InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity 8: Vendetta ❯ Crime and Punishment ( Chapter 67 )

~~Chapter 67~~

 

 

 

Cain sat back, staring incredulously from one man to the next as he slowly shook his head and tried to make sense out of the information he'd just been given. “So . . . you're telling me that Drevin single-handedly destroyed every last one of the facilities?” he repeated.

 

Cartham sat back, knitting his figures together atop his stomach, his right knee jostling up and down like a bobber on the surface of the water as the silver chain on his boot jingled softly. “Sounds `bout right,” he agreed with a careless shrug.

 

Moe Jamison grunted, scowling at the coffee mug in his hands. “Located all the men on my list,” he added with a shake of his head, “'cept one . . . Well, I did find him, too, but . . .”

 

Blinking at the vaguely disturbed expression on the hunter's face, Cain frowned. “What does that mean?”

 

Moe shrugged. “One of `em—Thurman—he's dead. Hung himself in his apartment . . .”

 

“But . . .?” Cain prompted when Moe trailed off.

 

Moe made a face and set the cup on Cain's desk. “It wasn't so much that he killed himself that bothered me,” the hunter began. “But there was this jar there by his feet . . . you know, one of them Mason jars . . .? His, uh, err, well, his balls were in it.”

 

“His what?” Cain repeated blankly.

 

Moe shook his head. “Well, I didn't, you know, look to verify it, but . . . but it was someone's balls, anyway. They were in some kind of liquid, and I didn't check that, either.”

 

“Balls?” Cain echoed. “As in, testicles?”

 

Moe nodded.

 

“Ungh,” Larry half-groaned. Cartham looked decidedly disturbed. Cain wasn't surprised when all three men shifted in their seats just a little. “I guess I'd consider offing myself if someone removed my boys and pickled `em.”

 

Cartham grunted. “Shi-i-i-it . . . Hell, I think Kelly'd off me if someone lopped off mine.”

 

Moe considered that then nodded. “I can see that . . .”

 

“Aiyuh,” Larry intoned. “I imagine Gin'd feel the same way . . .” He grinned suddenly. “Get `em while they're hot: the tai-youkai's big fellers . . .”

 

Cain rolled his eyes. “Okay,” he growled, shaking his head and rapping on the desk with his knuckles. “Moving on—”

 

Moe chuckled and reached over to slap Cartham's arm. “I'll be damned. Zelig's blushing.”

 

“Can we focus, please?” Cain demanded.

 

“Aww, that's kind of precious, isn't it?” Larry remarked.

 

“What about the others?” Cain asked, ignoring their collective teasing.

 

“Nope,” Cartham said with a shake of his shaggy hair. “Far as I could tell, everyone else still had their balls.”

 

“My marks did, too,” Larry added. “'Course, I didn't check `em . . . Just didn't see any Mason jars . . .”

 

Cain heaved a sigh and wondered how it could possibly be that full-grown adult men could act so stupidly when left to their own devices . . .

 

“So basically, your new houseguest has a really bad habit of hacking off people's balls and sticking them in jars?” Cartham deadpanned.

 

Moe nodded. “In a nutshell.”

 

“All right!” Cain growled, tossing his ink pen onto the desk. “Let me know when we can finish this discussion like adults.”

 

The miscreants simply grinned at him, which just figured. They finally wound down, though, and Cartham shot him a rather conspicuous look. “Something else,” he drawled, propping his left ankle on his right knee.

 

“Something else about testicles?” Cain demanded.

 

“Naw,” Cartham replied with a chuckle. “Those sons of bitches, though . . . They were all terrified: lookin' over their shoulders and shit . . . Seems like someone or something put the fear of God into `em.”

 

“My marks were like that, too,” Moe said.

 

“Aiyuh,” Larry agreed.

 

Considering that for a moment, Cain frowned. There was only one person who could or would have done anything like that, at least in the timeframe provided. After all, InuYasha had told Cain exactly what they'd found when he, Ryomaru, and Evan had finally breeched the facility in Chicago, and that could only mean that someone else had gotten there, first . . . but why? Why would he have gone to such lengths? Simply injecting the tracking devices and warning them ought to have been enough, but it wasn't, was it? Not to him . . .

 

`You honestly have to ask that?' his youkai voice demanded. `Why else would he, indeed?'

 

`Because,' Cain reasoned with an inward sigh, `he really is her mate, but he . . . Why doesn't he acknowledge it . . .?'

 

`Don't be dense, Zelig. When one believes in one's heart that one truly doesn't deserve that level of happiness, why would you think that he would deny it?'

 

Cain grimaced inwardly. He knew something about that sort of self-loathing, didn't he . . .?

 

Yet it all made sense in the end. Cain wasn't sure why Drevin would have captured Samantha to start with, but . . .

 

But somewhere along the line, he'd fallen in love with Samantha, after all . . .

 

`She . . . she's been right all along, hasn't she?'

 

Thing was, Cain didn't know whether that was a good or bad thing, did he?

 

“And what were they doing, exactly?” Cain asked, deciding that the questions he'd been pondering could wait until later.

 

Cartham's chuckle was downright nasty. “Not a helluva lot of anything, tell the truth.”

 

“Mine, neither,” Larry confessed.

 

“Yup,” Moe agreed.

 

Cain nodded slowly. “So . . . it'd be safe to assign one person to keep track of them all . . . for now.”

 

The three exchanged looks then nodded. “I'll take care of it,” Moe volunteered. “I've got free time.”

 

Cartham chuckled, though this time, it sounded a lot less mean. “Though you'd retired, old man,” he goaded.

 

Moe shrugged. “Hell, I'm not a rancher,” he confessed, “and it gets a little boring sometimes.”

 

Somehow, that wasn't entirely surprising. To be entirely honest, he didn't figure that Moe would last more than six months out there in the middle of Montana with nothing to do and nothing but ranch animals to keep him company—not to mention that the man enjoyed his high-tech toys that he loved to acquire with the justification that they were `for the job' . . . Nope, not surprising at all that Moe would volunteer to devoting his time to keeping an eye on the researchers, and knowing Moe's mate? Well, she'd likely thank Cain for putting him to work again, too. Gavin, Moe's son, had mentioned a while back that his mother was complaining about Moe's devices that he kept buying, even if he didn't really need them anymore . . . Something about their modest little house looking like a Digi-Tech showroom . . .

 

The office door opened, and Cain looked up in time to see his diminutive little wife hovering in the doorway. Wringing her hands as she shot the assembled hunter one of her apologetic little smiles, she bit her lip when she met Cain's gaze. “Sorry to interrupt,” she apologized with a little bow. “Zelig-sensei . . .”

 

“Something wrong, Gin?” he asked, inviting her in with a crook of two fingers.

 

She skittered over to him and leaned in close to his ear. “There's a little . . . problem . . .” she whispered.

 

“What kind of problem?” he whispered back, fully content to play her game with her since she seemed heartily intent upon it.

 

She wrinkled her nose and scrunched up her shoulders seconds before the sharp, shrill cry siphoned through the cracked-open doorway. “Um, that,” she allowed.

 

“Was that the little girl?” he asked in a normal tone of voice.

 

Gin nodded. “Y-yeah . . .” she replied. “She's very upset, and—”

 

“So I gathered,” Cain said dryly. “Do we know why she's upset?”

 

Gin heaved a sigh, her ears flattening momentarily as she slowly nodded. “She . . . she wants her . . . her daddy,” she confessed.

 

Cain blinked. “Her daddy,” he repeated.

 

Gin nodded again. “Yes. We've been trying to convince her that she can stay with Samantha for now, but she's so sleepy, and you know how cranky they can be when they're tired . . . But she's had such a rough few days, hasn't she? So maybe . . . maybe just this once . . .?”

 

Letting out a deep breath, Cain slowly shook his head. “You think we should let her in to see him,” he concluded.

 

Gin grimaced but nodded. “Would it really be that bad?”

 

Cain stared at her for a moment then slowly stood up, very mindful of the three sets of eyes that were watching the exchange with avid interest. “Gin . . . sweetie . . . Drevin's here to be punished for what he did, remember?”

 

“But is the child?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest and stubbornly shaking her head.

 

Cain sighed then winced as a very loud, very pronounced shriek jarred through him so hard that his teeth ground together. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said as he stood up and headed for the door with Gin in tow.

 

On the one hand, he really wasn't very keen on the idea of letting the girl in there, but . . . but he also didn't have the heart to put her through that kind of upset when she'd already suffered enough. A child born and raised in one of those places . . .? Small wonder that she wanted Drevin, really. Regardless of how he'd actually treated her, he was probably the closest thing to a father that she had known thus far . . .

 

And therein was the real problem, wasn't it? The man . . . he seemed reluctant to want to keep her; seemed as though the idea hadn't crossed his mind, and to be honest, Cain hadn't thought about it, either, at least until after the fact. If he really was Samantha's mate, it might be all right . . . Still . . .

 

Still, he had already talked to the family that Ben had found. They were coming by tomorrow to meet the child, and that was another thing. As far as he knew, she didn't actually have a name . . .

 

The child was trying to wiggle out of Samantha's arms as she stood at the base of the stairs that led to the third floor. Samantha, herself, looked like she were ready to cry, too, but she smoothed the girl's hair and crooned in her ear. When she saw Gin and Cain, she shot them an imploring sort of look.

 

Cain sighed. He was going to catch ten kinds of hell from Kichiro, he was sure, for what he was about to do. The hanyou had made it abundantly clear that he wanted Samantha kept the hell away from Drevin, and while Cain had been cooperating with his wishes, he just wasn't so sure that he really ought to do that anymore, and even then . . . One look at the agitated little girl was more than enough to sway Cain's opinion, at least for one night. To make her suffer was one thing, but she was just a child—a baby, really . . . What other choice was there?

 

 

 

 

`So . . . when I breathe in . . . my . . . toe hurts . . .? How the hell does that work?' Kurt wondered as he blinked in the darkness. All right, so that was a little bit of a misnomer. It wasn't like his toe was the only thing that hurt—God, no. It was just the strangest thing that hurt, he supposed . . .

 

Not surprising. He'd discovered that a lot of body parts could hurt, given the right impetus, and those relatives of Samantha's? Well, they were damn good at finding said-impetus . . .

 

He'd been given one day off after the uncle—Ryomaru—had at him. It wasn't actually what he'd call a day off, though. No, he'd spent the majority of that day in training, and he'd hardly call dodging the entirely too-sharp blade of Gin's Kursarigama `resting' . . . But it had done some good—not a lot but some—or so he'd thought until he'd realized that his next opponent was that brute of a fellow named Bas.

 

The others had teased Bas, saying that he was too slow when he attacked, not that Kurt could tell. Bas still moved much faster than a human on a good day, and if one added to that the idea that every single one of Bas' strikes hurt so badly that Kurt saw stars, and, well, he really had thought that it couldn't get worse. No doubt about it, the man was terrifying, fighting with a grim determination that had literally scared the shit out of Kurt. All that, of course, after the claim that they wouldn't actually kill him . . . Go figure.

 

He'd fought Morio the next day, and while Morio hit with far more frequency than Bas did, his strikes weren't nearly as mind-numbingly painful, either, and after a while, he'd started cracking jokes—really bad jokes—and the more he joked, the more often he hit, too . . .

 

So today he'd ended up being paired off with the one they called Gunnar. Almost as tall as Bas which put him nearly a half a head taller than Morio, and not nearly as burly as Bas, either, Kurt might have believed that he was going to be all right . . . One look at the man's eyes, though, had convinced Kurt otherwise. There was more intensity in his gaze than Kurt could credit, and he'd figured out quickly enough that Gunnar was frightening, in his own right.

 

He'd actually reveled in telling Kurt exactly where he was going to hit him, how hard he was going to hit him, and what Kurt had done to earn the hit that was coming, and one might have thought that Kurt would be able to counter those hits since Gunnar had gone through the trouble of telling him all of that, but no. If the others could move with that much speed, Kurt wasn't sure, but Gunnar could and did. In the space of a moment, he'd somehow managed to dash forward and strike, only to back away fast enough that Kurt really couldn't even see him move.

 

No doubt about it: Samantha's family was a frightening lot.

 

He sighed. He really had been stupid, hadn't he? Thinking that her family might not be able to protect her against the white-coats? What a joke . . .

 

Frowning when the sound of a child's crying broke through his abysmal thoughts, Kurt scowled at the door. `Stinky-butt . . .'

 

He closed his eyes, willing himself to relax. She was going to be fine, right? There were more than enough women in the house—women who knew how to deal with a child . . . They didn't need him to tell them what the girl needed, did they? So why did that idea piss him off even more . . .? He shifted slightly, wincing as another bout of pain shot through him.

 

It was laughable, wasn't it? He hadn't known what to expect when he'd arrived, but if he were pressed to ask, he'd have to admit that he was really expecting something more along the lines of what he'd done to the white-coats. He certainly hadn't expected this. Did they really believe that what they were doing was nearly enough? They'd seen for themselves what the bastards had done to her, hadn't they? How could that be all right? They should despise him; loathe him; want to kill him, and while he did ache, he couldn't say that he was actually suffering, per se.

 

Nope, about the only thing he could say with any real sense of clarity was that being so close to Samantha but not being able to touch her, to talk to her . . . It was more than enough to drive him insane . . .

 

He'd known from the start that it was no good. Her family would never, ever accept him, and with good reason. After all, the things she'd been subjected to . . . because of him . . . No, everything was better this way. The plain and simple truth of it was that he cared about her far too much to hurt her even more than he already had . . .

 

Even if it killed him, damn it . . .

 

But the incessant crying was almost more than he could tolerate, too—the wail of a child who simply didn't understand . . . it didn't help at all to tell himself that the women could take care of everything. That child . . . she'd already cried enough in her short life, hadn't she? Cried and been afraid . . . and he could understand that, too . . .

 

The rattle of the door handle broke Kurt out of his reverie, and he blinked when the bright hallway light streamed into the room. Cain stood in the doorway—Kurt couldn't see his face—and just behind him, the sniffling child snuggled securely in Samantha's arms. With a ragged little cry, the girl squirmed to be let down, and Samantha complied as Cain stepped into the room and strode toward the bed.

 

Kurt winced and grunted as the child climbed onto the bed, whimpering, crying as she shoved her face against Kurt's chest. “Can you sit up?” Cain asked brusquely.

 

Kurt tried; he really did, but with the girl on his chest and the myriad of aches that erupted all over his body all over again, he sighed and shook his head. “N-no . . .”

 

Samantha stepped over and gently helped him. Kurt had to grit his teeth to keep himself from groaning. It was painful just to be that close to her, wasn't it? Painful in a completely foreign sort of way . . . He just wanted to lean into her, to breathe in the scent of her, to reassure himself that she was there; that she was near; that he . . . that he . . .

 

Cain unfastened the handcuffs that secured him at night and stepped back. “She's had a pretty rough day,” he explained, nodding at the child who was sniffling and whimpering.

 

“Y-yeah,” Kurt muttered, frowning thoughtfully as the little girl yawned and slowly closed her eyes.

 

“Anyway, I have a family that's coming to meet her tomorrow. Figured it'd be best to let them get acquainted before they try to take her home.”

 

Why did he hate the idea of someone else taking her home . . .?

 

Deliberately trying not to think about that one too long, Kurt nodded. “All right.”

 

“Another thing. Does she have a name?”

 

Kurt blinked, unsure why that question seemed so odd, given the situation. “Uh, no,” he confessed.

 

“What do you call her?”

 

It occurred to Kurt that what he called her really wasn't exactly a name, either, but . . . but Cain asked, didn't he? “Stinky-butt,” he admitted.

 

The man blinked and stared then blinked again. “You call her . . .? Uh . . .”

 

“W . . . She . . . Uh, yes,” he stammered. Funny how that never seemed quite so wrong to him before as it did, staring at Cain Zelig . . .

 

Cain eyed him for another minute as though he weren't exactly certain what to make of that, then headed for the door.

 

“W-wait!” Kurt blurted before the man could pull the door closed.

 

“Samantha said she'd stay, too, in case the girl has to go to the bathroom or anything.”

 

That said, he closed the door, the sound of his footsteps heading back down the hallway was blunted but not completely blocked out.

 

Kurt didn't say anything for a long moment. He wasn't sure what he could say, and he was having very distinct difficulty in even looking at Samantha. He wasn't entirely certain that he understood what was going on at all, but when the child moved in closer to him, he heaved a sigh and slowly shook his head. “Samantha . . .” he said slowly.

 

“She's cute, isn't she?” Samantha blurted suddenly, as though she were afraid to hear whatever it was that Kurt was going to say. He could sense it in her aura, couldn't he? Her reluctance—her fear . . . that he would send her away . . . and while he knew in the logical part of his brain that he really ought to tell her to go, he . . . he couldn't . . . “She hated the bath—you probably knew that . . . I ended up getting in with her, and she seemed to be all right then . . .”

 

“She's just a little thing,” Kurt replied softly, silently cursing himself for his weaknesses. “I can't believe she followed me here . . .”

 

“Most youkai and hanyou are born with the instinct to follow their noses, you know?” she said, visibly calming down since he seemed to be willing to carry on a decent conversation with her. “You left her with the child and social services people, didn't you?”

 

Kurt grimaced at the censure in her tone, though he also knew well enough that he'd done the only thing he'd known to do at the time. Showing up here with a child in tow . . . what would that really have accomplished except to put her in a situation where she'd have been subjected to even more of the ungodly drama? Glancing down at the child cuddled against his chest, he almost smiled. Neither of the females in the room with him needed that kind of thing. Unfortunately, that seemed to be about the only thing he was good at . . .

 

“Taijya . . .”

 

“Hmm?” he said, only half-paying attention as he mussed the girl's hair and smoothed it down again.

 

“Nothing,” she said slowly.

 

Silence seemed to grow and thicken, lurking around the perimeter of the room like a broken shadow or a bad dream, thickening like the morning fog: dense and cloying. Samantha's aura pulsed, ebbed and flowed with the beat of her heart, and for a moment—only a moment—Kurt let himself savor the welcome brush of it on his raw nerves.

 

It had been too easy to forget the way that her very proximity could affect him—the overwhelming feeling that always made him feel as though the world could fade away, disappear, and as long as she was there, then that'd be fine, too . . .

 

“You rescued her, didn't you? Just like you rescued me,” she finally asked.

 

Kurt grimaced as he gingerly stretched out his leg. That damned Gunnar had whacked him in the back of the leg with a vindictive abandon. “Yeah,” he confessed, carefully shifting the child off of a rather painful bruise.

 

“She was born there?”

 

He nodded. “Yeah.”

 

Samantha's gaze clouded over as she reached out to touch the girl's cheek. “Poor thing.”

 

He wasn't sure what to say to that. In the end, he muttered something under his breath and tried not to stare.

 

She'd regained some of her weight, though he didn't know if she was back to her normal weight since his memory of that sort of thing in the first few days after he'd captured her wasn't that clear. He hadn't wanted to remember, had he? But damned if she didn't look good to him now . . .

 

`Knock that off, stupid!' he told himself firmly. `Remember, can't you?'

 

“She tried to eat the dog food that Grandma left out for Bas' dog,” she said.

 

Somehow, that wasn't nearly as surprising as it should have been. “Oh?”

 

“Yeah . . .”

 

Kurt frowned.

 

“I've missed you,” she ventured hesitantly.

 

He paused but didn't reply. He didn't dare.

 

“So . . .” she tried again. “Did you do whatever you needed to do?”

 

“Little demon,” he began, “you don't belong in here with me.”

 

She let out a soft sigh and slowly shook her head. “If I don't belong with you, I don't belong with anyone.”

 

That earned her a scowl.

 

“You're my mate,” she said simply.

 

“Tch!” Kurt snorted, shaking his head and thanking dumb luck that the room was too dark for her to see him blush. “What does that mean?” he demanded a little more sharply than he intended.

 

She leaned against the footboard and wrapped her arms around her calves. “It means that you're the only one for me,” she replied with a simple shrug.

 

“You . . . You don't want to be with me,” he insisted with a shake of his head. “I put you there, remember?”

 

“You got me out, too," she reminded him.

 

“I would have let them do whatever they wanted to you if I hadn't gone back,” he countered.

 

“But you did come back, and you wouldn't have,” she replied with a smile.

 

He scowled at her. “The only reason I came here was to get the data cards.”

 

“That's not true,” she said with a confident grin.

 

“How do you know that?” Kurt asked quietly, staring at her with a defiant tenacity.

 

Samantha giggled. “If that's all you wanted, you could have broken in to get them and gotten away easily enough. You wouldn't have come during the day, and you wouldn't be letting them beat on you now.”

 

He snorted. “As if I'm letting them do that.”

 

She laughed quietly then sighed. “Would it . . . would it be so horrible?”

 

Heaving a sigh of his own, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Don't ask me that,” he muttered.

 

“You . . . you kissed me,” she whispered, staring at her hands.

 

He flopped back, smacking his head hard, which set off about a million other aches spiraling through him, and he couldn't staunch the low groan that slipped from him, either. “I . . . I shouldn't have done that,” he grumbled.

 

“Why?” she challenged.

 

Staring at her through half-closed eyes, he steeled himself against the formidable flattening of her ears. “Don't do that,” he sighed.

 

“Sorry,” she said, reaching for her ears to pull them upright again.

 

Kurt eyed her for a moment then slowly shook his head. “That's . . . That's just wrong,” he told her.

 

“You . . . you came for me,” she said.

 

Closing his eyes for a moment, he could only hope that she didn't sense the lie in his words. “I didn't.”

 

“You're lying.”

 

The little girl whimpered in her sleep as though she sensed the contention in the air.

 

Kurt rubbed her back to quiet her. “Your family won't accept me,” he muttered. “Let's just . . . just leave it at that.”

 

“But they will,” she argued gently. “They know that I want—”

 

“You don't know what you want,” he growled.

 

“I do, too,” she maintained stubbornly.

 

“You don't,” he shot back. “Damn it—”

 

A strange glimmer lit her gaze; a knowing sort of light that was almost frightening in its intuitiveness. She looked at him—through him—into him. “You love me,” she murmured. “You . . . you do.”

 

Kurt forced himself to meet her gaze, made himself steady it, to hold it. “You and I cannot be . . . anything,” he heard himself softly say. “What you want . . . what you think you want . . . What you think you feel . . . Samantha, it's all in your head.”

 

She smiled a little sadly, reached over to stroke the child's hair. “No, Kurt,” she replied with an odd sense of foreboding in her tone. “It's not all in my head. It's all in yours.”

 

 

WolfPad (I generally don't post on weekends; sorry.) ------ malitiadixie ------ Jester08 ------ Firedemon86 ------ oblivion-bringr (considering it's only been about three days since Kurt got to Maine in the story, I don't think it's “slow” at all …) ------ Dark Inu Fan ------ Usagiseren05 ------ sheastarr334 ------ OROsan0677 ------ darkangel05 ------AtamaHitoride ------ kittycatkitten ------ 3427

Proforce ------ malitiadixie ------ madhatter ------ laura.beth ----- OROsan0677

Final Thought from Samantha:

Blanket disclaimer for this fanfic (will apply to this and all other chapters in Vendetta): I do not claim any rights to InuYasha or the characters associated with the anime/manga. Those rights belong to Rumiko Takahashi, et al. I do offer my thanks to her for creating such vivid characters for me to terrorize.