When Muraki was sure the ink was dry, he folded the card and set it next to the generic urn and memorial tablet he had received with Sakaki's effects. If he did not return, Oriya would know what to make of the instructions left on the card. He would do right by Sakaki's memory. Not because Oriya had been particularly fond of Sakaki, but because he was Oriya. It went against his nature to do anything disrespectful or improper. Even if the person affected was no longer in a position to care.

If Muraki had been a different person, he might have felt guilty looking at that small collection of objects. What greater memento mori was there than seeing a long, full life reduced to a handful of bones and ash, a diving watch and glasses? If Muraki did return, he supposed he could process what he ought to be feeling then. He could have a gravestone erected, buy Sakaki the most expensive Buddhist name he could find to ensure his restless spirit never came back. Try to reach out to anyone who might have known Sakaki in the past. Anyone who might have cared that he was dead.

But Muraki did not plan to return.

Oriya would surely curse his name for this. Until the day he died. He loved too much for his own good.

Satisfied that he had done all he could do, Muraki took the watch from the table and trench coat from the back of the chair. He turned off the crystal chandelier over the dining room table for what he expected to be the last time.

In the darkened hallway mirror, he caught his reflection. Black wasn't his color, it always made his pale complexion seem even whiter and more corpse-like; but it was appropriate for a doctor who had seen his last patient. It made him look like an undertaker, or a rook, a carrion bird. A shinigami.

His reflection smiled back, the expression even reaching his ruined eye. The vision in it was starting to fail him for minutes to hours at a time now, but it wouldn't matter for long. When this was over, he would either be a master of death, or dead.

The cemetery was old, its last gravestones erected before the war. No one came here anymore—at least, not to this corner of it. There was no one left alive to remember those who were interred in this dark grove, and so the names on the markers faded away beneath moss and acid rain.

But the dead remembered.

His brother-in-law had been wrong. Tsuzuki did visit his sister's grave. It was only that he'd never visited alive.

"I messed up again, Ruka." The concrete slab beneath him was rough and dirty and cold, just the bed he deserved to lie in for his betrayal. "It's what I always do, isn't it? Hurt the people who love me?"

A dark, all too familiar thought passed over him like a shadow: Did they even love me? Could a thing like him even be loved at all? He certainly didn't deserve it. It wouldn't have surprised him if they were all pretending.

The blue lines overlapping the scars across his wrist glowed as Tsuzuki traced them idly with his thumb. They would not let him forget what he had done. What he might have done, had Hisoka not escaped when he did. Just knowing that he would have gone all the way if Hisoka couldn't stop him, that he had been ready and willing to subject Hisoka to the same violence and humiliation he'd suffered under Muraki, made Tsuzuki want to hurt himself. Open a vein, pluck out an eye—whatever it took to soothe just a little of the agony of the self-hate he felt inside. Only he knew it wouldn't really help. And that pain was the least of what he deserved.

Whatever made him think that it was a good idea? Pressuring Hisoka into doing what he should have known, given Hisoka's history, was too perilous, too reckless? Could Tsuzuki say he was drunk on lust when he knew, when he could feel Hisoka's fear as clearly as if it were his own? And still he'd tried to take what he had convinced himself was rightly his, telling himself what he thought was fear was really excitement. In the clarity of loneliness, Tsuzuki understood by just how much he had crossed the line—no, obliterated it. But he had really thought—in that moment, he had truly felt that he was wanted. That he was desired. As he was. With no ulterior motive.

Of course it was a lie. It had to be. Hisoka was an empath, after all. Maybe he never truly returned the affection that Tsuzuki felt for him, only reflected it like light on a mirror, blinding Tsuzuki to its true source. Maybe all that stuff about caring for me because I was his partner was a lie too, and he didn't even know the difference. I tricked him into believing he was my friend. I tricked myself into thinking he could be something more. And because I wanted it, needed it to be true so badly . . .

"Every time I think I finally have something good, I have to destroy it. I just can't seem to help myself. That's the real reason you left me, isn't it, Ruka?" He could still see that last look on her face, before she turned to flee from him forever. Hisoka had looked at him that same way, just before he teleported away. "You knew I'd eventually do the same to you if you stayed. But it didn't matter. I destroyed you anyway."

Never ill, a perfect carrier for all sorts of diseases. Because he never knew, no one ever knew he might be a walking plague, not even after it was too late.

It didn't seem to matter what the particular sickness was. He was the disease. His soul, toxic, from the very beginning. He killed Ruka just as sure as if he'd plunged a knife into her heart. As sure as he'd just killed whatever semblance of love Hisoka might have had for him in his heart. Somehow that seemed a worse crime than when he'd thought he had wiped Hisoka from existence.

Tsuzuki stroked the stone as he might a bed quilt, one sibling sharing a late-night confession with another. "In a way, I'm glad you and Mother didn't live to see what I became. You would be so ashamed of me, for the things that I've done, and I hurt you both enough as it was. It wasn't your fault. You could never change what I was, no matter how much you tried. No matter how kind you were to me. The monster always won out in the end."

But you must have known that. You must have been frightened for your life, every day in that house. Always wondering, Will today be the day he loses control?

His sister's remains did not answer. They never did. Wherever her soul was now, it was long gone from this place of burnt bones and engraved names.

But Tsuzuki was not alone. And whatever restless spirits still lingered here were quiet, hiding. Not from the shinigami who could have taken them away, but from what stalked him. The black void that blocked out the stars as it loped between the rows of graves, dragging its long skirts of shadow. Circling. Biding its time. Waiting for its chance to come near.

"I just wish with all my heart I could go to where you are."

Whatever oblivion Ruka was in, he wanted nothing more than to be there right now. To feel nothing—no pain, no guilt. No memories of all the suffering he'd caused. Nothing but the comforting embrace of non-being.

"But I know I don't deserve that either."

"Okay. Out with it. What did you see?" Kazuma said, drawing Imai aside to where they would not easily be overheard. Thankfully the other guests seemed preoccupied enough with gossip, as they made their way down the front steps of the Castle of Candles and into waiting cars. Better they focused on their conspiracy theories and getting themselves home than asking Kazuma and Imai why they were lagging behind.

"It's going to sound crazy," Imai said (Then again, what part of any of this is sane?), "but I could have sworn I saw a dragon."

He wasn't expecting that to strike a chord. "A dragon?! What kind?"

There are different kinds? "I dunno! The kind with scales and fire-breath that rains down death and destruction!"

"That isn't very specific!"

Imai sighed and shrugged. It was clear they were both losing patience with one another—and if he were the interrogator, he could bet he'd be frustrated with his answers too—but he didn't know what else to tell her. "It was a dragon. Black and red—or maybe red and black, I don't know. It cast a huge shadow over everything, and everything was on fire. I only saw it for a second. I'm afraid I can't give you any more detail than that."

Well, that description ruled out Sohryuu, but not much else. And Kazuma could think of one shinigami who'd recently acquired a black and red, fire-breathing dragon. "When is this supposed to happen?"

"Well, obviously it hasn't happened yet, but I've never had a premonition of something this far in advance before. I suppose it could be a week from now or a year or an hour, for all I know."

"But you haven't had a premonition yet that was wrong."

Imai caught the question in it, and the desperate hope. He hated to disappoint, but "No. Not yet. But there's a first time for everything."

"We need to tell someone about this."

But whom, Kazuma wondered. She didn't have a straight line to Enma, nor was she sure that the Lord of Death would believe the word of a newly minted shinigami who still didn't know how to control his power. Security needed to be put on alert in case this omen came true sooner rather than later, but she wasn't sure she could trust Todoroki to take the necessary precautions, either. More likely he would dismiss her concerns and subject Imai to who knew what sort of tests to try and get a better sense of his power; and in the meantime they would all just be spinning their wheels while the inevitable drew nearer.

Summons had some experience with dragons, though. At very least she could call Konoe with what little Imai knew.

Then it felt like the world dropped out from beneath her.

Kochou. She was with Sakuraiji. And if a dragon did attack, the most vulnerable person would be the one mortal they had been foolish enough to think they could protect in this world.

Meaning Nonomiya would be directly in harm's way.

That decided it. "We're going to the Count."

"But didn't he just kick us all out?" Imai asked. In vain, it seemed, as Kazuma grabbed his arm with a superhuman strength and whisked him back the way they had just come.

The onyx tiles were cool under his hands and knees, the darkness of the chamber, sheltering; but the tiles brought no relief to the shame that burned within him and the darkness could not hide him from judgment. All the things Muraki had made him do— No. All the things Tsuzuki had done while under Muraki's roof, he was loath to tell, let alone relive in his own mind.

But. It was over and done with now, and he did not hide his regrets. So, if it pleased the court. . . .

"He does not tell us the whole of it," Kaguhana said from the base of the King's dais. "He hides something from us."

"You're certain?" boomed the voice from behind the screen.

"We cannot identify what it is. But we can smell it."

Tsuzuki tried not to let his nerves show as he stared the disembodied heads down, but it was like trying not to scratch an itch. It only seemed to make what ailed him worse. "My lord King," he said, "I hide nothing. I have answered all of your questions promptly and honestly, even at great difficulty to my person. And has your mirror told you I've left anything out? That I've lied or embellished my answers? If anyone can tell if I have been dishonest, it's Your Grace. My mind is an open book to you."

"Is it now?"

The figure behind the screen shifted, and Tsuzuki, already on his knees, quickly lowered his eyes. Formality dictated he do so, but terror gripped him, too. He had seen King Enma's face before and ever since he had been unable to wipe it from his mind, no matter how hard he tried to forget. Paintings in the Living World depicted the Lord of Death as a fearsome demon, with the Devil's blood-red skin and fangs like the tusks of a boar. And it was true that he could appear as such to the souls of the dead—or worse—at their judgments, if he thought they deserved it.

But he had another image, somehow even more disturbing: the image of a courtly man of no more than thirty, tall, delicate, with long hair that fell in intricate knots and plaits down past his waist. His skin could appear either pale as the moon or coal-black, so that one could never quite tell if he was the inverse of his own image, but he always wore robes of deep scarlet spider-silk that glistened like the raw, bleeding flesh of a flayed man and pooled around him like strewn viscera.

And he was beautiful. So beautiful it was painful to look at him, as if he somehow defied comprehension. That was what was cruelest of all, and so difficult for the mortal mind to reconcile: that the face of Death and Judgment itself was so perfect, so peaceful. And so inhumanly apathetic.

"I want to believe you, Tsuzuki," Enma said. His voice, lyrical and eerily intimate without the screen to project it, though Tsuzuki did not delude himself that it contained genuine warmth for him. "You have shown a commendable willingness to confess to me the worst of what you experienced under confinement. That could not have been easy."

From the corner of his eye, Tsuzuki watched as those long-boned hands produced two square shrouds, which Enma let fall over Mirume and Kaguhana, putting them to sleep just as a cloth over its cage does a bird.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs and continued closer, and Tsuzuki lowered his forehead nearly to the tile in front of him, heart pounding in dread of he didn't know what. He meant what he said when he said he wasn't hiding anything. "What good would it serve me to keep the truth bottled up inside? They say guilt rots the soul from the inside, like an infection—"

"And in unburdening yourself of it? You wish to be absolved of your sins against me? Or merely free of your guilt?"

There was a trick in that question. So Tsuzuki did not answer. Enma knew that his deepest desire was to be released from this sentence of servitude. That was the only way Tsuzuki would ever truly be "free". He did not need to say it out loud.

Enma placed one of those long hands on Tsuzuki's crown, and it felt like the touch of a bodhisattva: light yet solid, and healing-warm. Promising mercy, but at a price.

"My advisors do not believe you have been entirely forthcoming."

"Your Grace, I did not lie about any—"

"I do not think that you lied in your testimony. How could you? If you tried, as you said, my mirror would strip your folly bare in an instant."

Enma gently stroked his hair, but that touch, deceptively compassionate, violated Tsuzuki in a way that even Muraki had never been able. Even if he shut his eyes, he could feel Enma's staring back at him from the recesses of his own soul.

There was only way to relieve himself of them, he knew. Open his mind completely. Let Enma see everything there was to see. But that was what he thought he was already doing. "My mind is yours, Lord. I don't know what else you want from me! I've told you everything—"

"No. Not everything. There is something here, I can just sense it, something that . . . eludes me. But how can it?"

"I told you Muraki drugged me when he first took me in. He offered me liquor on numerous occasions. Sometimes I drank until I blacked out—but who wouldn't, in my situation? I thought that was my only way out of that hell! Maybe I just don't remember."

But that wasn't it. Tsuzuki could feel the accusation in his own mind as Enma rooted around. Memories and passing thoughts were tossed about in Tsuzuki's mind as if by a cyclone. There was no corner of his brain that could escape Enma's all-seeing gaze.

And yet, something in him did escape.

Tsuzuki saw it, but only in a flash: the briefest image projected on his mind of a young boy with his eyes, a smile on his lips that Tsuzuki could only describe as evil as he pressed a hushing finger to them. Then the boy sank back into the void. And vanished.

Along with the other presence in Tsuzuki's head.

"It is gone," said Enma. "How deep your shame must run, Tsuzuki, that even you cannot see the bottom of it." He stroked Tsuzuki's hair back from one ear, and the gesture seemed almost conciliatory. But Tsuzuki wasn't fooled. "Very well," Enma said, turning back towards the throne. "Despite a few . . . reservations, which I shall have noted, I have seen nothing to indicate to me that you are unfit to return to service—"

Tsuzuki must have gasped. He knew this was a possibility, but had he really believed it?

Enma took some amusement from that. "You seem surprised. But you didn't really think you would escape your sentence so easily?"

When Tsuzuki opened his eyes, the Count's half-mask was staring back at him with that one dead, empty socket. Its jagged line of jaw and sharp-toothed grin seemed to be laughing at Tsuzuki, and all the ironic turns his existence had taken.

But if a voice were to suddenly come from it, Tsuzuki suspected it wouldn't be the Count's laughter he heard, but that of his ten-year-old self, his own manifestation of the malignancy he carried even through death, hidden within him like an absorbed twin: his demonic nature.

"Only one other was ever capable of hiding what was in the depths of his soul, when he stood in judgment before me," Enma had remarked curiously, as if to himself, after he dismissed Tsuzuki from his courtroom, "and he has the advantage of a mask."

That's right, Ruka, I forgot to tell you. I met my real father tonight. Somehow I don't think you'd be surprised to know how alike we are. I am, I know now, every bit my father's son.

If he put the mask on again, he would be invisible. Not the sort of invisibility that he used here in Chijou, to walk among the living unseen, but real invisibility. Anonymity. The kind that ought only to belong to the Lords of Death. Why the Count had it and not Enma, Tsuzuki could only guess. All he knew was, it felt made for his face, for his soul. It called to him, seduced him with its power. What it granted wasn't true oblivion, but with that mask Tsuzuki could stay here, wallowing in his misery in this place next to Ruka's bones, forever. He could hide himself away from the world. Perhaps even from Enma.

But not from everyone.

He reached for the mask, and the inside of his wrist glowed beneath his cuff like the display of a digital watch. Persistent. Accurate. Tsuzuki had been wearing the mask when he let himself into Hisoka's apartment earlier tonight, too. And Hisoka had known right where to find him.

That would not do.

Though regret and self-pity had made his whole body feel like lead, he pushed himself up to a sitting position. It was a muggy summer night, and he itched beneath his tuxedo. He had no idea how much time had passed since he came here. It couldn't be as long as it felt. The sky above Tokyo was still pitch-black.

But the dark presence that shared the cemetery with him was blacker still, blacker even than the shadows between the gravestones. It moved with the silence of fog, but the threat of it was deafening as alarm bells. Even the cicadas, whose song should have kept him up all night, were afraid to make a peep so long as it was near.

"Taimou," Tsuzuki addressed it, "I didn't just summon you here to keep me company."

At the sound of her master's voice, the darkness stirred, slipping through the graves on little cat feet.

"Is it true that you can break any lock, any spell? Even those said to be unbreakable?"

A deep, breathy laughter stirred the fallen leaves. The distant lights of the city faded as an immense, impenetrable black shadow in human form rose before him.

Even in Gensoukai, Tsuzuki had never seen Taimou's true face, because there was no face to see. Only the void where one should be, hiding an intelligence that shook him in a way none of his other eleven quite could. The four Guardians of the directions had command over the elements, Touda was death and destruction incarnate and Rikugou and Kijin saw where no one else could, but Taimou was an eternal mystery. Looking into where her face should be was like looking into the nothingness he yearned for with all his soul. And just as forbidden.

"There is no spell that will not yield to me," that voice from out of the void echoed off the gravestones. Confident and amused, as if Tsuzuki had merely challenged her to a game of checkers.

He raised his right arm toward her, turning it in his other hand so she could clearly see the spell that bound him to Hisoka. "Even this one?"

A single yellow-green eye flickered open within the shadow. Lidless. Socket-less. Like a lantern floating in the dark. The eye swiveled from his wrist to his face, but Taimou did not change her answer.

"I need you to break it."

She did not remind him that the spell was said to be unbreakable for a reason. She must have read Enma's hand in it, but did not see fit to warn him that to defy the Lord of Death was to court destruction. She did not even say whether the spell would be a difficult one to break, or whether doing so would cause him pain.

"As you wish," was all she said.

Tsuzuki wondered if she would grant all his requests so unquestioningly.

Hisoka startled awake at the turn of the conference room doorknob. He pulled his knees up to his chest, instinct making him want to present as small a target as possible, and prepared himself to teleport.

But it was just Tatsumi who stepped through the door. Hisoka could relax.

He turned on the light. Then started when he saw Hisoka bunched up against the inside wall, below the windows so no one would see him if they looked in. "Kurosaki?"

"Are you alone?"

"Yes." It was practically a question. "But it's nearly three in the morning. What are you doing here? I thought you were with Tsuzuki."

Hisoka didn't have to say anything. Just the mention of that name and it was all he could do to hold back the tears he'd thought he must have run out of hours ago. Added to that, Hisoka's disheveled appearance, and the fact that he had been sleeping against the baseboards in the office in his tuxedo rather than in his own bed told Tatsumi all he needed to know.

"I'll kill him." His voice was calm, but the room's shadows jumped.

"Nothing actually happened—"

"But he tried. Is that it? I am going to kill Tsuzuki when I see him, I don't care who he is."

The secretary's protectiveness toward him was comforting, but the rage that came off him in waves, not very helpful. Hisoka put out a staying hand as he hoisted himself to his feet. He was sore all over, and Tatsumi probably took that to be Tsuzuki's doing, though this time it was just from sleeping against a hard surface in a tense position.

"I don't want him to know you know," Hisoka said as he peered through the blinds, checking to make sure they truly were alone in the office. Doubtless Tsuzuki would figure it out anyway, but no need to make things worse. "I'm not hurt." Physically, anyway. "Besides, I'm just as much to blame as he is."

"How can you—" Tatsumi shook his head in utter disbelief. "No. No, Kurosaki, don't ever think this sort of thing is your fault."

Normally Hisoka would have agreed with him. He thought of Muraki and his mind games, of Fujisawa telling him when they first met that Hisoka looked like the type who wanted to be raped. As if there were such a thing. Just the excuses selfish, sadistic men made to avoid facing the monsters they were.

"But in this case it's true. You don't understand." Nor, it seemed, did Tatsumi want to try to. "It's this empathy. It's not a one-way street. I knew that, and still I went and got myself in over my head." Again. It seemed to be a bad habit of Hisoka's lately. "I should have controlled my feelings better."

Tatsumi shook his head, the muscles in his jaw clenching. He didn't want to argue, but he would never agree with Hisoka's assessment either. "You didn't tell him about . . ." He itched to say Yatonokami, but dared not. "Yourself?"

"No." Hisoka looked down at his feet. "And how can I now? After that?"

Tatsumi never had been the hugging type, but his stable presence gave Hisoka some strength he very much needed right then. "Anyway," he said, desperate to change the subject, "why are you here at this hour?"

"Honestly?" Tatsumi pushed up his glasses. "I couldn't sleep after the way the party ended. I always wondered what the Count looked like under that mask, but now that I know the answer, I just feel like I've trespassed somewhere no one was ever meant to go." It seemed selfish to him to complain about it now, though. After what Hisoka had just been through. "I thought I might get an early start on work to try and clear my head."

Hisoka nodded numbly. That actually wasn't a bad idea.

"But if you're here, where's Tsuzuki?"

"I left him back at my apartment. I guess I hoped he would crash when I left." Not that Hisoka particularly cared at that moment where Tsuzuki was. In fact, part of him hoped Tsuzuki had gotten himself hit by a garbage truck stumbling out of some Chijou whiskey bar and that Hisoka had at least until midmorning before he had to look Tsuzuki in the face again. He wasn't confident he'd be able to do it. Just thinking about going back to work at the same desk as Tsuzuki, pretending in front of all their coworkers that nothing was different, was almost enough to induce a panic attack.

He knew he had to do it, though, so he tried to use his locating spell just to check on Tsuzuki's whereabouts. Only nothing was coming through. It was like trying to peer through a dense fog. He couldn't feel Tsuzuki at all.

Thinking maybe it was because he didn't want to see Tsuzuki, Hisoka checked his wrist. But the lines of the spell were faint and dim, like an old scar healed over. "That's weird."

"Hm?"

"I thought the locating spell was supposed to be impervious to tampering."

At Tatsumi's furrowed brow, Hisoka held out his wrist for inspection. "It shouldn't look like that," Tatsumi confirmed. "Even across the membranes of worlds . . . It can't have gone out."

"I can't get a fix on Tsuzuki's energy at all. I have no idea where he is."

"We need to inform the chief of this right away." On that, Hisoka could agree.

"Tatsumi," he said while the secretary dialed, "there's something else." Hisoka had been too preoccupied with memories of his assault to think of it, but now that it entered his thoughts, he felt sick with dread. "When Tsuzuki showed up at my apartment, he was invisible."

Tatsumi froze, his thumb hovering above the call button.

"I didn't see him at first. In fact, he startled me after I got in." Hisoka swallowed. How much was it safe to tell Tatsumi? The whole truth—about Tsuzuki's relationship to the Count? The fact that he had called the mask his inheritance?

"He had the Count's mask," Hisoka settled for. He could always add the rest later, but he couldn't unsay it. "He must have stolen it somehow. That has to be why the Count was so furious at the party. Otherwise he never would have allowed us to see his face. I don't know if Tsuzuki's using it right now and that's why the spell won't work, but I didn't seem to have any trouble locating him before."

"This complicates matters," Tatsumi said grimly, before hitting the button and placing the phone to his ear.

Not that he needed to tell Hisoka. Binding him to Hisoka had been Tsuzuki's one shot at a second chance—with Todoroki, with Enma. Not only had he blown that out of the water, but in going after the regalia of the second most powerful being in Enma-cho . . .

Despite everything, Hisoka loved Tsuzuki. He couldn't deny that. He hated him right now for all he was worth, and felt like he never wanted to see him again, he knew what sort of depravity festered in Tsuzuki's soul, and still Hisoka couldn't help loving him. But in stealing the Count's mask, Hisoka feared Tsuzuki had just signed the warrant for his own destruction.

Maybe that was the plan all along.

Author's note: More shikigami guesswork, this time on how Taimou would appear outside of Gensoukai. Needless to say, the shadow-person form and having eyes are total artistic license, and I think the bit about breaking spells might be too. I do know her specialty is forbidden magic, though, and shadow people are freaky AF, so. . . .

A lot of artistic license taken on Enma's description too, though it is based on his appearance in volume 12 of the manga.

The chapter title, "Miserere mei" means "Have mercy on me" in Latin and comes from Psalm 51. It was famously set to music by Gregorio Allegri.