Hello my lovelies! I have returned to resolve my evil evil cliffie. It's a longer chapter again. Had a last minute scene that just BEGGED to be included.

DarkRoseDragon: wait no more my dear, here's the fight.

I braced myself before the wave of power struck, the force nearly knocking me down. When it faded, Kuwabara was laid out on the ground, Yukina next to and tending to him. Yusuke seemed shaken, but I was too afraid of dropping my shields to find out how badly. Hiei was in his full green, multi-eyed demon form and laughing at the larger male.

"How do you still stand?" it roared in frustration.

'Pyro?' His mental voice held a small amount of fear.

I sent him a mental hug. 'Standing. Learned it. Fry his ass.'

"You fail, weakling." Hiei growled. Black fire danced around his hands.

The larger male roared and shook his fists. "I can not fail! I am Eoghan, I always kill what I aim at!" He powered up again.

I planted my feet more firmly as the wave crested. I glanced around me at the demons trying to be protection detail. In the split second before the energy wave broke, I decided they couldn't take another hit and pulled the energy into myself.

It was a long shot. I didn't think it would work, but it did. The wave disappeared.

Hiei, ever the strategist, took the opening of the shock of my move and sent a blast of his Mortal Flame attack at Eoghan. The mountainous demon staggered under the combined blows of stolen energy and the black flames Hiei controlled.

"You will not be that lucky a second time, demon bitch!" Eoghan roared and sent another wave of energy.

I pulled the energy in again. It didn't quite work the same way, and the wave crashed over my head. It had nowhere near the strength of the first two attacks, so I was ok. And the others were spared the hits.

Hiei hit the demon with another blast of Mortal Flame, and I sent one of the fireballs I had learned back in that Delaware alley powered by Eoghan's energy wave that I stole. Both hit at the same time.

Eoghan burned for an hour.

The proper reports had to be filed, and I had to appear before Koenma again, to discuss my new-found ability to steal energy unleashed in an attack. None of the boys had been allowed in the room as Koenma and I talked, and I was sworn to never turn my ability against Spirit World. Not that I ever would have anyway.

Hiei was at my side as soon as I stepped out of the portal at the edge of Genkai's forest. He nudged me toward a small copse of trees. "I told you to tell me where that baka lived."

I slid down one of the trees to sit on the ground. I had been a while at Koenma's, and he's not big on chairs for people coming to talk to him. "I didn't know he was a demon. I thought he was just some jackass." I snapped.

He sat next to me and pulled me into a fierce hug. "I probably should have mentioned that." He kissed the top of my head. "Why didn't you tell me you could commandeer attacks like that?"

"Because I didn't know I could until I tried it?" I sat up and fidgeted with my fingers.

"You risked your life on a what if?"

I ducked my head.

"You could have been killed, that thing I'm trying to prevent." He started a low-level growl in the back of his throat.

"And you and the others wouldn't have been able to stand!" I yelled. "I had to risk it. That first power tsunami hit all of you really hard. I couldn't let him hurt you again." I broke down in tears.

He pulled me in close again and stroked my hair. "I'm not mad. It worked, everyone lives."

"Kuwabara's still out cold."

"His mental shields have never been very good."

I punched the ground next to his leg. "I hate that I have to take a hit to learn it."

"Meh, he would have fallen no matter what you did. The idiot's getting too old for this. Last years invasion did more than leave physical scars on him." Hiei kept his touch light, but I could feel the slight tremor at that thought.

"If he's getting too old, then what does that mean for me? And Kurama, for that matter." I shifted to look Hiei in the eyes. "I'm not that much younger than him, what's gonna happen when I start to decline?" It was a loaded question.

He hummed a little. "You will most likely be like the old woman. You work hard to keep yourself trained and at top form. She may not be the legend she once was, but she can still roast anything that comes after her." He laughed.

I punched his shoulder at half power. "Don't laugh, Hiei, I'm serious! You're a demon, you have, like, hundreds of years till you get old. I've got decades at best."

"Oww! Dammit, you getting weak needs to happen soon." He rubbed the shoulder I punched with a pout on his face.

"Oh suck it up... wimp."

"What did you just call me?"

The flare of his anger made me giggle. "I didn't stutter."

He pounced and knocked me flat on my back. "Take it back, onna."

"Nope." I shook my head and giggled harder.

"I'm not a wimp. I am a mighty demon slayer."

I took advantage of his overconfident lax hold on me and threw him off to the side without the tree. "When I help, maybe." I pounced and held him down.

"It was all me that time in Delaware." He rolled us both to pin me again.

"After I got hurt."

He growled and tightened his grip slightly. Not enough to hurt, just to let me know I crossed a line.

"And I took out the one the day we met."

He growled again. "That's only since we met. I've slain hundreds in my lifetime."

"Oh, so you're letting me catch up then?"

"Maybe I'm just making you believe I'm a wimp, so I can impress the hell out of you and sweep you off your feet." He gave me a wink.

"Oh. My. Gods. You went and read Yukina's stash of mushy romance novels, didn't you?" I gasped in shock. Surly Hiei, my surly, I-don't-do-romance Hiei just pulled a cheesey romance novel line. The world was definitely about to end.

"Maybe..." He blushed so deep red his eyes almost got lost.

"Aww! So sickeningly cute!" I giggled. "But please, don't ever do that again. Cheesey romance lines don't suit you dear."

"It seems to always work in the books."

Hah, busted. "That's because its fiction. It works because the writer wrote the girls to be silly and fall for things like that."

"That actually explains a lot..."

I freed my arm and ruffled his permanently spiked hair, then immediately squashed the thought that my parents would hate him based solely on his hair and clothes. "Silly Hiei. Reading cheesey romances is for girls."

He leaned back and smirked. "So where's your stash?"

I totally led myself into that. "I am definitely not a girl, I'm a woman with a jaded core. Those saccharine-sweet drugstore novels piss me off. The novels I read have vampires and werewolves and gods with nasty sadistic streaks that make some of the demons you've faced look like kittens." I sat up a little and leaned on my elbows. "And the pair that ends up mated at the end start out hating each other, and both nearly die at least once before they decide they love one another." I giggled, because that's almost how our relationship had developed.

He gave me a little shove back flat. "I didn't say you could sit up."

I started to sit up again. "Bite me, I'll sit up whenever I bloody well want." I was in a mood to make him fight me for dominance. I couldn't be easy to top all the time.

He bit my shoulder. "Stay down, onna."

I made a feline growl. Like I've said, I picked up a lot from my cats. "Make me, oni-san."

He had just pressed his lips to mine when fur and rose scented vines pulled us in opposite directions.

"Damn. Kurama." Hiei growled and yanked the vines, succeeding only in tying himself tighter.

The red head in question made his appearance. "Can't you two keep a lid on it?"

"Can't you go a week without tying me up in vines?" I grumbled at the smug kitsune. I thought a little and the vines slid from both Hiei and me.

"Just as I thought." Kurama smirked.

"Totally winging it. No idea it would really work. Gods I hope Lord High Pacifier Mouth doesn't count that as using that power against Spirit World." I pressed a hand to my face and sighed. The death god had promised me a cell in Spirit World lockup if I did.

"You're damn lucky. Especially with that last one. And Koenma told us to train you with it, so no jail cell for you." Kurama said, the smirk fading fast.

Hiei gave me a look that said I would be explaining later. "We all are. Remember when I told her to tell me where the man who had tried to kill her lived?" He effectively changed the subject.

"You mean the vow that gave away your fondness for her? Yes, I remember the pain you promised him." Kurama chuckled.

Hiei broke into a broad grin. "Don't need to find him anymore. We killed him."

Kurama laughed openly. "Ok, so I was a bit wrong about that. Assumed he was human."

"Moi aussi, mon ami." I patted the fox's shoulder.

Hiei kicked a rock through a tree. "We may eventually have been called out to arrest that one. We should have before now, but Koenma doesn't care if they only ATTEMPT to kill humans." he grumbled under his breath.

I threw my arms around the pissy fire demon. "I wouldn't change a single moment of that time. Made me the uber bitch I am today."

I needed to be alone. I hadn't been alone since the last incident with Lotus, and I was getting sick of the boys. For an entire week after destroying Eoghan they would randomly launch attacks at me just to train the new ability and test my limits. It was starting to get on my last nerve, so I gathered up a couple of the training scarecrow dummies, my music, strapped a bokken to my back and took off into the woods.

I told Yukina where I was, and to immediately tell Hiei if I was gone more than a few hours. She gave me one of those smiles that said 'honey, you're a little slow' and said, "He'll know the second your energy flares and be at your side, sword drawn, before anyone even knows there's a fight."

I dropped the dummies at the edge of the clearing and set up my speakers. Bat Country, by Avenged Sevenfold poured into the silence. I used the song to pace the Tae Kwon Do forms that I was using to warm up.

The song switched to Innervision by System of a Down. Instead of setting the dummies around in positions and hitting them, I decided to see if I could make them move. By the end of the song I had them completely mobile, and armed with sticks.

Lady Boy by RuPaul came up next. The dummies were tied in to the tempo of the music, so the attacks and my defense seemed almost dance-like. I grinned and lost myself in the music and fight.

Hiei's POV

Her power flared. It was far out in the woods in a direction she'd never run off in, and there was no one even close to her. I ran in the direction of her energy flare. I would have to remember to talk to her about this if she is not hurt.

As I neared the place I felt the flare, I drew my katana, sure to have to end a very messy fight. When I reached the clearing, I stopped. The sight was not at all the bloodbath I had expected.

She was in a pair of tights that went to her knees and a very small top that just contained her, chest. Her stomach and arms were bare, bruised in places and speckled with dirt and debris. Her bokken flashed, barely blocking the stick weapons of the things she was fighting.

One stumbled closer to my position and I recognized it as one of the training dummies from the temple, armed with a stick and moving on its own. I took half a step forward before I realized they were moving in tempo with the music she had playing. The onna singing said something about a disco stick. I added that to the list of strange ningen things to ask her about.

The song changed, and so did the tempo of the fighters' movements. The dummies nearly had her down, but she threw them back with a yelled curse. The dummies did not get up. She still whirled and spun to the music. The onna in the song said something about a bad romance, and Pyro did a move I had seen in a ningen dance exhibition Kurama had dragged me to. I remembered thinking it boring then, but hypnotic with my onna.

Pyro's POV

I took the cool down period to practice my very rusty belly dance skills. I had just finished the hip drops when the clatter of metal on rock told me I wasn't alone anymore, but safe, because my audience was spell bound. I grinned, but kept my back turned. "Took ya long enough to come after me, Hiei."

He coughed slightly. "You shouldn't leave like that."

I laughed and shook my head. "I didn't just wander off. Did you enjoy watching me?"

"You didn't tell me you were leaving the temple." His voice hadn't gotten any closer. That meant he was worried, and was resisting the urge to nuzzle into my neck. He liked to do that from time to time, especially after a particularly nasty hit in training.

"Kina knew, she would have let you know if I was lost." I moved to collect the fallen dummies.

He got there first. "You should have told me about this power." He shook a dummy for emphasis.

I shrugged. "Wanted some sparring partners, had a few dummies going spare, so I decided to just try it. I think I learned it from being so completely in your head." I tapped his forehead, then went and shoved all the music stuff back in a small bag.

"Your new penchant for experimenting will lead to an early death for me."

"Oh shut it. I know damn well how much you experimented every time you got a new power. Man, you experimented with that jagan for well over two years. And I know that if you didn't get scared about accidentally offing me, you'd be testing that dragon on me."

"You remember what you saw when we were twined?"

"Of course. You are important to me, therefore I have tried to remember everything that I think pertinent." I started off for the temple.

"Pertinent?" He stood in my way and refused to let me pass.

"Yeah, you know, relevant to my oni-san?" I crossed my arms and glared at him just as hard as he was glaring at me.

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like. The things that make you, well, you. The pertinent stuff."

He dropped the dummies. "Just how much did you see?"

I smiled at his very small, shocked voice. "If its in your head, I saw it. Honestly, Hiei, I didn't see a damn thing that would ever make me think any less of you." I grabbed the dummies by an arm each, slung them over my shoulder and walked toward the temple again.

'You still feel the same?' He was shocked again. But at least this time his shock held a note of relief.

I didn't turn to him. Didn't trust myself to not pounce on him. 'I feel the same, and damn lucky to have you the way you are. You could have become like Eoghan, or Niroth.'

'I'm not. I'd never be like them.' He was suddenly beside me again, with his arm around my waist.

"But you could have been. The demons that raised you..."

"I'm not like that. I have honour." He cut off my words and pulled me closer.

"Thank the gods for that." I breathed.

He gave me a quick squeeze, then took the dummies from me. "Can I ask you a question about your music?"

I giggled. "Anything for a change of topic."

"The onna who was singing the song I showed up during, she said something about a disco stick. What is that?"

I gaped at him. The question was delivered so innocently, like a small child's curiosity. After a moment I shook my head and laughed.

"What did I say that was funny?" His bewildered expression made me giggle a little more.

I started walking again. "You're serious?"

He kept pace with me. "I wouldn't ask if I weren't."

I ducked my head so my hair would hide my blush. "Its a dick, Hiei. She wants a casual mate."

We remained silent for the rest of the walk back.

Ok, the playlist is as follows: Bat Country-A7X, Innervision-SOAD, Lady Boy- RuPaul, Love Game- Lady Gaga, and Bad Romance- Lady Gaga. All songs owned by the people with the copyrights.

Updates should happen a little more quickly now, I've finally published my book.