Because She Died
Dane Soar
Looking back on the first chapter, I realized that I didn't make it too clear that the prologue takes place much farther along in the timeline than the first chapter itself. Sorry about that.
Thank you to you reviewers, I appreciate the feedback so much! Read and enjoy.
Part 2
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One visit from Botan later, they had a location and had left her in the dust. She didn't blame then, considering the circumstances.
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"Why does it always have to look so normal?" muttered Kuwabara, as they craned their heads back to look at the office building. From outside, it looked innocently mundane. Barring the broken window.
The broken window was what Hiei had his eyes fixed on. (Or the two normal eyes at least).
"We're going inside," said Yusuke. "Meet us there if you don't find anything out here." When Hiei had that look, he'd do whatever he felt like, so Yusuke didn't even bother to order him.
Hiei grunted in response as Kuwabara tested the office-building door to see if it was unlocked. Finding that it was he entered.
Following him, Yusuke found himself in a tastefully decorated foyer. "Murdering people's mothers appears to pay well these days," He grumbled.
"Not really, Urameshi," Kuwabara had opened one of the doors off the foyer and was peering beyond it. "It's all unfinished past this point."
"Any staircases? That broken window was on the third floor."
The stairs were quickly found and they wasted no time going up them. It was all bare cement and un-dry walled, the foyer was clearly a front.
With no doors on, it was easy to see the room that the gang that had killed Shiori Minamino adopted as their own. The fact that there was the corpse of a demon in front of it helped too.
Inside the room was…carnage. Bodies in pieces, blood, entrails, bits of plants that were scattered around the room. Carefully they picked their way through, bit-by-bit, turning over corpses one by one. Each was a demon. Each was dead. Kurama had apparently made very sure of it.
In fact, according to Botan, this gang was the same one they'd hit on that last mission, one that had been trying to establish itself in the human world. They'd killed the main ringleaders, but obviously there had been survivors.
Those survivors had managed to track at least one of the Spirit Detectives down.
"Crap," spat Yusuke emphatically, as he found one body hidden under another. "This one's a human."
"Are you sure?" Kuwabara asked.
"Yeah. Damn, that's not good." Demons that killed humans were severely punished by the Spirit World, as Yusuke had learned in the disaster with Hiei's sister. Then he felt a faint pulse under his fingers on the human's neck. "Wait, he's alive! Lost a lot of blood, yeah, but alive for now. Good." He walked to the shattered window to look down, thinking to find Hiei. He spotted him almost directly below, almost out of sight of the edge of the window and called down to him. "Hey, anything down there?"
Stepping back, Hiei glared upward at him. "I found Kurama."
"What?" Yusuke leaned out of the broken window peering at the ground.
"He either fell, or jumped from the window. Is there blood on the glass?"
At Hiei's prompting Yusuke inspected the few shards of glass that still were in the window and immediately spotted the red on its edges. "Check on the blood, and a lot of it."
"If Kurama jumped out that window he'd have done it without cutting himself." pointed out Kuwabara. "He's a thief, he'd know how to do it without hurt. I bet he got pushed."
"This just keeps getting better and better," growled Yusuke. "Kuwabara, if that human guy dies, we're gonna be in a lot of trouble. Could you see if you can get him to a hospital? Normally I'd say bring them to him, but there's dead demons all over, which is sort of suspicious. I'm going down to see how Kurama is."
"Over and out." Kuwabara saluted then sobered. "This is bad, Urameshi."
"I know, but that seems to be today's theme."
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TBC