Chapter Sixty-Nine

Syaoran watched the head tumble to the ground, his eyes near-perfect circles. Seishirou half-turned, wincing when he absorbed the boy's expression, then turned his head back to scan the corridor for any other intruders. The masked man—Fei Wang Reed's soldier, he knew from years of research—had rushed him alone, after his identically-dressed comrades had fallen. Clusters of bodies littered the floor, throats glistening red where Seishirou had cut them.

Fuuma snored softly in the other room, his unnatural sleep undisturbed by the chaos. Seishirou could hear his heartbeat, soft and steady despite the all-consuming illness eating away at his insides. The carnage hadn't reached his bedroom. They weren't targeting Fuuma, at least. But it doesn't make sense for them to kill the homeowner. He'd made some assumptions when he'd first walked in, based on the volume and scent of decay. Miss Adele was slowly rotting somewhere downstairs, having endured whatever Reed's soldiers had done to her. Seishirou prayed for her sake it had been brief.

He returned his attention to the Little Wolf. The boy's face was deathly pale, and his eyes had gone from wide circles to being completely closed. His mouth hung open about an inch, his breath slipping out from the narrow slit. Smeared across his right cheek was a splotch of blood, probably picked up from the carnage downstairs. Syaoran either didn't know it was there, or was too far gone to care.

Seishirou took a step in the boy's direction, letting his sword slip back inside his body. As his foot hit the ground, the boy's eyes flashed open. Syaoran retreated three steps, leaning heavily against the wall. His hand was bloody, too. The red fingers trembled for a moment before closing up in a fist. The tremors moved up his arm, then took hold of his whole body. His breathing grew loud and shaky.

"Calm down now," Seishirou said evenly, lifting his hand like he might do to show someone he wasn't going to harm them. Syaoran's muscles tightened, and he edged back another half a step.

"No closer," he whispered, closing his eyes again.

Seishirou seldom allowed the words of others to affect him. After so many years of traveling, he'd accepted that the vast majority of people were not especially smart, and were thus prone to making judgments based on first impressions. When he'd visited Clow, the other Syaoran had watched him take down three men with ease without assuming he was a threat. That child had, even at such a young age, known enough of the world to withhold such base judgments. This Syaoran had been the same. But Seishirou could see now that this boy's perceptions had changed. In watching him kill a man, whatever fragile trust he'd cultivated in the boy had shattered.

"Syaoran."

"Don't."

The word meant a lot of things: rejection, fear, apprehension . . . perhaps even resentment, for the things he'd witnessed this evening. It cut Seishirou deeper than he'd expected. "Syaoran-kun."

The boy flinched and slid back another step, almost at the top of the stairs now. His eyelids squeezed tighter, as if he could drive the image out of his mind. The image of me taking someone's head off. Of course. Why wouldn't he flinch from that? "Is that the first time you've ever watched somebody die?" he asked.

The boy hung his head and mumbled an answer. Seishirou was barely able to decipher the words. "No. Just the first time I've watched someone I know kill someone else."

Seishirou nodded in understanding, though the boy couldn't see the movement with his eyes closed. Syaoran had shut him out. "That can be very traumatic," Seishirou agreed, trying to coax the boy into opening up again. It had taken so long for him to come around in Infinity—the days had quite literally seemed to stretch out forever in that country. If he lost the boy's loyalty now, Fuuma stood no chance. "It'll be okay."

Syaoran's spine went rigid, and his eyes opened. Fury was written bold across his face. "No. It won't. You just . . ." He faltered, then regained his voice. "What happened here . . . The fact that we didn't leave Cirrus the moment we found one of Sakura's feathers . . . Our journey can't continue like this!"

"What do you mean?" He heard the edge of anger in his voice and fought to rein it in. The boy couldn't mean to leave now, when Fuuma was still at risk.

"Everywhere I go, there is disaster," Syaoran said. "The longer I stay in one place, the worse things get. This world. Tokyo. Clow." His voice cracked on the last, and Seishirou wondered how exactly the boy had destroyed Clow Country. The Little Wolf went on. "My existence is like a butterfly of doom. No matter what, I can't stop destroying things. Sometimes, I think it would've been better if I'd never left my home dimension."

"You shouldn't say things like that."

"I always thought," Syaoran said, voice dropping to a whisper. "I was doing the right thing. Searching for Sakura's feathers even though she treated me like a ghost. Sparing Fai, when it would've made more sense to finish him off. Leaving them for you."

He flinched.

"I always thought I was doing the right thing. But it doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter what choices I make. I will always draw disaster, wherever I go, and there's nothing I can do to stop it." He turned for the stairs, his hand dragging against the wall until it encountered the banister.

"Little Wolf, stop."

"Don't call me that."

"You can't just leave!"

The Little Wolf let out a sharp laugh—"No. I can't. That's the problem," he said—and disappeared down the steps.

Syaoran walked back to the park, not knowing where else to go. The burnt patch of grass where his spell had hit still scarred the land, and he could see the spot where he'd spared Fai's life not half a minute later. A few slices in the dirt marked the place where Kurogane and Seishirou had fought.

Syaoran hadn't known what he'd expected to find here—perhaps some semblance of life in a place where his previous companions had tread, or maybe a glimmer of hope that they might take him back, if he begged their forgiveness. When he knelt down beside the burnt grass, however, all he found was grief. Grief for the chance he'd missed, only a few days ago, to return to them. Shame for bringing his enemy to an innocent. Nausea at the thought of that red-spattered house.

But above all, there was a certain sense of betrayal in what he'd witnessed tonight. The logical part of him acknowledged that letting their enemies live would only bring them hardship, but there was another part, already broken and bleeding from the sight of Miss Adele's tortured corpse, that had collapsed the moment Seishirou had separated that faceless man's head from his body. It had been done almost casually, with an economy of movement.

Syaoran had seen people die. In Shura, when the Other had been caught up in the war between the Yasha and Ashura clans and watched people get cut in half. In Tokyo, when the Other had stumbled upon a pile of corpses at the entrance of the tower. Syaoran also knew that people he'd grown close to had killed before. Both Kurogane-san and Seishirou had openly admitted to killing people. But evidently, watching someone, even an enemy, die at the hands of someone you trusted was a much more earth-shattering experience than simply hearing about it.

"I've always believed that if you can spare your enemy, you should," he whispered to himself, brushing his fingertips across the blackened blades of grass. His thoughts flashed to his father—Fujitaka, the only part of the Other's life that Syaoran acknowledged as belonging to both of them. He would've said that killing another person because they were in your way was unjust. Even in self-defense, he scorned the thought of murder. His fingers tightened around the grass, ripping it out by the roots. Have his principles set themselves so deeply inside me that I can't bear to watch such a thing? Isn't that what all this training is for—to kill, in the event I'm ever forced to? Have I been lying to myself about why I wanted to be strong?

He took a deep breath, looking away from the singed grass—just another thing he'd destroyed—and over to the place where Sakura had stood before he'd loosed the spell. He crawled over to that spot, searching for some sign that she wasn't lost to him.

He found it in a half-inch long metal screw.

At first, he didn't recognize the little piece of steel. It was such a common object, even here in this childproofed world. But as the images from the fight came back to him, the little screw took on great significance. He remembered seeing Sakura's leg brace fall apart as she skidded to a stop, remembered the little metal bits flying apart and scattering in the grass right here.

He picked up the little bolt and cradled it in his hands. After a moment, he closed his palms around the smooth metal and brought them to his chest. "Thank you," he whispered, lifting his head to the sky. "Thank you."