Disclaimer: As always, Yu Yu Hakusho is the property of Yoshihiro Togashi, Shonen Jump, Funimation, and all sorts of other people who aren't me. Sadness.

Variation
Part Two: Exchange Sacrifice

"To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game"
(Savielly Tartakover)

Wednesday afternoon, 3:09pm

Stupid!

Hiei rolled on impact, putting his shoulder underneath him and rolling onto his side, onto his feet, get his legs underneath him and move, fast before they get another chance-

Impact against his left side, just beneath the collar bone, and poison pumped into his blood before he could tear the blasted thing away.

Damnit. That makes twice.

He crushed the hollow glass dart to powder in his hands and tried to make his body work for him. The first shot had taken him by surprise, and even though whatever this poison was worked fast, he never should have allowed the second.

His arms and legs felt leaden, even his own weight was a burden difficult to bear. Hiei was still faster than they were, they still couldn't catch him, but he was operating at a fraction of his usual speed and reflexes.

I should have known, he thought grimly as his vision started to go fuzzy, blurring the three demons approaching him, and a chiming sound began to ring in his ears, that this was a setup.

Clandestine messages from Kurama were not uncommon. On the contrary, the stupid youko seemed to get a perverse pleasure out of seeing how many different ways he could find to sneak and smuggle messages to him. Hiei thought it was a juvenile waste of time. After all, Mukuro didn't care who he communicated with as long as it didn't violate her interests, or compromise his loyalty. He'd tried pointing that out. It hadn't done much good.

Most of the messages found their way to him via plants: creeper vines growing through cracks in the ceiling and dropping letters on his head while he rested, trees that twitched their branches at him and groaned irritably until he reached inside a concealed knothole and pulled out whatever message Kurama had secreted there. A briar patch that grew into neatly arranged rows of hiragana and kanji.

Mukuro wouldn't have minded the odd correspondence. If she found out that the youko was flexing his powers inside her territory, especially while technically still connected to Yomi's court, and well-known to be amongst Urameshi's supporters…

This message had been brought by demon. A low-level bird-type, with the stink of a carrion-eater about it. That alone should have alerted him. But the rock it had dropped on Hiei's head from the sky had turned out to be a hollow seed the size of Hiei's fist. Cracked in half it had revealed a sheet of parchment and a message from Kurama requesting a meeting.

The seed was saturated with Kurama's youki. The letter was in Kurama's handwriting, the words sounded authentic. Hiei was beginning to wish, in the clarity of hindsight, that he'd insisted a little harder on some sort of prearranged code to authenticate messages.

Hiei allowed himself a moment to wonder what enemies they'd made that could coerce Kurama into baiting an ally into a trap.

It was done. He had to get out of this alive before he'd get any answers. Then he'd kick that stupid fox's head in for getting him into this mess.

The three approaching him were powerful, as far as it went. Lower B-Class, Hiei would judge, and he was being generous toward the third. The woman, though, was… not unimpressive. The youki she put off was as cold and smooth as ice, and something about her made his hackles rise.

Not powerful, no, but dangerous.

She was the one to be wary of. Hiei held back a snarl as they slowly approached, and gathered his strength for an attack. Curse the bitch and her poisons.

"Little guy doesn't want to go down," one of the males drawled. Ridiculously tall and gangly, with triple-jointed arms and rear-jointed legs, his head swiveled atop a narrow stalk. "Urameshi went down like a ton of bricks when we hit him with this stuff."

Hiei paused, the words coming through a fog as thick as soup to settle in his mind.

"Oh look. We got his attention." The second male was mostly humanoid with pointed ears and four parallel scars across his right cheek.

The female stepped closer, and Hiei dimly realized that the ringing sound was not a result of the poison, but bells tied into her hair. Her eyes were black, as were her lips and fingernails, and when she spoke he could see that her teeth and tongue were the same oily black as her eyes. Her skin was pale white, and black veins crisscrossed her face and arms. Something about that caught his memory, but then flitted away into the fog.

"We have taken Urameshi," she said. She was short, compared to her companions, reaching only the shoulder of the scarred male. "And we have taken Kurama. In a few short moments you will no longer be able to resist the effects of my poison, and then you too will be taken."

"Over my dead body," Hiei snarled, putting enough force into the words to surprise her.

"That could be arranged," she told him in earnest seriousness. "Kingman had hoped to use you as a weapon, but you are not indispensable."

A weapon against what? Hiei narrowed his eyes. "Your poison." The black eyes and teeth and tongue. He raked her body from top to bottom and yes, there, at the chest and the waist – a bulge, where extra appendages were wrapped tightly around herself, hidden by the flowing silk and scarves she draped herself in. "A weaver." That explains why Kurama-

"Very good. It only took you a few moments longer than it took Kurama to figure it out." She smirked and tapped a black fingernail against her black lips. "Urameshi didn't have a clue."

That's unsurprising.

"If you surrender you'll be kept alive." She stepped closer, her feet crunching on the rocks and dirt.

"My Queen," the scarred male crossed his arms and managed to look bored. "Others approach."

Hiei couldn't sense anything, but he was barely staying on his feet by then, the weaver's poison working against him. He narrowed his eyes and turned his concentration inwards, focusing on his core energy, gathering up his strength before the poison spread completely.

The weaver looked briefly furious, but schooled her expression quickly. "Finish him then." She threw a vicious smirk at Hiei as she turned away. "Hopefully the human will be more sport than this one."

Kuwabara. All four of them were to be targeted. Was this because of reikai tantei business? Because of their brief stint as Team Urameshi during the Dark Tournament? Maybe they'd killed someone these demons – and their Kingman – had cared about.

Well, that could be almost anyone, really.

Was this political? Kurama from Yomi's court, Hiei from Mukuro's, Yuusuke from Raizen's? Why involve Kuwabara then? He'd no connection to the makai. Unless they'd meant another human entirely.

No. The weaver bitch had meant for him to react to her words. The only humans he could be connected to were Genkai and the idiot, but the idea that threatening either one of them was a means of discouraging him was laughable.

Hiei growled low in his throat. First Kurama, now this. The next time Kurama had something flowery and dramatic to say about teamwork Hiei was going to remind him of this situation.

The scarred male approached him warily, passing by the weaver. He was practically radiating wariness as he eyed Hiei – smarter than he looked, then. Under normal circumstances Hiei would have made short work of him, and this one seemed aware of the fact.

"Finish him, Rook." The weaver had a strand of her hair wrapped around her finger and was tapping a bell against her lips.

Hiei filed the name away with the others for reference as Rook gave the weaver an indecipherable look and raised his right hand to chest height, palm down, and curled his fingers.

Then he pulled and a sword slid out of his chest.

Not reiken, or anything so flashy, just a metal sword with a plain hilt. Wards and spells danced over the blade, but the sword itself wasn't mystical in the slightest. The spell to sheathe it inside the chest was a fairly common one in makai, where the ability to carry a concealed weapon past even the most thorough guards was practically a matter of survival. Hiei considered it an amateur's trick, but that didn't mean he hadn't memorized the spell himself decades ago.

Rook raised the sword above his head-

That's sloppy swordsmanship.

-and struck downwards, slicing the blade through the air and through the space where Hiei had been just a split second ago.

Rook barely had time to realize what had happened before Hiei sank the blade of his katana into Rook's back, severing his spine. The sword dropped from the demon's fingers and he toppled into the dirt at Hiei's feet. The weaver hissed and the gangly demon shifted, preparing to attack himself, but Hiei ignored them, pulling away the warded cloth that bound his jagan. The third eye opened and Hiei could see the approaching youki of a horde of minor demons, still several miles off. He could see the dull aura around the weaver's remaining companion, could see that no shields surrounded the demon's mind whatsoever.

The little strength he'd managed to muster for the attack was fading, but the jagan didn't care. It would feed off Hiei's core energy until he was dead, or until it was warded again and in the meantime it was child's play to reach out and snap the demon's mind with a sharp mental crack.

The weaver glanced sideways as her second companion collapsed in a tangle of long limbs, knees bent and pointing at the sky as his face slumped into the dust. Hiei bared his teeth in a dark grin. Two down, and one or two tricks still left up his sleeves.

The jagan flared but he directed it away from the weaver. Her shields were too tight, too well constructed. Her race tended to develop them early in self-defense from their kin. But there were other ways.

Hellfire blazed down the length of his arm, sucking the last of his strength and leaving him raw. He channeled it at the weaver, taking a moment of grim amusement when her eyes widened in shock just before it struck her dead center.

His knees would no longer support him, but he managed to lower himself to the ground before he could collapse. Wearily he braced his forearms against his knees and concentrated.

Yuusuke was shielded, too elaborately and too completely to be his own doing. Kurama was a fog of sensation with no coherence, no solidity. The idiot was fucking oblivious, but his subconscious was starting to stir, aware of the jaganshi's perusal.

Hiei felt the bitch slip alongside him, not getting through his shields, but following the link beyond them, tracing the thread of a connection that did, literally, span worlds. A connection that would give her an open door into the idiot's mind.

Breaking a psychic link could be compared to severing your own arm, and it was the last thing Hiei had the strength to do before the poison pulled him under.

Queen glared at the fire demon sprawled at her feet. She was displeased by his reaction to her poison, annoyed that her attack had not been as successful as she had predicted. At least he had gone down, although Kingman would be… displeased at the loss of Rook and Bishop.

And now she'd also lost the link to the human. It was a minor inconvenience as she hadn't planned on using Hiei to track down his last ally, but it would have been a delicious irony. Hiei, betrayed by one teammate and betrayer of another. She would have taunted him with the knowledge before she killed him. Foolish, noble types tended to react most pleasingly to that sort of thing.

She sighed and pulled at the charred remnants of her gown, now little more than a collection of blackened scraps. The hellfire attack had been most unexpected, and most unprecedented. If she weren't so annoyed, she would have been impressed at his determination. The poison must surely have started burning his blood by that point, gathering himself enough to attack her must have hurt him badly.

Kingman would certainly have words to say about how she had handled the situation.

She pursed her lips and gazed at Rook and Bishop. Rook was broken, his spine severed, but Bishop's body was untouched. Only his mind had been destroyed.

Queen had not chosen him for his mental abilities, anyway.

She knelt at Bishop's side and pressed the nail of her index finger against the skin of his forehead. The thin, hollow spine that extended through her finger, alongside the bone, broke the surface of her finger and pierced his skin.

A few drops of poison slid into his skin, and she licked his forehead to close the puncture would. Her venom spread through his body quickly with no living will to resist it, and she focused, spreading her webs through his entire body. Under her direction his hands twitched and his eyelids flickered as his head rolled back to stare up at her.

"Wake up, Bishop," she cooed, running her hands through his hair. "Your Queen has some need of you yet."

The body staggered to its feet. Cloudy eyes were aimed at her, but showed no focus, no sign of clear thought. She flexed her control, manipulated it a few steps forward until she was certain she could control the movement of the ridiculous limbs. "You'll have to do, my poor Bishop," she said finally. "Gather the fire demon so we can go tell Kingman we've done his bidding."

Bishop's corpse did not move. Queen spun around and saw only dirt and scrub and Rook's hollow corpse.

"Damn," she said quietly.

End Exchange Sacrifice

to be continued in The Captured King

As always, c&c appreciated.