Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 34: Rose, Gar: The Mouse That Roared

As she watched the boy pick up Gar with the care of one who knows how, and then wink out, Rose was on the verge of running, not walking, to the house that had to be the epicenter of the haunting, interrupting whatever Yukie and her father were doing, and telling them all about it. It was too serious not to come clean and get help, no matter what trouble might follow. The only thing which prevented her from doing so was hearing her name.

"Rose!" She looked up. There was Kitaro, who was standing on…a large white bed sheet which floated as if it were a hoverboard. "Yes, this is magic. Yes, I followed you and you can call me a creep and a stalker and beat me up later if you want to after we're far away from here safely. This neighborhood—it's walled up for a reason. Now give me your hand. We need to get out of here before the ghosts notice you."

"I can't. I think they already noticed and, and…this little boy took Gar. I can't leave him here. You never leave a teammate behind. Ever." She spun in a circle, looking everywhere for him, for them, in the shadows. "Gar was being a cat, and the boy yowled like a cat." She nearly stepped on her cellphone before she found it, but luckily it was not hurt by being dropped.

"That isn't good. But it's better than if he was being human, and the ghost decided to kill him." He jumped off the bed sheet, which flew away on its own, and landed lightly on the ground beside her. "Why did you come here, anyway? I thought you were going to spend tonight figuring out how to get Gar home."

"I was going to, but it was Gar. He insisted. He overheard my father and Yukie talking about coming here to lay Kayako and her son to rest, and thought it meant they were going to kill somebody. I should have talked him out of it, but…but I wanted to find out why they weren't including me." She laughed, but without humor. "I guess I know why now, huh? They knew it was dangerous."

He nodded, and suddenly flung both arms out. Little orbs of light flew out of both sleeves like a magician's doves, only they circled around the two of them, driving back the darkness, which had taken on an ominous syrupy quality, oozing and pouring closer.

"I knew they were going somewhere dangerous when you introduced us at the ryokan. Your father had the Heart Sutra written all over him, except where it would show in public. That's like armor and camouflage combined, against the spirit world."

"Like Hoichi the Earless," she remembered. "You have Mage Sight, I guess. What about Yukie, though?"

"Lady Snowblood has another sort of protection," he said, cryptically, turning in a circle to survey the darkness.

"Lady Snowblood?" Rose asked. "You mean Yukie? Why do you call her that, and what kind of protection?"

"Um—it's from an old movie. Her name is Lady Snow, that's what Yukime means, and it just made me think of the movie, I guess. As far as protection…Your stepmother is a little further along in her spiritual development than most people. That makes her Teflon-coated and bulletproof as far as the supernatural is concerned."

"How do you know all this?" Rose demanded.

"Believe me, if you had the Sight, you could tell. It's like most people are candles and she's a lightbulb. 25 watt, maybe. Not blindingly bright, but steady—and it can't be blown out. That's about as far as she can go until she gives up eating meat and otherwise participating in deaths. Has she done this kind of thing a lot? Laying ghosts, I mean." He summoned a light in the palm of his hand, played it around the intersection where they stopped.

"In the last week, several of them. There was the Kuchisake-Onna—." Rose told him, but he interrupted.

"That was her? What did she do?"