Please read Disclaimer in Chapter One.
Title: Maya's Tale (C15: Capture)
Author: JaganshiKenshin
Genre: Action/Adventure, General
Rating: K+/PG-13 (for anime-style fight scenes/language)
Summary: A 'haunted palace' holds the key to a mystery.
A/N: The Block from Chapter Black continues to fascinate me.
"Is this my second chance?"
Maya's Tale (15: Capture)
by
Kenshin
"Fifty years ago something happened. Fifty years ago the neighborhood changed."
His breath pluming in the frigid air, Kurama watched the suspect's house from the shelter of the undergrowth. Though in good repair outside, the house looked abandoned, dark, silent.
The moon flung knife-edged shadows across Kurama's allies: Hiei, alert as a stalking panther, Shayla Kidd, shivering but game nonetheless, noting the structure's appearance, asking, "Is Maya even in there?"
"Let's find out," replied Hiei. "Bust down the door."
Kurama grinned. "Know what I like about you, Hiei?"
"Can't imagine what you're referring to." Hiei, repeating word-for-word what Kurama had said when they had met at dawn.
"I gave you all sorts of trash this morning, and yet you show up now with no recriminations, no I-told-you-sos."
Hiei snorted. "Canonize me after we get that girl back. Besides, I'd do anything to escape Grandma Hirameki."
From the moment Kurama heard that Maya had been kidnaped, an anger as cold and remote as the moon had seized him, and he enjoyed a mental clarity he had not felt in weeks. Kurama refreshed, power at his fingertips.
If not for the fact that it was Maya in danger, he might have been exhilarated.
But perhaps that was the point all along: Maya, held captive again, and Kurama must free her.
Was this an opportunity for redemption, a second chance, a call to honesty about his feelings toward the girl?
Through chattering teeth, Shayla Kidd wondered, "The sisters... will they b-be all right, alone with a monster?"
"Miss Olivia and Miss Ruth are armed. We'll have to trust their skill." As for weaponry, though Kurama had fled his house the moment he arranged a ride from Hiei, his hair was well-loaded. "And you?"
Hiei flicked aside his jacket to reveal his sword. Shay-san nodded, blowing on her bare hands to warm them. Somewhere under her hooded jacket would be her Beretta. Kurama was no gunsmith, but he knew you couldn't pull a trigger with frozen fingers.
Hiei had parked his car the next block over, and the three of them had cut through the crook-shaped belt of trees that separated Rokurokubi Block from the other neighborhood.
Curious, too, that those trees should even be there. With land at such a premium, surely the builders could have squeezed in a few more houses on that strip of land.
It was as though no one wanted to live closer to Rokurokubi Block. Whatever the reason, it worked to their advantage, for the undergrowth provided shelter while Kurama studied the house.
The house was three stories tall, and apart from a turret facing the woods, it was a slab-sided rectangle, nowhere near as large as the home of the Kawasaki sisters.
The chest-high iron fencing that surrounded it on all sides lent it the aspect of a fortress. All it needed was a moat.
To think that he should end up back here, after Hiei cut down the dead Bartholomew tree by means of hurling his sword like a spear, Kurama retrieving the 'spear' with his own Thrashvine.
It was also in these woods that Kurama had encountered the eerie, threatening voice. Both incidents now seemed not a mere oddity or coincidence, but the hand of fate.
"What now?" Hiei asked. "I could get up on the roof for a quick recon and be back before anyone knew I was there."
"I could go lend those sisters a hand," put in Shay-san.
If Kurama had tossed aside his schoolbooks, Hiei and Shay-san had cut short a costume rehearsal as the Prince and Princess of the Haunted Palace, dragging on whatever street clothes they could snatch as quickly as they had flung off tights and tutus. Dressed in sweat pants and hooded jackets in various degrees of disrepair, they looked more like ragamuffins than elite commandos in the Shadow Wars.
"I'd prefer we stay together. Something's off. Maybe it's the block, or the house itself, but I'm sensing-"
"A strange kind of youki?" Shay-san moved closer to Hiei.
Hiei grunted. "Maybe not youki... not a vampire either."
Shayla Kidd hissed in a breath.
"Whatever it is, I can't identify it until we get closer." Kurama leading the way, they departed the undergrowth, crossed a strip of beaten-down weeds, and reached the iron fence at the edge of the property.
"Up and over," Kurama instructed. They scaled the iron in hasty stealth, Kurama first, Hiei assisting Shayla Kidd into his care, then hopping over last.
But when Kurama had touched the icy metal of the fence, he sensed a change, as if a blanket had been thrown over him, muffling his sixth sense.
Though he could still perceive the normal world in the moon's blue glow on iron, the sounds of distant traffic, the leaf-and-bark scents from the woods, his 'early warning system,' that ineffable means by which he sensed youki, was on the blink.
Had someone cast a Territory? No. This was different, more gradual, as when twilight overcomes the day.
More like the slow onset of an illness than the activation of a Territory, an almost feverish drain of power.
He still had one hand on the iron railing. He let go. The effect remained.
Hiei kept his voice down. "You feel that?"
So it's not just me? Kurama nodded.
Though he had no sixth sense to speak of now, perhaps he could still access his old king-of-thieves knowledge. Signaling the others to remain, Kurama glided across twenty feet of dead lawn, then peered into a back window. He got close enough for his breath to mist the window, but nothing showed on the other side, no speck of light, as if the window had been painted black.
There was no back door. That, too, was unusual. The Kawasaki sisters had no less than three, perhaps four, entrances. Kurama's own house had two.
He signaled his allies to cross the lawn. "Front door," Kurama said, and they circled the house.
The door was made of wood, with four carved panels, a blacked-out fan window set high, and an ordinary-looking lock. Kurama flicked a glance at Hiei.
Motioning the others back, Hiei raised one hand and casually fire-blasted the lock.
Or he tried to.
Hiei used the correct stance, the same motions he always used for a fire attack, but no flame emerged from his hand.
Hiei said a bad word.
"So much for stealth," murmured Shay-san.
"I was afraid of that," said Kurama. "Our powers-"
Shay-san glanced up, her gray eyes unhappy. "Suppressed?"
"Doesn't matter. We have a sword. A gun. And this." Exchanging places with Hiei, Kurama knew it had been a while since he'd picked a lock, but once he started, his hands knew their way.
Hiei and Shay-san watched in respectful silence.
First Kurama attempted to loid the lock with a simple credit card. No go. He took out a torque wrench-a small, L-shaped piece of sturdy metal-and a shallow steel pick that was longer than the wrench, straight with a triangular end. The wrench he placed in the lower portion of the keyhole. Using the pick, he felt for each pin inside the lock.
There were five pins, all their pointed cylindrical ends oriented downward. Each time Kurama pressed up with the pick, he felt the telltale click that spoke of success.
The pins out of the way, he turned the wrench, using it like a key, and the door opened on soundless, well-oiled hinges.
"Done," he said. They walked into a long cold hallway with no one there to stop them.
Had Shayla Kidd been correct? Was this a false alarm, an abandoned building?
The only way to make sure was to search.
Leaving the door partway open behind them, Kurama could see well enough, and not just because of the decor-the walls hung with pale silk, the floors gleaming pale marble-but by the moonlight that poured in from the fan-shaped window.
A window which had, from the outside, been blacked out.
Shayla Kidd murmured, "That feeling from before-"
"Stronger," Hiei replied.
"I couldn't cast a spell to save my life."
"Don't even think it," said Kurama, but she was right. With this cloying, choking suppression, could he summon enough spirit power to activate any of his plant weapons?
Hiei put a hand on his sword. "And the weird youki-?"
"Can't sense it now," replied Kurama. "Not that I could under these conditions. We don't know whether our powers are being suppressed by man or machine."
"That girl could be anywhere," Hiei muttered.
"Where do we start?" said Shay-san.
Hiei indicated a faint light, three-quarters of the way down the hall, a light that painted the marble a paler color.
They had taken only a few steps when Kurama halted, struck motionless by another dizzying change. "What the-?"
Quick as a thought, the silk-hung walls shriveled and blackened. Marble crumbled beneath their feet. A smell of mold and dust suffused the air, and they stood in the middle of a bleak ruin.
"Haunted Palace." Shayla Kidd's voice quavered a little.
"Yeah." Hiei steadied her. "Like the set drawings." He sounded angry. Kurama thought that was a good sign.
The opposite of Toad's Palace, Kurama thought, new outside, decay inside.
Dust sifted over their shoulders. Kurama glanced up. The ceiling was far gone, in danger of caving in. Plaster hung down in strips like the skin of a flayed animal.
But light still burned from the door down the hall. They picked their way over broken flooring toward the illumination, dust snowing overhead, grit crunching underfoot.
The door wasn't locked. They opened it.
When Kurama saw what lay in the room, his heart leapt, then pumped what felt like ice water.
Shayla Kidd gave a little gasp; Hiei was silent, but his hard-edged anger was as clear as though he had spat words.
There would be no spells cast, no flame attacks, and Kurama himself was all but crippled, unable to deploy his Rose Whip.
This was the only room in the house still in good repair, and it looked new-minted: circular in shape, though from the outside, the slab-sided walls had no curve on this facade. It was sparsely furnished, with a table, a chair off to one side, and a few other items.
The vaulted ceiling and the rounded walls were light and bright with a chill, acid-yellow illumination. The floor was laid in black rubber, and its odor stung the nostrils and caught in the throat.
Floating in mid-air, in the carousel motion of Kurama's recurring dream, were the cards.
As in the dream, making a slow circle around their subject. But without the blurring dream-fog, he was able to see that they were not cards, but photographs.
Of Maya.
Maya, at the door of the Kawasaki house. Maya, on her little black scooter, headed down the street. Maya, going inside Muktananda's home. Maya, everywhere.
Similar photographs lined the walls and ceiling, and every image had one thing in common. Each had been taken without the subject's knowledge.
The seed of cold anger grew in Kurama's heart, leaving no space for mercy.
Close to the far wall stood a man of about 60. Bigger than Kuwabara, and solidly built, though the exact nature of his physique was hidden under a fur-collared winter coat.
His dark hair was touched with gray, but no frost lightened his bristling brows, nor the goatee beneath his thick red mouth. His skin was sickly-pale by contrast.
He gave them a single contemptuous glance from deep-set eyes the color of winter ice.
Next to him was a rolling medical cart. On the cart was a stainless steel instrument tray.
The tray held scalpels and forceps and syringes. On a nearby table were laboratory flasks bubbling black, orange, and bilious green. Their rotten-egg stink momentarily stamped out the smell of black rubber.
In front of the man was a gurney draped in white sheets. And floating above the surface of the gurney lay Maya herself, her eyes blank and unseeing, her mouth opened on a silent scream.
-30-
(To be continued: A curse to strip the walls of paint.)