotgun. "Hell," said Kurama, closing his eyes. "I hate being shot at."

"I know the pair of you aren't human," said the older man holding the shotgun. "So my apologies about this treatment, but you're dead anyway and we prefer to only have live people in this area."

"I wouldn't fire that," Kurama said, not opening his eyes. "I really wouldn't."

"They all say that," said the man, sighting.

Kurama threw his hands up and turned away. "Satisfy yourself."

If the man with the shotgun had been extremely perceptive, he would have caught the very brief glance exchanged between the two and the accompanying slight smile. "Again, I apologise for this treatment, but I've got guests and staff to think of, and don't you want to not be...decaying and such? Anyway, I hope this doesn't hurt."

The first shell disappeared three inches from the muzzle in a burst of black fire. The second one went up two seconds later. The shotgun-wielding man yelped and dropped his weapon when the metal and plastic began heating up. "Where on earth did you get that?" Kurama asked, turning back around and nudging the gun with a toe. "I don't believe these are legal in this area."

"They're not," the man said disgustedly, stooping to pick it up. "But after all your sort showed up, it became a necessity. Trust me. I've seen the movies."

"They're not our sort," Kurama pointed out. "We're very much alive."

"But you're definitely not human," the man said, fumbling in a pocket for new shells.

Hiei sighed impatiently. "Were you looking somewhere else while your first attempts failed miserably? Don't even try or it'll be you on fire next time."

"I don't doubt it," said the man, looking ruefully at his gun. "But I still want you to leave."

Kurama silently dropped a roll of paper money at the man's feet, next to the gun.

"Never mind," said the man hastily. "Welcome, strange non-human creatures."

"Does it really show that badly?" Kurama asked. "You must have some kind of ability to detect it."

"I got some psychic training when I was younger," the man confided. "It shows on him, all over. I would have missed you if I didn't suspect you by association and look harder. You know, you didn't feel like the undead usually do, but I figured you might be a new kind," the man confided, carefully reaching down for the money. "Sorry. Hey, Junior!"

There was a stifled curse from the girl who had now regained her hammer. "Stop startling me, you make me drop things!"

"Sorry, but we got more people looking for a place to crash," the gunman told her plainly. "Forgive our lack of formality, but...zombies."

"Did you shoot at them?" Junior demanded, brandishing the hammer. "I told you to stop shooting at people! All right, fine, I'll go find a keycard!"

"Unfortunately, she's all the help I can find now," the gunman, who seemed to have taken on the role of the owner, mourned. "I mean, I've scraped some boy whose house burned down to clean the place and fix the vending machines in exchange for room and board, and I've got Junior to be charming at the front desk and do bigger repairs, and that's it."

"And you shoot the zombies who try and come in the front door," Kurama completed. "Got it."

"What's left of the front door," the man acknowledged. "Their homes are getting burned and looted like the rest, or they've been dead so long they don't have homes, but I'm not going to be a halfway house for the undead. I'm going to have hell to get the smell out of the carpets anyway."

"No one notices it any more," Junior announced. "This place has smelled like death in an oven for ages, and zombies just barely made it worse. Do you people like heights? Third floor has empty rooms, and the windows are in really good shape, which means they're not broken."

"'Charming' doesn't mean painfully honest!" the owner yelled as Junior stuffed her hammer through her belt and stood. "'Charming' means flatter them and lie through your teeth, dammit! And smile more!"

Junior smiled obediently at the owner, then picked her way through the rubble of the front door with a "Come this way, please."

The owner sighed and started to reload his shotgun meaningfully.

Some time later in another dimension, Yusuke had braved a staring match which had ended in a wary "You'll do," from Mukuro, and was now loitering in place of the border guards, wishing for a zombie to take his mind off the unending boredom. He was about five minutes away from counting blades of grass when his phone rang. Not bothering to wonder about the mysterious reception (it was, after all, somewhere Mukuro frequented), he grabbed at it. "Hello?"

"Have you checked your messages yet?" Kurama asked.

"Thank you. Thank you so much," Yusuke said in relief. "Yes, I checked my messages. Hey, I apologise for the telepathy-eyes-bleeding thing. It was pretty much my idea and I guess it sort of backfired on you."

"Mm," Kurama agreed. "It wasn't so very bad. It was mostly the shock factor that scared me. I was already feeling somewhat skittish, and having someone inside my head didn't help."

Yusuke marvelled at Kurama's aplomb. "And yet you're having this conversation with me as though there was absolutely nothing wrong at all whatsoever in the world. Is there a reason you decided to ransack a lower-class brothel?"

"It was there," Kurama said. "Yusuke, where are you right now?"

"Standing around on the border, waiting for zombies to show up. I can't say I blame Hiei for skiving off, even though he sort of didn't." Yusuke looked around hopefully in case a zombie had shown up, almost automatically.

"Yes, about that." Kurama's voice had gotten quieter. "Yusuke, I want you to come back here."

"Why?" Yusuke asked sharply. "What have you gotten into?"

Kurama took a slow breath. "Yusuke, you may have figured out that Karasu fixated on me before the fight, and that I was aware of this. He likes to find me when I'm alone. I prefer this, of course, but now it has gotten to the point where I..." Kurama seemed to find this tack dissatisfying and changed his approach. "This isn't the tournament, as you noticed. He can play with me as much as he wants here, and if I spent all my time in the company of humans, he would probably carpet bomb wherever I was, just to draw me out. If I spend my time with someone he qualifies as a threat, he's more likely to wait, grow impatient, and make a mistake. He knows that you and the others are not only a danger to him, but...well, you've never reacted well when someone like me is being harassed. At least, not well if you're the harasser."

"I'm missing what you're getting at, here," Yusuke said, though he had a fairly good idea anyway. "Keep going."

"I want you to come back here," Kurama enunciated. "I want Karasu to get frustrated. Your presence will dissuade him from coming near me, which seems to be his aim. I want him to make a mistake."

"You know, I told Hiei to find you," Yusuke said mildly. "That would be why I'm here."

"He's here," Kurama said evasively. "I'm not sure for how much longer."

Yusuke said merely, "Ah," and waited. The problem with this theory was that Kurama seemed quite content to not say anything at all. After a minute of dead air, he finally sighed and said, "All right. Karasu is scaring the shit out of you and you want someone else around to give you time to think."

"Yes," Kurama answered.

"And under no circumstances do you want to have this conversation with Hiei."

"...yes."

"If I were you, I wouldn't look forward to having the conversation that will occur if you let him walk out and Karasu gets at you. This, of course, is assuming you survive to have the conversation. If you don't, then I have the conversation, from which I doubt I will walk unscathed. Let's not even talk about how Kuwabara will react when he finds that he too has been totally left out of the loop."

Kurama suggested gently, "You could just come here and avoid the whole thing."

"You don't know where Karasu is and I don't know where you are," Yusuke said brutally. "And there's no way that you could give me directions."

"This is true," Kurama acknowledged.

Yusuke sensed triumph. "Look, I'm pretty sure he won't just vanish on you anyway, but yell at him if he tries. He'll probably listen to you."

"You're probably right," Kurama told him resignedly. "Yusuke, this wouldn't by any chance have to do with this bet you were raving about last night, would it?"

"Oh look, a zombie! Hey, I have to go now," Yusuke lied wildly.

"You're a horrible liar," Kurama said, but Yusuke had already hung up.

"I really want to know the exact terms of that bet," Hiei said from the doorway.

Kurama managed not to show that he was startled. Barely. "I would, too."

"Yusuke talks loudly," Hiei added, distractedly running a hand through his hair, which was now wet and flopping in interestingly gravity-defying directions. The zombie ichor had been cleaned from his skin as well.

Kurama gave up on hiding his astonishment. "So you heard that." When Hiei nodded, he pressed, "All of it?"

"Yusuke was right," Hiei told him. "You really would not have liked the conversation that would have occurred if you'd cut me out of this."

"It wouldn't have been cutting you out of it so much as not interfering with your plans," Kurama hedged, going to the window and looking at the darkening sky. "This morning was a very long time ago," he added quietly, resting his forehead on the glass and closing his eyes. "I always forget how these days feel. I think it's a sort of internal self-defence mechanism."

Hiei realized that the subject had been very neatly changed and, out of respect for the sheer artistry of it, let it go. "Possibly."

There was a resounding crash from three stories down, followed by a veritable river of curses that could be dimly heard through the window. "I really should be worried that this place is going to fall down in the night," Kurama reflected. "But somehow, I just can't seem to feel any real concern."

"We've had worse," Hiei said dismissively.

Kurama smiled slightly when the curses outside subsided into unenthusiastic hammer strikes, then grinned outright when the hammer strikes gave way to a dull thunk and more swearing, this time in pain. "I suppose so. Listen, I give even Karasu a day to start getting annoyed, but do you want to sleep in turns? Are you even that paranoid about the human world? I don't expect zombies to come in here on a raid, but stranger things have happened so far."

"You sleep; I'll think about it," Hiei said dismissively.

"The last time you slept was, I think, four days ago," Kurama pointed out.

"And?"

"And we have a megalomaniac necromancer, an undead Quest-Class demon, and probably all sorts of other irritated undead people after you, me, or both of us," Kurama reminded him. "Sleep would be something of a good idea, even though you pretend you never do. This place has really bad coffee anyway."

The last point seemed to do more to convince Hiei than anything else. "I said I'll think about it."

"Be an active and involved thinker, then," Kurama told him, carefully turning and sliding to the floor. "If you don't and thus feel the need to steal coffee worth drinking, steal me some too."

Some hours later, Kurama woke up, biting back a scream. He knew that someone was sitting next to him and probably had woken him up, but he didn't pay very much attention. Instead, he felt his way from the darkened room without a word. When he returned, his skin had taken on the grey-green cast of someone who is more or less out of things to throw up but whose body keeps giving it a try anyway.

"I thought you'd stopped having those dreams," Hiei said. His eyes were glowing oddly.

"I had," Kurama agreed. "But one can understand why they'd start again. Was I screaming?"

Hiei nodded. "Not for very long."

"Not in this consciousness, perhaps," Kurama admitted. "I dream of things that I should not even be able to imagine, and I wonder if it's his influence or my own. I have seen enough horrors that the things in my mind now are only a step farther. So I wonder if these things that I dream...I wonder if they are things he would do to me, or if they are things that I am capable of doing, should I want to."

Hiei stood up easily and joined Kurama over by the window. "I wouldn't know."

"Mm. Do you mind telling me how you knew I'd stopped having those dreams?"

"They're noticeable," Hiei said, feeling vaguely as though he were admitting something that he'd rather not talk about.

"I suppose I don't know if I'd stopped," Kurama continued meditatively. "I could just have been pausing until something brought it all back for me."

"Such as Karasu himself," Hiei pointed out.

"True." Kurama rubbed at his eyes. "That knocks sleeping right out of potential activities for now, that does," he added ruefully. "Damn. Have you slept?"

"Yes," Hiei said. "Some. Tell me," he began, knowing that the question he was aiming for might not be well received. When Kurama looked at him inquisitively, he continued, "What is it like?"

Kurama didn't dodge the question at all. "The physical pain is quite great. The fear is so bad I forget what it's like to feel any other way. I always prefer it to be real, because then I can try to kill him again. When I dream, I don't have that option. And he never, ever deliberately does any harm to my face."

"I see," said Hiei, and he was pretty sure that he did.

A few minutes of silence later, Kurama said thoughtfully, "Yusuke should have cut me in."

"What?"

"That bet he keeps going on about lately," Kurama mused. "I have a feeling that it's something of a long-running one."

"Yes," said Hiei with some relief at the change of subject. "What is it, anyway?"

"Probably some kind of bet on whether or not we're having it off," Kurama continued. "If so, you confused Yusuke no end last night, which would be why he keeps pushing it."

Hiei again felt that vague feeling of going into mental territory which he'd rather not be in. "And why does he feel the need to do such a thing?"

Kurama looked blank. "I don't know. Maybe he really needs the money."

"It's not like he's going to get it," Hiei pointed out. "Is he?"

Instead of answering him, Kurama leaned over and kissed him instead. It took two seconds for what had been on the relatively friendly side to turn into something much more involved, hungrier, and with two very definite participants.

After five seconds, Kurama pulled away and said quietly, "I'm sorry, but you asked for it."

"Yes," Hiei realized. "I rather did."

The silence that descended was not in any way uncomfortable, but instead that of two people who are simply tired. When Kurama fell back asleep, Hiei didn't feel the need to wake him or to go elsewhere.

Review me. Love me.

Nyte Kit: Ah, subtext. How you crash down on my head and box my ears.

Bluespark: That's Julian's job.

KyoHana: First angst/comedy, now horror/comedy. I NEED TO NOT BE SO AMUSING.

A lilmatchgirl: He's back now. Promise.

Capella Alpha Aurigae: It just sort of popped up in my skull, replacing my previous convoluted plan. And I said "WTF" muchly, and in my skull, Hiei and Yusuke and Mukuro all said "WTF" with me.

Oya: Chapter three, I believe it was. You won't get the terms until much later.