Please read Disclaimer in Chapter One.
Title: Maya's Tale (C17: With A Gun)
Author: JaganshiKenshin
Genre: Action/Adventure, General
Rating: K+/PG-13 (for anime-style fight scenes/language)
Summary: A moment's hesitation costs dearly.
A/N: For reference, I use a combination of the American YYH manga and the subtitled anime.
I appreciate your reviews and thank you for reading this tale!
"Let her go!"
Maya's Tale (17: With A Gun)
by
Kenshin
Seeing the captive Kitajima Maya, Hiei could not help thinking of his sister Yukina. Yukina had once been imprisoned by the human thug Tarukane Gonzo.
He stopped himself. The memory made him angry, and to deal with the situation, he needed a clear head.
Almost shoulder-to-shoulder, they stood in tense, wary silence, Hiei on the left, Shay-san in the middle, Kurama to her right, the door at their backs.
Kitajima Maya stared at nothing, her mouth open in silent distress as she floated above the gurney. With her white gown trailing, she inhabited a secret world of horror and despair.
From behind the girl, as if using her for a shield, a dark foreign man regarded them with disdain.
A circle of small photographs rotated just above man and girl like the rings of Saturn.
Acid-yellow walls to sear the vision. Black rubber floor to make moves tricky. The round, windowless room was about 35 feet in diameter, its very shape within the square house a paradox.
Not an ideal place to fight a battle for a girl's life, but you didn't always get to choose your arena.
The room offered little in the way of cover, all of it near the enemy, and therefore to his advantage.
The gurney was in the middle of the room. A table of foul-smelling, bubbling labware stood within the man's easy right-hand reach, and a tray of gleaming surgical tools lay at his elbow.
Kurama might be able to tell what some of the chemicals were. He would surely know the meaning of those razor-edged surgical tools.
Some ten feet behind the man, in what would be a corner if the room had corners, clothes had been tossed carelessly onto a metal folding chair.
They had blown their chance to rush the foreigner. He was too close to the girl for that to work anyway.
The foreigner sighed, then spoke in heavily-accented Japanese, his voice deep, sonorous, and self-assured. "No one knows how to dress these days."
He didn't sound crazy. But you never knew.
Do I have enough speed to grab that girl before he can react? Everything else is secondary: who he is, if he gets away.
They should not have been standing so close together. If they were spread out, the foreign man's attention would be divided, and that would work in their favor. But their moment of shock on seeing the girl had cost them the element of surprise.
They would have to work with anything they could grab now to use as an edge, to tip the situation to their advantage.
What sort of man was this, human or youkai? Hiei's Jagan wasn't functioning either; he could not probe the man's mind.
The photos that surrounded Maya and the foreigner were moving too fast to study, but Hiei glimpsed images of the girl as the pictures twirled past. And some of the photos on the walls had been torn in half so Maya was the only person in them.
The perp reminded Hiei of Toad.
The foreigner raised a thick eyebrow. "And, unless I am very much mistaken, is this not the little boy from before, and his inquisitive, door-pushing friend?"
From before? How does he know us? Wait-no, it couldn't be! 'Door-pushing?' Is he working with Muktananda?
"I appear to have misjudged you," he went on," eyeing them sourly. "You did not heed my warning. However, I cannot allow you to interfere. I am almost there."
Almost where? Don't like the sound of this.
Palming an eyedropper filled with day-glow orange fluid, the foreigner steadied Maya with one hand, then turned her face-up. With the eyedropper aimed into her parted lips, he expelled one, two, three drops.
Kurama seethed, and Hiei needed no psychic powers to detect this. But he also knew Kurama had not been himself this past week. How would that effect his judgment?
"That dress." Shayla Kidd spoke in English. "Not the sort of thing Maya would wear. And there's a folding chair with a green sweatshirt on it."
Shay-san had used an excellent tactic, mentioning a detail in itself not crucial. If the man did not react, they could speak freely without being understood.
Hiei raised the stakes. "Kurama, you know this bastard?"
All Kurama's attention was on Maya's captor. "No. But I heard his voice once."
The foreign man chuckled. "Let us lay our cards on the table, shall we?" He spoke in perfect, if accented, English.
So much for that gambit.
"What's your name?" asked Hiei. "Just so long as we are laying cards on some table or other."
"I see no harm in this." His hand trailed through the girl's hair. "Here, I go by Von Brandt."
Aliases, then. A past, crowding up to his front door, maybe from continents away. "Nothing's happened so far," said Hiei. "Nothing we can't forget once we leave."
"With the girl," Shay-san added.
The foreign man gave her a dismissive glance. "Is that even female? It dresses like a boy."
Though she did not reply to the insult, there was a subtle shift in Shayla Kidd that Hiei sensed but could not define.
"The girl," continued Hiei. "Let's work something out."
Von Brandt palmed another eyedropper, this time containing black fluid. This he measured out into the girl's open eye, tap, two, three.
From Kurama came a barely audible hiss.
"Temper, temper, my boy," said Von Brandt. "You fail to realize how momentous is the occasion."
"We don't have to understand," said Hiei. "We just have to leave with the girl."
Von Brand smiled. "This, I cannot allow."
Hiei had talked people out of doing stuff before. He didn't have a lot of hope here, but he gave it a shot.
"All we want's the girl, and you can go on doing whatever it is you do in here." That was a lie, of course, and both he and the foreigner knew it, but it was a card that had to be played. "Suppose you tell us what that is, and we can strike a bargain. Are you human, or youkai?"
"Both. Neither." A note of pride rang in the deep sonorous voice. "I am me."
"Not from Japan?" Hiei asked. They had naturally assumed certain roles. Hiei would do the interrogation. Shayla Kidd would try to use the information. Kurama-
With the most at stake, Kurama would pit his intellect and will against Von Brandt, whose powers were unknown.
Von Brandt had been hesitating. "My home is called Mount Onyx," he replied at last. "Cold and remote and scarred with crevices and crags. The very trees are twisted, dead, deformed by wind and hail."
His pale eyes took on a faraway look, but he shook it off immediately. "A place of great beauty, but you will not have heard of it. I did not wish it to be known."
"Where is it?"
"Somewhere on the Continent," he said impatiently, shooting the sulfurous, bubbling glassware a sidewise glance. Somewhere, a timer dinged.
"And you need this girl because..."
"Because she is my chosen one," Von Brandt snapped.
I figured. "Chosen for what?"
"To be the mother of the new race."
The glassware bubbled on. That girl continued to float. And Hiei said, in a voice smooth as silk, "New race?"
"Not so much new, perhaps, as an improvement." The baleful eyes relaxed into thoughtfulness again. "But yes. Eventually. A new race to populate a new earth."
This time, it was Shay-san who hissed a breath.
Hiei said, over the exhalation, "Why do you do this?"
Von Brandt heaved another sigh. "Why does one do anything? To improve the breed by combining the best traits of both human and youkai. Youkai are tough, stubborn, rebellious, but possess arcane powers. Humans are frail, weak, but-malleable."
Michael and Cecila are half-and-half. Smith-the guy Kurama works for-is, too. Doesn't this guy realize that human/youkai crosses already exist? Man and woman get together, and you gladly take whatever comes of it. "And what happens to the girl?"
"The girl? That remains to be seen." Von Brandt moved to his labware, fumbling among the equipment. This took him a yard or so from the girl, his attention on the flasks.
Now? Hiei coiled himself to leap.
But the bastard swiftly turned back, placing his hands on Maya to steady her, gazing down at her with his thick lips curving in a half-smile. "Perhaps this one will survive. She is quite lovely, and for her to witness her part in this great deed... yes, that would please me..." He trailed off, running a finger against her cheek.
Willing Kurama to remain calm, Hiei said, "Explain."
"The last batch went wrong." Von Brandt seemed content to elaborate now. "They disobeyed me. I commanded one, and one only among them, to go forth into the neighborhood and test her powers on the frightened peasants. But they all went forth at once, and were all destroyed at once."
Questions flew through Hiei's mind: Last batch...? Destroyed...? Has he already done something irreversible to that girl? He brushed the questions aside. Next time he turns to that witch's cauldron of glassware, I'm taking her.
"You see..." Von Brandt slipped a big hand around Maya's wrist, felt for her pulse. "My new creatures had no self-control. I admit that I may have made an error in the selection of their mother, but I am confident that this batch will prove a bit more amenable to obeying my orders."
"You've done this before?"
Von Brandt released the girl's wrist. He flicked a scornful glance at Hiei. "Are you as ignorant as you seem? It takes a good deal of time to do the research, discover why the experiments fail. You will not know this either, but Edison failed a hundred times before inventing the light bulb."
He still sounded sane. That was the worst kind of crazy.
"I had thought that a half-human mother would provide the sort of creatures who would listen to reason, but that was a mistake, I know now. No, I needed a fully human girl in order to breed in the ideal degree of docility combined with great destructive power. And it was not until recently that I found the perfect subject."
He's not letting us go, Hiei realized. That's why he's telling us all this. It will end in ashes.
They should have moved farther apart. They should be standing at different angles of the room, making the guy track each of them. With a gun and a sword and some distance they stood a chance, but not frozen together like this.
Kurama hadn't said a word since they had given up on English. Now he did. Though he spoke softly and with great calm, there was a note in his voice that drove a spike of ice down Hiei's back. "Give us the girl."
Von Brandt chuckled. "Do you wish to offer a sacrifice?"
The question lingered like smoke. Then Shayla Kidd lit with eagerness. "Yes," she said. "That's right. A sacrifice. Take me instead."
Some primitive instinct boiled up in Hiei and clawed at his reason. He wanted to shout, No!
But was his Firebird merely using another tactic, buying time, waiting for the odds to shift, giving them a chance?
Von Brandt fingered the hem of the girl's gown, then let the material drop. He spoke of Shayla Kidd, but as though she was not there. "That one? She flatters herself."
Hiei had to play for time, too. "Why?"
Von Brandt ran a big hand down Maya's cheek. Then he reached into the instrument tray and grabbed a hypodermic needle filled with bile-green fluid. He raised the hypo, squirted a green drop from its tip, then placed it on the gurney. "She has already been bred. I need not only beauty, not only a certain aura, but utter purity."
And with those words, Shayla Kidd took action. She reached into her roomy sweat jacket. The Beretta seemed to materialize in her hand, and she had a bead on Von Brandt.
-30-
(To be continued: A curse to strip the walls of paint.)