Rin couldn't stop looking at the printout from the ultrasound appointment. When they got home, he'd just sat down on the couch and taken it out and he had absolutely no idea how long he'd been sitting there because he couldn't really comprehend anything else outside of the picture. Outside of the yellow circles around each baby and the date at the top. March twenty-fourth. It was likely they'd arrive even before then, since most twins came early.
Twins. He still couldn't believe it. The sonographer had easily identified one of the babies as a male, the smaller of the two. She hadn't been as sure about the other, but had told Rin and Daphne it was likely that the second was female. A boy and a girl. Rin didn't really care if his kids were boys or girls or somewhere in between, if they would have the blue flame or be completely human, or anything else, as long as they were happy and safe. Daphne sat down on the couch beside him and put her arm across his shoulders.
"You all right?" she asked, smiling.
He tore his eyes away from the printout to look at his beautiful, beautiful wife and he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I feel amazing."
Daphne kissed his cheek and stroked the hair on the back of his head and rested her own against his shoulder. She looked at the printout, too, and let out a long breath.
"Guess we overdid it on the fertility treatments, huh?" she chuckled.
Rin shook his head. "They're perfect."
Daphne smiled and closed her eyes, and the two of them sat in silence for a long time, just relishing the feeling. It had been ages since Rin had been this giddy about anything. As acute as the pain of the miscarriage had been, so was the excitement and joy that overwhelmed him now. He was already looking forward to March.
But the stillness was broken when the phone rang.
Rin had to sit up to get at the thing in his pocket and disturbed Daphne in the process. She took the printout when he offered it so his hand would be free.
"It's Akiyama," he said, looking at the phone screen before answering. "Hello?"
"Mister Okumura, hello," Akiyama said on the other side. She sounded breathless, nervous maybe. "I'm sorry to disturb your evening."
Rin glanced at Daphne who was watching his face with worried eyes. "No, that's all right. What's up?"
"Are you and Major Okumura available to come to the lab? My experiments are finally conclusive. I've confirmed a…a connection, a link, I believe, to the demon in question. But I have never had personal contact with it, and that's put a bit of a kink in the hose, if you'll excuse the crude analogy."
"You want us to come down and unkink the hose?"
Daphne's eyebrows drew together and she put her hands up and mouthed, "What the hell?" but of course she couldn't hear Akiyama, so Rin's reply had no context.
"Not exactly," she replied. "More like fuel—I can explain once you get here. If tonight doesn't work, perhaps tomorrow morning? I'm keen to get on with the procedure as quickly as possible, and—"
"Let me just ask Daphne."
Rin held the phone away from his face. "She wants to know if we're free to go to the lab tonight."
"Did she say why?"
"She wants to use us as fuel for a connection to the demon."
The flicker of a grim frown passed over Daphne's features. Darkness always slept just beneath the surface with her. The slightest whisper and it would wake and rise. She glanced away from Rin for a moment, considering, her hand placed over her abdomen. Then she wet her lips and nodded.
"Tell her we'll be there as soon as possible."
They made use of their cram school keys to maximize efficiency. Daphne didn't see a point in taking the train to the Academy when the situation was so serious. She'd had enough sick-rolling stomach over the course of the day that to even think of riding the train, wondering the whole way there what it was Akiyama wanted them for, and what the results of that wanting might be, was out of the question.
So she and Rin stepped through their front door into the cram school and made their way quickly to the girls' locker room on the top floor of the gym building.
Daphne hadn't visited much since Akiyama's arrival. Not that she'd visited at all after being nearly drowned in the bathtub, but she hadn't had a reason to go. With Akiyama's lab set up in the epicenter of the spiritual energy as it was known on True Cross Academy grounds, she'd had plenty of reason. But she'd always found a means to duck out when she could.
The energy in the room was simply too strong.
She felt it hit her the second she stepped into the building. A wave of dread and nausea that had her physically staggering backwards. When Rin looked her way, his eyebrows raised, she shook her head, swallowed, and pressed forward. But the nausea only worsened the closer they got. Rin didn't seem to sense it in the same way she did. Daphne wondered if that was because it had been her encounter with the demon in the locker room, or if it had to do with her bonding to Kurikara and the stronger connection to Gehenna she'd been able to feel because of the baby.
Babies.
That was going to take some getting used to.
By the time they reached the locker-room-turned-lab, the power of the place was practically pulsating in Daphne's head. She closed her eyes and tried to shut it out as Rin knocked on the door, but she couldn't eliminate the feeling completely.
"You feeling okay?" Rin asked.
She shook her head. "Not really."
Rin drew in a breath to respond, but Akiyama opened the door then.
"Thank you for coming," she said, stepping to the side to allow them in. "Lord Pheles is on his way as well."
Daphne and Rin exchanged curious expressions.
"Really?" Rin asked.
"Mm." Akiyama motioned for them to follow her across the room. "I called to inform him of the progress I've made and to propose a further plan of action. He's had me on a short leash, as expected, so I've had to receive approval at every stage."
She brought them to a small section of the locker room in the far corner. The place had long since been completely transformed. Tables and equipment and computers and the whole shebang. A couple rows of lockers had even been removed to suit it all. Akiyama had transformed as well. She'd developed an assertiveness Daphne hadn't ever seen her display. And there were bags under her eyes.
"I'll brief you before he arrives."
She trotted them through a general overview of the experiments she'd been conducting since her arrival. Mephisto had given her express instructions to discover anything and everything she could about the demon in question. Initially, her research had focused on engineering the summoning spells her team—the dead ones—might have used to break the thing out in the first place. After all, she couldn't study a demon she couldn't observe. That had taken weeks, and she'd gathered other information in that time, reviewing her past attempts at spirit bonding, reading witness accounts from exorcists who had attended to manifestations that had shown the five pointed star pattern. Weeks and weeks of data gathering and attempts at summoning had followed.
"Which brings us to today," she said, then regarded each of them seriously for a moment. "I believe I have created a spell that will summon this spirit."
Daphne went tense. Summon it?
"Something went wrong with the spell my colleagues initially used," she continued. "From what I've been able to gather based on photographs, and observations of the water drainage in this room, one of the lines in the pattern is slightly curved."
She unearthed a photograph that had lines traced over the top from a mess of papers on her desk and offered it to Rin and Daphne.
"Undoubtedly, this imperfection is why they failed to bind it."
"What makes you think you'll be successful?" Daphne asked. "That thing is incomprehensibly more powerful now."
Akiyama conceded with a nod. "There is a risk. I have developed a new method, one that relies on preexisting channels. In experimentation, an already open channel requires far less energy than creating a new link, and the unused energy can be devoted instead to binding. It is one of the reasons Tamers grow more easily able to summon and command their familiars over time. Your channel to this demon, as far as I can gather, is the most established."
Daphne looked at her lap. She drew a deep breath in through her nose and let it out through her mouth. It felt like she was breathing in the air of Gehenna itself.
"What's the end goal here?" Rin asked.
"To detain and bind the demon in such a way that will allow me to study it," Akiyama replied. "Lord Pheles has agreed to assist with that."
"So you just need us to open the channel. Unkink the hose."
Akiyama nodded. "Essentially, yes."
"And if you're able to study the demon…"
"It is expected that I will be able to discover a way to either destroy it or bind it permanently."
This was crazy. Crazy. Azazel—one of the eight demon kings, and the third most powerful—hadn't been able to keep the spirit bound permanently. Akiyama, she was just a person, just an exorcist and a researcher. However, it had been her research that had led to the demon getting out in the first place. It was likely that she was the only one who understood the kinds of restraints required to put it back.
Daphne looked up. "What do you need us to do?"
"Neither of you are Tamers, correct?"
"No," Daphne replied, "but I've bonded four demon swords and I have an Aria meister."
Akiyama blinked. "Four?"
Daphne nodded.
"Lord Pheles informed me that you had only three demon swords." She began hunting through her papers again, as if looking for confirmation that that was what she had been told.
"The fourth is Kurikara. Rin's blade," Daphne replied. "That bond is new. As of, like, twelve weeks ago." Twelve weeks on the dot, almost.
Akiyama looked to Rin. He shrugged.
"Not a Tamer, or an Aria. And I've just got the one bond, but I don't really know how I did it, so I'd say Daphne's your best bet."
Except for that she felt like hell, but Daphne didn't say anything about it. She wanted this demon gone. Gone gone. Off her mind and out of her life for good. If she could make that happen before her child—children, damn it—arrived, then all the better. She didn't care how sick she felt, or how badly Gehenna had been knocking on her skull since she'd arrived. She'd overcome it before and she would overcome it again.
"Tell me what to do," she said.
Akiyama talked both of them through the procedure. Rin would provide secondary energy and support while Daphne followed Akiyama's spell instructions. Akiyama would monitor and make adjustments as needed, and Mephisto would trap the demon once it arrived.
It was a pretty solid plan, and as far as Rin could tell, the science checked out, but he couldn't help feeling like they were kicking a hornets' nest. They had no way of knowing how powerful the spirit was now. Would Akiyama's formula even be enough to summon it in the first place? Would Mephisto have the ability to control a demon that had successfully possessed a demon king?
Rin sat and chewed on his lip while Daphne practiced the incantation and the movements for the artificial summoning spell. She'd gone into full military mode, but that was probably a good thing. Rin was all kinds of wound up. He wished he was able to even look a fraction as calm as Daphne did on the outside.
When Mephisto appeared in a puff of pink smoke and glitter, Rin actually jumped.
"Apologies, dear brother," Mephisto replied, his expression grim. Ordinarily he would have cracked up, and it was actually more unnerving that he hadn't. His eyes passed from Rin to Akiyama. "Is everything in order?"
She nodded. "I'm prepared on my end. The rest is up to the Okumuras."
Mephisto looked to Rin, so Rin gestured his attention over to Daphne. She was laser-focused—like a she-wolf or a mother bear. Surprisingly, Mephisto folded his hands over the handle of his umbrella and waited for Daphne to respond rather than waltzing right over to break her concentration. After a moment, Daphne looked up.
"I'm ready."
"Places," Mephisto said, and his lips curled back in a dark smile.
Rin and Daphne went to the tub the spirit had tried to drown her in and stood in the basin, positioning their feet under Akiyama's direction in the places she'd outlined in permanent marker. Between their feet was a precisely measured, precisely drawn pentagram. Akiyama turned on the water just enough for it to run down the drain and trace the outline of the five pointed star. She spent a moment adjusting the flow, then nodded to Mephisto, who took his place behind the faucet. Akiyama went to a table covered in research instruments and switched on a bunch of monitors.
"Mr. Okumura, the connection, please."
Reaching out, Rin locked eyes with Daphne and placed his hand on her shoulder, close to her neck. She took deep, measured breaths as the atmosphere seemed to build around them, like how the air tingles right before a lightning strike. In his other hand, he held the spell instructions facing Daphne so she could read them.
"Lord Pheles?"
Mephisto tapped the point of his umbrella once against the tile, igniting a bluish-purple glow at the tip. Akiyama checked the readings on her instruments before speaking again.
"Major Okumura, whenever you're ready."
Daphne squared her shoulders. Took a deep breath. Then began to read.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."
It was a fairly generic verse, one that was pretty common as far as Rin remembered. Daphne spoke in English, though. Akiyama wanted the King James Version for one reason or another, which Rin supposed only made Daphne an even better candidate. Native English speaker. Trained by Catholics. Carrier of three Puritan demon blades. God, he loved her so much. He let that energy course through him. Hopefully it would help.
"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies," Daphne continued. She raised her arms above her head, following the diagram drawn beside the verse on the paper with precision. The air began to crackle. "Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over."
The crackling turned into stinging, and a wind began to blow. Daphne lowered her arms in a wide arc.
"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."
The wind picked up, whipping Daphne's hair, forcing Rin to squint. It became an all-out gale in a matter of seconds, and Daphne had to shout to hear herself over the force of it.
"And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!"
The wind howled. Rin tightened his grip on Daphne's shoulder and clutched the instruction paper to keep it from being ripped from his hands. Overhead, the lights flickered, and the wind expanded to fill the whole room, knocking over several of Akiyama's instruments and sending hundreds of her papers flying.
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates." Daphne raised an arm above her head and the wind tore at it. "And the King of glory shall come in."
These were modified verses, and she had to get them right.
"Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle."
She raised her other arm and the wind tore at that one. One of the bulbs above their heads broke with a shattering pop.
"Lift up your heads, O gates, and the King of glory shall come in."
Another bulb broke, then another, and another. With a sound like a thunderclap, the whole of them shattered, sending glass into the wind and making the room go black—black except for the light at the end of Mephisto's umbrella, which was gradually growing. Daphne lowered her arms in the arc again, then raised them through a mantra at her chest.
"Who is this King of glory?"
The water coming from the faucet suddenly increased.
"The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory."
Akiyama shouted something that was lost over the roar of the wind.
"Selah!"
At once the wind ceased. Glass fell tinkling from the air, peppering Rin's hair. Everything was silent.
Including the faucet.
"Did it work?" Rin asked.
Akiyama shushed him, so he looked at Daphne instead. Her eyes were shut, her brows drawn together with incredible focus. Then Rin heard it—a distant rumbling.
It sounded like a rockslide miles and miles away, getting closer every second, and building and building the closer it got. Daphne's jaw clenched and her face strained and Akiyama called out to her.
"A moment more, Major Okumura! The spirit comes!"
Daphne's lips peeled back to show her teeth, grit with the effort of the summoning spell. Rin tensed his hand on her shoulder, willed that to do something as the rumbling continued to grow.
"Hold!" Akiyama cried.
Daphne strained. Rin could feel the muscles in her neck taught as rope. The rumbling was deafening now, and it sounded all around them, like the pipes themselves were trembling. Daphne started to roar, and that roar built with the rumbling, grinding her vocal chords, the sound of the effort she couldn't keep inside anymore.
She bellowed.
Then Rin felt her shoulder fall from his hand.
And every pipe in the locker room burst.
It was like a geyser had erupted. Rin called out to Daphne, but water got in his mouth and he choked; it sprayed into his eyes and blinded him. He reached for her, but couldn't find her, and in that moment of panic, he felt a powerful voice in his mind.
"HELLO, DARK ONE."
Rin reeled. The spirit had never spoken to him with such strength before. He almost couldn't understand the words and they hurt. They rattled his brain like a marble in a can.
"YOU HAVE CALLED ME HERE."
Rin couldn't find the energy to respond. It was like she was sucking it out of him. Water continued to pour from the ceiling and spray from the floor and he couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't find Daphne—where was Daphne?
"ARE YOU READY TO BE ONE?"
She—she was pleased. She was excited. The pure joy that colored the question was entirely incomprehensible given the dominating way the voice boomed. For a moment, Rin couldn't sense anything but her power drawing nearer to him, reaching out, eagerly grasping. Then, there was a cry, and it tore Rin's mind to shreds.
"YOU HAVE BETRAYED ME."
The world went pop!
And suddenly Rin was standing soaking wet in the bathtub in the girls' locker room with all the lights on.
Daphne was in the basin below him, on her side and elbow deep in water. She was coughing fiercely and holding a hand to her head. Akiyama was braced against her table, which had been pushed against the far wall, surrounded by equipment as wet and wrecked as she was. Mephisto had maintained his footing, his arm extended and wielding his umbrella. His breath came and went in heavy pants. His clothes were doused, his hair drooping, and in the air, above Rin, suspended on the point of the umbrella was a cube of what Rin could only describe as compressed space.
"Were you successful?" Akiyama called as Rin bent down to check on Daphne.
Mephisto grunted, then offered a strained, "Perhaps."
Akiyama dashed over to help him, but Rin wasn't paying attention, he was holding onto Daphne and helping her to her feet.
"I'm sorry," she said, breathing like she was exhausted. "I couldn't hold it."
"You did your best, Miss Lux," Mephisto replied. He and Akiyama carefully lowered the cube to the ground onto a metal sheet where it seemed to lock into place. "None of us quite anticipated that, hm?"
He chuckled, but the chuckle turned into a cough. "This prison will not hold her interminably. Not with an incomplete binding."
Daphne cursed and pressed the heels of her hands against her brows. Her eyes squeezed shut and a few tears cut down her already wet face.
"It wouldn't have regardless, Miss Lux," Mephisto added. He left Akiyama to the work of securing the cube and stepped over to Daphne. "This was only a temporary measure. To allow Director Akiyama time to study."
"And how much time does she have now?" Daphne spat.
Mephisto pursed his lips. "That I cannot say."
"The spirit's angry," Rin added. "I think she'll be trying to get out."
The three of them went quiet. The water continued to drip from the ceiling and drain through the floor. The lab had practically been destroyed. Mephisto, in an uncharacteristic show of affection, put his hand on Daphne's shoulder. She looked him dead in the eyes.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
Author's Note: Hiiiiiii. I busted my ass to get something a little more substantial out, and had my ass handed to me in the process. Haha! If you liked it, let me know! I love reading comments. They make me all fuzzy.