DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fan fiction produced for entertainment purposes only. I only wish I were making money from this.

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Last chapter...

"Oh, here," Mana held up a plastic bag, "Itsuki-kun thought you would be home, so I thought it would be fun to have lunch together."

"Great idea," Xi-Shin walked to the kitchen in anticipation. Maybe this wasn't so bad. He was a horrible cook, and whatever was in the bag smelled delicious, "You got Thai?" He lifted the take-out plates out on the counter. Thai was his favorite! In any case, it sure beat the ramen he was planning on eating for lunch.

"Yes," Mana answered from the living room, "It was Itsuki-kun's idea."

So, the brat had brought good food, it still wasn't enough to save him.

"Oh, look in the bottom," Mana stood in the kitchen door, smiling, "Itsuki got something else too."

Xi-Shin pulls out a small box of dango, and sighed. Now, he'd have to let him live.

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Horizons

Chapter 4 (part 2)
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Itsuki pouted at the ceiling. "It's cold down here. Why do I have to sleep on the floor? You aren't being a very good host," He said chidingly.

"It's what you get for showing up here with Mana," Xi-Shin grumbled from above him.

"Oh, so if I had showed up here without her you'd have welcomed me with open arms?"

Xi-Shin leaned over the edge on the coach to glare at other boy, but the affect was lost due to the darkness.

Shortly after they had finished eating, there had been a small accident. Mana insisted on helping to clean up, despite the boys' protests. (Not because they were prefect gentlemen, but because they knew how much of a klutz she was. It usually leaded to extra work when she helped.) Inevitable, she split something, and managed to slip. In the end, she was left with a twisted ankle.

Xi-Shin was all for calling ambulance, and going to the emergency room. While Mana insisted to him that it wasn't that bad, Itsuki had ignored them both, and pulled some frozen peas out for Mana's ankle.

After a short call to Aunt Nasumi ("You tried to help clean up didn't you? You know better."), Mana was staying for the night. Itsuki, being the good soul that he was, insisted on staying too. ("It would look bad if there was a girl all alone in your apartment all night, Senpai.")

"I wouldn't put it past you, just to show up to torture me, but there is more to it, isn't there?" The tired sigh in the older boy's voice was easily audible.

Itsuki's sigh echoed though quiet room, "Well, yes. We wondered what you knew about these weird attacks. The ones that look like they were done by a animal."

"We?"

"I've already discussed it with Tomonori. Now there's a guy with a story to tell."

"What would that be?"

"Now, aren't you a little old for bedtime stories?" Itsuki never saw the pillow that hit him in the face coming. "Hey! I thought you were suppose to be the mature one."

Itsuki was sure he heard Xi-Shin fighting a laugh, but the fact was so unlikely, he had to doubt it. Could be the lack of sleep.

Xi-Shin got up, and padded into his bedroom. After a minute or two he retuned with a laptop under his arm. Sitting it on the coffee table, he sat down on the floor in front of it, his back to the couch. Working beside a now grumbling Itsuki (unhappy about having his makeshift bed sat on), "Have you already talked to Mana?"

"On the way here. She wants to look into it. Can't we do this in the morning?"

"No. You told her what a Chimera was, right?"

"Man, you already know it's a Chimera. I thought I'd at least have something new on it."

"It's something I've been keeping an eye on," Xi-shin said, his finger flying over the keys. He continued before Itsuki could ask the reason for his interest. "Do you know about the incident that occurred two weeks ago at a rental house in Aoyama?"

"Hmmm...Come to think of it," the other boy grumbled, while taking a seat beside Xi-shin in front of the computer. "It rings a bell. So, what happened there?"

"Murder."

Xi-Shin opened a file, and began clicking though pictures of chalk outlines, and rust colored covered wood floors. The camera's flash showed that the blood was still slightly shiny with moisture. The pictures were probably only taken a few hours after everything happened.

"The news said something about burglary. The victims were a family of three. Ido Shima, 38 worked at Sony Records as a Manger. Keiko Shima, 36, was his wife. She stayed at home to care for their daughter," He clicked on to a picture of a young curled up on the ground. Itsuki felt vaguely sick at the sight of her lying in a pool of blood. "Rumkio Shima, 13, lived with a worsen heart condition. Both parent were shot four times seemly at random, the daughter just once though the head."

"When her family had trouble making the medical bills, they started sub-leasing to this man," Itsuki clicked to the picture of a tall, gaunt man. It looked grainy like it had been taken from some kind of surveillance camera. "Heromaki Airshinta."

"He looks like a Vampire."

"Right faction, wrong kind. He was a minor evil god. Arayashiki had been watching him for a while. To find the best way to get close to him." So they could kill him, was left off.

Itsuki let out a long, low whistle.

"When the Police arrived the room he lived in was trashed, and Airshinta was nowhere to be found," Xi-Shin clicked back to the first picture. "Did you see anything weird there?"

"Well a side from that Airshinta's room, the rest of the house was kind of clean to have been broken into. And if a Evil God had killed them, then he wouldn't have bother picking up a gun to do it."

"Anything else?"

Itsuki scratched his cheek thoughtfully. "Nope."

"So, you would just lie still while someone shot you four times?" Xi-Shin smirked, glancing over at other boy. "I think they were already dead when they was shot." He said his tone retuning to its former seriousness.

"What makes you say that?"

"Look at the bloodspots, " Xi-Shin clicked back to the picture of the fist body, pointing to the dark stains on floor. "There's no smearing, not even much splatter. You can't say they wouldn't move around at all."

"So, they were unconscious," Itsuki answered.

"Yes, but the coroner's report says there were no marks on the bodies. They didn't even have bruises from falling."

Itsuki yawned, and rubbed the back of his neck. "Why bother shooting people who're already dead?"

"A burglary would draw less attention than a bunch of 'mysterious deaths', don't you think?"

"Yeah," Itsuki let his head drop back against the couch cushions. "So have they found Heromaki Airshinta yet?"

"Part of him."

"What?" Itsuki looked over at him without moving his head.

"They found enough to identify the body, but not much else. The Police found him in an empty storage center miles away. The remains were left a mist strange circles, and symbols. It looks like something ripped up the room, and the body. Again, it looks like he was dead, before that happened. Well, Good night!" Xi-Shin clicked down the top of his computer, and climbed up on the couch.

"You planed this," Itsuki sighed. "So, when I have bad dreams, you're going to hold me tight, and tell me everything is okay, right?"

This time Itsuki was able to block the pillow.

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The Itsuki's household earlier that day...

Haruna carefully laid the ice pack across her knee.

"I really can heal it for you." An embarrassed Tuskasa mumbled from across the table.

"Its just a bump. Save your energy," Haruna sighed. "In the future, however, do not come knocking on my door like the world is ending, just because your clothes are dirty."

"I'm sorry." Tuskasa stared down at the table.

"Its my own fault I can't walk normally." Haruna sighed. Nayoa's right, I don't know how Tomonori says no to him. "I'm the one who tripped over my own feet. So, what did you do that left you smelling like you drown with dogs? Nayoa said you were just babysitting."

"I was," Tuskasa smiled. "I spent the day with Cho-san's three baby German Shepherd Dogs. Though I don't think they are really what you call babies--"

"I'll kill him!" Haruna threw her hand up in the air. "I knew he give you some awful job. He hates going over there. Those things are demons."

"No! It was great. The dogs were so nice. And I almost made enough money to get Tomonori-san something nice for Christmas now."

Haruna propped her head on hand, and smiled. "Must be the eyes. They're universal."

"What?"

"Don't worry about it."

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Elsewhere that night...

He felt a sting across his palm, and lifted his hand to his face. No--This wasn't his hand. Blood caked talons for nails, fingers that were too long, too boney to belong to a human. No, this was wrong. He fell to his knees, clutching his head. The world blurred into dark red splotches, and dirty white floors. He collapsed to his side with a pain filled moan. His back felt like it had been burned, and his joints popped and cracked as he tried to stand.

Wrapping his fingers around a metal bar close by, he pushed himself up. The protest on his still bleeding hand easy to ignore compare to the cries from the rest of his body. A strangled, sickened, sob escaped him as his eyes focused on what lay before him. Long, jagged shadows cut across once white floors like forgotten trenches. Blood was splattered across the walls in dizzying patters. Tears stung his eyes, and he did nothing to stop them from falling.

The familiar walls of his classroom were littered with faceless bodies of students he didn't know. The windowpanes were all busted out, but the first. The glass of it was completely covered in translucent blood, casting a sepulchral red glow across the front of the classroom. In the center of that light, not too far from the partial open door, lay a man dressed in long gold and white robes. His face was to the floor, black hair obscured any part of him that might have been recognizable, but he knew who it was. He couldn't deny it when he saw a shattered pair of glasses lying by a mutilated desk.

Kaname jerked out of his dream. He sighed when he recognized the familiar blue walls of his room. Sinking back to the bed, he closed his eyes, rubbing them with the palms of his hands. Trying the erase the memories burned into them. How many nights he woken up like this, he wasn't sure anymore. How many nights where his mind tormented him with memories that weren't his own, but the monster's inside of him? How many people had he watched die at the hands of this beast?

How many people had he killed?

He tried to stop it. Every time, forgetting that it wasn't real, that all he was seeing had already happened. Some of those people died hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago. Those houses were burned, before anyone would have thought he would exist.

The soul of this monster, this killer, was trapped inside of him, fighting for its chance to get out. It wanted to do all the things it showed him in his dreams. To kill, hurt, and destroy anything that dared cross his path.

Kaname shuddered.

It wasn't always the monster's memories he saw. Sometimes he saw its wishes. He remembered the beast's wrapping his—its—fingers around Mana's neck, but in his dream her voice couldn't reach him. She died at the hands of the monster.

He'd killed all his friends in his head actually, his sister, even his parents.

Sometimes he thought it was his own fears just coming to reality in his dreams. Maybe he wasn't connected to the monster at all.

That didn't seem very likely, but it was that thought that got him through nights like this. He sat up and glanced towards the window. "Well it is a nice night," He lifted the glass away, and let the frosty air run against him face.

Though it had stopped snowing a few hours earlier, the ground was still endlessly white. The roads had been cleared, but from his window it couldn't be seen. The streetlights cast a golden glow against the piles of snow below them. Images of gold and white robes from his dream flashed into his mind. He tightened his grip on the windowsill, until his fingers hurt from the biting cold metal.

"Kaname?" a soft voice called from behind him.

He spun around, knocking away the hand that was hovering just above his shoulder. He saw his sister fall back, wide eyed. Before she hit the ground, he caught her wrist, and pulled her up.

"Aha. Now if I had tried to scare you, it wouldn't have works." She laughed, but Kaname could help but think it sounded a little nervous.

"Sorry…"

"It's all right," She smiled. "Did you get hot?"

"What?"

"You have the window open, and you aren't asleep."

"Ah," Kaname glanced back at the window like he had forgotten it was there. "Yes, I was hot." He replied lamely.

"Mm, well don't leave it open, you'll catch a cold. I'll turn down the heat. You should try to get some rest."

"Yeah," said Kaname, sitting down on his bed, sending the springs creaking. "I have a game tomorrow."

"That's right. It's at four?" Kaname nodded. "I'll see if I can't make it to this one." She smiled as she made her way to his door. "Why don't we have breakfast togetherin the morning? I have to get in to work early the rest of the week."

"Okay," Kaname answered, before she glided out the door. He dropped back on to his bed, sending his black bangs flying into his face. He closed his eyes, and just laid there, wishing that a dreamless sleep might find him. It wasn't until he was finally drowsy, almosttwo hours later, did he realize that his sister had given him an easy excuse for being awake,and that he didn't know why she was awake.

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NEXT CHAPTER: Tomonori tries to do some investigating on his own.

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