chapter fourteen: in which things go boom

"I really have to ask if you and Yusuke actually practice finding ways to screw up my plans. On that note, your teeth need to get out of my palm right now this second."

Hiei had realized who he was biting somewhere around the middle of the first sentence. "What the hell is going on?" he demanded.

Kurama shook his bleeding hand automatically, already backing away. "I have to be somewhere else right now. You should go back before Yusuke gets confused."

"Yusuke is still traumatised from meeting a succubus on the border. I'm the one confused," Hiei retorted. "Explain."

"In that case," Kurama said, wiping his bloody hand on his shorts, "follow me. I don't have time to argue with you."

Hiei ducked into another hallway, waited for Kurama to quietly close the door, then demanded. "What the hell are you wearing?"

Brushing at his hair in a motion that left streaks of blood on his forehead, Kurama said tiredly, "Toshi's clothes. Listen, I need to be gone very quickly, so what was it that you wanted to know?"

"Why are you disappearing? In case you hadn't noticed, there are about five hundred zombies storming around upstairs, with a grand total of two people against them," Hiei said, pointing at the ceiling. "We're trying to kill the man behind this and you just walk away for your own reasons?"

"You could put it that way," Kurama said. "We have both done such things before, so don't start."

Hiei reminded him, "It's likely that if you kill the necromancer, Karasu will die."

"That's just it," Kurama replied hotly. "If I kill the necromancer, Karasu dies. I want him to die because of me, not because it was some incidental thing."

"What are your chances?" Hiei asked. "You should have died the last time you fought. You have one hell of a lucky streak. Discounting that, what do you have?"

Kurama's eyes were empty. "He's good. He was better than me then, and he might be better than me now, especially since he's undead. But it won't last forever. If I go after him seriously enough, he'll try to kill me. He came for me here. He thinks he's found me, which gives me time. Toshi won't be able to hurt him, either, which will frustrate him until he twigs to what I've done. It's not hard to get the upper hand of him either when he's angry or when he's overconfident."

"All right. I understand getting Toshi to look like you. Why the hell do you look like him?" Hiei demanded.

"Fair trade," said Kurama. "I needed Toshi's cooperation quite badly. Besides, it'll get Karasu's attention."

"Yes it will," Hiei muttered, looking Kurama over.

Kurama smiled, slow and murky. "How did you guess, by the way? You couldn't have seen Toshi for longer than a minute. I thought I did a better illusion job than that."

"I notice things," replied Hiei, "that most people never even look at. I can't quite help but do so."

"This could go one of two ways," Kurama realized. "One of those ways will not get me out of here in a timely fashion. By now, Yusuke has to be wondering where you went. He's going to get Toshi killed if he does something wrong. I need this to go right."

Hiei nodded. "Go." When Kurama disappeared in the other direction, Hiei's curiosity prompted him to start taking a longer look at the hallway he was in. The first door to his left had rather a weak lock, after all.

While this was going on, Yusuke had actually forgotten entirely about Hiei. This was because Karasu had started winning handily against whom Yusuke still perceived to be Kurama, and Yusuke was in a high state of distress.

Somewhere behind the high state of distress registering in Yusuke's mind, however, a rather perplexed thought line was forming. There was a good amount of blood scattered on the floor and spattered on the walls, but it seemed disproportionate to the multitude of gashes and flayed patches on Kurama's body. It simply wasn't enough.

"Hah," wheezed Kurama from where he was leaning on the wall. "Is that all you have in you? What the hell are you waiting for?"

Karasu seemed to be having similar thoughts. "I really would like to ask you that," he said softly, leaning closer. "Since I died, have you gotten soft?"

"Maybe I don't want to fight you so much," Kurama said as Karasu drew closer. "Maybe I want you to kill me. Maybe I want to die."

"Maybe," said Karasu, stepping within reach and pressing the bombs a hairbreadth away from Kurama's body. Yusuke held his breath and edged up the stairs a little farther, expecting fireworks at any moment.

"And maybe you need to go play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself!" snarled Kurama, sweeping one hand down into the back of Karasu's neck. Karasu yelled, the noise almost obscured by the series of loud explosions which sent smoke roiling back to where Yusuke was leaping up from the stairs.

"What the hell was that?" Yusuke wondered, flailing at the smoke that crossed his vision. "Kurama!"

"Oh, my," said Karasu, looming up out of the fog, blood streaking down into his clothes from where a knife stuck in his spine. "Someone seems to have been watching. I remember your screams, little boy, from when I ripped his flesh from his bones and he dropped bleeding to the floor in my deathmatch. Do you all love him so well, that you all look at him with desire in your eyes and terror on your lips?"

Yusuke's eye twitched. "You're sick," he managed at last through a throat tight with loathing. "But it's not my fight."

"I am wondering very much if it is mine, either," Karasu said lightly as the smoke cleared. Two steps brought him over to the huddled, bloody mess with red hair that Yusuke hesitated to associate with Kurama. "I am wondering if you are who I think you are."

"Gnk," said Kurama, wavering to his feet. Yusuke had to swallow bile at the sight of him bomb-scarred and bleeding from head to toe. "You're both...so fucking...stupid."

"Am I?" asked Karasu, deceptively gently.

"Not just...you." Kurama rolled his head around, cracking his neck. "I'd lay odds the person shrieking my name over there thinks he knows me oh so very well," he continued, his voice coming more smoothly. "Idiots, the pair of you."

"I do know you," Yusuke said warily, thoughts of amnesia running through his head. "Don't you know me?"

Karasu's eyes narrowed. He reached up, ripped the knife from his neck, and looked at it. "You," he realized, dropping the knife and stepping on it. "You tricked me. You tricked me, you cheap little human whore! Must I kill you again and drop your pieces at the feet of the one who engineered this?" he screamed, both hands fastening around his prey's neck.

Yusuke, having twigged that it was not Kurama bleeding to death, now felt free to weigh in. "If you do any such thing," he said calmly, one hand rising, "I will kill you."

"Will you?" asked Karasu, the air starting to glow around him.

Yusuke shrugged. "Have it your way," he said, and fired.

The boy who had looked stunningly like Kurama before the bombs had done their work slid to the floor, watching Karasu's headless body topple over. "That won't do for him, you know," he said to Yusuke quietly. "He was running around with his head cut off before."

"I just wanted to get you out. Kurama would cheerfully murder me if I did for Karasu," Yusuke said, grabbing one bloody wrist and hauling the boy to his feet. "Come on. Can you walk? I've got a friend upstairs who can heal you. There's only so much blood you can lose, you know."

"Get me out of here, fine," said the boy. "But I'm already dead, so if they deal with the living, I'm shit out of luck. Listen, it's not urgent. You want to talk to me, talk to me. But please, mister, get me out of here before he gets up or regrows his head or whatever the fuck he's going to do."

"Okay," Yusuke agreed. "There's a guy outside waiting in a car. He's undead too. I'm going to take you out to him. There was one other thing, though," he remembered as he hit the stairs. "Shit! Where the hell did Hiei go?"

"Short, evil-looking guy who plays with fire?" the boy remembered. "Following Kurama, probably. In my business, you learn to look for the really obsessive stalker-type looks, and Christ, did he ever have it."

"Yeah, about Kurama. If you're not him, where did he go?" Yusuke demanded.

The boy looked over Yusuke's shoulder warily. "I don't want to talk about that here. What I do want is to go get my face healed, and then to get the hell out of here. I'm guessing you're the source of the madcap noise up there?"

"El Zorromancer pretty much declared war on us," Yusuke said. "I used to work for Koenma pretty much full time, and he sort of asked me and my friends to step in again here."

"Okay," the boy agreed, nodding. "But I'm not alive and El Zorromancer fucking owes me for all the shit I've indirectly gotten from him, so I want to go get my face put back on. Is this okay?"

"If we can get up there without being ripped apart by the horde, yes," Yusuke said, looking up the stairs. "And I really want to know where Hiei is. I mean, I thought I knew where Kurama was, but apparently now he's in the wind and there's some zombie double running around, and oh, where the fuck did Kurama find a zombie double?"

"He didn't," Hiei said. Yusuke leapt three feet into the air and crashed down with a racing heart. "Karasu did. By the way, said zombie seems to be on his feet but missing a head. I don't think he's happy, but he doesn't seem to be inclined to much violence yet. Is that your fault?"

Yusuke took a deep breath. "I assume that you will explain as well as you ever do in short order. He wants to go see El Zorromancer."

"I bet," Hiei muttered. "There is apparently a whole other set of stairs and hallways behind here. Going back the way we came would not be a good idea. Let's go."

In El Zorromancer's room, the necromancer was carefully putting Julian's hair back up. "Is that the back door?" he asked.

Julian slipped from El Zorromancer's lap and went quietly to the back door. "Yes, sir, it is. Good evening," he added upon opening the door.

"You've got a customer," said a dark-haired young man, carefully handing over a familiar figure. "He's in rough shape."

"And you are Urameshi Yusuke," El Zorromancer realized, coming to the door after Julian.

Yusuke nodded. "I'm not here for me. You want to put this kid back together? I need to talk to him, and he says you owe him."

"Yeah, you do," chipped in the bloodied redhead. "Ignore the fact that you're out for each other's blood and fix me, dammit. Karasu won't like it if his boy-toy is in pieces."

"Will you come in, or will you wait outside, sir?" Julian asked Yusuke, extricating the redhead and taking him carefully to the settee.

Yusuke looked off to the right, then back. "Would you mind if I came back later to have a...talk?"

"Please do," said Julian politely.

When the door shut on Yusuke, he looked over at Hiei with awe in his eyes. "I know that the people who try and kill me usually treat me with a lot of respect and honour, but this is just bizarre!"

"I wouldn't know," Hiei said. "I never get that." He too was looking rather baffled.

"So he's doing a token shot at killing us out front, is being nice to us in back, and in the middle he's just randomly healing the boy we hand to him," Yusuke theorized.

"I think Toshi's a repeat customer," Hiei corrected. When Yusuke looked blank, Hiei elaborated with a gesture at the closed door. "His name is Toshi. He's Karasu's messenger. Did I mention that superficially, from a distance, and in the dark, he looks rather like Kurama?"

"Enough to fool us, I suppose," Yusuke acknowledged.

Hiei corrected him again, "It seems more likely that if Kurama was feeling deceptive enough to switch clothes with Toshi, he would probably take the final step and use those illusory powers that fox-demons have."

"When did you learn this?" Yusuke asked, and was rewarded with a summary of Hiei and Kurama's meeting under the stairs. At the conclusion, he mused, "We really need to get back and help Yukina and Kuwabara, but there's this guy Toshi. I want to know what the hell is up with him."

"I want to know what the hell is up with me too," Toshi said waspishly, walking through the door, closing it, and leaning on it. "You said you can get me out. So get me out of here!"

"Back door?" Yusuke asked Hiei, who stared back at him blankly. "Hell." It only took two knocks for El Zorromancer's door to open. "Back door?" Yusuke repeated to Julian.

"This way, sirs," Julian murmured, sliding deftly between the three and leading them down the hall. "If this door pleases you, do use it."

"You're not human, are you?" Toshi asked wonderingly.

Julian smiled dismissively. "You wouldn't like for me to answer that, sir. Have a nice night."

"Gah," said Yusuke when Julian had retreated and they stood on the street behind El Zorromancer's office. "You're on to something. He's not human."

"Hey!" A great tank of a car eased up to the curb next to them. "This great whacking lot of zombies started storming the place, so I decided to drive around the block. A lot," Weed amended.

"I'm moving into your car," said Toshi, climbing into the passenger's seat and slamming the door firmly after him. "You wanted to ask me something?" he added to Yusuke.

"There was the pressing question of what you've done with Kurama," Yusuke told him.

"He took off," Toshi said. "Told me to distract, piss off, and slow down Karasu. And look, I've succeeded. He swore he'd kill Karasu in return. I believe him, because he looked kind of scary when he said it. Anything else?"

"Yes. Get the driver to give me one of his cigarettes," said Yusuke. "My hands are shaking."

Hiei watched Yusuke fumble for a lighter without much interest. "There's a killing habit," he remarked when Yusuke had finally managed to take a few drags. "You sure you want to do that now?"

Yusuke exhaled smoke. "Yes. What do you want to do?" he asked Hiei. "I think we've been chasing Kurama for long enough when he doesn't want to be found."

"He didn't mind being found," Hiei said. "If he didn't want to be found, we would have no fucking idea where he is. Like right now. But we do have a very good idea where that necromancer is, and that is going to be one hell of a fight."

"Says he, looking ridiculously pleased," Yusuke muttered. "All right. Let's go rescue Kuwabara from the scary, scary zombies. Take off, Weed." A thought struck him as the Cthulhu car roared away, as well as a faceful of exhaust. "You don't actually turn into a zombie when they bite you, do you?"

"If it's Kuwabara you're worried out, I don't think there would be much change either way," Hiei assured him.

"I feel so much better," Yusuke muttered, trotting around to the front door. "Holy shit! Christ, Hiei, blood fucking tells. What did she do?"

"Shut up," Hiei said absently, eyes roving over the carnage. Every zombie in the front office and out on the pavement had been frozen solid. In the middle of this highly bizarre scene crouched Kuwabara, nursing a heavily bloodied arm which Yukina was carefully repairing.

Yusuke waited until the ice maiden was done, then whistled appreciatively. "Damn, Yukina."

Yukina looked around, confusion showing on her face. "Oh my. I seem to have been very thorough. Oh dear. I just wanted a little bit of peace so I could fix Kazuma's arm, is all."

"You even got the receptionist," Yusuke continued, looking at the frozen girl behind the desk.

"Oh no," Yukina replied, hurrying over. "Oh dear." Despite her concern, her mouth was twitching into what might have been a heavily suppressed smile.

Kuwabara struggled to his feet, flexing his newly healed arm. "She's the best," he said brightly to the universe. "Really smashing."

"Yes, yes," Yusuke said, detecting that Hiei was starting to look slightly ill. "All right, let's go see El Zorromancer."

"And by 'see', you mean 'kick the ass of'," Kuwabara completed hopefully.

Yukina looked doubtful. "Are we...going to make a plan of attack first?"

"I think ass-kicking makes a really solid plan," Kuwabara protested. "Doesn't it?"

"Best plan there is," Yusuke agreed. "Come on, then," he added, starting down the hall. "This is the way, right?" he continued, walking backwards.

Yukina looked like she might have clapped a hand to her forehead if it hadn't been an impolite thing to do. "Yes. Oh!"

The object of her exclamation was currently being shown out of El Zorromancer's office. "Ah," said Karasu upon recognizing the group. "Your group usually has another person. About yea tall, charming personality, lovely screaming voice, red hair? I want to know where he is."

"No," said Yusuke. "We don't know where he is either. Go out and play, will you? I have other things to do."

Karasu shrugged lightly. "If you do not know, I have no use for you," he said, fingers curving around something as yet unseen. "Good-bye," he added, flinging the invisible object down.

Absolutely nothing happened.

"Please," said Julian from by the door, startling everyone, "El Zorromancer's office requests that you take your battle downstairs or outside."

"He's stopping me, is he?" Karasu asked, whirling and gripping Julian by the throat. "Cordially tell him, Julian West, to cease and desist his hold on me."

"I wish," Julian whispered, "that you would let me go. It would be best, sir."

Karasu slammed him up against the nearest wall. "Your cordial speech is intimidating, I know, but I have learned to speak thus myself. Tell your employer my wish as well. It would be best for you, Julian West."

"So he works for El Zorromancer," Kuwabara confirmed in Yusuke's ear. "Do we save him, or do we let them kill each other off?"

Karasu continued, ignoring their discussion, "Do remember that killing beautiful things slowly is something in which I delight. You are a beautiful creature as well as intensely useful...but I will kill you nonetheless."

"No, sir," said Julian. "You won't."

Everyone turned to stare at him. Julian was standing with his usual exquisite poise by El Zorromancer's door, not a hair out of place. "Did you see him move?" Yusuke hissed to Hiei. "I didn't see him move!"

Hiei shook his head slowly. "I saw nothing."

"There was nothing to see, sirs," Julian said, inclining his head in their direction. "Please do not degrade yourselves."

"What is going on out here?" El Zorromancer asked, poking his head out the door. "Oh, hello!" he said brightly to Yusuke. "Would you like a job? I do so want to hire you."

Karasu whirled on El Zorromancer. "I wish you to no longer restrain me," he snarled.

El Zorromancer shrugged and leaned on the door frame lazily. "No. Either you stop assaulting my staff and my guests, or you leave."

Karasu reached up and started to unhook his mask. "If I were you, I would not ask such things of one like me."

"But I am not bound to a necromancer," said El Zorromancer. "Whereas you are. I will take your soul back now."

There was a resounding crash as one of the air vent grilles dropped to the floor, followed by Kurama. "Don't do that," he said to El Zorromancer. "You'll spoil it for me."

"Oh, you are still here!" El Zorromancer commented. "Well, he's yours to be angry with, then."

Karasu's mask clanged across the floor. "I will leave this place and everyone in it in pieces," he breathed to Kurama, "except for you."

"I was going to leave," Kurama told him. "I was going to make you chase me, but I witnessed this little scene. Why should I give you the pleasure of hunting me? You've got nothing. You're pathetically weak now. You can't even set off one single bomb here. Go on, try it. You can do nothing to me."

"Maybe we should back up," Yukina suggested, obeying her own recommendation.

"Release me," Karasu snapped at El Zorromancer.

The necromancer looked thoughtful. "He's a clever one, but he's forgotten that I want him, and all of you, dead. Have it your way." With the conclusion of his sentence, Karasu began to fairly glow with sheer power.

"Shit," said Kuwabara, scrambling back. "He'll blow the place to bits!"

"I actually thought that you would say that," Kurama replied to El Zorromancer, causing the necromancer to smile appreciatively. "You see, I didn't really want to fight him if he didn't struggle, but now he's panicking. I don't have much honour in a fight, but I have some personal pride." Kurama held out one hand in Karasu's direction, rose petals forming on his palm. "I don't want anyone else hurt," he said, eyes fixed on Yusuke. "You may want to back up."

"You're not in a position to dictate such things," said Karasu. "Have you forgotten what I can do to such frail things as petals, even when they have a razor edge?"

"No," said Kurama, flipping his hand over.

It took only a second for the petals to bite through the floor, ripping it apart thoroughly from where Julian stood all the way back to Yukina's retreating feet.

"Detonate something now?" Kurama invited as the floor wobbled, chunks falling through to the cellar. "I don't know what makes up floors, but whatever it is, it's no longer in one piece. If I were you, I wouldn't even breathe heavily."

Karasu weighed his options. "Die," he decided, spreading his hands and folding the fingers towards Kurama.

There was a loud explosion, some screaming, the sound of eight people falling fifteen feet through a broken floor onto cement, and then a slow sigh like that of a house settling after a modest amount of C-4 had been detonated on-site in a hallway.

Funny how that works.

Outside, Weed and Toshi stared at the smoke and rubble curling out of the windows and doors. "Is that a good sign or a bad sign?" Weed asked.

"Bad sign," Toshi replied. "Really, really bad sign."

"I thought so," Weed said unhappily, dropping his head onto the steering wheel. "Fuck."

Bang bang, children.

Aithril the Elf-Maiden: Yay!

Kooriya Yui: Slashy demons, yes.

Oya: Over the railing and through the woods?

KyoHana: It's magic.

Katia-chan: No. He's not going to live it down.

kikira-chan: Indeed he does.

Evene: She's a demon. It bothers me that she'd be a damsel in distress, because...well...demon.

sukini: I'm sorry!

Bluespark: But I'm better now!

MikaSamu: I'm glad someone loves the car too.

kahuffstix: Adding!

Dane Soar: Not deliberately!

Nyte Kit: Weed is probably the sanest character here. And no, his plans never actually work.

A lilmatchgirl: If you find one, please tell me!

Kurama'sGirl88: Eheh. Heh. Well...

'tis the season (for feedback)