Yuu Yuu Hakusho
Shadows and Lies
by Sionna Klassen and Kristin Huntsman
Disclaimer (short version, since the Author's Notes will be posted at the
_end_ of this novel): Most of the characters in this story are the property of
Yoshihiro Togashi, Shonen Jump Weekly, Studio Pierrot, and Fuji Television. No
infringements of their rights are intended. Please, don't sue us, we're already
poor...
I am standing at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
It can't be that cold - the ground is too warm to touch...
This place is so quiet, sensing the storm...
--Peter Gabriel, "Red Rain"
Prologue
They were there, all four of them.
The largest of them was Kazuma Kuwabara, who towered over the rest as
they stood together. He had short, carrot-colored hair, and small black eyes in
a long face. He was grinning hugely and laughing at something one of the others
had said.
Yusuke Urameshi had short, glossy black hair that was slicked back,
although it wouldn't all stay that way. Some of it fell into his large brown
eyes constantly. Compared to Kuwabara's bulk, he seemed unimpressive, but he
was wiry and a lot tougher than he looked. He was wearing a white T-shirt and
jeans, standing in the shade of a large tree. Kuwabara was standing in the sun,
regardless of the summer heat.
Hiei was tiny compared to the rest of them, barely five feet tall if
his spiky black hair was included. A startling white streak silvered the tips
of his hair on the front of his head, and the edges of the rest of it were a
deep blue. His eyes were a hard brown, like dark amber. He would normally be
wearing black, but as a concession to the heat he had changed into a lavender
shirt with a purple tunic over it. His pants were still black, though. A sword
was sheathed at his side, and his right arm was bandaged up to the shoulder,
although all that could be seen of the wrappings was a little bit on his hand.
He didn't have an injury; he bandaged it to hide the black markings of a dragon
that wound around his arm, a permanent mark that he hadn't acquired
intentionally.
Hiei wasn't human, but a youkai, more specifically a fire spirit. He
didn't look too pleased at being in the human world at all, much less sharing
the company of the other three people, but then very little pleased Hiei
anyway.
The last of the four was leaning against the tree trunk, dappled with
patches of sunlight and shadow. Though Kurama was several inches shorter than
Kuwabara, he was still taller than Yusuke and Hiei's shoulders only reached his
waist. He had a slender figure, deep red hair that fell to his waist in the
back, and huge green eyes that all conspired to make him look so feminine that
he had been mistaken for a girl on more than one occasion. He was wearing a
white shirt and pants with a long, light yellow tunic over them, trimmed with
blue. Locks of his hair fell in front of his ears and forward over his
shoulders.
In the human world, he was known as Shuichi Minami, a sixteen-year-old
high school student at the top of his class. Very few people knew that he was
actually a fox spirit reincarnated into a human body. It was one of the things
that had made Kurama very difficult to track down.
But the effort had been worth it. He'd found all four of the fools.
All together, all unsuspecting. He grinned to himself, reached out, and struck.
Chapter 1
Yusuke woke up and didn't know where he was.
He sat up and looked around. He was on a hardwood floor, the boards
warmed by the sun that was streaming in an open window. A soft breeze that
smelled of summer wafted in and toyed curiously with his hair. The room was
bare of any furnishings. Kuwabara, Kurama, and Hiei were all sprawled on the
floor, unconscious. Yusuke stood up and walked to the window. He looked out,
trying to get some sense of where they were, but all he saw was an open meadow
that was bordered by a forest that started a few hundred yards from the house.
Nothing moved in his range of vision except for the grass blowing in the wind.
Feathery clouds drifted lazily across the perfect blue sky.
"Where the hell are we?" Yusuke muttered.
He turned around as he heard a small noise. Hiei stirred and levered
himself up, glancing around. His white headband was loose and slipped downward,
revealing the third eye in his forehead. Hiei growled and pushed it up, out of
his eyes. He glanced at Yusuke. "Where the hell are we?"
"Beats me." Yusuke shrugged and nudged Kuwabara. "Hey, wake up."
Kuwabara groaned, "Five more minutes..."
"Come on, idiot! This is serious!"
Kuwabara finally opened his eyes unwillingly, then woke up fully as he
registered the unfamiliar surroundings. "What the...?"
"Don't ask; I don't know where we are," Yusuke said wearily. He looked
at Kurama, who woke up instantly after Hiei prodded him. He lifted his head and
pushed his red hair out of his eyes. He looked around too, then got up and
looked out the window.
"Well?" Yusuke asked. "Aren't you going to ask it?"
"Ask what?" Kurama seemed distracted.
Yusuke asked, "Did you hit your head or something? Haven't you noticed
that this isn't exactly Tokyo?"
Kurama sniffed the air. "No," he agreed. "It's not Tokyo. In fact, I
don't think we're even in Japan."
"What?" Kuwabara demanded, tripping himself up suddenly. "How do you
know that?"
Kurama shrugged. "I can tell. Besides..." His voice trailed off and he
frowned. "This place seems familiar somehow."
"Do you know where we are?" Yusuke asked.
"No...maybe it'll come to me later." He turned away from the window.
"I think a more important question is, what do we do now?"
After a thorough exploration of the house and the surrounding meadow
(no one wanted to risk going into the woods yet), all four of them met again in
the room they'd originally found themselves in. Kurama still seemed to be
acting strangely, as if he wasn't quite focusing on the present. But when
Yusuke asked him about it, he smiled quickly and insisted that he was fine.
There didn't seem to be anything else Yusuke could do about it, so he let the
matter drop.
"So...what have we found?" Yusuke asked.
Hiei glanced up with his hard brown eyes. "The house is totally
empty," he said. "Not a stick of furniture, no provisions, nothing. We
certainly aren't going to be able to stay here."
"I went up on the roof," Kuwabara offered. "I couldn't see any
landmarks, in any direction. As far as I could see, it's just forest stretching
on for miles. I think this is the only clearing."
"Dammit, this doesn't make sense!" Yusuke said. "Why is there a house
sitting in the middle of nowhere? It's crazy!"
Kurama said softly, "We've established we can't stay - but if we
leave, where will we go? There's nothing out here, like Kuwabara said. We could
travel for months and still never see any sign of civilization."
Hiei shrugged. "We won't starve. We'll hunt for our food."
"How do you know there's game out there?" Kuwabara asked.
Hiei rolled his eyes. "This is a forest, idiot. It's got to have
animals in it."
Kuwabara was about to make an angry retort, but Yusuke prevented it by
slamming his hand on the floor. "Will you two cut it out? Bickering won't help
us decide anything!"
Glaring at each other, both subsided. Hiei said sourly, "What do _you_
suggest?"
"Well, we've got to eat. Why _don't_ we go hunting? But we'd better
try not to get too far from the house, and mark our paths so we won't get lost."
"That'll also let anyone else follow our trails," Hiei pointed out.
"Who's here to see us?" Kuwabara demanded before Yusuke could say
anything. "Come on, let's go. I'm hungry already."
Getting up, they all left the house.
Hiei thought that trying to hunt game with no better weapon than a
sword was stupid, but he had no alternative. If they were here long enough,
he'd try to make himself a bow and arrows. In the meantime, he snaked through
the trees, looking for an animal large enough to have any meat.
He didn't see any.
In fact, he didn't see any animals at all. He heard birds singing, but
that was it. He searched for holes in the ground that would mark burrows or
dens, and didn't see any of them, either. He couldn't even see any of the
birds. The whole forest seemed almost lifeless. Or frozen.
<Damn, what do I do now?>
Yusuke stopped short as Kurama halted abruptly. They were still fifty
feet from the beginning of the trees, but the sunlight seemed to be dimming
already as they neared the dark green woods. Yusuke looked curiously at Kurama,
then saw the expression on Kurama's face and felt suddenly concerned. "What is
it?"
Kurama was staring at the trees. He looked spooked, which was
extremely rare indeed. He blinked at Yusuke's voice and shook his head.
"Nothing. Nothing." He stepped forward hesitantly, and walked a few feet closer
to the trees. But it was as if he was forcing himself to go forward, trying to
make himself do something he didn't want to.
"Kurama..."
Kurama had stopped again, and was standing rigidly in the tall grass
with his hands clenched into fists. His back was to Yusuke and he stared at the
trees as if he was expecting them to move. He was shaking.
"Kurama, what is it?"
"I can't," Kurama whispered. "I can't go into that forest."
"Why not?"
"I don't know." He turned to look at Yusuke, his green eyes wide.
Something wild and not quite sane lurked in their depths. "They're just trees!
What's wrong with me?" He looked back at the forest. "I feel like they're
pushing me away."
Yusuke tried not to sound patronizing. "You don't have to go in," he
said. "You could go back to the house...the rest of us will come back when
we've found enough food for dinner."
Kurama was suddenly angry. "I'm not going to let a bunch of trees
scare me..." He strode forward and vanished into the shadows. Yusuke ran to
catch up.
"Kurama! Wait!"
Yusuke stumbled to a halt inside the forest, needing to let his eyes
adjust to the dimness. He looked around, but there was no sign of Kurama.
<Damn! Where did he go?>
Kurama turned and looked back toward the inviting sunlit meadow, only
to discover that it was gone. He had only taken two steps into the forest, yet
he was surrounded on all sides by the moss-covered trunks of trees. He whirled,
looking for an escape route, but the forest was pressing in all around him.
Suddenly he heard a noise behind him and he ran.
He wondered why he was running even as he tried to speed his steps
even more. What was he running from? It was probably only Yusuke. What was he
thinking? Why was he panicking for no reason? It was stupid!
He tried to slow down, but he ended up running faster. The sounds
behind him were getting closer. He tried to urge his feet to greater speed,
leaping over a fallen tree trunk and vaulting over a stream. As he landed on
the bank something cracked in the distance, and he recognized it as a gunshot
although it sounded more like thunder.
The next instant the bullet hit his heart.
He fell in the mud of the bank, slipped downward and landed facedown
in the stream. The freezing water carried his blood downstream in the current.
Kuwabara heard a noise and got ready to pounce, but it was Yusuke who
crashed through the bushes. "Hey, what do you think you're doing?" Kuwabara
demanded. "You'll scare all the game away!"
"We've got to find Kurama," Yusuke said. "Something's wrong."
"There goes dinner," Kuwabara muttered as he followed Yusuke.
Hiei was completely lost.
It was ludicrous. He'd been orienting himself by the sun, and by every
marker he came across, but somehow he'd gotten himself lost anyway. The markers
he remembered, like odd-shaped rocks or twisted trees, just weren't where they
should have been. It was as if the forest had changed itself to confuse him.
A thought struck him, and he regarded the trees suspiciously. Then he
leaped up into the branches and climbed to the very top of the nearest tree.
Because of his slight stature, even thin branches held his weight easily. Soon
he couldn't climb any farther, but there was a taller tree next to him. He
hadn't broken through the canopy yet. He jumped to the other tree and climbed
it rapidly. It was an immensely tall, straight tree with almost fuzzy, reddish
bark. It had thick coats of dark green needles instead of leaves. It was like
no tree Hiei was familiar with, but most of the plant life in this forest was
of a type he didn't recognize.
He climbed to a height that allowed him to see over all the other
trees, and scanned in all directions. He spotted the clearing quickly, and made
sure of what direction it lay in. It was odd, but the clearing looked so far
away that he must have been walking directly away from it all this time. Which
he was sure he hadn't been doing.
<This forest is a labyrinth!>
Hiei frowned. Certain suspicions in his mind were beginning to harden
into something more certain. He decided that it would be best to find his way
back to the clearing by the trees instead of on the ground. It was too easy to
get confused.
He climbed down and launched himself at another tree as soon as he
spotted a branch that would hold his weight. Leaping and climbing like a
squirrel, he made his way back to the clearing and the house.
A liquid shadow detatched itself from the trunk of a tree and
slithered along the ground. It stopped at the edge of the stream, then
stretched itself out over the water, arcing to land in an oily blot on Kurama's
shoulder. It paused, as if considering. Then it moved down Kurama's back and
vanished into the hole made by the bullet. Once the last of the darkness
vanished, there was no sign of any wound.
Kurama suddenly shuddered and yanked his head up, out of the water. He
coughed up water and looked around dazedly, unable to remember where he was or
how he'd gotten there. He got up and climbed out of the stream, then sat on the
bank and stared at the unfamiliar forest with its profusion of redwoods and
ferns.
The house. The clearing.
Kurama got up.
"This is crazy! We'll never find him in here!"
"Well, I'm not giving up!" Yusuke snapped back.
"Isn't it possible he just went back to the house?"
"Without me seeing him?" But Yusuke thought about it. Kurama might
have turned back, gone back to the house while Yusuke was searching the woods.
The last place Kurama wanted to be was in this forest. The more he thought
about it, the more likely it seemed that he'd simply missed Kurama through bad
luck.
"Maybe you're right. Let's go back. But if he's not there--"
"We'll come back and look, okay? Come on." Kuwabara gestured and
started walking. Yusuke paused.
"Kuwabara - didn't we come _that_ way?"
"Hell no. What's wrong with you? I remember passing this rock."
Yusuke frowned and shook his head. He could have sworn that the
clearing was to their left. But he shrugged and followed Kuwabara anyway.
Hiei opened the front door of the house and walked inside, and ran
straight into Kuwabara and Yusuke who were walking out. "What are you two
doing?" he asked.
"We've got to find Kurama," Yusuke said. "He's missing."
"Missing?" Hiei demanded. "What happened?"
"I don't know!" Yusuke complained. "He vanished in the forest!"
Hiei snorted in derision. "He probably wanted to hunt without you
getting in the way. He'll be back."
"No, that's not it. He didn't want to go into the forest at all. I
think he was afraid of it."
"What?" Hiei was irritated now. "Are you crazy? Why would Kurama be
scared of trees?"
"I don't know!" Yusuke said again, almost shouting.
"What are you yelling about?" Kurama asked mildly from behind Hiei.
Hiei whirled and stared at Kurama, wondering how he had managed to sneak up on
them like that without anybody noticing.
"Kurama! What happened?" Yusuke demanded.
Kurama was soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. "I fell in a
stream," he admitted.
"Are you all right?" Hiei asked.
Kurama smiled. "Don't be silly. I'm fine." Then he fainted.