InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity Redux: Fruition ❯ Desperation ( Chapter 35 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Toga strode into Cain's office with a scowl on his face as he read through the emailed briefing that Kyouhei had sent.  "Did you read this?" he asked without preamble as he flopped down in a vacant chair.

"Depends on what, 'this' is," Cain replied evenly.

"The email from Kyouhei-san.  I forwarded it to you an hour ago."

Cain sighed.  "Yeah, I read it."

Toga snorted.  "Keh!  If they think I'll let them get away with threatening Sie?  I'll tear them apart," he growled.

"Ben called a little while ago," Cain remarked, patting his pockets for a pack of cigarettes.  "He said that they think it's best if you and Sierra go home soon.  He seems to think that it'd be harder to target you or her there, providing you keep your hunters close to home."

"Yeah, I already called and made reservations," he said.  "We're going to stay with tou-san for now since his mansion has better security than our house."  He heaved a sigh and dropped his forehead into his palm.  "Kami, what a mess . . ."

"And InuYasha's Forest?  How secure is that?"

Toga stood up and strode over to fill a cup with tea that Gin had left in the office.  "That's part of the reason why we're going to stay with Tou-san.  That way we can set more of the hunters to patrol in and around the forest."

Cain lit a cigarette before replying.  "So, Nezumi should be safe enough."

Toga shrugged as he lifted the tea to his lips.  "Given that Ryo isn't really going to let her leave his sight?  She'll be fine."  Staring at Cain for a long moment, he sighed.  "You know they're targeting you, too."

Cain let out a deep breath, watching the smoke rise before his face.  "Of course.  Kind of figured it was coming."  He stood up, stepped around the desk to grab a bottle of water out of the small refrigerator in the wet bar.  "There's been grumbling, ever since Bas was born . . ."

"They'd be stupid to go after him," Toga concluded.  "That boy grew up to be downright scary, damned if he didn't."

Cain smiled despite his bleak thoughts.  "What about Gunnar?  Maybe it'd be best if he goes home with you and Sierra for now . . ."

Toga shook his head. "You tell him that.  He's not listening to me.  Says if they have a mind to come after him, then they can damn well bring it."  He made a face. "Baka . . ."

"He isn't a slouch."

Toga shot Cain a dark look.  "It doesn't matter how good Mamoruzen is.  If they send enough youkai after them . . ."

He didn't have to finish his statement.  Cain understood the situation well enough.  He had his own hunters out there, keeping a closer eye on the vicinity than was usual.  So far, they hadn't reported anything out of the ordinary.  Even so, Toga couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was simply the calm before the proverbial storm.

Cain scowled at the desk for a long moment, as though he were trying to make up his mind about something.  Finally, he heaved a sigh and slowly shook his head.  "Something else Ben said—something that wasn't in the email from his brother . . . One of the ones behind all of this is his father.  He's, uh . . . He's coordinating a lot of this stuff.  He's a lot more integral to this whole thing than we originally thought, and he's lining things up, trying to plan for all contingencies."

"Second in command?  And what do you mean, contingencies?"

"Their mother's pregnant," Cain admitted, taking a long swallow from the water bottle, draining nearly half of it before he lowered it again.  "Ben seems to think they did this so that he can plead leniency, should it come down to that, and then they can use the reprieve to run."

"There will be no leniency given; not in this."

"I didn't expect any differently."

Toga heaved a sigh, raking his hand through his glossy black hair.  It was hard to say when everything had gotten so out of hand.  He had a feeling, though, that it was something rooted heavily in the past.  The truth of it was that, until he could sit down and really discuss the situation with Sesshoumaru at length, he could only make educated guesses.

Setting the cup down on the tray, Toga opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it closed when the strangest sensation—an irrational sense of fear—shot straight through him, drawing him up short as his frown shifted into an all-out scowl.  Too vague to get a really good read on, it felt like an instinct—or a warning.

"Toga?  Something wrong?"

Toga didn't respond right away, his gaze shifting to the wall of windows behind Cain's desk.  What was it?  'Why . . .?'

And slowly, the vague sense of fear grew larger, hotter, infinitely more desperate.  'Fear . . .? What do I . . .?'

"Something's wrong," Toga said slowly, shaking his head in confusion as he dragged his gaze off the windows, shifted his eyes to meet Cain's.  "But I don't know what . . ."

Cain frowned and shook his head. "Wrong?  What do you mean?"

Heaving a sigh, Toga paced the floor, struggling to get a grip on what he was feeling.  "It's . . . It's like . . . emotion," Toga said, wishing he could understand a little better than he did.  It didn't make any sense, and yet . . .

The sudden vision of his granddaughters flashed through his head, bringing him up short as he eyes flared wide.  "Damn!" he hissed, digging his phone out of his pocket, fumbling with the device as he tried to hurry through the call list.

"Toga?"

"It's the twins," Toga said, unsure why he knew it, but certain that he was right.  Whatever was going on, those babies . . . "They're scared," he said, more to himself than to Cain.  "Damn it!" he bellowed when he fumbled the phone for the second time.

Cain reached over, took the device, scrolled through it to select the recipient and handed it back again.

Charity didn't answer.  The call routed to voicemail after four rings, and Toga ended the call with a vicious growl as he dialed the satellite phone instead.  She didn't answer that, either, and Toga erupted into another savage growl.

"Why do you know this?" Cain asked, holding his phone to his head as he waited for whomever he'd called to answer.  "Yeah, Ben, hold on."

"I bonded my youki with them.  Wanted to help them adjust on Charity’s human nights," Toga muttered, grabbing the phone out of Cain's hand and lifting it to his ear.  "Ben, where are you?  What's going on?"

"Toga?  Hi, uh . . . I don't know . . . Why?  Is something going on?"

"What do you mean, you don't know?  They're your family—your daughters—and my daughter!  Where the fuck is my daughter?" he yelled.

"Uh . . . She's—they're—at home.  I'm with Steve, checking into an incident . . . What the hell's going on?" Ben demanded.

"Fucking—” Shoving the phone at Cain, Toga turned to storm out of the office.  Cain caught his arm and shook his head.  "What do you think you're going to do?"

Toga shook his head stubbornly, yanking his arm away from Cain's grasp.  "What do you think I'm doing?" he countered.  "That's my daughter—my grandchildren.  I'm going."

"Are you crazy?  You know how far that is!  If you do make it down there, you're not going to be of much use, and—"

"And if it were your granddaughters?" Toga demanded, gaze glowing dangerously.  When Cain sighed and nodded, Toga turned away.  "That's what I figured," he said, striding out of the office.  He barely got the front door open before his body disintegrated into his energy form, as the small flash of dark green light flew off into the sky.

Cain paused for only a moment before lifting the phone to his ear once more.

"—Better tell me what's going on!  What the hell are you trying to say?"

"I don't know," Cain replied, rubbing his forehead as he stepped over to close the front door.  "Toga just suddenly got this feeling—he said they're afraid—the twins."

"What?" Ben growled.  "What?"

"Toga bonded them to his youki," Cain explained calmly.  "So, he can feel them—their emotions.  They're afraid, and we don't know what's going on, but Charity's not answering either phone."

"Charity . . . Goddamn it . . ."

The call ended abruptly, and Cain dropped the phone into his pocket with a heavy sigh.  It would have been simpler, maybe, if the twins were old enough to have more than a primal reaction to things, but they weren't, which resulted in the ominous sense of fear that Toga had felt, and the stronger that emotion was in the two, the more magnified it would be to the one person they'd been bonded to: Toga.  The only other person who would feel that as acutely as Toga was bound to be Charity as their mother . . .

But where, exactly, was she . . .?


Charity groaned and slowly opened her eyes, lifting her hands to cover her face as the unwelcome intrusion of afternoon sunlight pooled on the floor where she lay.  Her head thumped with an entirely unwelcome beat, and through the haze of her muddled mind, she struggled to latch onto any kind of conscious thought.

"What . . .? What . . . happened . . .?" she muttered, wincing at the absolute volume of her own whispered words.

'Cherry?  Kami, Cherry, you're finally awake!'

She groaned and half-whimpered as her youkai's voice boomed in her throbbing head.

'Move it, woman!  You can whine about that later!  Right now, you've got bigger fish to fry!  That pup's getting away with your babies!'

She gasped, sitting straight up as a wash of memories crashed down on her, like floodgates being released all at once.  The young man—cougar-youkai—delivering the purchases from the toy store . . . the strange smell of something odd . . . the girls . . . Stubbornly ignoring the awful pain that triggered a horrendous wave of nausea, Charity forced herself to her feet and staggered toward the door as fast as she could.

'That guy . . . He took them,' she thought, yanking at the door, growling viscously as she struggled to get it opened. It finally, mercifully opened, and she ran outside, not at all sure-footed, but determination alone carried her forward.

There was no boat waiting at the dock.  Ben had taken the one this morning when he'd left to go see Steve Vasquez . . . Charity didn't hesitate as she dashed into the water, ignored the chilling bite as she dove in, as she swam for all she was worth, as the sense of urgency rose to choke her.  Where ever they were, the babies were afraid.  She didn't know how, but she could feel it as well as she could sense her own emotions.  Choking down a suspicious lump that threatened to overwhelm her, she forced herself to drag her body through the water, toward the shore.

By the time her feet hit the sand on the other side of the bay, Charity nearly swooned, but caught herself before she fell.  Whatever the boy had used to knock her out—chloroform, maybe? —was still stuck in her head, condensing around her brain like an insidious fog.

Stumbling onto the shore, she shook her head, trying in vain to shake off the lingering fuzziness as she gripped her temples and tried to remember on the training she'd done so long ago.

"Find your target's scent and memorize it," InuYasha-oji-chan had said, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned back, as he pinned each one of them—Charity and her sisters—with a fierce glower.  "And above all, don't allow yourself to freak out. If you do, you won't be able to concentrate, and if you can't concentrate, you might as well give the fuck up."

"Concentrate . . . Right . . ." she muttered, giving her head another good shake before dropping to her hands and knees in the sand, tamping down the sense that she was wasting valuable moments, as she struggled to find the scent of her children, of the one who had taken them . . .

"I . . . I can't smell," she murmured, smashing her hands over her face after the harsh realization sank in.  All she smelled with every breath was the lingering odor of that nasty liquid . . . "Damn it . . . Damn it!"

'Get a hold of yourself, Cherry!' her youkai-voice commanded.  'You're not going to be any of any use to anyone if you let yourself fall apart now!  Those babies need you—need you to not panic, need you to get to them!  Now, stop and think, will you?  You don't need to track them by smell; not really.  You're their mama!  So, concentrate on them, not on their scents!'

Biting back the surge of panic that tried to grab hold of her, Charity pushed herself to her feet, forced herself to close her eyes, concentrating instead on the visual of her babies' sweet faces, their smiles . . . And she gasped as a small cry slipped from her, as her eyes flashed open a moment later, as her head snapped to the side, to the west, as she stumbled to her feet once more.

And she took off at a dead sprint.


Grimacing in the semi-darkness of the abandoned house on the cliff, Hecht stepped over to the window that was covered in a rotting sheet of plywood, peering around the broken edge at the area as he waited impatiently for any sign of Diego.

He sighed, raking a hand through his hair rather nervously.  At least, the babies had finally fallen asleep—had cried themselves to sleep, as a matter of fact—over in the corner on a few blankets that he'd managed to scrounge up in the debris left behind in the decaying old house.

It was all going according to plan, he figured.  Now was the hard part—the part he hadn't figured out yet.  He'd thought before that he'd be okay, taking the babies back to his parents as they'd wanted him to do, but . . .

But he couldn't help the nagging feeling that everything was wrong.  If he took them back, if he allowed his parents to basically sell the girls to the highest bidder?  Just what good would come of that?  And true, he'd told himself a few times that it'd be okay.  After all, if the people had enough money to buy the twins, then they'd be taken care of, right?  Which was a far sight more than what he could say for himself, but even so . . .

It was a fluke, Diego had said, when he'd inadvertently figured out who the 'Ben' was who had the babies, to start with.  One of his men had mentioned that the Zelig's closest friend as well as highest ranking general was a panther-youkai named Ben Philips, and, with a bit more checking, they'd discovered that he did, in fact, own a tiny islet, too.

Then Diego, swearing that he had nothing better to do, had decided to come along with Hecht, to scope out the people who had the twins, to try to figure out exactly how to go about, getting them back.  After about a week of surveying the island, using state-of-the-art cameras and stuff—Hecht didn't want to know where Diego had gotten his hands on the devices—Diego had announced rather blandly that the make-shift family was so upstanding that they were, in fact, boring as hell.

But Hecht . . .

Turning away from the window, he shuffled over to the rickety old table in the middle of the room and plopped down in an equally rickety old chair.

He hadn't thought that, at all, had he?  Watching as they'd brought the babies outside to play in the sand or to dangle their toes in the ebbing surface of the Gulf waters . . . Observing as the man—Ben—climbed onto the roof of the house just to hang strings of Christmas lights from the eaves while the woman had sat in the sand with the babies, calling encouragement to him as he laughed and smiled and cracked bad jokes . . .

He'd started to understand, hadn't he?  He'd started to realize that maybe that was what being a family was supposed to be like.  Children weren't supposed to cower whenever their father came near, afraid that he was going to backhand them for whatever reason set him off on a given day . . . Children weren't meant to suck it up and keep it to themselves when their mothers disparaged them for the things they weren't or could never be, shouldn't be made to feel smaller than they were when their mothers mocked and belittled them . . .

And maybe he hadn't realized that such a thing really could exist: the kind of families that he’d never seen outside of the confines of TV sit-coms where every bad situation was solved and neatly tied up with a pretty ribbon by the end of the episode . . .

He wasn't entirely sure when the idea had first occurred to him.  Maybe it was during those long days, spent hiding in the makeshift shelter they'd built to look like a pile of brushwood where they sat inside, spying on the couple with the children.  Somewhere along the line, the thought had come to him, that maybe he ought to run away, to keep the girls and raise them himself—to show them the kind of life that he'd never had.  He could figure things out.  He wasn't stupid, anyway.  Maybe he could find steady work somewhere, and the only real question was, where could he go? Where could he take them?  Where could they live so that he wouldn't have to keep looking over his shoulder for his parents or worse . . .?

He frowned, tapping his claws on the table top.  No, he'd have to die, or at least, he'd have to make them think he was dead.  He already knew well enough that his family, such as it was, needed him to do their dirty work.  If he tried to tell them that he just didn't want any of it anymore, there'd be hell to pay, and even if he did manage to walk away, they'd never stop, and he knew that, too.  It wasn't that they loved him, and really, he had to wonder if they even understood what that even meant.  Nope, it was all a matter of supply and demand, and that was all it was.  They demanded that he do things, and he supplied them with whatever they were asking for, no questions asked . . .

"You took the rap, didn't you?  For the guns and shit?  For the drugs your ol' man was trafficking," Diego remarked one day when there was even less movement in the house on the island than usual.

Hecht shot his friend a look.  "How did you know?"

Diego shrugged.  "Man, give me some credit," he complained.  "The way your old man bragged that he had you under his thumb?  Why you do it?  Why you let him treat you like that?  I mean, if you're gonna go down to the big house, might as well be for your own gain, don't you think?"

Hecht grunted, reaching for a half-empty bottle of tepid water.  "They're family," he replied in almost a monotone.  "Family protects each other."

"Yeah?  Is that what they told you, man?  'Cause I don't see a damn one of them motherfuckers out there, protecting your ass.  Do you?"

And those were the words that hung in Hecht's mind, that he couldn't shake off.  It was true, wasn't it?  Even when he was small, he could remember . . . They'd gone to the small convenience store near their home one day.  They needed milk and some other stuff, his mother had said.  He was just a cub then, maybe three or so, and he remembered vaguely that his mother had hidden behind some shelves in the only corner that could not be recorded by the store surveillance cameras, and she'd shoved stuff under his baggy sweat shirt, into the pockets of his jeans, and when they'd gotten caught on the way out of the store with the pilfered goods, he'd stood there, crying as his mother brought down the wrath of God on his head for stealing.

He was simply a means to an end for them, and he knew it, and after watching Ben Philips with the children and the woman?  He'd realized, hadn't he?  That kind of family . . . That was what he wanted . . .

A strange sort of sound registered in his ears, and he stood up slowly, turning to face the door as an unnatural kind of light erupted around the ill-fitting edges, as the surge of youki so angry, so darkened with absolute rage, that he unconsciously stepped back in retreat as it filtered into the room.  With a groaning creak, a ridiculous crash, the door literally exploded, blasting into the small area in an explosion of splintered wood, of misshapen hunks, that fell to the floor like rain.

As the dust cleared, as the setting sun outside illuminated the silhouette standing in the now-empty doorway, he blinked then narrowed his eyes at the diminutive form of the woman whose eyes glowed somewhere between golden and crimson and back again . . .

"Give me back my daughters," she said, her voice little more than a menacing growl in the hazy dark.  "Give them back or I swear to kami, I'll kill you."