Last chapter: Hiei fled when Botan asked him if he thought they could ever be together, and although it was disappointing to hear, Botan soon forgot about it as she explored the living world, where she discovered Yukina is indeed an amazing cook and Yusuke and Keiko are very much still a couple. After almost barging in on Keiko and Yusuke in the middle of a certain act, Botan began wondering what it might feel like to perform that same act with Hiei. She then stumbled into Shizuru, who took her home to watch a movie that ended up being spooky in all the wrong kind of ways.
Chapter 10: Don't You Know
As Botan flew back into Spirit World, she saw a familiar sight: all the lights in all the windows belonging to the ferry girls were out except Ayame's. Botan was not really sure why she had decided to approach the temple from the angle that she had, and, as she slowly drifted by Ayame's window, she regretted her choice all the more, seeing the dark-haired ferry girl glaring out at her and slowly shaking her head. The sight reminded Botan that Ayame had told her she could only have the one day off from her duties, and in the morning, she would need to return to work.
Return to her regular routine like nothing had happened. Like she had not been to another world. Like she was just another ferry girl.
Botan was sullen as she readied herself for bed, eventually crawling under her sheets and remaining there, entirely underneath the sheets, away from the world outside: the world that she almost resented, as it fell so short of her expectations, so far from what she wished it could be, so far from what it had been in her illusions.
"Botan, wake up."
Botan froze, huddled up beneath her bedsheets.
"Wake up, Botan!"
Botan squeezed herself into a tighter ball defensively.
"Wake up!"
Botan shrieked as she was suddenly blinded by light and cold. She blinked to clear the haze from her eyes, finding herself still huddled into a ball on top of her bed, but it was suddenly daylight in her room, and Ayame was standing over her, clutching the bedsheets she had just torn from Botan.
"It's morning already?" Botan moaned.
"Yes," Ayame replied. "Did you enjoy your day off?"
"Day off…?"
The day had passed by so quickly, it hardly felt like a day off to Botan, but she supposed it was as much as she was going to get.
"Are you ready to return to your duties?" Ayame asked.
Botan rose up to her knees, sitting on her heels, she looked up at Ayame sadly as her colleague handed her a long, long list of souls she would have to collect that day.
"There's a bit of a backlog," Ayame explained as Botan took the note from her hand. "Because you were given the day off yesterday, and the day before… Well, you were incapacitated the day before."
"I was trapped by the Lure," Botan said, looking down at the list as she spoke. "Why don't you just come out and say it?"
Botan snapped her head up at the end of her question, but Ayame had gone. Botan looked about herself, partly expecting Ayame to reappear, despite her room being small and there clearly being no corner she could have disappeared behind. Once she was sure she was indeed alone, Botan sighed, and set about getting herself ready for what was clearly going to be a very long day. She went about her usual morning routine without much thought, as far as taking herself into the main hall of the temple before deciding that she lacked the energy to fight her way through the throngs of frantic bodies racing around there. She instead turned and headed back to her room – ignoring how tempting her bed looked as she passed it – and threw open her bedroom window, flying out that way. She did not even bother to close it behind her.
Botan kept her eyes on her list as she flew. Her first target was a place she regularly went to, a place where many people died. As she passed through the portal to the living world, still not looking where she was going, still not needing to, she began checking the rest of the list. It was not the first time she had gone to that exact location to collect a soul in the morning only to end up going back a couple of hours later for another one. If there was a chance she could multitask and collect two souls at once, she absolutely intended to. The list was so long.
At the same moment that Botan realised there was only one soul to be collected from her destination, the creeping concern rose in her mind that there was an important reason why the place she was heading to was somewhere she often went to collect souls. There was a very important reason why humans died there a lot. Something she really felt she ought to remember. Something she felt was probably going to influence how she collected the soul.
"I thought I might find you here."
Botan slowed to a halt, hovering over the dead body she had been about to attend to, looking over it at the figure standing on the other side of it.
"I took him back here as quickly as I could, but he had some sort of human bodily failure after seeing Demon World."
It was the place where an inconsistent tear existed between the human and demon worlds: humans often died there because they passed through the tear and either the shock of what they saw, the foul atmosphere or a stray demon killed them.
"You need to forget everything that has happened lately and move forward."
Hiei gave Botan a harsh look and she slid from her oar, banishing it.
"The Lure is gone now, and anything you saw while it was controlling you wasn't real," he continued. "You need to move forward now."
Botan nodded.
"Move forward," he said again.
"I am moving forward," Botan replied. "I'm back to work, and I'm… Very busy…"
Botan waved her long task list in the air to demonstrate her point.
"Good," he said. "That's how it should be. You collect souls for Spirit World."
"And you… Bring carcasses to the living world…" Botan said, a frown appearing on her face as she spoke. "That came out wrong. I wasn't accusing you of killing this man."
"It doesn't matter," Hiei said sternly. "You do your work for your world, and I do my work for my world. That's how it is. That's how it should be."
Botan felt that he was trying to imply something, and, as she looked at the awkward, tense way he was holding himself, she remembered their last conversation, where she had asked him if he thought they could be a romantic couple, and he had basically run away from her.
"Yes," she said mechanically. "This is how it is, how it should be."
"Yes," he said.
"Yes," she confirmed.
"We understand each other."
"Yes."
Botan nodded and Hiei turned and leapt through the tear, back to his own world. Botan hesitated for a moment, watching the space where he had disappeared, before looking down at the body before her. The man's spirit was nowhere to be seen, which was odd, though in some cases, the spirit was a little delayed in leaving the body, so perhaps this was one of those times she would have to wait. It never took more than a few seconds to happen.
But Botan lacked the patience to wait that long.
As she flew away from the scene, Botan thought she heard the man's spirit crying out, but she ignored it and flew on, determined to just do one more thing, run one more personal errand, before she fully returned to her duties as a ferry girl.
Before long, she found what she had been looking for, and, after a few minutes of following above a car driving along the motorway, it turned off, and took a familiar route, eventually pulling into a small car park outside of a block of small apartments by the edge of a sprawling university campus.
"Keiko," Botan said, landing beside the car.
Keiko yelped and clasped a hand to her chest, almost falling back into the driver's seat she had just stood up from.
"Botan!" she said. "You startled me!"
"Keiko, I need to talk to you about something," Botan said, ignoring Keiko's state of alarm.
"Is it about Yusuke?" Keiko asked. "Is he okay? Is there another dangerous demon in this world?"
"No, it's nothing like that," Botan assured her. "It's about Hiei."
"Hiei?"
Keiko's top lip curled when she said his name, and she slammed her car door shut a little more forcefully than seemed necessary.
"Yes," Botan continued regardless. "I think I might have… Put him off."
"Put him off?" Keiko echoed. "Off of what? I didn't know he liked anything that he could be put off of."
"Well, I don't necessary know that it was something he liked," Botan qualified.
"Well, I think you know Hiei's my least favourite of Yusuke's friends," Keiko tersely replied, folding her arms and thinning her eyes critically.
"Really?" Botan responded. "Hiei's your least favourite? You like him less than Hokushin, Yusuke's friend who eats humans?"
"Hiei kidnapped me and tried to turn me into a demon, Botan. It's great that nobody else ever remembers that, but it's not exactly something I've been able to just forget about."
"I haven't forgotten! I remember that Hiei attacked you with the shadow sword and tried to turn you into a demon."
"So if the thing you've put Hiei off of is me, he was never exactly a fan of mine in the first place."
"No, it's not you, Keiko. It's me. I think I've put Hiei off of me."
"What?"
"I know it's hard to imagine, but I think maybe Hiei…"
"You think maybe Hiei what?"
"I thought that maybe he…"
"Likes you?"
Botan froze and Keiko smiled.
"Come on Botan, you must know he likes you," Keiko said.
Botan slowly shook her head.
"Of course he does!" Keiko continued. "That time he kidnapped me and tried to turn me into a demon, wasn't he talking you telepathically the whole time?"
"Well, yes," Botan began. "But I don't see how that means that he likes me, per se…"
"And he's spoken to you telepathically a bunch of other times too, right?" Keiko asked.
"Yes," Botan said slowly. "He has…"
Keiko shrugged.
"He's never spoken to me telepathically," she said. "Or Shizuru or Yukina."
"Are you saying him talking to me telepathically means he likes me?" Botan asked.
"Like I said," Keiko replied. "Only you. Never me, Shizuru or Yukina."
"Well, it wouldn't be very appropriate for him to talk to Yukina telepathically if that was something he only did with girls he likes!"
"Why not?"
Botan's face slowly fell as she realised her blunder: Keiko still did not know that Yukina was Hiei's sister.
"Because Yukina is Kuwabara's girlfriend," she said carefully. "And knowing how Kuwabara and Hiei are so often at loggerheads, it would be just awful if they ended up fighting over the same girl."
"Well they very nearly did, right?" Keiko replied with a smirk.
"Wh-what?" Botan echoed.
"Didn't Kuwabara have a crush on you before he met Yukina?" Keiko asked.
"Yes, I suppose he did."
"So before we all met Yukina, Kuwabara and Hiei did both like the same girl."
"What? No!"
Keiko laughed.
"Come on Botan," she said. "You have to admit, in his own weird, repressed, moody kind of way, Hiei does sort of have a crush on you."
Botan wanted to be suspicious – hearing someone tell her that Hiei had feelings for her sounded too much like what she had experienced during her hallucination, under the control of the Lure – but Keiko was the last person she had suspected would tell her anything about Hiei, so she held back her initial reservation.
"You really think so?" she asked instead.
"Yes, I do," Keiko replied. "Why? You didn't know already?"
"Well, no actually," Botan said meekly.
"Really?" Keiko echoed.
She looked at Botan as though the conversation they were having ought to be a casual and obvious one, but to Botan it still felt odd.
"You're not creeped out by it, are you?" Keiko asked her.
"No," Botan replied, shaking her head. "Why would I be?"
"Well, we are talking about Hiei here," Keiko said with a wry smile. "And he is a little creepy."
Botan forced a laugh when Keiko gave a small chuckle, hoping that her response sounded more natural to her friend than it did to her own ears.
"Don't worry about it too much, Botan," Keiko assured her. "I figure he's probably had a crush on you since he met you, and he's never acted on it before now, so I doubt he'll suddenly act on it now."
"Oh, yes, of course!" Botan said, waving a hand and trying her best to appear casual. "I'm not worried."
"Okay good," Keiko said with a smile. "Does that answer what you came here to ask me?"
Botan nodded, though she had started to lose focus on her present moment. Keiko made a good point: if Hiei really had feelings for her that had lasted for several years, he had never shown it before, why would he show it now? Maybe he had feelings for her but could not bring himself to actually be in a relationship with her. Maybe that was why he had never acted on his feelings. That seemed to be what he had told her when she had met him by the dead body she was meant to be attending to: he seemed to be trying to tell her that because they came from, lived in and had obligations to two different worlds, they could never be together.
"Okay, well, it was nice talking, but I have to go," Keiko said, hoisting her bag onto her back. "See you around, Botan."
Keiko started to walk away, but Botan spun around and grabbed her arm, halting her after just a few steps.
"Keiko…" she said slowly. "Just out of curiosity, just for fun, if I wanted Hiei to tell me how he feels, how do you think I should, you know, go about that."
Keiko searched Botan's eyes for a long, quiet moment, as though trying to decipher exactly what she had meant.
"Are you-are you joking?" she eventually asked in a quiet, unsure voice.
"Yes," Botan mechanically replied. "I was just asking… For fun."
"Oh, okay, thank goodness!" Keiko said with a small laugh. "I thought for a moment you were being serious. Can you imagine?"
Botan forced laughter along with Keiko's.
"But how would I get him to admit it, do you think?"
Keiko stopped laughing immediately.
"Just for fun," Botan quickly added. "Just… Hypothetically. Just a fun game, a game us girls play, where we pretend… What we would do if an unlikely boy… Liked one of us...?"
"Oh, okay," Keiko said, smiling and turning fully towards Botan. "Yeah, I guess that could be fun."
"Yes, fun," Botan said, smiling as naturally as she could manage. "So… What do you think?"
"About Hiei?" Keiko asked.
"Yes."
"Well, I guess if it was me, I'd probably just flirt with his best friend and see if it got a rise out of him."
Botan paused long enough to imagine herself awkwardly flirting with Kurama and Yusuke – picturing that Yusuke would just make fun of her and so that would be a failure and Kurama would likely politely brush her off the same way he did with the human girls who flirted with him – and then she thought that she might even have to flirt with one of Hiei's friends from Demon World to have any real effect on him. Like Mukuro.
"This is getting weird," she concluded aloud.
"This game was your idea, Botan," Keiko reminded her.
"What else could I do?" Botan asked. "Other than… Flirting with one of his friends…"
Keiko shrugged.
"Tell him you like one of his friends?" she offered.
"Are all your ideas based on using someone else to make him jealous?" Botan asked.
Keiko smiled.
"It's a strategy that's always worked for me," she said.
Botan nodded.
"What do you think Shizuru would say?" she asked.
"I don't know," Keiko replied. "Why don't you ask her yourself?"
"I…"
Botan touched a finger to her chin and cast her eyes downwards. She wanted to know what Shizuru would suggest, but for some reason, she could not bring herself to go back to see Shizuru. She could not really fathom why, but she felt like Shizuru might not want to see her. She thought it might have something to do with something she had said or done the night before, but when she tried to think about it, she could not really remember much about the night beyond meeting Shizuru at a food market and then going back to her house with her. Botan did remember that she had bought a cucumber at one of the food stalls, and Shizuru had mocked her for it, and when they had gotten back to Shizuru's house, she had said she put the cucumber in the fridge. It was probably still there, Botan had forgotten about it, and had certainly not taken it with her when she left. She hoped Kuwabara did not find it and think anything odd about her.
"I really have to go, Botan," Keiko said, interrupting Botan's thoughts.
"Oh, yes, of course," Botan agreed.
"I'm sure you do too," Keiko added.
Botan nodded, stuffing her task list – which had been sliding out of her sleeve – back up her sleeve absentmindedly.
"Goodbye, Botan."
"Goodbye, Keiko."
Botan summoned her oar and took to the skies, heading off in the direction of the Kuwabara family house.
Botan was a little surprised to find Shizuru actively gardening – it was not something she had ever seen her friend do before – but the surprise was dampened slightly when she spotted Kurama lending a hand. Banishing her oar, Botan continued on foot, through the gate and into the back garden of the Kuwabaras' house.
"Are you alright there?" Kurama asked Shizuru.
"I'm fine," she replied, sounding both less than fine and irritated that he had asked her.
"That must be heavy," Kurama commented.
Shizuru was balancing what looked like the trunk of a tree on her right shoulder, and it did look like holding it there was taking its toll on her.
"It's been a long time," Kurama added. "Maybe we should consider getting a tri–"
"I said I'm fine, Kurama," Shizuru cut him off harshly. "I'll hold it as long as I have to. Let me worry about this, you worry about getting them all out of here."
"Alright, but if you need a break–"
"Back off, Kurama. I mean it."
Kurama nodded and returned to his task of pulling weeds from a flowerbed. His task did look like a testing one – with it being the start of a particularly warm summer, the blooms were plentiful and the plants were densely packed, and finding the weeds and successfully removing them looked like it required some degree of patience.
"Yeah, my arms are tired, okay?" Shizuru said suddenly. "But whose fault do you think that is?"
Botan slowed her pace, frowning slightly when Kurama did not respond to her question, continuing quietly about his work. When Shizuru said no more either, Botan quickened her pace, stopping in front of Kurama and close to Shizuru.
"Hello Shizuru!" she greeted her friend. "Hello Kurama!"
"Hey Botan," Shizuru answered her.
Botan blinked at her friend before turning her head to look down at Kurama. He kept his head down and continued about his task, as though lost in his actions, oblivious to her presence: which was odd, because Kurama was never usually oblivious to anything.
"He won't hear you," Shizuru said. "Probably best just to leave him, he's got a difficult enough job to do, and he's probably the only one patient enough to do it."
"I suppose…" Botan said, giving Kurama one last curious look before turning back to Shizuru.
As she turned back to Shizuru, the light changed, as though the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. The garden – and Shizuru – became bathed in golden sunlight, and, to confirm her assumption, Botan began to feel the warmth of the sun on her body. Shizuru put down the tree she was holding and stepped closer to Botan.
"What brings you here, sweetie?" she asked with a lop-sided smirk. "Did you come to get your cucumber back?"
"What?" Botan yelped.
"Don't worry, I didn't let anyone else get their hands on it," Shizuru said.
Shizuru walked past Botan and started back towards the house. Botan turned and followed after her, holding up a finger as she walked.
"I really don't care about the cucumber, Shizuru!" she whined.
"Are you sure?" Shizuru asked as she stepped inside the house.
"Yes!" Botan moaned, following her inside.
Botan followed Shizuru into the kitchen, where there was a wide window that overlooked the back garden. Brilliant sunshine from outside had created a slanted rectangle of light in the approximate shape of the window across the floor and the far wall of the kitchen. With the sun shining directly through the glass, it was actually warmer in the kitchen than it had been outside. The closer Botan moved to the window, the warmer she felt. She felt that her kimono was too tight and restrictive in such weather, but before she could give the matter too much thought, she noticed something sparkling in the middle of the window.
"What's that?" she asked, reaching out towards it.
"It's a sun-catcher," Shizuru casually replied.
"Sun-catcher?"
Botan shuffled closer to the kitchen worktops and leaned over them to reach for the sparkling object. It had clearly been hung up by a member of the statuesque Kuwabara family, as she could barely reach it. She had to strain against the worktops, against her kimono, and stretch her arm up and outwards to reach for the spinning, gleaming object. After some effort on her part, she managed to catch it in her hands, finding that it was a circle of coloured glass that was the size of the palm of her hand.
"It's the all-seeing eye," Shizuru commented behind her.
Botan turned her hand around and looked at the object. It was just a circle of white glass with a purple circle in the middle, with a smaller black circle in the middle of the purple one. She had seen similar things before at the international market Keiko sometimes liked to shop at. It was meant to be a crude representation of an eye, and for some reason, Botan found herself staring into it.
And staring into the black circle, the pupil of the "eye" as it were, Botan felt herself get colder. The light around her dimmed – as though another large cloud had moved over the sun, blocking out the warming, illuminating light it had been providing moments earlier. Botan slowly lifted her eyes from the object in her hand to the window beyond it. The garden outside looked duller again – almost grey without the golden sunlight to colour it – and Kurama had stood up from his onerous weeding task. He was looking in the general direction of the house, but was not looking directly at Botan. He looked worried and tired.
Botan looked down at the glass circle in her hand again. She slowly became aware of a feeling of pain in her hand: but it was not her own pain. It was the sort of pain she felt coming from someone else. It was the feeling she got when she placed her hand onto a wound to heal it. The pain was not her own. It was coming from the object in her hand. At the same moment Botan felt something warm and wet on her palm she quickly released the glass circle, sending it into a spin. It clinked softly against the window a few times, but Botan's attention was focused on her hand. There was blood on the palm of her hand.
Botan looked at the red mark on her hand for a long moment before wiping her hand onto her kimono over her thigh. She then looked down at her hand again, finding that she had successfully wiped away most of the blood, just small amounts of it remaining in the creases of her palms. She felt no pain and saw no injury, and again her mind drifted back to the fact that it had felt as though the glass decoration was the thing in pain and not her. She looked up at the spinning disc, watching it as it slowed to a halt. Before it had stopped, she could already see that it was smeared with blood. It eventually stopped spinning, but swayed from side to side for a little while, during which Botan heard blood drip from it. She looked down at the windowsill, seeing a small puddle of blood there, that was dripping over the edge, down the tiled wall, over the edge of the kitchen sink and into the sink itself.
Botan followed the trail of blood back up to its source, where she found the glass decoration had stopped still, the eye looking directly out at her. It was bleeding from the black dot in the very centre of it. And Botan thought she knew why. She turned her head sharply to her left, where she saw a set of knives in a wooden block on the kitchen counter.
"Did you stab…?" she asked, turning to Shizuru.
Shizuru did not answer her, as though she had not even heard the question. Botan turned back to the knives. She had never noticed them there before. They looked incredibly lethal. The black handles were the only parts visible, the blades embedded into the wooden display, but even the handles were metallic, gleaming and looked sharp.
"Didn't you come here to ask me something, Botan?"
Botan moved her eyes to Shizuru upon her question.
"You wanted to ask me something, right?" Shizuru pressed.
"Yes, I did," Botan replied. "It was about…"
Botan turned back to the block of knives. It was just a block of knives, much like one any kitchen in any human household might have. She turned to the window, watching as the sun came out again, illuminating the garden once more in glorious golden light. Her view of it was unobscured, the window free of any distractions, just a plain, open, wide pane of glass, with nothing else across or over it.
"Is it about Hiei again?" Shizuru asked.
"Maybe," Botan said, turning to face her. "How did you know?"
Shizuru smiled.
"Seems like you don't think about anything else lately," she replied, holding up a cucumber in one hand.
"Shizuru, that's not fair!" Botan wailed.
"I'm right though, right?" Shizuru asked.
Botan balled her hands into fists at her sides and pursed her lips.
"Yes," she tightly replied.
"So what is it this time?" Shizuru asked.
"I just wanted to know what you thought…"
Botan trailed off, her mind momentarily going blank, before one single thought surfaced, and overtook her entire mind.
"You gave me advice about Hiei before," she said slowly.
"Yeah," Shizuru agreed.
"I asked you what I should do, because I'd found out he had feelings for me," Botan continued. "And you told me I didn't have to do anything, and that was really good advice."
"Are you saying I don't usually give good advice?"
"No, but that particular piece of advice was fake."
"What?"
Botan paused. That particular piece of advice, that particular conversation with Shizuru, had been fake, a part of the hallucination she had experienced whilst under control of the Lure. It had been fake, yet it had felt real. That piece of advice was something Botan could genuinely imagine Shizuru saying to her. Had she imagined that conversation? She must have: it had fallen right in the middle of her time as a captive of the Lure.
"What would you tell me to do if I told you I found out Hiei has feelings for me, and I don't know how to react to it?" she asked Shizuru, giving her a hard look.
"Does Hiei have feelings for you?" Shizuru asked.
"Doesn't he?" Botan countered. "Keiko said – no – wait – just answer my question. What would you tell me to do?"
Shizuru shrugged.
"I wouldn't tell you to do anything," she said. "You don't need to do anything just because someone likes you. Not unless you like him back of course."
Botan nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Now what would you tell me to do if I told you Hiei does have feelings for me, but he won't admit it, and I need to make him admit it."
"I'd tell you maybe you need to slow down there," Shizuru replied. "If he's not admitting anything, you can't know for sure how he feels. Not unless he's made it really, really obvious to you."
"Right…"
"You could just be projecting. Two of your best girlfriends are dating demons. Maybe you just want to be part of the pack, did you ever think of that?"
"Two of my best girlfriends? Is there something you're not telling me, Shizuru?"
"No. Keiko is dating Yusuke – a demon – and Kazuma is dating Yukina – a demon."
Botan took a moment to register that Shizuru was joking, but even when she realised as much, she could not bring herself to laugh.
"Sweetie, are you okay?" Shizuru asked her. "You seem kinda agitated."
"I'm just…" Botan began. "I just got confused, is all. Just when I saw those knives."
Botan waved a hand in the direction of the block of knives she had been distracted by earlier. Shizuru followed the direction of her hand, before shaking her head and meeting Botan's eyes again.
"What knives?" she asked.
Botan turned sharply, at first not seeing the wooden block of knives that had been sitting on the kitchen worktop. She turned around to face the window again, looking up and down the length of the kitchen worktop: but the block of knives was nowhere to be seen.
"There was a block of knives here," she said. "I saw it when I was looking at the…"
Botan looked up at the window before her. Her view of the window was unobscured, free of any distractions, just a plain, open, wide pane of glass, with nothing else across or over it: not even the sun-catcher that had been hanging in front of it.
"No…" Botan said, taking a step back. "This isn't right… Something's not right. Shizuru, what happened to the sun-catcher that was…"
Botan's voice trailed off as she turned around and found herself alone in the kitchen.
"Shizuru?" she said, taking a step forwards, bringing her to stand on the spot Shizuru had been occupying only moments earlier. "Hello?"
Her voice went unanswered and so she slowly moved further into the house, checking all the rooms on the ground floor, but finding them empty. A strange feeling of foreboding began creeping up on her, and, as she began ascending the stairs to the upper floor of the house, she could swear the air was getting colder, so much so that she could feel her skin prickling as she reached the top step. She continued to Shizuru's bedroom, pushing open the door and peering in, but finding it empty. She was almost too scared to try calling out for anyone any more, though she could not be sure why. She moved on to Kuwabara's room, a crackling sound coming from within growing louder as she opened the door and stepped into the room.
The room was devoid of life, but the television was still on, still showing static. It seemed to be glowing, but perhaps that was just because it was dark outside. Which was odd, because it was the middle of the day.
Botan moved over to the television, noticing an open video cassette case laying on top of the set. She realised it must be the film she had fallen asleep watching with Shizuru the night before, and she aimed herself towards it, picking it up and turning it over.
The cover was blank.
Botan looked down at the static on the television, the flickering mess of dots, generating an undulating hissing sound. Although she was not sure why, as the sound filled her eyes, her head turned towards the bedroom window. It was wide open, one of the curtains sucked out of it, flapping gently in the wind. The sky was dark outside, but something told Botan it was not night-time. She squinted at the blackness of the sky, finding it odd that it was so completely black – not a single star was visible, and no hint of the moon – and so she approached the window, leaning forwards to look properly outside.
Directly ahead of her, out the back of the house, the sky was black along the horizon, but the remainder of the sky was not entirely blacked out. The source of the darkness seemed to be on the deep, black point on the horizon, emanating from which were long, wavy tendrils of darkness, the stretched out towards Botan, ending in tapered points directly above the house. They were clearly an extension of whatever it was that was on the horizon, several miles away in that direction.
In the direction of the park Botan had found the Lure, the park where Kurama had publicly killed the Lure.
Maybe it was another Lure, come to the living world to seek vengeance for its fallen kin.
Maybe it could answer some of her questions.
Botan summoned her oar and launched herself out the bedroom window, flying fast and direct towards the source of the darkness.
Next Chapter: Botan arrives at the park, where she seems to be having some sort of fleeting hallucination: but Hiei is on hand to revive her from it. He takes her to safety and they talk, and Botan tells him how she really feels about him. Chapter 11: You Don't Even Know
