Chapter Thirty-Eight

It seemed all Yuuko's magical artifacts blessed the user with the ability to sense magic. Without the glass eye, Seishirou might have been able to sense a magical presence nearby, but with it, he could sense the direction, the distance, and the nature of the power. So convenient, he thought, running at superhuman speed toward this dimension's feather. The waves of power hummed in his ears, a constant vibration that grew stronger every passing minute.

It felt like he was getting close. He pushed himself forward, grinning at the thought of finding the feather. If it would keep Fuuma alive just a little bit longer, if it would keep the boy from wondering where the other feather had gone, it would be worth any hassle.

The waves were stronger still, almost painful in their proximity. As he drew closer, though, he sensed a secondary presence, a dingy brown and green aura that added another note to the heavenly sound of magic—a discordant, ear-splitting note. When he arrived, he realized why.

"What a surprise to see you here, Syaoran."

The boy, dressed in a blood-spattered black shirt with a bat emblazoned on the front, glanced over. A pair of mismatched eyes examined him with apathy, one the same color as the Original's eyes, the other a deep blue, replacing the glass eye that had plagued the boy's vision for so long. The boy looked at him a moment longer, then said, "The feather is gone from this world."

Seishirou smiled. "It is. But it would seem you have one. Several, in fact."

The boy said nothing, just stared him down with that dull gaze.

"You know, you've caused the Original quite a lot of trouble," Seishirou said, amused by the stony silence. "I would even say you drove him into my hands, setting it up so he was all too ready to leave his friends. I ought to thank you for that."

"My only directive is to find the feathers," the boy said mechanically.

"Oh, I know. But surely, you can spare one."

"No."

He felt his smile widen, his claws come out. At this, the boy edged back, taking a fighting stance. Seishirou sensed no fear from him, just an automatic readiness in the boy's tense, unfeeling body.

There were no more words after that. Seishirou lunged forward, moving at a speed impossible for a human body to match. The clone countered as well as he could, using their combined momentum to throw him aside while minimizing damage to himself. Seishirou saw his own technique in the move. "It seems you remember at least some of what I taught you. Let's see if you've improved since we met in Outo."

The clone gave no indication he'd heard, despite the words being perfectly clear in the quiet clearing. They exchanged blows again, claws meeting flesh. This time, Seishirou drew blood.

Your body seems numb to pain, he thought, feeling the sticky fluid flow down his fingertips. Their dance increased in tempo, until the boy resorted to magic. Seishirou saw a flash of blue, the instant before he slammed into an invisible wall. The force of the blast knocked him off guard, and his arms extended out, softening his landing. In the time it took for the boy to ready another spell, he was back on his feet and well out of the way. "So you got some of the magician's magic when you took his eye. Things are starting to make sense now." I'll have to ask Syaoran what happened in Tokyo.

His own magic wasn't as powerful as the magic this boy had stolen, even halved, so he changed tactics, fleeing into the trees and looping around the clearing in an attempt to catch the copy off guard. He knew the feather had to be contained within him, probably using the same technique he'd taught Syaoran before the mage had stopped his heart. Seishirou knew how to draw the feather out, but he knew that would take time, and given how resistant this one was to losing even one feather, he doubted he'd be able to do it without first killing the boy.

Not that that's a problem, he thought. I have the Original. That's all I need.

Before he could find a decent attack point, a new magic presence entered the field. Seishirou darted forward, recognizing the unique signature of Yuuko's dimension-shifting device. How many of those does she have? he wondered, frustrated. His clawed hand reached out for the clone, piercing the air where he would've been standing if he hadn't slipped away in time. "Shit," he muttered, watching the last wisps of the space between the dimensions fade out of existence.

He felt no other magic in this world.

Syaoran dreamed, and as always, his dreams were nightmares.

It wasn't the Other this time. Instead, Sakura stood in front of him, holding something red in her hands. As it pulsed, Syaoran realized what it was.

"I thought you were the one with the heart," she said emptily, looking right at him. The organ twitched in her hands, and red fluid dripped between her fingers and onto the tiled floor of their new apartment. As Syaoran watched it join the growing puddle on the floor, he realized there was a trail of blood leading away from the princess. His gaze followed the red spots automatically, and his lungs cramped up, as if he was choking, but couldn't cough up whatever substance had invaded his lungs.

He looked down and saw the expanse of red at his feet. To say the sticky liquid formed a puddle would've been inaccurate. It was a lake, with him at the center. At first, he wondered where the blood had come from. Surely one person could not bleed out so much and survive. Then he realized he wasn't alone.

Another body lay, crumpled up, in front of him. Several punctures marred her otherwise unblemished arm, along with a shallow slice. For all that she looked like she was sleeping, he knew from the faint smell of decay that she was dead. "I didn't do this," he whispered, looking back up at Sakura. The heart still pumped in her hand, pulsing with unholy life. Again, Syaoran felt like someone was choking him.

"A heart stopped can never be restarted," she said. "But you know that already, don't you?"

He shook his head, more in denial than in disagreement. "I . . . I had to. She . . . I needed the blood."

Sakura stared him down, the look in her eyes as cold as empty as the look in the Other's eyes had been. "If you took my Syaoran's heart, why don't you have one of your own?"

"You don't understand. He was the clone. I already had a heart!"

"Look down, then."

He obeyed reflexively, wondering what she could possibly mean. His eyes grazed the stiff red fibers of his shirt, torn open. That happened when Fai tried to kill me, he thought, but some part of him disagreed. The hole in his shirt was much too big. It could've torn after the attack, all the tiny punctures coming together to leave a deceptively large hole in his clothes, but somehow, he doubted he'd done anything to further damage his shirt since waking up.

And besides, there was fluid leaking out of his chest. He lifted one clawed hand up to touch the wound. Impossible. The vampire blood healed me.

His fingers brushed the edges of the wound. He felt no pain, no familiar agony of pressure on an open sore. But he did feel something else. An absence.

He looked up at Sakura, staring at the pulsating mass in her hands. "Impossible . . ." he whispered, shaking his head. He looked down again, not willing to believe it. All the blood around him . . . It was too much for a single body, even squeezing every drop out. The deep thrum of the heart echoed in his ears, the only sound in the nightmare. Still, he moved his hands over the hole in his chest, feeling the flesh that had been gouged out around his heart without feeling the pain of his injuries. "Impossible," he said again, looking up at her.

But there was no denying it. The thing in her hands was his heart, gouged out of his chest.

Syaoran woke, alert faster than he'd ever been before. He jumped to his feet, his supernatural speed actually making him lose his balance, and toppled forward, falling to his knees. His hand reached up to feel his chest, and he recoiled when he felt the stiff fibers of his shirt poking out at him. His breath came quicker, the loudest sound in the world.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, he got up and ran. His newfound grace wasn't enough to keep him from stumbling, and by the time he slowed down, he was covered in fresh, rapidly-healing scrapes and bruises. A wave of nausea came over him, and he started retching, right where he knelt. Oh god . . . he thought, remembering the lake of blood, the beating heart, the dead woman. Souma, her name was Souma . . .

Once he'd heaved up half a quart of bloody bile, he got back to his feet and staggered deeper into the woods. His breathing became labored again. I'm choking, he thought irrationally. I'm choking on the air, oh god . . .

He almost bent over again to puke. Almost. Instead, he continued forward, no destination in mind except away. Away from all of it, away from the nightmare, away from the gnawing anxieties, away from the accusation in Sakura's eyes in the final moments of that dream. He remembered feeling Souma's pulse slow, remembered being annoyed at the drop in her blood pressure. What have I done?

Another few steps, and he tripped. For several seconds, he contemplated staying down, just lying down here to die. He deserved it, after what he'd done. There was no redemption for his sin. But after another minute, he got back up and kept walking. This time, he didn't stop until he reached a stream.

The water smelled strange, and it took him a moment to realize that was only because his senses had sharpened so much. He sat beside the muddy water, looking down at the swirling currents. I could jump in, he thought. I could jump in and take a deep breath, and I wouldn't have to think about this ever again.

The tenor of his thoughts jolted him out of his panic. He'd never been suicidal, had explicitly told the others that he wasn't suicidal. But they aren't here right now.

He couldn't make himself do it, though. Couldn't make himself take the plunge into the dark waters. I'm not even sure it would kill me. Who knows how hard it is to kill a vampire?

Instead of drowning himself, he looked around. A pool of water had gathered in a dip in the ground, probably after a flood. Syaoran could see the canopy above reflected on the surface, and decided to crawl over there, to get the first look at his eyes now that he'd become a vampire.

Both his eyes were gold, which struck him as odd. Since he'd given up one of his eyes years ago, he'd expected the glass eye implanted in his head would've stayed the same shade of brown. But there must've been some sort of cloaking magic in that eye, because it was the same unnatural gold as the other one.

He stared at his reflection for a long moment, trying to come to terms with what he'd done. He was almost sure now he'd killed Souma. Her slowed pulse in those final seconds, the sharp drop in blood pressure . . . It only made sense for her to be dead. I killed someone, he thought. I really killed someone.

What kind of monster . . . he wondered, What kind of monster have I become?