Disclaimer: I do not own Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Pairing: KaitoxShinichi

Chapter Rating: T

Collection Summary: No matter where or what they are, their lives are always entwined. KaiShin stories in fantasy settings.

Chapter Summary: Kaito and Shinichi attend the annual magicians' ball. Unfortunately for Shinichi, it's a costume ball as defined by magic users, which is how he finds himself coerced into taking a shape shifting potion.

Kittens and Costume Parties

[Castle Verse]

Part 3

"So are you going to tell me what you're planning now or do I have to guess?" Shinichi asked just a touch impatiently as he and the magician dressed the following morning. His irritation was directed more at the fact that his kitty ears and tail were still very much in place than at Kaito's secrecy, but there was nothing he could do about the furry appendages. He could, on the other hand, get answers.

"Well, it depends on what we find when we get to the library," Kaito replied airily. "So we had better hurry. We only have access for a day after all."

So it seemed he wouldn't be getting answers either. Grumbling under his breath, Shinichi tucked the notebook he was using to document everything they learned in their search for Pandora and the people who had caused the death of Kuroba Toichi into the inside pocket of his jacket and followed Kaito out of their suite. The soft jingle when he moved reminded him that he was also still wearing his kitty collar, which in turn reminded him of the tiny words he had discovered just that morning had newly been etched into it. The charm now had his name on the front and "Owner: Kuroba Kaito" on the back. The thought made his face heat up, and he quickly turned his attention to other things.

The hallway outside was deserted both because of the early hour and because guests who had been indulging in course after course of lavish food and cup after cup of fine wines were not typically guests in a hurry to rise on the following morning. As such, the servants had left the corridor lights dimmed.

Although they had also prepared a variety of breakfast foods that were good cold and lay them out for any early risers. Yamashira might be full of himself, but he definitely didn't do things by halves. That included being a thorough host.

In the muffled stillness of the mansion's elegant halls with their thick, ornate carpets and their glittering walls hung with bejeweled tapestries and statues, Shinichi found he could almost see the allure of the place. It wasn't the fanciness or even the wealth of which it screamed. Such things had little attraction to him. But there was an air about the place that spoke of secrets and of knowledge.

It was like the way he had felt when Kaito had taken him to a museum in one of the neighboring lands. That shrine to the artistic and the history of those arts had spoken to something inside the soul, though even then Shinichi hadn't been able to put words to that feeling.

Stopping before an enormous tapestry that spanned the entire length of the hall they had just turned into, Shinichi gazed at it in wonder, seeing the intricate stitches that brought to life a mountain valley into which three waterfalls fell. The deep basin of water at the foot of the falls and the tiny shrine perched at its shore…

He couldn't take his eyes off the woven landscape. It captivated him in a way he had never felt before, like it was drawing him right into it—

"Shinichi!" A hand clamped onto his arm as a voice he had never heard speak in such a forceful manner cut like a sharp blade through the fog. "Close your eyes."

The force behind the demand had Shinichi shutting his eyes before he'd even fully registered the words. The instant he had, however, that feeling of being enraptured faded, and suddenly he found he could think clearly again. When he looked again at the tapestry—just a brief look—he saw only a very well woven image of three waterfalls, nothing more and nothing less.

"What was that?" he asked Kaito as the magician slid an arm around him to propel him gently but insistently down the hallway.

"That was a Mesmery. I'll tell you more about them later."

The grimness in Kaito's voice made Shinichi stay quiet though he desperately wanted to know what a Mesmery was. He'd never heard the term before. Even thinking about it now gave him the shivers. It had had him completely in its thrall.

"And here's the entrance to the library," Kaito announced, leading them up to a pair of massive, elaborately carved double doors covered in sculpted images of dragons.

"The gateway to the horde," Kaito muttered sardonically. "Now let's see if this passkey he gave me really works."

Producing a small, silver key from nowhere, Kaito slipped it into a keyhole being guarded by a pair of entwined dragons with eyes of inset rubies. There was a click and a shimmer of magic. Then the doors parted: silent and majestic.

Shinichi's nose instantly caught the familiar dry paper, ink and leather smells of old books. It was a scent he'd always loved, and his earlier irritation evaporated completely as he realized that he was about to walk into what was said to be the most comprehensive library of magical books in the world! More extensive than even the collection he himself was in charge of managing back at Kuroba Castle.

A thrill raced up his spine, and his furry ears perked up. This was the chance of a lifetime!

He stopped just inside the library doors and simply gaped. He remembered the archives in the city of Ebon where he and Kaito had found one of their first real leads to the identities of the people behind the murder of Kuroba Toichi and the mystery of Pandora. That library had been like an enchanted forest of knowledge. If that library had been a forest, however, this one was a jungle crammed inside a vast and twisting canyon. The shelves here rose, layer upon layer upon layer, up and up and up until they literally disappeared into the darkness of a ceiling too far away to see. And every last shelf was completely packed from end to end with books. Winding this way and that throughout this incredible series of shelves was a veritable spider web of narrow walkways.

"It's huge!" the librarian gasped, kitty ears perked straight up in unrestrained awe.

"It's in another dimension," Kaito replied, gazing at the entire affair with a rather more critical eye. "You can feel the shift in the atmosphere as you step over the threshold. I'll bet the books are enchanted to prevent them from being removed from this space as well." He waved a hand through the air at the doorway then examined the frame and wall. Eventually, he let out a grunt of grudging admiration. "It's good work. He must have hired someone to do it for him. Anyone who wants to steal a book would have to undo the entire dimensional partitioning as well as a host of security spells. It would take days if not weeks."

"Well, that shouldn't matter since we're not here to steal a book," Shinichi replied then frowned in sudden suspicion. "We're not, are we?"

Kaito laughed. "I won't say I didn't think about it—hey, don't look at me like that. I only thought about it. But it would be impractical in the long run, especially since I may need to come here again someday. No, I prepared something much better for this little venture."

"And that would be?" Shinichi prompted.

"This." Kaito tossed him something pale and rectangular. Shinichi caught it on reflex then blinked in confusion. In his hands was a block of pale wood the size and shape of a standard novel.

"I take it this isn't just a piece of wood," he said more than asked.

"Of course it isn't. Now come on. We're wasting time we really can't afford to be wasting."

"Do you have any idea where we're supposed to be going though?" Shinichi asked, casting a dubious eye at the labyrinthine stacks.

"Not yet. But I will in a moment." Kaito stepped up to the desk that had been positioned by the library's front doors. It was another of the elegantly sculpted antique masterpieces Yamashira was famous for collecting, he noted. On it was a bell with a sign next to it that said "Ring for Assistance". With that sign, however, was another that said "Sorry, but we are currently closed".

Rolling his eyes, Kaito muttered something under his breath then rang the bell.

Shinichi looked puzzled. "I thought you said he sent all his librarians on vacation."

"I'm not expecting them to come help us," Kaito said distractedly, eyes narrowed in concentration. He rang the bell again. "This bell is connected to his librarians' offices. I'm using a tracing spell to figure out where those are."

He rang the bell a third time then a fourth before nodding in satisfaction. "I think I've got it. But we better take this with us just in case."

He pocketed the bell.

Shinichi decided not to comment. Instead, he tucked the block of wood that was supposed to be the key to Kaito's plot under his arm and followed his magician into the winding depths of Yamashira's library.

-0-

"So you said you were going to tell me what a Mesmery was," Shinichi said as he followed Kaito deeper and deeper into the twisting maze of shelves and pathways that was Yamashira's famous archives. All around them hung an eerie silence that made even his quiet voice sound loud, and he had to resist the urge to speak in whispers.

Kaito apparently felt no such compunctions, and his voice cracked the still air like a whip as he spoke. "They're an old-fashioned kind of magical trap meant to delay and possibly capture unwary souls. They capture the eye and mesmerize the mind, drawing the viewer into a fabricated mindscape and trapping them there. Once fully caught, it usually takes outside stimuli to break the spell. If nothing snaps the mesmerized person out of it, he or she will just stand there and waste away."

"That's…unpleasant."

"Very much so," Kaito agreed. "Worse still, some of them were addictive. Once exposed to one of those, victims started to crave that sense of total serenity where they had no worries and no needs—or rather none that they could feel."

Shinichi shivered at the mental images that Kaito's explanation brought up. He was suddenly very, very glad that Kaito had been with him when he'd seen that tapestry and that the magician had recognized it for what it was and reacted so quickly.

"I think I'm starting to understand why you don't like Yamashira," he said grimly.

Kaito cast a sardonic look back over his shoulder at his librarian. "I would have thought it was already obvious. All considered, the reasons are many and diverse. Frankly, I'm not sure I can think of anything to appreciate about the pompous twit."

"His taste in literature?" Shinichi suggested, pausing to gaze rather longingly at what he'd just realized was the entire, first edition collection of a series of mystery novels Shinichi had always enjoyed but never been able to finish reading due to the scarcity of certain volumes which had gone out of print years ago.

Kaito followed his gaze and chuckled. "You can borrow one to read while we're here. We'll put it back on our way out."

Not about to pass up such a golden opportunity, Shinichi immediately snagged the one volume he'd always heard was impossible to find and tucked it securely under his arm along with Kaito's mysterious block of wood.

They found the first office some twenty minutes into the maze of shelves. And they only found it because of the enormous griffin statue posted just outside the door, carrying a sign in its beak that read "Griffin's Office, Stay Out".

Kaito read the plaque, snorted most derisively, and pushed open the door.

And that, naturally, was when all hell broke loose.

A dark mass exploded out of the room he had just tried to walk into with an inhuman, ear-piercing screech that made all the hair on its audience stand on end. Kaito threw up a shield just in time to intercept the thing, but the impact of its collision with his shield sent him skidding back down the hall a good fifteen feet.

It was only a combination of instinct and the heightened reflexes granted to him by the morphing potion that Shinichi managed to twist out of the way as something massive, hairy and clawed scythed through the space where he'd been standing. It swerved to grab at him, but he slammed the stacked wood block and book he'd been carrying down on top of it. Another horrendous screech made him flatten his ears, but the claws retreated back into the…the whatever it was.

The creature—if you could call it that—resembled nothing so much as an enormous, fluctuating black miasma. Portions of its amorphous body would flicker and solidify into enormous limbs like hairy, multi-jointed arms that ended in clawed hands the size of small tables. Those clawed limbs lashed out at everything and anything that moved. And from inside the miasma where no light could penetrate, unseen mouths continued to hiss and screech.

The good news was that the…thing did not appear to want to leave the office. It simply filled the doorway and attacked them when they drew too close. The bad news was that its claws had gouged two-inch deep furrows into the solid stone ground. They were sharp and strong, and Shinichi did not want to find out if it was possible to recover from a direct attack by one of those limbs—provided you could even survive such an attack.

"What is that?" he asked Kaito when the magician let his shield drop and moved to stand beside him.

Kaito frowned at the undulating mass, and it flashed its claws and an occasional tooth at him.

"I'm not actually sure," he said finally. "Some kind of defense system, obviously, but as for what kind… It's difficult to tell without being able to get a good look at it. Do you see or hear anything unusual?"

"Uh, everything?" Shinichi replied dryly. "But if you meant anything less obvious, I…guess it's the smell."

Kaito perked up, attention caught. "Smell?"

"Well," Shinichi said slowly as he took several more careful sniffs of the outer haze of the miasma. "I thought it was an animal of some kind, but it actually smells more like a plant. But I guess that doesn't help much…"

"No, no, it does,!" Kaito exclaimed, eyes suddenly bright with gleeful triumph. "I've read about these. It's a reconstituted plant."

"A say what now?" Shinichi asked, no less confused than he had been before.

"There was a fad going around for a while where mages would use magic to augment and alter plant life to use as guards. Some plants took particularly well to the alterations and became crazy powerful, semi-sentient demon-like entities that made everyone who met them glad that they still had to be rooted in soil."

Shinichi stared at Kaito then back at the hazy monster. "That's a plant?"

"That's my best guess anyway."

"Okay." Shinichi paused, giving the undulating mass another long look over. "So…what? Do we go back for some weed killer or something? Or is there some way we can bargain with it? You said it was sort of sentient, right?"

"Not so much so that you can reason with it," the magician replied. "Weed killer would probably work, but we're a bit short on it. So, lucky for us, they're still plant enough to be afraid of fire and frost."

So saying, he lifted a hand and conjured a brilliant globe of white gold flames. Fire in hand, he advanced on the plant monster.

It let out an angry hiss, and its flailing grew more frenzied, but it cringed away from the heat. The closer Kaito and the fire got to it, the more agitated it became until it abruptly lashed out at him with its largest set of claws. Kaito reacted instantly, moving his fireball to intercept the assault.

This time, the beast's shrieks were like metal claws tearing through metal sheets, and Shinichi had to clamp his hands over his flattened ears in a vain attempt to keep from going deaf.

But the plant thrashed and convulsed in a wild, gyrating dance before it abruptly withered back and shrank down and down into a bent and twisted little shape rooted in a round, black pot. This diminished, it resembled a single bulb with a pair of long, thin leaves tipped with serrated claws, but it still hissed when they looked at it, showing off petals edged with rows upon rows of tiny teeth.

"It's burned off too much magic to be dangerous right now," Kaito concluded. "We should get our look around before it gathers up enough strength to demand round two."

-To Be Continued-