Author's Notes: Okay there Xellos is officially a part of this fanfic now. Xellos/Filia fans rejoice!

Ghost Slayers

Chapter Sixteen

By Relm

During Lina's breakfast Zelgadis was amazed. He had never seen someone eat so much food. 'She's so skinny... where does she put it all?' Zelgadis didn't realize he was staring, that is until he noticed Lina was glaring at him.

"What?" She barked with her mouth full of food.

"Sorry. It's just, you're so small! How can you eat all that and not get sick?"

"I have a very high metabolism." Lina explained wolfing down the last bit of her food. "It's a family thing, we all eat a lot."

"Oh."

"I'm going to take a shower and get changed." Lina announced once she finished cleaning up. "You'd better not peek on me." Lina threatened.

Zelgadis blushed. "Really I didn't mean to last night! Honestly!"

Lina glared at him as she went into her room.

Zelgadis sighed. 'It doesn't matter what I do from now on. To her I'm just going to be that guy that peeked on her.'

Since he didn't have much to do Zelgadis decided to look around Lina's apartment. He scanned her book shelves seeing what books she had. To his delight he recognized some of the titles. 'I've read those books!' Faint memories in the back of his mind unfuzzed a bit revealing old forgotten tales. The more he looked the more he remembered. 'Either Lina and I have similar tastes in books or I just read everything.'

The DVD racks provided to be interesting too. Three whole columns were just romantic comedies, another three were horror and the last row was action/adventure movies. Zelgadis also recognized most of the titles too. Though he didn't remember watching all of them, just a few.

Moving away from the movies Zelgadis went to the walls. Lina had several water color paintings covering her walls. Though they were all different they all appeared to have the same signature. Sylphiel's. Lina also had an interesting collection of sculptures and pots.

Next Zelgadis looked at the photos. There were a lot of the Ghost Slayers crew, smiling. There were also a lot of pictures of Lina in various stages of her life. Zelgadis went to pick up a baby picture to take a closer look. 'She was a cute baby.' He mused.

"What are you looking at?" Lina asked coming back into the room towel drying her hair just wearing a bathrobe.

Zelgadis was startled by Lina's sudden appearance that he dropped the picture he had in his hands. The glass from the frame cracked as it made contact with the wood floor. "Oh no! Oh god Lina I'm sorry!"

Lina shrugged. "I've got tones of extra picture frames laying around. One of the hazards of working with ghosts, they tend to break things." Lina got out her broom and dustpan and started to sweep up the mess. "Wait a minute, you were holding the picture weren't you?" Lina realized after a moment.

"Yes I was!" Zelgadis responded in shock. 'I touched something... and without electricity!'

"Where you concentrating real hard on picking up the picture?"

Zelgadis shook his head. "No I just saw it and thought I wanted to see it more closely. And I picked it up like I would have if I was normal. Didn't even think about being a ghost. I just did it. I probably would have it still in my hands had you not startled me."

Lina grinned. "Well ghosts usually have to concentrate hard. Seeing how you didn't have to is another point to support the non-ghost theory. That and the blood."

Zelgadis was also happy about this. "Um... Lina, I thought you were going to change..." Zelgadis stated once he noticed exactly what Lina was wearing. "That doesn't seem like appropriate work attire."

Lina blushed. She had forgotten how revealing her robe was. 'Crap! I don't usually have guys over like this in the morning. Thank god I don't walk around naked.' "Ah, um I forgot to grab my hair dryer it's on the side table." Lina snatched the little machine and scampered back into her room.

Zelgadis didn't need to look in the mirror to know that he was blushing again. Knowing that he was still banned from Lina's room until she was ready Zelgadis sat on the couch and waited.

...

The drive to Ghost Slayers HQ was a quiet one. Both Lina and Zelgadis were pre-occupied with their thoughts. Ironically they were both thinking about the same thing. That damned missing book. Books don't just get up and disappear. But then again books don't usually have red misty hands reaching out to grab people.

Zelgadis let out a depressive sigh. 'It's starting to feel like I'll never be normal again.' He thought sadly. Though getting some of his awareness had been an initial blessing, now it was starting to feel like a curse. Because he was more aware the gravity of the situation he was in the more he was depressed by it. When his mind was muddled, he didn't seem to care about anything. He was happy in fact. Knowing what he was and what he was now didn't help things. It just made him long for what he was before turning into a ghost more.

"So did you think of a convincing story yet to explain the blood?" Lina asked Zelgadis breaking his trail of thought.

"No. I haven't." Zelgadis gulped. He had forgotten about it all together.

"We'll you lucky it's as embarrassing for me as it is you. Because I'll figure something out. So I won't tell them you're a closet pervert." Lina laughed.

Zelgadis blushed and glared at Lina. "I'm not a pervert!" He insisted.

"Yeah, yeah so you say." Of course Lina was only teasing Zelgadis. She knew that as unlikely as Zelgadis' story may have seemed that Zelgadis was telling the truth. 'He seems too green to be doing things like that anyway.' Lina thought about how her employees would react if she told them the whole story. 'Amelia would preach about abstaining from perversion and would rant about it for hours. Sylphiel would probably blush and not say a word. But Filia, Filia would go to town with it, irritating both me and Zel endlessly. Best not to tell them the truth.' "So what do you think you'll do when you're back to normal?"

"Isn't that like counting your chickens before they hatch?"

Lina flashed a triumphant grin at her transparent passenger. "Don't you worry, I'll get you back to normal I guarantee it. I never fail."

"Didn't you only get one ghost when you tried to clear that mega haunted house?"

Lina's smile faltered. "Alright almost never. But that was a little beyond my control as it is. Anyway, answer my question. What do you want to do?"

Zelgadis frowned as he thought hard about the question. "I guess it depends if I get my complete memory back. If I do and I'm perfectly happy with the way my life was before then I guess I'd just go back to what I did before."

"And if you don't get your memory back or you're not happy? What then?"

"I don't know."

"Well you could always work for me." Lina said all bright and cheerily.

Zelgadis rolled his eyes. "You can't afford to fix your company building. How can you afford another employee on the payroll?"

"Well you know what they say, one good customer breeds four more. Since doing that Sailune Publishing job, they might talk us up to some other big companies and hello money." Dollar signs appeared in Lina's eyes thinking about all that possible cash to be made.

"Unless they want to keep the slaying job you did for them a secret. They would hide it rather then tell others."

"I think I'm going to get a little electric zapper so that I can zap you when you say things that annoy me so that I can hit you." Lina glared at Zelgadis.

Zelgadis let out a low chuckle. "You're a strange girl Lina Inverse."

Lina smiled. "Nice to know I've got the magic touch. I don't think there's a person alive who could break you out of that depressive shell and get you to laugh so easily."

Zelgadis rolled his eyes again.

...

Lina pulled the car into her parking spot and got out. Strangely Slimer wasn't there to greet them. "That's odd. Slimer's usually here to say hello when I get in."

"Last I saw him he was sleeping in the utility closet in a bucket cradling a mop."

"Now that's a sight I'd like to see." Lina said with a laugh.

"Are we the only ones here?" Zelgadis looked around and only saw the Ghost Slayersmobile as the only other car besides Lina's.

"Yeah they usually get in a little later. I'm not really a morning person, but I still like to get here early as I can. Okay let's get upstairs. I want to see if Slimer is still in that closet."

...

Sure enough Slimer was in said closet and was cradling a mop. But the bucket he was sleeping in was toppled over on its' side and a lot of cleaning supplies were all over the floor in a mess.

'That's probably the crash I heard last night. Surprising he slept through it.' Zelgadis mused.

Lina smirked. "SLIMER! WAKE UP!" She yelled.

Slimer awoke fumbling around knocking more stuff all over the place. He looked up at Lina with fright.

"Ha ha ha!" Lina laughed. "I scared a ghost, I scared a ghost!" She gloated in a singsong voice.

Slimer wasn't amused. He straightened up the utility closet in no time, until it was neat and organized. Because if you could classify Slimer with what he does at Ghost Slayers then he would be the building's janitor. So keeping the utility closet clean was a must. And as he left the closet he had his nose turned up obviously not impressed with Lina one bit.

"Lina why did you do that?"

"Are you kidding me? Slimer causes all kinds of trouble. It's nice to sometimes give him a taste of his own medicine. Anyway let's get to work."

...

First things first Lina checked all the equipment that she was going to use for the job that night. Since they had to take everything upstairs to deal with that ghost yesterday it was all sitting in their chargers. When Lina decided everything was in working order she loaded everything they needed into the Ghost Slayersmobile. That included the extra containment boxes Filia had made the previous day. It was a very cumbersome task to do on your own transporting everything from upstairs to the downstairs parking lot. The equipment was heavy and Lina was only one person. Zelgadis felt bad that Lina was doing all this heavy lifting and he couldn't do anything. He had tried, he concentrated real hard but he just couldn't pick up any of the equipment up.

"Don't look so glum Zel." Lina chided as she loaded the last of the equipment into the car.

"Well try and see it from my position. It's hard to watch someone do so much heavy work and not being able to help." Zelgadis mumbled.

"I'm not exactly feeble you know." Lina stated matter-of-factly.

"But still going up and down the stairs... you must be exhausted!"

Lina shrugged. "I'm used to it. This place does have an elevator, but it doesn't work. So I'm used to going up and down the stairs a lot."

"What's wrong with the elevator?" Zelgadis wondered.

"One of the many accidents that happened here. It seems that it crashed with people it in. It's currently sitting on this floor in a heap of twisted metal. The cable snapped I think." Lina closed up the trunk to the Ghost Slayersmoblie.

"Don't elevators have an emergency break lock system in case something like that happens?"

"Probably. But it failed I guess. Either that or didn't have one, this is an old building."

"How many people died in there?" Zelgadis dared look to where the elevator door was. It was closed thankfully so Zelgadis couldn't see the carnage that hid behind it.

"One or two I think. Or at least that's how many ghosts lingered around that particular area of the parking lot when we came here. I tell yeah it was such a mess that we had to close the doors. Couldn't stand looking at it every time I parked my car."

A horrible thought dawned on Zelgadis. "There's dead bodies in there isn't there?"

"Probably a few bones here and there, I think the police cleaned up most of it. Who cares anyway? They are dead and have moved on. I'm not about to move whatever remains are there anyway. Sometimes disturbing remains can cause newer haunting and I highly doubt that elevator can be salvaged anyway. And I don't want to foot the money to get a new one put in."

Even though Lina didn't care, Zelgadis couldn't help but stare at the elevator doors as they passed them to go up the stairs.

...

Xellos hummed softly as he made his way to his classroom. It was a lovely day and he was determined to have a good school day teaching. But try as he may it just wasn't the same without Filia. He actually felt guilty at what he had done. Sure he loved the fact that he had stolen her job from right under her or how upset and angry he could make her. But he never intended her to leave the school all together. As it was Xellos had gone too far this time.

Now Xellos was stuck going day to day missing Filia in all her golden fury. He constantly wondered what she was doing. Many thoughts went through his head of new things he could do to annoy her, but alas he couldn't go near her. After Filia left to go work for Ghost Slayers she had filed a restraining order on him. Legally he couldn't go near her anyway.

So that left Xellos attempting to go through his days teaching with the same energy as he once did. Today was a test day so he was going to have fun staring down all the students. He loved doing that. The students were always so stressed during tests as it was that it was unnerving to have a teacher glare at them like as though they were doing something wrong. Xellos even walked around and looked over the students' shoulders as they worked. He pretended to read their answers getting far too close for the students comfort. Sometimes he shake his head as he walked away causing the student to second guess their work. Oh it was great fun for Xellos.

Realizing he was out of red ink in his paper marking pen Xellos went to unlock his supply cabinet to get more pens. But as he did so he found a strange sight. Inside the cabinet was an old looking book. It bore a strange design on the front and it seemed to give off some strange energy. He causally flipped through it but he didn't recognize the language it was written in. Though one thing was odd, the ink used to write the book was dark red.