Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ Raiden Youkai no Noroi: Zasshu ❯ Chapter Four ( Chapter 4 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Even if they had been given a thousand years, neither would have been able to guess the ages of the two witches sitting before them.

“Ciao, Strega. Boa tarde, Bruxa,” Hexe said, bowing to the two women. Strega had a classic Roman look about her, with black hair and brown eyes that seemed to look straight into one's soul. Bruxa on the other hand, was lighter and possessed softly curling light brown locks which framed black-green eyes. Neither bore a wrinkle on her skin or any gray strands in their thick tresses. It was their stare that gave away their ancient knowledge, gazes that reached right back to the beginning of time itself.

Strega motioned for Yusuke to come forward, and soft hands came up to caress his face. After about a moment she stopped, looked to Hexe and said, “Diciassette. Ragazzo. Giapponese, probabilmente.”

“She says she thinks you're a seventeen-year-old Japanese boy. Is she right?” Yusuke nodded, but didn't understand why Hexe's face lit up with such amazement. Sensing this, Hexe's eyes dropped and she murmured, “Look at her eyes, Urameshi. She's blind.”

To his astonishment, Hexe was right. How, then, had she...? Was it possible for a blind woman to do that? “It simply goes to show how long they have lived,” whispered Hexe. “I do not care if you use your foul tongue with me, Urameshi, but you will respect them. Even if they cannot speak your language, they do know when they are being insulted.”

Yusuke sullenly sat back on his heels. “Just ask her the damn question.”

She glared at him. “Ciò è Yusuke Urameshi e Kazuma Kuwabara. Stanno cercando le notizie di una ragazza del demon chiamata Rai.” she addressed Strega.

“No. Arashi in primo luogo.”

Hexe looked at her, confused. “No, Strega, stanno chiedendo notizie su Rai.”

“Desidero dire loro la storia del Arashi in primo luogo,” Strega answered, shaking her head.

Turning towards Yusuke and Kuwabara, Hexe translated for them. “She says you need to hear about someone named Arashi first. I don't know why, but this seems to be important to her.”

Bruxa and Strega relayed the story, pausing from time to time to allow Hexe to render their words into Japanese. Bruxa started.

“When I was a young woman, just barely of marrying age, there was a great fire throughout my town. Everything was burned to the ground. I barely escaped alive myself, and awoke to find that I was in a world quite unlike my own. This very village, though then a great and radiant city, took me in, despite the initial hatred of humans. Even a witch such as myself suffered a harrowing time of prejudice.” She fell silent here, waiting for Strega to pick up where she had left off.

“I came to this place under similar circumstances. It was not a fire, however, but the Plague that came upon my home. My parents told me to run and I did, for if any survivors remained they would have blamed me for bringing the illness upon them. I fell off of my horse and hit my head; when I woke up, I, too, was here. They took me in and allowed me to live with Bruxa. But no demon would come near us.”

“Strange. In the realm of humans we were shunned as demon spawn; the youkai here shun us because we were the children of humans.”

“Finally one of them gathered the courage to come to our home.”

Bruxa smiled fondly. “Yes, the little one.”

“Arashi was a charming young storm demon. Almost too charming for her own good.” Strega sniffed, and the others watched as tears slipped from her blind eyes. “Arashi left the day she turned two hundred years old. Immediately, it seemed, the city fell into decay. One by one the awe-inspiring buildings fell. One by one the citizens left. When Arashi ran away, she took our good fortune with her.”

“We hoped for the best...yet we feared the worst.” Bruxa inhaled a haggard breath before continuing, her quiet words barely heard over Strega's soft whimpers. “Only sixteen years ago we received word that she had been executed as a traitor. Apparently she was the first woman in nearly a century to bear a Noroi.”

Here Hexe interjected with her own explanation. “A Noroi is the term that raiden youkai give to those that are half storm demon and half dog demon. They actually hate all those with mixed blood, but a Noroi is prophesied to be the one to destroy the raiden youkai.” Strega spoke, and after a moment Hexe translated, “The parents are executed in a hellish ceremony that's supposed to free everyone of their sin.”

“What happens, exactly?” Yusuke asked.

“I can tell you that one on my own,” Hexe said. “First, the inu youkai is hypnotized-

"I thought you couldn't do that to demons," Kuwabara interrupted.

"Not by the way humans do it. But just think, brain waves and thought...it's essentially electricity, and that's the raiden youkais' forte. All they have to do it harness that and they have control of your thoughts. They use it and make the dog kill the raiden youkai he or she mated with. The other demon then relinquishes their control, so the youkai wakes up sometime in the middle to find their lover dying by their own hand. The inu is then is forced to watch his or her child tortured to death and is psychologically tormented so that their minds believe that this is their fault, that they are the ones who brought this upon themselves.

“Dog demons and storm demons are different from other apparitions. They mate for love rather than necessity. To go through something like that...and to see the product of one's love slowly murdered in that matter...it's enough to kill a youkai from sorrow. Most of the time the inu youkai is left in the same room that their family died in to waste away with those agonizing visions playing in front of their eyes until they finally allow themselves to die.”

Kuwabara narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You seem to know an awful lot about this,” he accused.

Hexe looked up at him with a deadpan face and said in monotone. “I witnessed it once. I never want to see something like it ever again.”

---

“The city where Arashi died is about a week's worth of traveling,” Hexe told them as they left the witch's hut. “So you have two choices. You can either go out on your own-”

“We'd planned to do that all along,” Yusuke interrupted bluntly. “Let's go Kuwabara.”

“-with no directions, no idea where you're going and no protection whatsoever.”

“Kuwabara, let's go!” He turned to walk away from Hexe.

“At least listen to what she has to say first,” Kuwabara countered, refusing to leave. Yusuke gritted his teeth in annoyance, stopped, but refused to turn around. In the past three years, Kuwabara had become infuriatingly stubborn, and unlike Yusuke, who hadn't grown up a bit since middle school, Kazuma had matured a great deal. Sometimes it led to situations like this, and right now Yusuke wanted nothing more than to get away from the tawny-eyed German woman.

“There's a caravan coming this way tomorrow, and it'll pass through the city. Alaric and I were going to go with them, and I'm sure they won't mind a couple extra freeloaders. You'll be able to eat without worrying whether or not your meal is contaminated, and even if it's not that comfortable, it's better than sleeping out on the ground.” ” She smiled at Kuwabara and ignored the scowl Yusuke threw back at her. “I think you should go with us.”

“Well...why are you going with them?”

“I want to go home. To Ningenkai.” She sighed and shook her head as Kuwabara tried to voice another query. “But my intentions don't matter. What does matter is that you two get to your destination safely. For the good of your mission, I mean.” She looked to Yusuke and said with a small smile, “The caravan's cargo is usually quite valuable. They may pay you a bit to help protect it.”

Yusuke turned to her and asked, “When does it come?”

Hexe's smile widened and she answered, “Tomorrow morning. The two of you may stay with me and my brother tonight if you wish.”

---

`First, the inu youkai is hypnotized... They use it and make the dog kill the raiden youkai he or she mated with.'

Senshi rushed at Arashi with astonishing speed, driving his clawed hand through the stomach that until recently had held his child. Arashi screamed, unbelieving until the last minute that he would do this, thinking that he would be able to fight it.

`The other demon then relinquishes their control, so the youkai wakes up sometime in the middle to find their lover dying by their own hand.'

The cloud around the inu youkai's eyes disappeared, throwing the woman's bloody image to him in sharp perspective. “Arashi!” But it was pointless. The macabre scene played out before him in all its disgusting vividness as the rai youkai coughed up blood just before taking her final breath, and she slumped over his outstretched arm, dead.

`The inu is then is forced to watch his or her child tortured to death and is psychologically tormented so that their minds believe that this is their fault, that they are the ones who brought this upon themselves.'

If you had never gone near her...

If you had never spoken to her...

If you had never defiled her with your poisonous touch...

Arashi would have lived.

The chorus of voiced chanted this to him, and Senshi couldn't help but agree. He had known the penalty; why had he dared to anticipate a life with Arashi and their baby? It was his fault...it was his entire fault. He blacked out, unable to take the stress. He never saw his daughter snatched from thin air, never knew that she had been saved.

`Most of the time the inu youkai is left in the same room that their family died in to waste away with those agonizing visions playing in front of their eyes until they finally allow themselves to die.'

“Are we actually supposed to touch this thing?” one man asked, disgusted at the thought of even coming near the dead body.

“They told us to get rid of it, but they didn't say how.”

“What about the garbage pit?”

“Nah. It'll stink up the whole town. Let's just fry it.”

“Sure.” The first man sneered, then kicked the corpse on the ground before spitting on it. “So ends the great and noble Senshi,” he proclaimed caustically. Both demons reluctantly placed a hand on the sickeningly beautiful cadaver and winced in abhorrence. A moment later the body exploded into hundreds of charred pieces.

Rai woke up from the dream, letting out a frightening wail that quickly turned into a series of bone-wracking, unfettered sobs. Someone stumbled into her room and grabbed her by her shoulders; she clutched at the person, uncaring of who they were. He didn't attempt to wrest himself from her grip, but neither did he attempt to calm her. It would have been useless anyway. She wasn't just crying- at this point she was keening, and nothing would pacify her until she consoled herself.

---

“Hexe, that hurts!” Alaric yelled as his sister continued to scrub his back furiously in an attempt to clear it of mud. “Hexe!”

“It's not my fault that you're an idiot. What in God's name possessed you to do something so stupid anyway?”

“Shut up!”

Kuwabara and Yusuke sat at the table wordlessly, listening to Hexe attempt to give the dirt-encrusted boy a bath, something Alaric apparently didn't take too well. Though their tub was nothing more than a basin of heated water hidden behind a screen, the woman was hell-bent on making sure that the boy was presentable, and when he had turned up in their home covered head to toe in filth, she had just about had a hernia.

Their arguments quickly switched to German, and the only thing that could be discerned was the regular curse of “Zicke!” that came from Alaric's mouth, which often earned him a slap from his sister.

“What do you think that means?” Kuwabara asked, breaking the silence.

“Dunno,” was Yusuke's answer, which he followed with a question of his own, “Why did she want us to come with her so badly?”

“Maybe she was just worried, like she said.”

“I don't think so. Desperate seems more the word. Why would someone who's never even met us want to help?” He remembered the witches' eyes that had reached so far into the past. Was it possible that they could reach in the other direction as well, and had they sent Hexe to do their bidding?

It finally ended with Alaric's exclamation of, “Das geht dich einen feuchten Scheissdreck an!” when Hexe calmed down and switched back to Japanese.

“It is my business when you come home looking like that- and late, I might add.” She went to one of the baskets that lined the hut's flimsy walls and began to rummage. “Now go sit down, I'm cutting your hair.”

---

Zicke- the German equivalent of bitch

Das geht dich einen feuchten Scheissdreck an- None of your fucking business!