I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi.

I hope everyone had a safe Christmas and New Year's holiday, and as much fun as I did (I heartily recommend the "Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile" boardgame, and the new World of Warcraft boardgame using the Pandemic engine).

Nodoka had to fight to keep a grin off her face as she watched her student (even if she was wearing a t-shirt and shorts rather than the traditional gi and hakama) stagger into the dojo. Nabiki might have been the exact opposite of a morning person, but over the past few months she had learned to compensate—getting to bed early enough to get a full night's sleep, a relaxing activity before bedtime (often involving a little 'snack' for Ranma) to take her mind off whatever worries the day had brought, a potion to help her sleep if necessary. She had actually gotten quite good at it, enough so that, if not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed like Akane, she was at least awake and ready to go when she and her sister (when the training involved kenjutsu) joined Nodoka in the dojo before breakfast.

But the middle Tendo did have the occasional relapse, and it looked like today was one of them.

Her expression serene (if a little stiff with suppressed mirth), Nodoka sternly stated, "Nabiki, you are late. How late did my daughter keep you up?"

The implication was clear, at least to those that knew what was going on, and Nodoka saw Akane—who was in a gi and hakam—stiffen slightly out of the corner of her eye. The youngest Tendo had more or less accepted that Ranma's nature as a succubus mandated an active sex life, but some days it was 'less' rather than 'more'. But it seemed today wasn't one of them—she managed to put on a smile that was only slightly more forced than Nodoka's probably was. "And last night a school night, what will Kasumi say? And lengthy, too, as stiff as you're moving. Shall we add masochism to your list of faults?"

It said something about the ... liveliness of Ranma and Nabiki's sex life, that Akane had seen enough morning afters to make a decent guess. But Nabiki's glare at her sister had some real heat in it, and Nodoka felt the first twinges of worry. Nabiki's response didn't help. "It wasn't long at all, just ... energetic. Ranma was hungry. She was still hungry when I stopped her."

Nodoka sighed, allowing her serene expression to drop, revealing her concern. With Nabiki's empathic sense it didn't matter whether she maintained her normal face to the world—both her career as an antiques specialist and as a Scout required it—but she'd soon realized that Akane needed a more human touch. Not that the youngest Tendo and budding Martial Artist really noticed, her body abruptly gone as tight as a bowstring, her attention fixed on her sister. "Ranma's finally going into heat."

Nabiki shrugged. "I wouldn't say 'finally', it's been maybe half a year since Ranma was cursed and it's supposed to be a yearly thing. But yes." She stalked over to her sister. "Ranma's not going to force anything, she's too honorable to give in to her urges easily and we'll take care of it before it gets that far. But if last night was anything to go by she's going to be like a junkie needing a fix, so she may ask. It's not likely, you've made your opinions on sex in general absolutely clear, but desperation might overwhelm her good sense. I wouldn't expect you to go along even if it would help—which it won't—but you will turn her down sympathetically if you can manage it. Don't try to pretend if you can't, she'd sense it in a heartbeat, but even then be polite. She'll appreciate the effort even if she's sensing overwhelming disgust."

She crossed her arms under her breasts and stood there waiting until Akane huffed and looked away, but nodded. "I know, 'a lion is a lion'. If she makes a pass at me I won't blow up at her."

"Good, the last time you did was devastating." At Akane's sudden blazing blush, Nabiki reached out one hand to gently shake her by the shoulder. "Don't beat yourself up about it, you're doing a lot better and Ranma can sense that it's real. Just don't do it again."

Akane hesitantly nodded, and Nabiki turned to the pair's audience. "So Sensei, I'm not really in shape to—" She broke off, blanching, and Nodoka shook her head.

"If we were training for competition I would agree. But we aren't and there may be times when you have to depend on your skills to save your life even when you are sore and exhausted." She nodded toward the bokkens in their stand, and her smile had more than a slight feral edge to it. "So you will train as you would fight."

Nabiki stared at her for a long moment, eyes wide, then deflated with a sigh and shuffled over to pick up one of the bokkens. "Yes, Sensei."

Nodoka knew her student wasn't looking forward to staggering through the day doing her best to maintain the glamour hiding her katana, and she would have to be careful or Nabiki would end up paying a visit to Dr. Tofu instead—he'd already had one discussion with Nodoka about pushing her students too hard. Hopefully, Nabiki would never have to thank her for it later.

/oOo\

Mara breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the sprite buzzing down the street below the Demoness First Class's store rooftop perch, her target was taking the most direct route from the Gosunkugi manor to the Tendo dojo. Then her eyes narrowed and she pushed off the roof and dropped. Her hand closed on the long tongues shooting from the mouth of the scum-covered, vaguely toad-like nature spirit lurking in the shadow between a garbage bin and the alley's brick wall just before those tongues could wrap around their oblivious prey. A flicker of power through that hand flashed down the tongues and their owner popped like a pricked balloon, spattering the side of the bin with gunk that would undoubtedly have both garbage collectors and any passers-by wondering at the stench.

Mara's other hand caught the startled sprite before she could do more than shriek in sudden terror. The demoness floated back up to the roof she'd occupied. Opening her hand to let the sprite free, she grinned at the shaking nature spirit crouched on her palm. "You aren't thinking of running away, are you?"

The sprite frantically shook her head, and Mara cocked her head to one side, as if to examine her captive from a slightly different angle. Odd, in spite of her suppression of her aura to a level that should have made her seem no more powerful than an average mortal, the sprite had clearly recognized her immediately and was terrified. "What's your name?"

"D-D-Dew Shine."

"You know who I am."

"Y-Y-Yes." Mara said nothing, but as the silence stretched her lips tightened, and Dew Shine hastily added, "Word spread after your ... encounter with Cherry Blossom and Ranma."

"Did it." Mara frowned thoughtfully at the news, wondering just how far word of that meeting had wandered. Niflheim had very little penetration of the nature spirit side of the supernatural world—or rather, they had very thorough penetration of a few corners, but that world's fragmented nature seriously limited the effectiveness of that penetration. Most of what they got from their spies about anything outside of those few corners was rumor.

But concerns about rumors getting back to the elder Gosunkugi were for later, she was here on another matter, and she 'reached' through the karmic debt accumulated by that young fool Hikaru and assumed by his father and found what she'd expected. "So he finally managed to force a familiar bond," Mara mused. "I thought that might be the case when one of the sprites his father had been collecting actually left the manor." Her teeth-baring smile made the sprite shudder. "But you work for me now."

Dew Shine's thin, high-pitched shriek at the sharp pain of Mara seizing control of her bond to Hikaru was piercing. The sprite curled into a shaking ball on Mara's palm, but as Mara patiently waited the shaking eased and Dew Shine finally uncurled and looked up. "T-T-The t-truce—"

"Doesn't apply here." Mara was actually impressed—as much pain as the sprite was in, as helpless as she was, and as much as that terrified her, and she could still push back. If only a little. "The binding was and remains mortal, and your master remains your master. I've simply asserted my own sovereignty through the karmic debt owed me by his own master. Now, what are your orders?"

Dew Shine took a deep breath and straightened. "I am to haunt the Tendo dojo, giving my Master"—her mouth twisted like she wanted to spit, her bitterness coming though the bond—"the opportunity to observe through my sense. I'm also to listen for any mention of Nabiki becoming pregnant, and notify him immediately."

Mara waited for a moment, then when no more was forthcoming, asked, "That's it? No orders not to tell anyone?" Dew Shine shook her head, and Mara barked a laugh. "Still an idiot." And his father didn't pay attention—careless, unless he doesn't care if they learn they're being spied on. Or wants them to know." She would have to consider that, but later. Sobering, she gazed down sternly at her new tool. "Well, I am ordering you not to inform anyone unless Hikaru orders otherwise, and no one at all about my assumption of ownership ... so far as anyone is to learn, Hikaru is your only master. Other than that, you will continue to follow Hikaru's orders. Understood?" She waited until Dew Shine reluctantly nodded, then added, "And no more of this suicide-by-predator, you will keep yourself alive so long as it doesn't conflict with your orders."

As tiny as Dew Shine was, Mara thought the sprite paled. "I ... I wasn't ... I didn't—"

"You were flying down the street without paying any attention to your surroundings at all. I don't care if your attempt to get yourself killed was subconscious or deliberate, it stops now. Understood?"

Dew Shine nodded jerkily, then squawked in surprise when Mara tossed her into the air. "Then fly, little bird, on your way." The demoness watched her new tool buzz off down the street, and grinned. Sure, she—and any other First Class whether Infernal or Divine—could bypass Nabiki's wards without being detected, but demons at that level had better uses of their time than sitting around watching the mostly-irrelevant minutiae of the daily life of the Tendo dojo—and below that level no spy was getting through those wards unnoticed ... or at all, for the lowest classes readily available for constant surveillance. But now, she could set up a screen to receive Dew Shine's visual and auditory sense input and assign watchers. It wasn't as good as multiple spies, but it was much better than just the imps she'd had hanging around the dojo and following its inhabitants when they left. Spies she was by now certain that Nabiki and Ranma, at least, knew about.

Mara set off for the closest portal. She had a not-date date with Calise tonight in their ongoing campaign to confuse everyone in Niflheim—except Hild, of course—and she didn't want to be late. Besides, she liked the way Calise's eyes lit up when she saw Mara in one of her party outfits, even if it didn't give her the same thrill as Urd's lust-filled gaze ... even if the Norn of the Past would never act on it, damn her to Niflheim (Mara wished).

/oOo\

Nodoka sighed with relief as she slid into the driver's seat of the small car she kept at her business for her multitude of work-related trips. This time she had visited a formerly wealthy family fallen on hard times and asking her assessment of what they could expect to receive for various antiquities that had been in the family's possession for centuries. She was in the process of wandering from one end to the other of multiple homes giving her opinion of what should sell the quickest for the most, and her feet ached.

She was just turning the key in the ignition when her cell phone rang, and her eyes closed at the sound of Stevie Wonder's "Only Superstition" ringtone (Nabiki's suggestion). At this point all she wanted was a hot soak in the furo and one of Kasumi's dinners. She most certainly did not want to spend most of the evening—maybe much of the night—on trains or creeping around possibly ghost-haunted sites. The joys of being a Scout. With a resigned sigh, she opened her eyes and picked up the still-playing phone. "Tatsuno."

"Tatsuno-san, I'm glad I caught you. I've been investigating a death, and there may be magic involved."

Really, Nodoka would have preferred a ghost.

/\

Nodoka stepped off the train, her bag with her business clothes plus various tools of her trade over her shoulder but adjusted so that it wouldn't interfere with the katana slung across her back (those clothes now replaced with standard housewife's blouse and skirt, she'd changed in a station restroom). She looked around, then headed over to Kogushi Shoko when he waved to get her attention at one of the station's exits. The plain, unassuming inspector—only his uniform made him stand out in the crowd—didn't say a word, simply leading her out to his car. (She would have wondered how Genma could follow the car, but since she had left from her business rather than the dojo that had become home she didn't have the unseen shadow that followed so often—she wondered how he managed to obscure his presence so effectively, it didn't have a spark of magic so it had to involve ki somehow.)

She sighed as she got in the car and closed the door, leaning back against the headrest. Assuming her daughter didn't overdo it 'feeding' on her future daughter-in-law again, it was going to be her turn in the morning to 'train as you fight' while Nabiki smirked. Nodoka had considered sharing the misery by asking her student to join her for the night's scout—Nabiki really had come along well in the last three months, to the point that Nodoka thought she could stay alive long enough to run away from anything they were likely to encounter—but what with taking the train halfway across Tokyo this was going to be late enough as it was, the time she'd have to wait for Nabiki to join them would just add to it.

So Nodoka set aside thoughts of her student's inevitable schadenfreude. "So what have we got?"

Kogushi started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. "A few days ago a woman dropped dead at a local market. The coroner ruled the cause of death as a heart attack, but found that suspicious—she was only thirty-eight years old and in fine physical shape with no signs of heart disease. The problem is that while toxicology found some anomalous results, they weren't anything that would contribute to a heart attack and weren't strong enough for other criminal activity."

"So naturally you're wondering if there was a cause of death that your coroner and toxicologist aren't trained to detect. Well, at least this time we aren't dealing with a dismembered corpse and blood spattered about the room."

Kogushi shuddered at the memory. "And in a ritually significant way, I'm sure." When Nodoka turned her head without lifting it from its supporting headrest to look at him, he shrugged. "It wasn't the worst scene we've ever met at, so it wasn't the blood that had you turning pale. And since you later said you had nothing to report, whatever had you scared had to be from your world rather than mine. I never asked—if you'd thought I needed to know you would have told me—but from your unconcerned tone when you gave your nonreport I assumed whatever it was had been handled."

"Yes, it was handled. And no, you don't want to know." Dicing up a murderous thrill-seeker that had deliberately sought possession by a demon that equaled him in bloodlust but had a great deal more power with which to slake their thirst had been the only real option—she hadn't even had the time to call in the big guns, she'd been lucky the pair hadn't finished syncing when she found them or they'd have squashed her like a bug—but in such cases she was technically a vigilante and it was still technically murder. What she didn't tell Kogushi, he wouldn't have to treat as a confession and arrest her.

Something he understood, because he didn't push it. Instead, at the next light he reached under his seat and pulled out a folder to hand to her. "The toxicology report."

Nodoka sighed, but lifted her head and accepted the folder, flipping it open and perusing the contents as the light changed and they started forward again. She frowned at a highlighted line. "Isn't that a date rape drug?"

Kogushi didn't bother asking what she was referring to. "Yes, it is. But its effects don't place a strain on the heart, and from the amount still in her system an effective dose would have had to be administered several days ago ... when according to the recordings from her apartment's security cameras she didn't leave home or have any visitors."

Nodoka sighed again and closed the folder, dropping her head back against the headrest. "But there is a use an Initiate can put it to, that doesn't call for a full dose. I'd hoped no one else had thought of it—I certainly didn't spread it around!—but it seems someone else might have had the same thought. Maybe we'll be lucky and when I check the body I'll find out I'm wrong."

Kogushi glanced at her for a moment before returning his eyes to the road, but didn't say anything.

/\

Nodoka gazed down at the corpse that had been slid out from her drawer in the morgue and had her covering sheet pulled down to her ankles. Nodoka's brow was furrowed in frustrated thought—she knew she'd never met the slightly dowdy earth-haired woman in her life, but she couldn't escape the feeling that she'd seen her and for the life of her she couldn't think of where.

Kogushi glanced over at her, and she shook off her moment's woolgathering to unzip her bag sitting on a nearby wheeled table and pull out a pair of gloves and a bag, both red velvet with a pattern of sigils stitched into them with gold thread. She pulled on the gloves, then opened the bag and dumped seven clear crystals into her palm that she quickly placed at the chakra points up along the body starting at the top of the head, spreading the corpse's legs apart so she could place the last one at the base of the spine.

Nothing happened with the one at top of the head, but after a few moments the others started glowing—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo—the intensity varying from crystal to crystal ... and as she'd feared, the yellow one's glow was the dimmest of the six, even flickered in a way that felt ... sickly, somehow.

Nodoka sighed as she stripped off her gloves, then pulled out a green felt bag with silver-stitched sigils and gathered up the crystals to deposit in it. "I'm afraid you're going to have another unsolved case, this is one of ours."

"How do you know? What happened?"

Crystals and gloves safely stashed back in her bag (and the rest of the bag's contents protected from the crystals until they were cleansed), Nodoka zipped the bag shut and slung it over her shoulder. "Have you ever heard of the Evil Eye?"

"No, I can't say that I have."

"No reason you should have, it's rare. The Evil Eye something our Initiates picked up from Western practitioners, a way to kill simply by looking someone in the eyes—make eye contact, and your victim dies from what looks like a natural heart attack. It does require casting a ritual beforehand and not performing any other rituals until it's used, but what really limits its use is the danger to the caster; any real protections—or even a sufficiently strong will to resist—will reflect back the attack, so the caster could end up the one writhing on the floor. But your victim was killed by a direct assault on her mind and will."

"Ah, so that's what you think the traces in the toxicology report were about, reducing the danger by reducing her willpower."

"Exactly. I'll want a copy of everything you've learned for our own investigators, for our own efforts to track down her killer. Whatever the reason it'll probably be personal, I'm not getting so much as a hint that she's a practitioner even as a supporting witness. You didn't find any of the tools or regalia at her home?"

"No, we didn't."

"What I thought. What's her name?"

"Ishonomori Yukiyo." Nodoka stiffened, and Kogushi's eyes narrowed. "You know her?"

"I know of her." Nodoka sighed and stepped over to run a gentle finger along a clammy cheek. Now she knew why that face had seemed familiar, she had seen a younger version in sixteen-year-old photographs. "A few months ago I investigated a ghost. She told me that she'd been murdered by her lover, the father of her baby. I promised her that I would try to find the baby." Taking a deep breath, she looked up to face Kogushi. "My long-time contact in the police tried to investigate the cold case—a missing person case rather than a murder—only to be taken off the case by his superior. After he found the case file in the shredder basket he passed it on to me ... just before he was killed by a suspect he has apprehending."

Kogushi gazed at her for a long moment, then said, "You believe he was murdered because of his attempt to reopen the case."

"I suspected he might have been, and put off beginning my own investigation for a few months to allay any suspicions." She smiled thinly. "I was also his occasional bed partner, you see, and Kenji's murderer might be paranoid to look into his acquaintances." She glanced down at the corpse again, her smile vanishing. "I might have waited too long, Ishonomori was Noriko's college roommate, one of the ones that first reported her missing. And Kanji interviewed her before he was killed."

"No, you didn't wait too long," Kogushi instantly disagreed. "If whoever is responsible is still clipping loose ends, you might want to wait longer. You don't have even the public visibility of a policeman."

"Not in your world, no, but I do in mine. And apparently it's a world I share with the murderer. I hadn't known that, the ghost had been shot with a gun. This is the first hint that he was anything but a normal Sleeper." Taking one more long moment to gaze at the woman her ignorance had apparently killed, Nodoka straightened and turned away. "So let's get me back to the train station, so I can get home and make some phone calls." She lifted a hand to cut off Kogushi's instant objection. "Don't worry, the results of the calls won't be traced back to me, I'll be perfectly safe." Until she had a name, at least, though at that point she'd be the hunter rather than the hunted.

Kogushi's mouth snapped shut, but after a moment he just sighed and motioned toward the door. "Let us be off, then, and make your night as short as we can."

Author's Note: Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I have some bad news. I have been less than happy for some time with the ongoing crusade by FanFiction's administrators to make it as difficult as possible to read this site's stories off-line, and, for me at least, the new captcha they've instituted is the final straw. From here on out, I will not be posting updates to my stories here. I will still be posting to Archive of Our Own ... I just posted a new chapter to First Chapters there ... and perhaps another site going forward. (Having my stories on only one site makes me nervous.)

So, for those that don't have a membership with AO3 and want to continue following my stories, I have some invitations available and may perhaps be able to get more. Anyone that wants one, send me an email address by PM and I'll send one while they last. Also, if anyone has suggestions for another site I can post my stories on, PM me that as well.

For those that don't want to shift to AO3, I hope you've enjoyed the past twelve years that I've been posting here, and best of luck to you going forward.