Warnings: None

Speak

Chapter 10:

"Detections"

Like the firmament fallen to earth, Sarayashiki glittered.

The demon clung to the fringes of the shopping district, just beyond the glow of the lights and the crowds milling through the streets. Strands of lights hung between buildings, trees, and streetlamps like a labyrinth of stars. Below, humans gawked, marveling at the tangled glow. The humans here were so unaware. None of them knew a powerful demon stalked their dazzling, commercial territory—nor did they know even more powerful creatures, in turn, stalked the demon.

Kuwabara, Yusuke, and I walked abreast as we navigated the sidewalks. Yusuke still wore his uniform from the ramen stand, gelled hair crinkled from time spent under a baseball cap. All of our watches had activated in the midst of other activities, drawing us here, but even after several hours we hadn't caught glimpse of the creature. Night fell without incident, save for the crowd of humans thickening.

"Not that that's surprising," I said when Yusuke bitterly complained. "Koenma told us it could disguise itself with a human form."

"Still," Yusuke said. "We haven't seen anything. Like, at all." He jabbed sullenly at his watch with a finger. "Is this thing broken?"

When activated in the presence of the demon we tracked, the minute and hour hands of the watch swung together and overlapped, shifting to point in the demon's direction. Tonight the hands of our watches spun in lazy circles. The demon was close, yet it evaded precise detection. The demon had great control of its energy, to be sure.

Even when using my own senses, the demon remained elusive. I could detect no more than a faint blip of energy on my periphery. It glowed a deep blue color, like water at the bottom of a lake, but it remained just out of sight, darting away every time I honed in on its presence—much like trying to see an object on the far-off ocean floor. There was no telling where, exactly, the demon stood.

This demon did not want to be found.

Kuwabara rubbed his arms. "It's here," he said. "I can feel 'im."

I believed Kuwabara even if, like Yusuke, I doubted the veracity of Koenma's device. Kuwabara was the most spiritually sensitive of us all. He grew paler and paler as we walked, hands clenching in the fabric of his jacket. Tennis shoes dragged the pavement as he moved. It had only grown colder as the night progressed. Clouds of his breath, once healthy plumes of vapor, now misted wispy from his mouth.

"Do you need to rest?" I murmured.

Kuwabara's cheeks reddened—but he nodded.

We sat at a nearby bench beneath a tree, backs to a brick wall, facing a lane of shops and the humans patronizing them. Kuwabara relaxed as he sat down. I relaxed as we moved out of the crowd. I disliked the press of bodies, the warped and mixing scents of hundreds of humans crammed into one place. Tall buildings loomed around us. Occasionally a wind dipped between them and cleared the pressing scents, but not often enough for my tastes. My senses remained sharp and on high alert, though perhaps in vain. The demon could conceal even its own scent.

I turned my eyes to Kuwabara. "How are you feeling?"

The psychic slumped, hands in pockets. "Fine."

"Really? You look like you're gonna barf," Yusuke observed.

"Sh-shut up!"

"You do look unwell, Kuwabara," I said. "Is something the matter?"

"You don't—" He paused, frowning. "You can't feel it?"

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."

Kuwabara leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands running through his bouffant.

I didn't need enhanced senses to notice the subtle tremble in his fingers.

"The energy is dark," he said, staring with unfocused eyes into the crowd of humans on the sidewalk. "Not as dark as Sensui, so don't get too worried. But there's a lot of anger here. A lot of rage." His deep breath shuddered. Kuwabara mopped a hand down his face, tracking matte lines across sweat-slicked skin. "And then there's the pain."

Yusuke sat heavily on the bench with a scowl. "Whaddaya mean, pain?"

"Just—the thing's in pain, OK? I don't know from what." He dug his fingers in his carroty hair, face toward the ground. Anguish roughened his voice. "The closer we get, the more I feel it. It's sour. It's bleeding into my brain and just pooling there, like...like vinegar, twisting things up inside."

Yusuke whistled between his teeth. "That sucks."

I asked, "Can you pinpoint where it's coming from?"

Kuwabara didn't reply, but I felt the warm, steady hum of his energy wash from him and fill the air, stretching long and searching into the night as he tried to find the demon. Yusuke didn't seem to notice. He dug a finger in his ear and sighed.

"Aw, man," Yusuke said. "I wanted to take Keiko down here his weekend. Fat chance of that if we don't find this demon."

"Have some shopping to do, I take it?" I murmured as I scanned the milling crowd.

"Nah. Want to see the light festival."

"Light festival?"

He waved, indicating the scenery at large. "Yeah. That's why this place is even more blindingly obnoxious than usual."

I frowned, taking stock of the shopping district with new eyes. Strands of lights with large, old-fashioned filament bulbs stretched between streetlamps, fountains, and trees, adorning bushes and benches and buildings alike. Now that Yusuke drew my attention to this, I realized the lights covered almost every surface imaginable. Some lights bore delicate tints of color, snaking up the walls of buildings in understated patterns.

I had merely thought these strands decorative, not part of an installation. This was a highly commercial area, after all. Gaudy displays like this did not seem out of place.

"It's more obvious if you go up a few floors, apparently," Yusuke said. He pointed at the tall buildings around us. Greenery spilled over exposed ledges here and there—restaurants on outdoor patios, I assumed. "Was going to take her to dinner, get a bird's eye view. But I don't want to bring her here if it might be dangerous."

"A prudent decision, Yusuke," I said.

"Yeah, she'll bitch about it, but it's for her own good." He eyed me sidelong, smirking. "Speaking of complicated women. Think Momo might want to come along? Keiko's dying for a double date."

"Perhaps," I said. "But Yusuke, I must ask—have you been telling Keiko about my personal affairs?"

Yusuke made an 'urk' sound at the back of his throat and sat up very straight. I laughed.

"Hey, can you blame me for telling her? You've never dated anyone, ever!" he said. He slumped against the bench, propping ankle on opposite knee while he jammed his hands deep into his pockets. "She just wants to know what Momo's like, that's all."

"Don't worry. I'm not offended," I said—and although that was true, I found at that moment I didn't want to think about my earlier conversation with Momo.

She had looked upset, at the end. She'd all but pushed me out of the café when I referred to Deaf culture as her culture. I knew she wasn't Deaf, of course. But she Signed. She lived in the culture. Why had she seemed so upset when I referred to it as hers?

Now was not the time for these questions, however.

"Back to the matter at hand," I said. I put my hand on Kuwabara's shoulder. "Any lucky?"

He shook himself, as though he'd fallen asleep, and mopped his face again.

"No. Sorry," he ground out. "The energy is like…a mist, almost. You can feel it and you know it's there, but it's all spread out everywhere. I can't find the source."

Yusuke, in an attempt to be helpful, said, "So it's like a fart in a crowd?"

Kuwabara lurched to his feet. "Urameshi! Gross!"

"But I'm right, right?" Yusuke said from his casual spot on the bench. "I'm gross but I'm right."

"I mean, I guess," Kuwabara said, revulsion clear. "But you don't hafta be so nasty."

Yusuke smirked. I said, "Does the demon know we're tracking it?"

"Can't tell. But probably." Kuwabara groaned and put a hand to his face. "Ugh, why did this have to happen tonight? I have a test tomorrow I need to be studying for!"

My tone could only be described as 'dry'. "This could have occurred at a more opportune time for me as well."

"Me, too," Yusuke concurred. "I'm missing a lot of business for this. Lots of out-of-towners here to see the lights." He kicked a toe at the ground, as though that particular stretch of concrete must pay for his lost clients. "I could make a killing if it weren't for this stupid—"

A wind stripped down between the skyscrapers around us, cold and biting. I pressed my face into the collar of my jacket. Yusuke froze. Kuwabara did too, spine snapping straight as he sat up. The two of them exchanged a wide-eyed, frantic look, one I did not understand. I drew in a breath to speak—and when I did, the scent hit me.

Acrid. Metallic. Bloody. Carried to us on the wind as though delivered by the purposeful hand of a messenger.

"Demon," I said. The scent cloyed my nostrils with the nostalgic taste of Demon World. I pushed back my sleeve, then presented my wrist to Yusuke as the man stood up. "Look at the watch. No change."

The hands continued on their infinite, lazy spiral. Yusuke cursed. I thumbed a button on the watch's side. The watchface darkened, hands vanishing to display a green grid on a black field. Dots depicting sources of demonic energy danced across the surface, never settling, moving in infinite, random patterns.

"Stupid Koenma and his stupid spirit gadgets," Yusuke snapped. He lurched in a tight circle, scanning the crowd, the buildings, the passersby. "The watch can't tell us it's here, but even I can smell the damn thing. It's gotta be right on top of us!"

"It's not the same one," said Kuwabara.

Yusuke and I turned to Kuwabara. He stood with fists clenched, body as tense as a bowstring. A bead of sweat tracked down his temple despite the cold of the night.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"How can you tell?" said Yusuke.

Kuwabara said, "It's got different energy than the demon we're tracking."

Yusuke and I had better senses of smell than Kuwabara, thanks to our demonic heritage, but Kuwabara by far had more acute spiritual sense. Still, I was no spiritual novice. I had not sensed another energy source aside from that which we tracked. I assumed the demon I smelled and the demon I sensed were one and the same. I'd never gotten close enough to smell it before.

"There's two," Kuwabara insisted. His eyes held nothing but desperate sincerity. "The big one with all the pain, and now—"

Kuwabara had always been the most sensitive of us all. If he said there was another demon, I trusted him.

But my motto in both this life and my past life had always been: Trust, but verify.

I fanned out my energy, letting it flow in a thin vapor around where we stood, suffusing the crowd, street, fountain and trees with my power. At first I felt nothing more than human spirit energy and the elusive presence of the demon we stalked…but then, energy a whisper on the wind, behind us in the trees—

"There!" Kuwabara said.

We spun. We saw the demon at once. Skin the color of rotten milk glowed against the dark bark of the tree overhanging the bench. Eyes like tennis balls bulged from its lumpy head; claws gouged the wood for purchase, keeping it suspended upside down as it stared at us. A low-level imp, servile and stupid. I'd encountered them before. But what was one doing here, now?

Its wide mouth stretched into a grotesque grin.

Then it scrambled up the tree and out of sight.

"It appears we're being watched," I observed.

"That's not the demon Koenma showed us," Yusuke said.

"Duh!" Kuwabara said. "I told you were was another demon!"

"The question is, is that imp working with the demon Koenma showed us, or is it an agent in its own right?" I murmured.

"Damn." Yusuke looked at me askance. "Should we go after it?"

The imp was so low-level, I wouldn't have noticed its presence had Kuwabara not sensed the creature. It was incapable of harming us. Any attempt at an attack, and we'd slay it in an instant. No. This creature was no worth our energy.

Before I could articulate this, the watch on my wrist began to beep again.

Yusuke's followed suit.

The Kuwabara's joined the cacophony.

The human crowd passed by, oblivious, as we looked at our wrists in an effort to track a creature that could slaughter them all. What I saw sent a chill skittering down my back. Yusuke and Kuwabara, meanwhile, were confused.

"The hands—they're pointing in opposite directions?" Kuwabara said.

"Switch to grid view," I said.

They did so. I heard the telltale blip of the switch before both of them made sounds of disbelief.

Yusuke said, "What, so now there's three demons?"

Our trackers showed two sources of energy, one to the north and another to the east of us, glowing the same blue hue I'd sensed all night. I still could not pinpoint the energy using my senses. The cloud of power remained as inscrutable as always—or had it thickened? Why did the watch display two fields of energy, when all night I'd only sensed one?

How as this possible?

"The watch should only be able to track the specific demon Koenma showed us," I said. "It's attuned to that demon's energy signature. For it to pinpoint two energies—"

"Did the demon split in two?" Kuwabara interjected.

"That would stretch the bounds of incredulity, I'm afraid," I said.

"So is it messing with its energy to confuse us?"

"It's been able to evade us all night using its previous method," I said. "Why the change in tactics?"

The creature's energy was no clearer to my senses now than before. Why could I not sense it, but the watch could? Had the demon intentionally revealed itself to us, or had its control slipped?

Was the demon, perhaps, tired of hiding?

Why were there now two identical energies in place?

Kuwabara's features screwed up tight. "I still can't get a hold of its energy. It's all muddled up. How's it tricking me but not the watch?"

"Aw, man. This sucks!" Yusuke said. He ran his hand through his hair, cursing. "What the hell are we supposed to do?"

My mind hunted through the possibilities, tracing patterns and paths until I arrived at a conclusion.

"Kuwabara," I said. "Can you sense the imp demon we just spotted?"

"Um—"

Yusuke discerned my intentions before I had a chance to explain, before Kuwabara had a chance to respond. "I get it—three of them, three of us." He pounded fist into opposite palm, grinning. "I say we track 'em down!"

"I'm inclined to agree," I said. "So, Kuwabara—can you track the imp? As the most spiritually attuned, you stand the best chance to find it without Koenma's technological aids."

He nodded, eyes going out of focus for a second, and then they snapped back to sight.

"Got a bead on 'em," he said.

"Good. Yusuke, you track the signature to the north. I'll take its twin to the east."

Yusuke nodded. "Flare your energy if you get into trouble. I'll come runnin'."

"Got it," Kuwabara said. "Let's get these bastards!"

As one, we turned to pursue our intended quarry.

The watch—rudimentary as it was—kept me informed as to the direction in which the demon lay, but little more. Humans passed unaware as I walked through their ranks, chattering amongst themselves as I stalked the demon in their midst. No matter how long I walked, deeper and deeper into the heart of this glittering shopping district, the demon never grew closer.

I did not fear it would attack in this area, fortunately. Too many witnesses crowded the streets. Though demons had begun to move into Human World after the fall of the barrier between worlds, they had not yet made their presence known to humans. This demon in particular had evaded discovery for so long, it was unlikely it would risk exposing itself attacking on this crowded street.

Logical assurances aside, I feared for the safety of the humans. This demon had killed a child before. It held no love for human life. Koenma, too, had hinted at an even darker truth behind the demon's presence. Of what was this creature capable, and what did it intend to accomplish in unwitting Human World?

When the watch led me in a circle, around the base of a tall building covered in rattling construction tarp, I moved off the street and into the shade of an alley. The light installation did not reach that dark nook, affording me a concealed hideaway were I could observe the passing humans. None of them bore horns, tails, or other telltale signs of a disguised demon. I watched them from the shadows, stretching out my senses as I endeavored to detect the demon in a more traditional fashion.

The watch leading me in circles, I surmised, indicated the demon was close. It was time I shucked technology in favor of my more idiosyncratic methods.

Focusing my spirit energy took little more than a second's scant concentration. I gathered the energy in my nose and ears, my senses of smell and hearing blossoming far beyond the reach of any normal human being's. I heard voices, footsteps, rustling cloth as people passed my hiding place. I smelled cologne, perfume, sweat, and concrete, all mixing in a confusing mélange—but in that moment I possessed the nose of a fox. I sorted through the scents and sounds one by one, picking apart faint traces of where Yusuke and Kuwabara had earlier passed, isolating individual traceries of human odor with such precision each scent seemed to resonate with its own unique color—

I smiled when I finally found it.

Blood.

Dry scales.

Hot metal.

Underneath the tangle of Human World scents, these three aromas wove together in a single, sickly mass. This was a demon's scent, as unmistakable as the scent of Yusuke's cloying aftershave, and different from the demon I'd smelled earlier. I never would have found this scent had the watch not led me close to its source. The scent meandered through the crowd, tracing its way down a road I had not yet had the chance to search. I could practically see it in the air, a foul green mist winding about the feet of the passing humans before it vanished in the crowd.

"I have you now, demon," I remarked to myself. "No one hides from a fox's nose."

I stepped out of the alley, narrowing my focus onto the demon's odor. For a moment the humans' scents overwhelmed the trail of the demon; I channeled more energy into my senses, breathing deeply of the air to pick up the trail again.

As I did, I smelled something else.

I almost didn't notice the scent. In fact, had I not smelled it earlier that day, I likely would have paid it no heed. It traipsed through the air like petals on the wind, light and clean and fragrant and impossible to ignore.

I frowned.

I knew that smell. I swore it.

The scent cut a soft path through the crowd, winding away from me through the air to the other side of the road. I peered above the heads of the humans walking by, moving energy into my eyes to sharpen my vision of the road. Glimmering shops held nothing of interest. I saw no one and nothing familiar in the crowd. So where—?

Movement in an alley opposite mine, a patch of dark cloistered between two light-strung cafés, drew my attention. My eyes focused, hawk like with the energy flowing through them. Whatever lay within the shadow moved again, and then—

The familiar scent—of plumeria blossom, soap, and clean perfume—rose to a sweet crescendo.

In the shadows of an awning, wearing black from head to toe, stood Momo.

NOTES:

Wanted this to be longer but I've been sitting on these words for weeks and the rest of the chapter is being stubborn. Figured I should post this. Kept y'all waiting long enough.

Many thanks to those who reviewed the previous chapter: Sanguinary Tide, Here After, jcampbellohten, OdinsReaper, Guest, ILoveLilies247, Kaiya's Watergarden, rya-fire1, xanaldy, AkaMizu-chan, and Melissa Fairy!