Hisoka could hardly believe his luck. Natsume was going to confess to spying on Summons for Todoroki, just like that? All that was needed all this time was someone to just put the pieces together and he would come clean?

No, it can't be that simple. Natsume may have drifted about the office in an easy-going, disarming manner, but that didn't mean Hisoka had to allow himself to be disarmed by it. He had played along with it this long; this time Hisoka expected to get something in return for it. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

Natsume blinked. As if he really doesn't know what he did. "I was going to ask you the same thing. You're the one who followed me here, Kurosaki. What's on your mind?"

Hisoka shrugged. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay." Sure, he could go with that angle, see where it led him. See if you really could catch more flies with honey. "Anyone could see that that Endo guy upset you. Not that there was a single one of us that didn't want to clock him ourselves." At that, Natsume chuckled a bit. "But I've never seen you so upset by a case as this last one."

Despite the chuckle, though, Hisoka could read nothing from him. He couldn't be sure if it was the Lake of Fire interfering with his empathy; the heat of it was sufficiently distracting. This was just the sort of location someone who was guilty might choose to evade an empath's search for the truth.

"Come on, we haven't been together that long," Natsume said. "Although, I guess I should have expected you of all people to pick up on that. I wasn't exactly subtle, was I? I hadn't had to interact with Endo in so many years I'd almost forgotten why I couldn't stand that asshole. Man, Todoroki's lackeys sure have a knack for knowing which buttons you don't want them to push. Not my finest hour."

"What did he do to you?"

"Nothing," Natsume said. Then reluctantly amended, "Per se." He seemed to be struggling with himself before settling on: "He was just doing his job. I don't blame him for that. It's just sometimes you really wish someone would extend you the courtesy of pretending something never happened, instead of rubbing it in your face every chance they get?"

"You mean, something to do with this last case." Something flickered across Natsume's gaze for the briefest of moments, but it was enough to tell Hisoka he was on the right track. "I knew there was something different about this one, something that really got to you—"

"Anyone ever tell you how annoying this mind-reading thing of yours is?"

It was so automatic to correct people about how his empathy worked, Hisoka almost shot back that he couldn't read Natsume's mind. If I could just get a hand on him, I'd know the truth whether he'd want me to or not. But with the Lake of Fire just a good shove away, Hisoka didn't think he could risk it. He may have survived Rikugou's fire, by some means still unknown to him, but he wasn't so confident that any shinigami body could survive a dip in those waters. Or, if by some chance it could, not without significant pain and hardship, and he had only just finished recovering from his last injury.

Besides, another thought stopped him. It was something Zepar had said. The devil had been so sure that Hisoka had it within his power to manipulate others' emotions. If he could only learn how to do it. Hisoka's go match in Gensoukai with Rikugou had been his first attempt to put the idea into practice, and he had managed to mislead the shikigami just enough to win his loyalty, if not the game. It hadn't been a true manipulation, but Hisoka had succeeded in projecting his own emotions just enough to have them be received by another mind, another soul—and to influence that mind just enough into giving Hisoka what he could use.

He could do that here, he thought. If he could rouse a feeling of enormous guilt from within himself—and it wasn't as though guilt was a foreign emotion to him; his relationship with Tsuzuki alone provided more than enough fuel for that fire—he might be able to aim it and project it onto Natsume. Perhaps it could be enough to compel him to tell Hisoka what he wanted to hear.

"You'll feel better if you just say it out loud," he tried. "Believe me. It's doesn't feel like it would be at first, but it's easier to let someone you trust help you bear the burden." Just like Hisoka had always made it worse for himself, when he bottled up his own pain inside, fearing that inevitable moment when it would all come bursting through the dam he built around his emotions. But he never learned. He always seemed to think he could master his feelings without any outside help, and so he always shut himself off, buried his feelings deep. . . .

Whatever was bothering Natsume, Hisoka could feel it just below his surface, like a lid about to boil right off its pot. Problem was, he wasn't sure how much more he could turn up the heat.

And Natsume's defenses just seemed to push back against him. "Trust you? No offense, partner, I like you, I do, but I think I know what makes me feel better a little better than you do. And I don't think we're to the point in our working relationship when we can pour out our deepest secrets to one another."

"But you came down here for a reason." Hisoka was fishing, but he had to. He never knew where he might feel a bite. "The Lake of Fire's supposed to be able to burn everything, right? But whatever's got you so upset, it's not a physical thing, an item. You can't just throw it in and get rid of it. You can't just run from what you're feeling."

There! He thought he felt a tug on the line, if only just a little one. Natsume furrowed his brow, turning away from Hisoka.

"Why not? I guess we all feel it from time to time, right?"

Here we go, Hisoka thought. Confess. Just say the words. You won't feel better until you do.

"It just wasn't fair," Natsume said, meeting Hisoka's gaze squarely through his glasses. "Taking those people's lives, after they'd just managed to get free from their diseases. I don't care if it was against their will. Who really wants to die that way, wasting away, in pain twenty-four/seven just waiting for it all to be over? After everything they'd been through—and through no fault of their own, I'm sure, even if you believe that 'karma from a past life' crap—for us to just . . . steal it all away again in an instant. . . . When I accepted Tatsumi's offer to come back and work for Summons in Tsuzuki's absence, I thought it would be just like old times. Only I'd forgotten what 'old times' actually entailed."

He shook his head, as though to clear it of some even older memory. "I'm not gonna lie to you, Kurosaki. This job may be necessary—and I get that we're doing this important, noble thing here and that it's our due penance and all—but it isn't fun. And if I had it in my power to just leave the people from this last string of cases alone, I would. That doesn't mean I think what Dr. Akiyama did was right. And I don't mean that I think she deserved to die for what she did, either—though I was pissed at her for putting us in the position we were in, of having to undo her damage. Or un-damage, as the case may be. It's only that I can't see how what she did and what we do is really all that different, when you really get down to the nutmeat of it. And yet the ones who always end up paying for it are the ones who deserve it the least."

Hisoka didn't know what to say. For all he could tell, there had been no guile in Natsume's confession, and Hisoka's own certainty wavered for a moment. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Natsume wasn't the mole, even though he'd had every reason and opportunity to be.

The man in question flashed a brittle smile. "And there you have it, Kurosaki. Just a little crisis of faith. I'm sure everyone here gets them from time to time. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

Just a crisis of faith, huh? Or maybe he was just that good. Maybe he was just telling Hisoka what he thought he wanted to hear. Maybe Natsume had been reassigned to Billing because he was impervious to bribery or appeals to his conscience. Maybe he lacked a conscience entirely. Hisoka had never actually encountered the like; he wasn't sure if he knew what it would be like to touch another soul that felt nothing for its fellow human beings, if he would even recognize such a soul.

But that couldn't be the case, could it? Natsume had appeared genuinely disturbed by the recent string of cases, too affected for it all to have been an act. So surely there were other reasons for his apparent confidence. Natsume displayed a gift for charms and spells. Could he have found one that could turn his mind into a psychic Faraday cage?

He was taking this far too well. Confidence. That was precisely what it was—what his posture was telling Hisoka, his psyche. For all that flattery, he doesn't believe I can get in. He must think he can trick me into believing his honesty, distracting me like a magician from what's really going on. But Hisoka just took that as a challenge.

"No," he said. "No, that isn't what I wanted to hear. I think there's something else you're hiding from me."

A muscle twitched in Natsume's jaw. And if Hisoka had been closer, and in a place that wasn't loud with roiling liquid fire, he was sure he might have felt Natsume's pulse jump, too. So, there is something.

"So what if there is. Everyone's entitled to have a secret or two of their own. But you're the empath," Natsume sneered. "Why don't you tell me what it is I'm supposedly hiding."

Damn it, he knows my power doesn't work that way. Hisoka had told him as such on their first case.

What Natsume didn't know was that what empathy Hisoka did have could work both ways. He poured on the guilt, let it fill the room like thick waves. "Really, Natsume, it would be better for you if it came from your own lips."

What Hisoka hadn't been expecting was the sensation of betrayal that echoed back at him. "Maybe you ought to drag it from me, then, Kurosaki, if it's so goddamn important to you. Really, I don't know what I've done to deserve this kind of treatment—"

"You fed information on Summons back to Peacekeeping while we were looking for Tsuzuki."

Natsume's eyes went wide in shock. There! I've got him.

Only it wasn't so much the shock of a man who's been caught out—though even that could have been just another example of Natsume's acting skills. He recovered quickly enough. "I'm not sure where to even start with that," he said with a little laugh. "I told Tatsumi he might have spies in his department, back when maybe we could have actually done something to prevent it from getting out of hand, and all I got was a cold shoulder. No one believed me. Now you're telling me that not only have you known there was a mole the whole time, you think I was it?"

"You deny it?"

"Yes! Of course I deny it, because it isn't true!"

"And what reason do I have to believe you? How can I know you're not lying to me right now?"

"You're the empath. How can you not tell?"

"Maybe because you've convinced yourself you were doing the right thing for so long, you actually believe that what you're saying is the truth—"

"Because it is the truth! Why would you even think I'd betray Summons? You know how I feel about Peacekeeping—"

"I know what you tell me you feel."

Natsume sighed. He shook his head and threw up his hands, as though pleading for some higher power to knock it into Hisoka's brain for him. Whether or not Hisoka's projection was having an influence on him, he couldn't let up the pressure. Not now that it seemed like Natsume was on the brink of capitulating.

"Look," he said as he massaged a temple, not meeting Hisoka's eyes. "I hate Peacekeeping. Okay? They're the whole reason I'm stuck in Billing day in and out instead of doing something meaningful with my afterlife. You got a sense of that better than anyone else has a right to. So you tell me why I would work with them to undermine Summons."

"Maybe they promised you something." But Natsume shook his head at that. "Everyone has a weak point that can be exploited, Natsume—"

"What could they possibly promise me that would make me forgive them enough to betray Summons for them?"

"If you wanted to be a Summons agent again so bad, I'm sure it's well within Todoroki's power to have you reinstated, and get whatever you did to get transferred expunged." Hisoka couldn't quite tell from Natsume's laugh if the other found that ridiculous, or he was getting closer to the mark. "What am I supposed to think, Natsume? You had access to our inner circle—information that only the most trusted Summons agents knew, yet somehow Todoroki knew what we were going to do before we did it."

"Have you subjected Terazuma to this little interrogation yet? No one outside of Peacekeeping ever hated Tsuzuki so much. I'm surprised he isn't you number-one suspect."

This is what I expected, Hisoka thought. It was a sign of desperation, trying to throw the scent off of himself and on to someone else. And Hisoka knew he had a point, he should have suspected Terazuma; yet he knew with a certainty that he could not explain that Terazuma's loyalty, perhaps more than anyone else in the department, was beyond question.

"This isn't about Terazuma," he said. "It's about you. You had the access, Natsume, and for all I know, you had the motivation, too. You were awfully quick to call Peacekeeping in on our last case, for someone who claims to hate them so much."

"Because the sooner we show them we're willing to cooperate, the sooner we get them off our back!"

Even as Natsume said that, he knew how it sounded. Hisoka detected fear—fear that admission would be seen as a sign of his guilt, or . . .

No, that it might lead to what he was really hiding. Hisoka narrowed his eyes, as though he only needed a better view to bring what was coiled up within his partner into focus.

That was when he heard the growl behind him. A droning sound he knew without turning belonged to a cat. K had arrived.

Or perhaps she had been there with them all along, hiding in some dark corner until the time was right to show herself. Hisoka couldn't say either way; K was a psychic black hole to him. And though he had little to fear from a small cat, he didn't like the fact that he was trapped between her and the master she had come to protect, with the furnace that was the Lake of Fire uncomfortably close off his side. Even a little cat could deal a fatal blow, if she could throw him off his guard and off his balance.

Or did so long enough for Natsume to attack. Right. He was the one Hisoka needed to watch, the one he needed to be wary of. He had seen Natsume's speed in the field, his resourcefulness. Sure, he seemed calm now, with his hands in his trouser pockets, but there was no telling if he had fuda in there, or something even more dangerous. More of those cherry bombs, perhaps, only this time releasing venom from Enma's spider instead of salt and holy water.

But Hisoka had come too far to let the matter drop now, when he was so close to an answer. He sidestepped a little bit away from the lake, a move which did not go unnoticed, and may have been taken as a threat. He felt Natsume tense, and heard K's mrowl pitch upward in warning.

"It's alright, K," Natsume said to her. "Kurosaki and I are just having a little chat." But the cat didn't seem to believe that was all it was.

"Just tell me what I want to know and we can be done here," said Hisoka, eager to have this over with himself. "You know, if you don't want to say the words out loud, we can always shake on it. Let your conscience do the speaking for you."

But Natsume looked in dread at his extended hand. "I think I'll pass. No offense, but I do not consent to you rooting around in my brain. In any case, my word ought to be enough for you, if this partnership of ours even means anything. You wouldn't put Tsuzuki through this rigmarole—"

"I'm sorry, Natsume, but I know better than anyone that words are cheap. Even Tsuzuki's."

"Damn it, I'm not lying on this! I'm not the spy—"

"Yet why do I get this guilty feeling you're hiding something from me?" Natsume's eyes widened behind his glasses, though he tried not to look affected. Hisoka allowed himself a smirk. "I don't need to touch you to know that much."

Behind him, K produced a more nuanced mrowl that Natsume appeared to be listening to. Whether the cat had given him away, or he had finally put the pieces together on his own, the game was up. "Are you manipulating me right now?"

Hisoka couldn't deny it. So he asked, "How do you feel?"

"Sick. Like my breakfast wants to come up. Only not my breakfast." Natsume almost laughed at the revelation. "A secret. That's it. Whatever you're doing, it's like you've caught some secret inside me on a line and you're trying to pull it up."

"Then it's working."

It was anger Hisoka felt coming back toward him, however, a sense that he had violated something he shouldn't have, something precious. "Oh, this is low, Kurosaki, even by Summons' standards. You have no right to get into my head, make me feel things—"

"But you want to confess. Don't you?" It wasn't really a question. The look on Natsume's face said enough. "Just say it, and I'll stop."

K hissed behind him. There was no way for Hisoka to know if the next second she would attack him to defend her master. But he was so close. He couldn't give up now. "To ease your conscience, Natsume. I know how it's eating you up inside, keeping it in. I know because I feel it too. That's how this projection thing works. So just tell me what I want to know, and both of us can get on with our day, and go back to work like none of this happened."

"Does this mean you believe me when I say I'm not the spy?"

If that was what it took . . . "Let's say I do. But if we're to be partners going forward, there shouldn't be any secrets between us that might interfere with us doing our duty."

That was awfully bold, coming from him. Everyone has secrets they're entitled to keep, Hisoka, even you. And Hisoka knew he deserved that thought, when an echo of it was aimed his way. Whatever agreement passed wordlessly between them, K's growling stopped, and she dashed by Hisoka to leap up on to her perch on Natsume's shoulder.

He rubbed her head before saying to Hisoka, as if both he and the cat had decided: "Why not. I now know about this . . . projection thing that you can do. I suppose it's only fair you have something you can hold over me. I, uh, don't suppose it's too late to ask for your discretion?"

"Tell me first. Then I'll decide whether it stays between us."

Natsume shrugged. Really, it was the best he could hope for given his present circumstances. "Just to warn you, it's kind of a long story. I hope there isn't somewhere you need to be for the next hour or so."

They agreed they needed to find some other place to talk. The heat of the lake was oppressive, and neither one liked yelling over the roar of the roiling while discussing such a sensitive topic.

A short while later found the three of them wandering the labyrinth of service tunnels and abandoned storage spaces that ran deep under the Judgment Bureau offices and all the way to the Castle of Candles. Many areas felt as though they hadn't seen a soul in years, but they were still in the territory of kappa and other demons endemic to Meifu; so to keep from being overheard, they kept to the drier passages, and traveled inside the bubble of a charm Natsume produced that would mask their conversation.

"So long as we're being honest with each other," Natsume said only when he was certain it was safe to do so, "you should know that I'm planning to break into Mother."

The supercomputer that Watari had been instrumental in creating before he came to Summons? Hisoka had been under the impression that it was impenetrable, and incorruptible. That had been the whole point of the program.

And for that reason, reason enough to keep such a plan secret. Hisoka could see now why Natsume had been so afraid of revealing it. "Why would you want to do that?"

Natsume was fighting again. Hesitating.

"Come on," Hisoka coaxed, really not wanting to put the pressure to confess back on. "You brought me all the way down here—"

"Because Muraki can't die."

Hisoka started. Whatever answer he had been expecting, that wasn't it. What the hell did he mean by that? "He's immortal?" That would explain a lot, not to mention confirm one of Hisoka's worst fears. And if Natsume hoped to use Mother to change that, maybe it was worth helping him out.

But Natsume sighed, said: "No. As far as I know, he can die. That's just the point. He can't be allowed to. I can't allow him to."

"But why the hell not?" Maybe they weren't on the same side after all, if Natsume was prepared to keep that man alive. "After everything he's done—Natsume, the mandeserves to die—"

"God, Kurosaki—don't you understand? If Muraki dies, he'll come here! Just like every other soul, he'll be sent to Judgment to stand trial for his life. And when Enma sees what he's capable of, he won't dare make the same mistake he did with the grandfather and destroy his soul. He won't let such a huge opportunity go to waste."

Even before he said it, it began to dawn on Hisoka. He felt a chill as the blood drained from his face.

"If you hate Muraki this much while he's alive," said Natsume, "how do you think you're going to like working with him for the rest of your afterlife?"

Hisoka couldn't believe that Enma would actually entertain the idea of making Muraki, the man responsible for bedeviling him and his goals for years, an actual shinigami. And he told Natsume so.

"I know. It isn't something I want to believe either. But I have reason to suspect that that's exactly what Enma has been planning for decades. He's been amassing powerful shinigami—building himself an unbeatable army."

"But for what?" was what Hisoka wanted to know. "Does he expect Enma-cho is going to be attacked?"

"Do kings need a reason to amass more power?" Natsume riposted, and Hisoka could not deny there was some truth to that, even if he couldn't believe there wasn't more to it. A powerful man, or god, always has to be on the lookout for rivals. There's always someone who wants that power for themselves.

"That's supposing he could even control Tsuzuki, though, let alone Muraki." And of Enma's ability to do that, Hisoka had serious doubts, if past experience was any indication. "You have proof?"

Natsume faltered in his pace for a moment, and Hisoka stopped before he could get too far ahead, turning back. He could feel Natsume's hesitation more than he could see it in the dark. The misgiving in the way he reached up to scratch K, who was riding along on his shoulder, as though to borrow some of her strength or certainty. This time, it was not that he feared Hisoka knowing what was on his mind. His was the hesitation of knowing that saying a thing only made it more real.

"No," Natsume eventually said. "I don't have any proof. That is, nothing that isn't highly circumstantial."

"But you do have circumstantial evidence."

"Only all the people Enma's been recruiting so far. In case you haven't noticed, quite a few of them have a connection to one Muraki or both."

"Such as myself," Hisoka thought aloud. "And Konoe mentioned he and Todoroki both worked for Muraki Yukitaka during the war. And Tsuzuki, of course. He stayed with Yukitaka for eight years before he died." That was the start of this whole Muraki mess, the way Hisoka had heard it; though he had never been able to blame Tsuzuki for it. How could he have possibly known what Yukitaka would go on to do after his death? From the sound of things, Tsuzuki hadn't exactly been himself during that time either.

Other than that, however, Hisoka couldn't think of another name that was connected. "You think there may be others in the Judgment Bureau? In Peacekeeping? In Summons?" He couldn't imagine Wakaba or Terazuma, or Tatsumi for that matter, having some tie to the Murakis—but how much did he really know about who they were when they were alive?

"I'm still working on that angle," Natsume admitted with a grudging grumble. "I do know that Sister Agrippina was summoned by Tsuzuki himself—"

"What?"

Natsume blinked at his shock. "You didn't know? Well, yeah. From what I heard, it wasn't pretty. She fought him pretty hard, and didn't make any effort to hide the fact that she held a grudge against him for taking her life against her will. If you ask me, she'd been waiting for him to mess up and give her a reason to take him down a peg the whole time she was here. And I strongly suspect Todoroki recruited her for precisely that reason. I just wish I had the documentation to prove it. A lot of Todoroki's appointments and orders over the years seem to have been strictly word-of-mouth, no doubt so they can never be verified in court."

If that were true, Hisoka didn't feel so bad admitting he was glad he had inadvertently destroyed Agrippina. That was one less person who had it in for Tsuzuki—one less out of a multitude to worry about. "That doesn't sound very professional, hiring Peacekeepers who have such a deep hatred for the people they'd be watching."

"But if that's been Todoroki's mission from the beginning—if those are the orders he'd been given by Enma himself. . . ."

That was a disturbing enough thought in itself. Only Hisoka didn't know which was worse: that Enma had been thinking of Tsuzuki all this time as an attack dog, to be sicced on the enemies of his choosing, or that he had deliberately chosen the most sadistic agents to watch over him.

And that left Hisoka wondering just what kind of plans Enma had for him that he didn't know about. What parts of that plan had he already unwillingly, and unwittingly, fulfilled? "So, Agrippina can be connected back to Tsuzuki. But to Muraki?"

"I don't think so. But it's all part of the same larger plan, I think, this confluence of characters connected by either their karma or their deaths, or both. I do know that Enma would risk keeping at least one person around just for the connection, even though it's going to cost him more in the end than simply letting them move on."

That sounded like an awfully specific accusation to make—a threat, more like—requiring intimate knowledge. "Why, what makes you think that?"

"Because I believe that connection is the only reason I'm still here."

Hisoka wasn't sure he was hearing him right. "What are you saying? That you knew Tsuzuki in life, too?" No, Natsume's age wasn't right to have been around in the 1920s or earlier. He could have been one of Tsuzuki's cases, but somehow Hisoka didn't think that was it either. "You knew Muraki."

The steadiness of Natsume's stare, even through the dark, told Hisoka the latter was correct. "In a manner of speaking. You and I have more in common than you think, Kurosaki. We both have Muraki Kazutaka to thank for our deaths."

"If you can call it thanks. I thought you said you died in an accident." Or maybe it was Tatsumi who had said it, when Natsume was first assigned his partner.

Natsume grinned a lopsided grin. "Come on, Kurosaki. Everyone gets told you died after a long illness, but who actually believes it?"

Just the mention of his death was enough to bring on memories—the chill of Muraki's touch and the cherry blossoms in the light of the lunar eclipse that seemed to always resurface automatically. Forcing them back down again, Hisoka crossed his arms over his chest. "What did he do to you?"

"Nothing like what he did to you. Well, not exactly." K leapt down, and Natsume leaned back against the wall of the tunnel. And with that, he launched into his story.

"It was Nineteen-eighty-four, and I was studying engineering at the University of Tokyo, minoring in literature. I had plans to go into space, if you can believe it—well, build stuff that could be shot into space, anyway, although if I were honest I was just another fool trying to stave off the inevitable slide into salaryman-dom as long as possible. Muraki was at the medical school there, in his third year, but I didn't know it at the time—or have any reason to know him at all, for that matter. Our lives never had a reason to intersect.

"During that time, some Lit. friends of mine invited me to join an occult club on campus—"

"You can't be serious. Didn't you guys know how dangerous that is?"

"Well, we didn't really believe in that stuff," Natsume said, "so, no. We all just thought it was an amusing way to pass the time, you know, like those bored aristocrats in the original Hellfire Club. Drinking absinthe and reciting poetry, listening to Goth music back when it was actually worth listening to, and convincing the occasional co-ed to stand in as our virgin sacrifice for one night. We thought we were some kind of hot-shots, and liked to bring in our more superstitious friends and rig the place to give the appearance of ghost lights or floating candles, have some guy make demon noises in the room next door. Give them a good scare.

"Then one night, one of our members invites this nineteen-year-old kid who's supposed to be some prodigy in the medical program—"

"Muraki."

Natsume blinked, as if he could see the young doctor's face before him, before he had ever become "the doctor." "Yeah. I still remember how the air changed the moment he stepped into our club. He looked so different from anyone else on campus, so pale and unearthly and delicate, like—"

"Don't say an angel."

"Well, if the shoe fits! It might have been the first time some of us ever found another guy attractive. But, you know him, he has this way about him that just sucks you in, no matter who you are. He was so polite, so eager to get started, just all smiles and the most gentlemanly manners. A sort of Dorian Gray, you know? The kind of guy you can't fault for anything."

Hisoka could picture this Muraki he never knew, young and slight and almost androgynously beautiful, like an image of a saint; though whether the image was coming from Natsume or his own imagination, he couldn't be sure. Either way, it filled him with revulsion, knowing the beauty and politeness was all a facade. A lie. Like a beautiful tapestry hiding the trap door to a pit of bottomless cruelty.

"In hindsight, maybe we should have guessed he might be hiding some kind of darkness behind his act, but unfortunately hindsight doesn't work that way. Anyway, he had expressed some interest in the occult, so we thought we would humor him and do a little demonic summoning, see just how easily he scared."

Hisoka felt a chill run down his spine, even if these events had happened decades ago. He knew where the story was going, and it was as fresh to him as it was in Natsume's memory.

"Needless to say, out of all the times we'd performed the same rituals, not expecting a single thing to happen, that was the one time they worked."

Natsume tried his best to describe the scene, the emotions he and his fellow club members experienced, but he didn't need to say it aloud. Hisoka could sense the fear as though it were his own, the crisis of a nonbeliever suddenly shown the worst of everything he didn't believe in was true. The descending darkness in the room, the queer cast of the candlelight, the glowing lines in the center of the floor responding to the incantation. The knowing it was too late to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle.

"Then this woman appears in the center of the circle—one moment there's nothing and then, snap, there she is. It was almost laughable. She was dressed like Kaji Meiko in the revenge scene in Female Convict 701: Scorpion: long black trench, wide-brimmed hat. But tall. I mean, taller than she looked—like you could just feel the enormity of her. She looked human enough, but you could just tell she wasn't. I remember having his weird thought that maybe it wasn't Medusa's ugliness that turned anyone who looked at her to stone; because there was something about this woman that was so beautiful, it literally hurt. She looked at you, and you felt petrified.

"She had a live snake going up each arm, too, and two lions at her side. It was pretty bad-ass—or would have been if it wasn't absolutely, piss-your-pants terrifying. You could tell they weren't normal snakes and lions either. There was something in their eyes, like this . . . hunger that you just don't see at the zoo. Like you just knew, watching them watch you, that you were dinner.

"We didn't even get a word in before she sicced her animals on us." Natsume took a shuddering breath as he removed his glasses, wiping the lenses on his jacket. As if that could get the picture out of his head, the horror, or the memory of pain that Hisoka knew never actually went away. You only numbed yourself to it. "It was a bloodbath. They tore us apart, each and every one of us. All except Muraki. There was something about him. . . . I don't know. But before I died, I remember seeing him there on his knees by the circle, arms out, staring up at this woman and saying . . . something. I don't know what. To be honest, I wasn't concentrating on much of anything at the time except the fact that I was going to die. But his lips were moving and I have no doubt he was making some pact with her right then and there."

The donor of Hijiri's cornea had made a pact, too, and its imprint was left indelibly in his eye, like a seal stamped into wax. Muraki had an eye like that. It shone like a searchlight in the darkness of Hisoka's nightmares. So it wasn't so hard for him to believe that Natsume's theory had a good deal of truth to it.

"Do you think his being there was what summoned the demon?"

By the furrow in Natsume's brow, he must have been wondering the same himself the last twenty years. "All I know for sure is that nothing we ever did worked even remotely like it did that night, and he was the only thing we did differently. It was like we were only there to be his sacrifice," he said with a grimace, sickened by the thought. "The whole club of us."

"Who were you trying to summon?"

That earned Hisoka a little laugh. "Who else? Only the high king of Hell, Astaroth."

Hisoka paled. It must have shown clearly enough in the dark, too, because Natsume sobered and asked what the matter was. "Astaroth has been after Tsuzuki for years," Hisoka told him. "After Tsuzuki defeated Sargatanas, he was supposed to inherit his position as Brigade Commander. Astaroth insisted he take the place, and forbade other demons to challenge Tsuzuki for it. Focalor broke that commandment, and set us up on a summons—"

"I remember that case!" said Natsume. "The fire at St. Michel Prep. I think Kira mentioned something about it."

"Kira," huh? There was something amusing in that that made Hisoka happy for his partner.

"Yeah, well, apparently Focalor wasn't as destroyed as we thought he was. He was the other devil in Minase's apartment that night." And now that night started to make a kind of sense that had been out of Hisoka's reach at the time. "I don't think he's given up on Tsuzuki. Only now I wonder if he and Astaroth have repaired whatever rift was between them. They must be working together. How else would Focalor have survived the return to Hell after disobeying his master's wishes?"

Natsume nodded slowly. "And Astaroth is working—has been working with Muraki for the last two decades. Man, if only I knew what Muraki promised her to get on her good side. . . ."

"Whatever it was, you can bet a person with Muraki's expertise and utter lack of compassion can actually deliver on it. I've seen him pull beasts out of thin air that could only have come from Hell. I always thought he was working alone, but now I have to wonder if he had some help from that other side."

"Which is just another reason he can't become a shinigami." By which Hisoka knew Natsume meant "must not." "If he's a menace in the living world now, what do you think he'll be with all this place's resources at his back, not to mention an immortal body? Can you imagine what havoc he could wreak by bringing those demonic energies here?"

"Worse than Tsuzuki's possession by Sargatanas?" It was hard to imagine worse, if only because Summons had come so close to losing that battle.

"Let's just say that if such a thing ever happened again, Enma will be damned happy to have you and Konoe, and people as powerful as Kannuki and Tatsumi on his side. Whether you like it or not, you're part of a collection. A super group, if you will, with some highly desirable skill sets."

Yeah, Hisoka agreed. He was beginning to feel that more and more. And in the process, feel less and less like he was in possession of his own autonomy. "And you?" he guessed.

Natsume snorted. "Alas, I am virtually useless—"

"What do you mean? You got Watari's contraption up and running," Hisoka supplied, remembering the unlikely toaster-like device Natsume had used to capture a shoggoth on one of their missions. And then literally fried the living daylights out of it. "Even if there were a few bugs still to work out. And you know more about demons and Hell than anyone else I know in this place—not to mention," he added, looking around them, "how well you know the ins and outs of this maze."

"I might have mentioned before," Natsume dismissed the compliment with a shrug, "I have a lot of free time on my hands down in the basement. Ample time to memorize all the secret tunnels under Enma-cho. My tinkering hasn't amounted to much, and my vast stores of arcane knowledge only seem to help me on office trivia nights. But at least I can't cause much trouble in the Billing Department. Enma probably thinks I still have information on Muraki or Hell that could be of use to him locked up inside my noggin, but if I do, it must be buried so deep that even I don't know what it is."

"You don't think he keeps you around for your hacking skills?"

Hisoka wasn't expecting that to get the big laugh it did.

"What's funny about that? Tatsumi's always talking about you having this uncanny ability to get any secure document he wants."

"Ah, that," Natsume managed through his laughter, "wasn't me. Truth is, I may know my way around an OS, and I'll even admit I'm kind of a spreadsheet freak. But I couldn't hack my way out of paper bag. Or into a paper bag, for that matter. And if I could, I sure as hell wouldn't tell Enma about it."

"But, the classified files—all that talk about updating security—and now you tell me you want to break into Mother? If you don't know how to do this stuff yourself, why would you even try? That isn't exactly amateur level. You know what can happen if you're caught tampering with Mother."

"But I never said I was doing it alone."

"Then, who's helping you?" Hisoka said as he bent to pet K, who was arching against his leg.

Natsume chuckled. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

K chirruped, and thrust her face into Hisoka's palm. He looked up at Natsume. "You don't really want me to force it out of you again."

But Natsume just grinned as he shook his head. "I'm not hiding anything, Kurosaki. You've already met my partner in crime. She's been right here with us the whole time—literally under our noses."

Hisoka was getting fed up with the run-around and was just about to tell Natsume to cut the crap. And then it clicked. He just hadn't wanted to accept the truth because it seemed too ridiculous.

He looked down at K—who had sat down on her haunches and was staring Hisoka in the eye, just waiting for him to get with the program. Despite his trouble reading cats, it was the first time he had allowed himself to see what had been in front of him all along. K may not have been human, but there was an understanding in her eyes that was no less intelligent, and no less appreciative of irony. He would even swear that she was smiling at him.

"She's your partner?" Hisoka deadpanned.

Natsume beamed just like his cat. "Yep! Been with me every day for the last fifteen years. Really, I'm surprised you didn't figure that out right away."

"Yeah, well, a heads-up would have been helpful."

Natsume blinked. "Sorry. I thought you knew from our first case together, figured that's why you never said anything about her accompanying us."

"My empathy doesn't work on cats," Hisoka grudgingly admitted, hating to feel like the butt of any joke. So this was the partner Endo had mentioned. He'd said it was weird. Hisoka hadn't really understood what he meant by that until now. "Are you really trying to tell me K is an honest-to-god shinigami?"

K shot him a look as if to say, Finally he gets it!

"Back in the mid-nineteenth century it was decided that an animal could attain enlightenment," Natsume explained, "so, according to the transitive properties of the On Earth As It Is In Heaven rule, it was decided they could become shinigami, too. It doesn't happen all that often, though. It takes a rare breed. K just happens to be one of them. We had a snow monkey in the mail room at one point, too, but he might have moved on since I last saw him. . . ."

Hisoka had to shake his head. He knew Natsume wasn't trying to pull one over on him, but it was still asking him to believe a lot. "So, she lived and died, just like a human shinigami?"

"Celebrated her ninety-fourth death-day, what, a year ago, K?"

The cat craned her head to look back at him and meowed.

"Ninety-sixth. Sorry, I keep forgetting what an old lady you are. She proved herself to be worthy of the position and the responsibility attached at her judgment, just like any of us. Even worked Summons and Peacekeeping for a time, making her one of the few shinigami left who's been in continuous service longer than Tsuzuki. I never got to see her at work in the field, but you've seen her bedside manner. I kind of envy the people who passed in her hands, er, paws. At least it would have been a peaceful death, compared to how I went."

"And she's your hacker?" said a still incredulous Hisoka.

"Look. Imagine you had been around for the combined total of about six full human lifespans—let's say of a conservative estimate of seventy years each—all the while with the young, springy neurons you had when you died. That's, what, four hundred twenty years? A long time for any human to be around. Think of the vast wealth of information you'd be able to retain, the languages you could master. Well, K's been around for roughly the feline equivalent. Ninety years is plenty of time to master a few skills."

"But she's a cat!" Hisoka didn't know why that point needed belaboring. It should have been obvious. "And we're not talking about learning to play chess. How could a cat possibly understand computer code? Never mind that—why would it want to?"

"Boredom? For the challenge? The pleasure of getting to be part of the coming-of-age story of an entire science, from its infancy on up? Maybe a combination of all those things. I don't know. She doesn't tell me. Doesn't change the fact that she does what she does. And very well, at that.

"I don't know why this is so weird for you," Natsume added under his breath. "You don't seem to have this problem with Zero-zero-three."

If he was trying to say Watari's little owl was a shinigami too, that was a little more than Hisoka could handle at one time. Though K being one would explain a few things, like how she seemed to be able to walk through walls. Teleportation might have been an unusual ability for a cat, but not for a shinigami.

In any case, for his own sanity he decided to steer the conversation back to more pressing concerns.

"So, you and K are planning to hack into Mother," Hisoka said as they picked their way through a chamber resembling an old subway station, packed haphazardly with old furniture and what looked like mid-century radio equipment. "Not something I would recommend—"

"Yeah, I know, I could be severely reprimanded—maybe even have my very existence terminated," Natsume huffed between breaths, K's bell jingling somewhere in the rubble nearby him. "Recommendation to abort duly noted."

"But what I still don't understand is why. What do you hope to accomplish when you've broken through? That is, if you manage to break through? Do you even know what you'll find when you get there?"

"I have some notion. I'm not going into this completely blind, I've done my research. And I have reason to believe the heart of Mother contains the source code, so to speak, of this world, and all the souls that pass through it. Once we've reached it, theoretically, we should have the power to reverse Muraki Kazutaka's death, should it ever occur."

"And the power to bring anyone you choose back to life. Or alter the destinations of their souls." If that's what Mother existed to protect, Enma had good reason to have that power locked away where no one, not even he, could reach it.

"No." On that, Natsume was adamant. "His is the only fate I plan to interfere in."

Hisoka had to stop. Not just to take a breather—and get some of this dust out of his system—but to really think about the implications. "I don't like it." The words just came out without any thought, so strong was the truth of what he felt that he couldn't contain it and didn't try. "You have to understand why I wouldn't like it."

Natsume hurried back to him. The charm of silence only worked within a small area, and he could not risk a topic this sensitive being overheard by some unseen ear.

"I have a rough idea how you died, yeah." God, Hisoka thought, did everyone in Enma-cho know that about him? "So I get why you'd want to kill Muraki yourself. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make that bastard suffer for what he did to me, too. But I have to think about the bigger picture."

"The bigger picture?" Now Hisoka really wasn't sure if they were on the same side or not. "The longer Muraki is alive and out there in the living world, the more innocent people die on account of his actions. Yes, I want to kill him for what he did to me, and for what he did to Tsuzuki. But he deserves to die, and to suffer, for the crimes he's done to the innocent."

And why don't I consider myself among the innocent? It was a question that might have been circling around Hisoka's consciousness for a while, but only when he examined his choice of words did it leap out at him. Was it just that he had been a shinigami for what felt like so long that he forgot that he had been human once, too, and innocent of this whole mess he was in now, when Muraki first came to him? This hatred he felt now, this burning need for revenge, had not been his until after his death; yet he spoke of himself as though the Hisoka he was now was somehow the same as the one who had been raped and cursed in that cherry grove, and murdered.

Or was it something more than that? Even before Muraki had come into his life, he had felt that something in his very nature was already cursed, already tainted. His own parents had shut him away, called him a monster, just for being able to read their feelings, their prejudices, their shame. And if that was just Hisoka being what he had been born to be, could he say he was ever innocent?

He looked up at his partner. "Natsume, I can't let you get in the way of my revenge. I have to kill him. Waking up each day knowing that is what I'm going to do is what's kept me going ever since I came here. And a part of me has to believe it's what I was made a shinigami for."

"I understand," Natsume said gravely. What he didn't voice, but what Hisoka knew he was thinking, was that he could not allow Hisoka to stop him from pursuing his goal either. "Then, should I expect you to report my plans to Konoe?"

That was the question, wasn't it? If Hisoka did so, Natsume would almost certainly have to go before Judgment, perhaps even Enma himself, and confess to what amounted to a charge of treason. That was even without considering that Todoroki might catch wind of it from their as-yet undiscovered mole, and involve Peacekeeping in the matter. Nonomiya was at least sympathetic to Summons and to Tsuzuki. Hisoka couldn't imagine trying to go about their business under the constant suspicious gaze and abusive tongue of someone like Endo; but that was a very real possibility if Enma was given some reason to agree with Todoroki, that a Summons without oversight was too dangerous to allow.

Hisoka felt like he was being tested, the longer he weighed the matter over in his mind. It seemed that no matter what he decided, there was no clear correct decision. If he kept Natsume's plan a secret, it would mean the person most interested in foiling Hisoka's own plan was the one working beside him. Yet if he revealed it, he could send Natsume to Hell or oblivion, or—knowing Enma—worse. And did he want the fate of a man's eternal soul on his hands? An eternal soul that wasn't Muraki's, that was.

"No," Hisoka decided. For now. "I won't report you. Even though I can't help you, either. You took a risk confiding in me," he said before Natsume's thank-yous could become too profuse.

"It's not like you gave me much of a choice."

No, Hisoka supposed he hadn't. "I might need a favor from you in the future," he said. "There might be a time when I need to be able to count on your discretion." After all, Tsuzuki was still out there, even if Muraki did have him for now, and getting him back was not a fight Hisoka was about to give up.

Natsume shot him a smile and a wink for that. "Whatever you need, just ask. I owe you one."

But for now, they had reached the end of their shared road. The tunnels had started to dampen, the drip of perspiration off the ceiling a perpetual background soundtrack to their conversation, and Natsume feared they would soon be approaching kappa country. Silence charms would do no good then, with a people who would spot them easily in the dark and know a couple of shinigami's presence in their territory was no good. Besides which, they'd been gone long enough from Summons; if they stayed out any longer it might arouse the wrong kind of suspicion.

With a "See you back at the office" they agreed to split ways, Natsume heading back the way he had come, Hisoka moving on ahead through a shortcut his partner had assured him would take him topside in a few minutes. For added assurances, Natsume sent K along to point Hisoka's way.

And though Hisoka was only the slightest bit closer to learning who the mole in Summons was, Natsume had given him a lot to digest, as he followed the cat's jingling bell and dancing tail through the dark passageways. Certainly not what Hisoka had been expecting when he decided to confront his partner.

This part was always hard, learning to trust someone after learning the truth about them—a truth that had been deliberately kept from him. And at the moment, Hisoka wasn't sure he could trust Natsume again. At least, not in the same way. He could still go out on a case with him and have every confidence in their ability to get it done. But could he ever really trust someone who was prepared to sacrifice others, even his own afterlife, to keep Muraki alive? Was it really Enma-cho's best interest Natsume had at heart?

Or was it Enma he feared—what Enma might do, if he had Muraki and Tsuzuki, and all his most valuable players, all in the same place? All that power—amassing it might not be enough. It might be too tempting not to use.

Presently K brought Hisoka to a root cellar, which opened up to a wooden shed full of gardening supplies and sports equipment. Hisoka's toe sent a croquet ball rolling across the floor, its possibly century-old paint wearing away under a layer of old caked-on dirt. Hisoka peeked outside to see if it was clear to come out. Thankfully the shed was situated behind a row of tall hydrangeas to hide it from passers-by, so he didn't think anyone would notice him coming out of it.

He started to thank K, who had been by his side a moment ago; but when he looked down, she had already disappeared.