As much as she wanted to hate him, Ema Skye found that she felt somehow indebted to Klavier Gavin. He had just saved her from what seemed to be a nasty fall, after all.

While Klavier rubbed his cheek where she had just smacked him, she muttered, "thanks."

"Bitte schön, fräulein Skye!" Klavier responded back in that annoying language.

"What did you call me?" She glared at him.

"You're welcome." He quickly adjusted his language, much to Ema's relief, and continued. "You certainly have a unique way of showing your appreciation."

Ignoring his stupid comment, Ema began to search the operating laboratory. Maybe they could find something here that would allow them to cross the collapsed room next door. Along the walls were antiquated human anatomy charts and rusted metal tools that even she didn't recognize.

One especially spindly looking tool stood out to her. It glowed faintly and seemed to radiate an aura of mysticism. As she reached for it, attempting to pull it from the wall, a loud rumbling sound filled the room.

Klavier, who had been looking at something across the room, turned around, his eyes widening. Ema saw him dash forward, frantically extending his arm out to her.

Before he could reach her, the tiled walls around her swept her around in a half-circle and into the adjacent room.

Ema's heart picked up a beat as she pounded on the wall. "Klavier!! Can you hear me? KLAVIER!!"

"Ema!!" Klavier's voice was quiet and muffled through the wall, but she knew he could hear her.

"He can't hear you, fräulein Skye."

Ema went rigid, feeling the blood in her veins freeze. That voice. She knew that voice. Deep. Rich. Just a hint of a German accent…

"What's the matter, mein fräulein?" A strong and warm hand slowly caressed her arm, up to her shoulder.

Finally, she willed herself to move, spinning around to face him. "Kristoph…!"

"You don't love me anymore?" Kristoph Gavin looked the same as usual. That look he was giving her, the small coy smile on his lips. If she didn't know better, he could still be the man she fell in love with so long ago.

"I have very mixed feeling about you, Kristoph," she replied flatly.

Kristoph appeared momentarily perplexed, but he recovered from it quickly. "After that incident, you disappeared from my life, Ema."

"Of course I did! That incident was the fact that you murdered someone!" Ema shook her head. "And, even if it were legal, it wasn't a good reason! Revenge because someone ditched you for someone else is never a good reason to… to…"

Ema faltered, realizing suddenly that, even though she was describing the magician Zak choosing Phoenix as his lawyer, this applied to her as well. She had also left Kristoph for someone else. His younger brother, no less.

"Have you just realized the position you are in?" Kristoph's grin was nothing short of malicious. He had always been far too good at assessing situations.

"Why… why did they let him out of jail?" Ema thought miserably to herself as he advanced, pressing her back against the wall…

...

Phoenix Wright was concerned. Since the happening in the servant's quarters, an oddly haunted expression had taken residence on Edgeworth's face. The prosecutor barely spoke a word as they scurried through the dressing room and back into the ballroom. The strangely discordant fiddle music filled his ears again, but Phoenix ignored it.

When they finally reached the middle of the dance floor again, the moonlight providing at least a bit of natural lighting and relief, he turned to his friend. "Edgeworth, what happened in there?"

"Wright I…" Edgeworth shook his head, feathering a hand through his hair. "…I don't know. One moment I was standing with you, and the next… it was as if I had been pulled through the frozen crust of the Arctic Circle. I couldn't breathe, you faded from my view, and then…"

He shivered. The sight disturbed Phoenix more than anything. Very rarely did he see Edgeworth like this. Something must have disturbed him a lot to make this happen.

"An earthqu—" he began helpfully.

"No." Edgeworth cut him off abruptly. "Nothing like that."

"Then what…?" Again Phoenix found that he couldn't finish his sentence.

"Wright, I have something serious to tell you." Edgeworth turned to him gravely, taking a deep breath and calming himself. "Dollie says hello."

Three words. Three simple yet devastating words.

Phoenix tried to keep a rational, reasonable, state of mind, but he found that he didn't have much of one at the moment. "D… Dollie…"

He shook it off, fixing Edgeworth with the most serious look he could muster. "Maybe you didn't see her. Tell me you didn't see her."

Edgeworth eyed his friend doubtfully. It looked like he struggled with something great in his mind before he finally spoke. "I didn't see her, but I heard her."

Good old Edgeworth. Honest to a fault. Honest to the point where Phoenix was seriously considering crying out in agony. Again.

"Wright, pull yourself together," the prosecutor said sternly. "If we should take anything away from this, it is that we must find Trucy and Apollo soon."

Rational Edgeworth. This was exactly why he brought him along.

Phoenix nodded for several moments. "You're right. Let's follow the other set of prints."

However, just as he was about to open the next door, it opened suddenly on its own, throwing him backwards.

"Mein Gott, fräulein Skye…!" Klavier burst through the door, barely seeming to notice that they were there before he ran to the next door in the ballroom, tugging it open.

"Klavier! What about Ema? What happened?!" Phoenix hurried after him, doing his best to decipher the German.

"Gefangen… sie war gefangen…" he murmured. It was clear from both his spoken and body language that the rock star prosecutor was hysterical.

What he was panic-stricken about, Phoenix still didn't know.

"She was captured? By who?" Edgeworth asked, following close behind them. Oh yeah. Phoenix had forgotten that his friend knew quite a few languages, one of which happened to be German.

"Mein bruder," Klavier responded crossly as he began frantically searching the room.

They had entered a creaky hallway, lined by cobweb filled candle holders. Their flashlights provided the only light once again as the door to the ballroom pulled shut. A faded red carpet ran down the middle of the hallway garnished by aged stands that displayed broken white statues. Only one statue remained intact. Klavier leapt towards it with hope, but he found that nothing happened.

"Kristoph?!" Edgeworth exclaimed, now beginning to search the room more carefully himself.

"Ja." Klavier growled, eyeing the peeling and aged wallpaper with scrutiny.

"Klavier. English please?" Phoenix asked, feeling his head begin to spin.

"My apologies, Herr Wright," Klavier said, his anger apparent in his voice. And in the statue that he threw to the ground. "I'm very concerned. Kristoph will not be so kind to Ema this time around."

Phoenix realized as he began to move that he couldn't see anything. He bumbled his way to the wall, feeling the texture of the wallpaper as he inched his way along the corridor. He took care to duck occasionally so that his head wouldn't hit the candle lamps. "Ema is very important to you, isn't she?"

His sudden sagely question must have caught Klavier off guard. He swung his flashlight briefly towards him, then murmured, "Yes… she is."

"A moron would have known that, Wright." Edgeworth commented snidely.

"I am not a moron!" On cue, as always, Phoenix's head decided to collide with a heavy lamp holder.

Phoenix fell backward to the ground, but as he did so, he noticed a rumbling sound resounding from the wall next to him.

Edgeworth was by Phoenix's side immediately, but Klavier's attention was drawn to the lamp holder. "Mein Gott, Herr Wright, what they say about your luck is true!" Klavier pushed the lamp holder further in the direction Phoenix's head had started, until it spun completely around.

The wall slid aside to reveal a secret passage way.

As Edgeworth helped him up, they followed Klavier into the dusty stone passageway.

...

Dick Gumshoe was having the worst night of his life.

Not only were they in a haunted house filled with spooks and monsters at every corner, but is seemed only he could see them! Franziska Von Karma merely insisted that the rooms were all unimpressive and whipped him as usual.

They walked up a set of creaky wooden stairs into a musty smelling old attic. Gumshoe flicked his flashlight quickly around the room, noticing with dread all of the miniature puppets hanging from strings around the room.

All of them were giving him that creepy smile.

The wind blew through the attic, rustling them around, making them sway closer and closer to him…

"This attic is unimpressive too. Only a fool would find it scary." Franziska frowned, folding her arms across her chest.

Gumshoe felt his teeth chattering. The puppets kept swinging closer and closer to him… their eyes all fixed on him…

One of the puppets lunged forward, its wooden mouth falling open as it thrust a spear at him. "Aiee!!" Gumshoe shrieked.

The puppet fell into pieces as a merciless whip broke it apart. An instant later, Gumshoe felt the painful sting of that very same whip on his back.

"Foolish puppet! And foolish scruffy detective!" Franziska shrieked, whipping a few more puppets in the room for what seemed like absolutely no reason. "You're all foolishly foolish fools!"

She glowered at the room, then folded her arms across her chest again and walked back out the way she came in.

Gumshoe took a look back at the puppet she had whipped to the ground. It turned its head, grinning at him, and reached again for the spear…

"FRANZISKA!!" He screamed, not caring how many times she would whip him, as he ran out the door after her.

...

Ema felt nothing short of pure dread as she was backed against the wall. "Why did they ever let a monster like you out?" She shook her head, her voice barely a whisper.

"A monster? That's all I am to you now?" Kristoph mused, pressing closer to her. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek, the clean scent of his cologne, his body pressed against hers.

The very things that had comforted her in the past now terrified her. She whimpered as he touched a warm hand to her cheek, brushing aside a stray lock of her brown hair.

"You've become cruel, fräulein Skye," he murmured, pressing a kiss into her cheek. "I never stopped loving you…"

Ema pressed her lips tightly together, refusing to speak and willing away her scared cries as he kissed down her neck.

"Such a fighter… why won't you love me back like you did before?" A single candle lamp lighted the passageway around him, the light from that candle was enough to glint ominously off the panes of Kristoph's glasses.

The room she was trapped in seemed like a corridor made of stone. Kristoph grabbed her by the neck, forcing her down the stone steps and into a larger stone room at the bottom. She noted immediately that there were two doors in this room, one of which she had just come through, and the other…

Ema waited, hoping that something would happen, that Klavier would burst through that door and save her from what she knew would soon happen.

The door remained shut.

"I know what you are thinking." Kristoph chuckled, tapping her pink shaded glasses and flicking them off her head. "I doubt anyone will find this place, fräulein detective. There are only two secret passageways that lead here, and this house is filled with them."

The room itself was spooky enough, even without Kristoph in it. A large upside down pentagram was painted in red and circled on the floor. High torch-like candles burned at the five points around the circle. Just being in this room was driving Ema a little crazy.

And then there was Kristoph.

Kristoph, who had already removed her lab coat and thrown it into the circle. With a light shove, he pushed her down into the circle too. She fell to her bottom, catching herself a little with her elbows. She winced in pain as she hit the cold and hard stone floor.

He was atop her immediately, pulling off her red scarf, and green vest. She struggled, flailing against him as he tried to undo the buttons on her shirt. "Love me Ema Skye, love me!"

Ema shrieked as he tore open her shirt, a few of the buttons flying in random directions on the floor. "No no… don't do this Kristoph!"

"Love, fräulein Skye, is the cornerstone of life. It is what holds us together," She winced again, shrinking away from him as his touch suddenly became tender again, brushing tears that she didn't realize she had shed off her cheeks. "When that love is taken away, how are our lives to remain?"

Kristoph swallowed, chuckling quietly at first, and then louder. "What would happen if that love were to leave you, to ignore you, to let you rot away in a prison cell and never give a scheiße about you?!" Kristoph's voice had grown loud, and his maniacal laughter filled the room.

"That's what you did to ME, fräulein Skye!" She tried to get up as his eyes widened. She remembered that look. Even when things had been good between them, it had meant trouble.

Kristoph pressed her forcefully back down to the ground, his perfectly maintained hair coming unraveled and beginning to splay around his shoulders. "Fräulein Skye, fräulein Skye… I gave up everything for you fräulein Skye!" His voice had reached that unhinged timber that frightened Ema like no other. He tore off her bra, and unbuckled her belt, throwing them both aside. He started to undo her pants…

"No! Please, Kristoph, no!" Ema's voice was shaky, and she felt hot tears spill down her cheeks with his every move. "I never meant to hurt you…. I just don't love you anymore…. don't do this…. please…."

Kristoph's voice quieted, and he fixed her with a look that was almost sane. "And what are we to do, once that love is gone?"

"Get over it, like everyone else."

Kristoph turned with surprise at the voice and promptly found a fist in his face.

Ema watched through tear-blurred eyes as Klavier swung at his brother again, knocking Kristoph onto the floor.

She was vaguely aware of Phoenix and Edgeworth at her side, both bringing her articles of clothing back to her. Edgeworth helped her put everything back on, and Phoenix draped the white labcoat over her shoulders afterwards.

Klavier wiped his brother's blood off his hands onto his pants and quickly scooped Ema up into his arms. "Oh Ema, I'm so sorry… I should never have brought you to this place…"

Ema smiled back at him weakly. "No…. you shouldn't have. You owe me one… glimmer-boy."

She fell asleep in his arms as he carried her away.

LateNiteSlacker's Notes:

A nice long chapter for you today! I hope you enjoyed it, and that my formatting was saved this time.

Next time, we will find out what has been happening to Trucy and Apollo!

Please review with your love or hate! :)