InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Purity Short: Cacophony ❯ Truce ( Chapter 5 )

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

“She’s got a job, cleaning rooms at a hotel.  The apartment’s decent—a little on the small side, but well within her budget.  All in all, she’ll be fine.”

Settling back in his chair, Cain slowly nodded, despite the thoughtful frown on his face.  “Good, good . . . Did you have enough on your expense card or do I owe you?”

Shifting slightly in the sturdy chair facing the tai-youkai’s desk, Cartham shrugged.  “I didn’t charge anything,” he said, tossing the card onto the desk.  “Well, my hotel room, yeah, but nothing else.”

Cain blinked, shifting his gaze from the card to Cartham’s face and back again.  “You didn’t?”

“Turns out, she didn’t want your help,” he replied.  “Only accepted anything when I told her it’s a loan from me.”

He looked confused, no doubt about it, and Cartham couldn’t really blame him.  “All right,” Cain drawled after a long moment.  “How much did you loan her, then?”

Again, Cartham shook his head.  “I loaned it to her,” he reiterated.  “Not you.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that you’re the very last person she wanted help from.”

“Me?  Why?”

Cartham shrugged as he dug the work prepaid cell phone out of his pocket and dropped it on the desk, too.  “I don’t know,” he admitted thoughtfully.  “But I think . . . I think she feels like you kind of left her hanging.  Mentioned that you didn’t go see her at all while she was in the hospital.”

Cain flinched, dropping back with a heavy sigh.  “I did, but she was resting, and then, the doctors wanted to keep her exposure to a minimum since she had open skin wounds . . . But I should have . . . should have gone more often . . .”

Letting out a weary breath, Cartham swiped the key card, waiting impatiently for the soft beep when the lock released.  When it did, he slipped into the darkened hotel room, but he didn’t bother to turn the lights as he closed the door and flicked the lock.  Passing by the old vinyl recliner with the cracks in the seat fabric and the permanent indent in the center of the seat, he dropped his jacket onto it before plopping into the chair, leaning forward, letting his elbows rest on his spread knees, hands dangling limply between them, shoulders slumped.

It had been a long day.

Three days ago, Cain had briefed him on a rogue coyote-youkai who had been spotted in Las Vegas by one of Cain’s many informants.  Bert Shier had killed a number of humans in and around the area a number of years ago in apparent robberies to fuel his gambling habit, figuring it’d be easiest to off his victims instead of simply just taking their winnings after they’d left the casinos for the night.  He must have finally run out of money if he was willing to risk, resuming his crimes.

Cartham had caught up with him, just before he’d managed to waylay another of his would-be victims.  He’d be silenced easily enough, but not before he’d managed to get in a couple lucky hits: one across Cartham’s chest, but those lacerations weren’t deep and were more annoying than anything, and one on his right arm.

The jacket, made of the treated skin of the Vasloges—a legendary creature that was closely related to the reptiles of old—had saved him from a more severe injury.  Cartham’s final task as an apprentice was to hunt down the beast and to retrieve the molted skin.  It had taken him the better part of a year to accomplish it, and, in the end, Rhen had fashioned it into the leather-looking jacket he wore now.  It might not be quite the same as having an entire outfit made out of the hides of the fire-rats, but it had never failed Cartham.  Bert Shier had torn the sleeve of it, but it was already mended, far faster than the torn skin of his arm, anyway.

He sighed.  The wounds would be closed up by morning, though they might remain a little tender for a day or so.  He really ought to go shower, let the lacerations soak and be cleaned out that way.  Damned if he wasn’t entirely exhausted, though.

It was the part of the job that he had never quite reconciled himself to.  He’d done it for the better part of nearly two centuries, and it never, ever went away: that sense complete emptiness that lingered, and maybe it was a part of his own coping mechanism.  The hollowness that led to the feeling of detachment . . . Maybe it was a necessary thing that his mind did, just to make sure he didn’t go completely mental.  There was no real way of knowing whether or not the other hunters felt this way, whether or not the whole thing was normal, but he suspected that maybe it was.  In a way, he figured that it was his mind’s way of coping with the atrocities that he committed in the name of the tai-youkai.  After all, killing was still killing, no matter what kind of light he tried to shine upon it, and, to be honest, he’d be more worried if it didn’t get to him every single time.  He didn’t know.

Ignoring the bone-deep weariness, he kicked off his boots and stood up, discarding his clothing as he headed for the bathroom.  It took several seconds for the water to warm, and even then, it wasn’t what he considered actually hot, lingering on the warmer side of tepid, at best.  He stood under the flow for a long time, just letting the water, rain down on him.

It helped a lot, blunting the edges of his numbed brain, allowing the slow intrusion of a more methodical line of thought to intervene.  The first thing he ought to do, he figured, was to fire off a text to Cain, let him know that the target had been silenced.  Normally, he’d do that directly after taking down the rogues, but, given that he wasn’t entirely sure that he could spare the time, he’d opted instead to get the hell out of there.  The alley was secluded enough, he’d figured, but nothing ever was completely safe, especially in larger cities.  A few years ago, closed circuit video had captured one of the newer hunters, taking down a target, and it had been quite a nightmare to clean up.  Cartham was fairly good about spotting cameras, but the way technology was moving, he could never say with one-hundred-percent certainty that he was ever really positive that he was safe from such things.

After texting the Zelig?

He made a face, finally reaching for the bar of soap.  After that, he’d sleep for the next day or so.  Normally, he’d book a flight home as soon as he could get one.  This time, however, Cain had also requested that he check in on Kelly again.  He could only hope that she’d be a little more receptive to him than she was the last time.

It’d been just over two months since he’d found her and helped her get the apartment, and even after getting back to his life, he hadn’t been able to get her off of his mind, either.  It was easy to say that he was simply worried about the little girl who was entirely too stubborn for her own good.  Every time he thought about it, though, he couldn’t help but to feel like leaving her here alone was a bad idea.  After all, Las Vegas was a world away from Bevelle, and that was where she’d grown up, the kind of life she knew.  Cities could be frightening places, and Kelly . . .

It was safe to say that a girl like her could easily get caught up in something she had no control over in a place like this.  Maybe, if she didn’t exude that sense of innocence—the one she tried to hide under her façade of street smarts and a healthy dose of sarcasm that she wore like a second skin—he might not be so preoccupied, worrying about some female who really didn’t seem to like him at all.  But he’d sensed that naivete about her pretty quickly, had seen it in the depths of her eyes when she thought that she was covering it all up.  She tried to be tough, wanted so badly to be independent, and yet, there was an underlying vulnerability.  Oh, he had little doubt that she fooled most people.  Why was it that she didn’t fool him . . .?

It didn’t matter, anyway.  Even if Cain hadn’t asked him to check in on her, he still would have because he’d be lying if he tried to say that something about her didn’t fascinate him, too.  He told himself that he simply wanted to know her story—all of it.  There wasn’t anything more to it than that, was there?  For now, he supposed, he’d leave it at that . . .


Shuffling into the small, but bright, kitchen in the quaint apartment that she called home, Kelly smothered a yawn with the back of her hand, ignoring the way her feet kept tugging slightly on the too-long bottoms of the thin cotton sleeping pants she kept stepping on.  Blinking in an almost awkward kind of way, she stuck the empty glass carafe under the running water tap to fill as she  dumped coffee grinds into the reusable filter.  The sound of the filling carafe reminded her uncomfortably that she hadn’t yet bothered to go pee, and by the time she dumped the water into the coffee maker, she was shifting quickly from foot to foot.

She hit the button to start the coffee before scuttling out of the kitchen and around the corner into the bathroom.  It didn’t take long to take care of her business, and she sighed, kicking off her pants and yanking off the long-sleeved but thin and stretchy tee-shirt for her shower.  She also studiously avoiding looking down at her own body for too long, adamantly refused to so much as glance at her reflection in the small mirror over the sink.  There was a longer, narrower mirror, hung on the back of the door, but she’d artfully covered it with a hanging towel that she never used but that seemed casual enough to not appear as though she were trying to block it.

She was off work for the next couple days.  Since her schedule rotated, she only got weekends off every other week, which meant that this week, her days off were Thursday and Friday, and that was fine with her.

She’d applied at a new casino that was opening near her apartment, and to her surprise, she got the job, working in the cage as a cashier.  She was making almost double what she was making as a room cleaner, and so far, she’d managed to save up just over five hundred dollars to pay Cartham back, which was a good chunk, given that it was only two months into the first year of the two year agreement that he’d stipulated for her to repay him the three-thousand-five-hundred bucks that she’d had to borrow from him to pay the deposit, a couple months’ rent in advance, along with the deposit on the electric and water and the few furnishings that he’d deemed necessary before he allowed her to call it good.

The only thing she didn’t particularly care for was the envelope she had stashed away with the money inside.  Since she really had no idea, just when he might come around, she’d decided that it was best to simply hide the money, but just knowing that she had any amount of cash on hand was enough to rattle her, even if she was relatively sure that it was safe enough where she’d hidden it.

Two months since he’d finally left her, and so far, he’d made good on his word.  She hadn’t heard a thing from him, which meant that he certainly wasn’t trying to rub her nose in it.  The thing was . . .

‘You wish he would come around, don’t you?  You wish that he’d just show up.’

Snorting indelicately as she lathered her hair in the shower, she refused to respond to what she considered to be a ridiculous thought.

After he’d gone, after she’d had time to calm down, to think more objectively about the whole thing, she couldn’t help but to feel pretty bad about the way she’d treated the man.  He hadn’t been here because he wanted to be.  Cain had sent him, and she knew that, which had really only served to make her feel worse about the way she’d lashed out at him.  At the very least, she’d like to have a chance to apologize for that.

‘Okay, you were slightly bitchy, sure, but I don’t think he was too offended by it.’

Kelly grimaced.  ‘Offended enough to offer to loan me the money to get settled here.  He wanted to be shut of me, and who can blame him?’  She sighed.  On one hand, she was all right with that.  On the other?

No, she wasn’t delusional enough to even try to convince herself that there was any other reason behind the unexpected offer.

Still . . .

‘Admit it: you’re fascinated by him because he’s so different from any of the guys you’ve met.  There’s something enigmatic, almost dangerous about him, and you . . . Well, you’ve always been a fan of the bad guy in the movies: the guy who has the broken and mysterious past.  What if he’s just a regular guy, though?  What if he’s not nearly as dark and elusive as you seem to want him to be?’

She wasn’t too sure about that.  He was a hunter, wasn’t he?  That wasn’t the kind of job that someone just walked into, either.  Sure, she was aware that Kichiro Izayoi’s twin was a hunter, and he seemed to be pretty normal, but he was born into an extraordinary family, too, one rooted in the history of what would have been a time long past, but wasn’t nearly as long ago, given the tales that Belle had told her.  The fanciful tale of the priestess who had fallen through the strange well, only to find herself some five hundred years in the past was true, if everyone else was to be believed.  Kelly had wondered about it from time to time, but . . .

But that wasn’t really the point.  Shutting off the shower tap, she reached for a towel.

‘He really could have made the whole thing simpler if he’d just given me an address or something to send him payments,’ she mused as she wrapped up her hair and yanked another towel off the rack.

‘Except he told you why.  If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.  He doesn’t really know you very well, and he’s a hunter.  There has to be countless youkai who might like to get their hands on information like that, don’t you think?  Besides, if he had given you an address or something, then you would know that you’d never see him again, and you want to see him again.’

She bit her lip, wrapping the towel around herself, tucking the end in securely for her trek to her room to get dressed.  The bathroom was much too small to even try to dress there, and she scooped her pajamas together with her foot, hooking them all pretty deftly, and she reached down as she lifted the appendage to retrieve them easily enough.

It didn’t take long for her to deposit the clothes into the hamper and to don the long-sleeved blouse of a thin, off-white, crinkled cotton.  Ordinarily, ruffles and lace weren’t her thing, exactly, but most of her clothing was warmer than this, so it’d do.  The blouse, along with a pair of light tan leggings completed her ensemble, and she was leaning forward, applying the last of her makeup, when the knock sounded on her door.

Frowning as she grabbed a tissue from the box on her dresser, she hurried out of the room, rubbing her hands to clean them off, wondering just who would be beating on her door.  She didn’t really know anyone very well, had only kind of gotten a little friendlier with a girl named Lyza, who she worked with at the casino, but it was more of a work-buddy type thing and didn’t extend to after hours.

The youki she sensed, however, stopped her abruptly in her tracks, and the moment she recognized it, she felt the strange and almost dizzying flip-flop in her chest; her heart, suddenly driven into overdrive.  Her hands trembled as she fumbled with the deadbolt lock after she hit the key on the lock pad beside the door to release the security system.

It seemed like it took forever to get the locks open, but finally, blessedly, she opened the door.  “H . . . Hi,” she said, ignorant of the whispering, wavering quality in her voice as she held onto the door and stared up at him.

He cleared his throat, gave an offhanded shrug.  “Hey.”


Wrinkling his nose, he finished off the mug of coffee that Kelly had made for him before setting it aside and trying in vain to school his features before she actually saw his overall disdain for the subpar cup of brew he’d just choked down.

She blinked, setting her own mug aside.  Settling back in one of the two chairs situated at the very small table in the clean kitchen, she pursed her lips, as though she were deep in thought, and slowly shook her head.  “It was cheap,” she explained a little defensively, having caught the expression on his face that he hadn’t been very good at hiding.

Cartham grunted.  “You can cut corners on a lot of things, missy, but quality coffee ain’t one of them.”

“Missy?” she echoed, arching an eyebrow.

“That’s right.”  He jerked his head toward the empty mug.  “How can you drink that sludge?”

She rolled her eyes and picked up her mug again.  “It’s not that bad,” she countered, her voice echoing in the cup.

“Not bad?  I’ve had shitty diner coffee that tasted better than that,” he countered.  “It’s not even worthy of being called coffee.”

“You heard the part about it being cheap, right?” she muttered, voice still echoing since she was in the process of talking between swallows.

“What’d you do?  Buy it at the dollar store?”

“No,” she argued evenly, lowering the cup to the table, but keeping it in her hands.  “The five-and-dime . . .”

He snorted.  “I thought those went out of business a long time ago.”

She shrugged.  “Apparently not.  Anyway, it was only, like, three bucks for that big old can of it, so—"

“Aight,” he said, standing so abruptly that his chair scraped as it scooted across the floor.  “C’mon.”

“Where are we going?” she said, sounding a little more amused than anything else.

He grunted, as though he figured she ought to know what he had in mind already.  “Where do you think?  We’re going to get you decent coffee because that shit ain’t.”

Kelly barked out an incredulous laugh, but she didn’t stand up.  “Stop picking on my coffee,” she told him.  “You’re a guest here.  You should be gracious and thank me for offering you a cup, in the first place.”

“And I would,” he replied, grasping her hand and tugging till she stood up, “if you had given me coffee and not a disgusting cup of dishwater.”

“Oh, my God!  You’re a hunter, aren’t you?  Do you travel with your own gourmet coffee everywhere you go?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted, which was true enough, especially if he was going to be gone for longer than just a few days at a time or if he was being sent to an area where he figured he wouldn’t find the kind of coffee that he wanted.

She stopped, stared at him as though she couldn’t quite wrap her brain around what he’d just said.  Then, she shook her head and rolled her eyes.  “You realize, don’t you?  That’s pretty sad.  I mean, aren’t you supposed to be a badass hunter?  But you can’t just suck it up and drink whatever coffee you’re given?”

He was having none of it as he waited while she pulled on her shoes.  “I’ve lived long enough to come to the understanding that you choose the things that matter to you, and what matters to me is the quality of the coffee I drink.”

He could tell from the way she pressed her lips together in a very thin line that she was trying really hard not to laugh in his face.  He refused to back down, though.  After all, he could deal with many, many things without complaint.  More than once, he’d ended up, camping out in the woods on hunts, stayed in the seediest hotels he could find, frequented the most unsavory establishments in the bitter dregs of the largest cities in the world.  Coffee, however, was the one thing that he simply wouldn’t negotiate.

She slowly shook her head, but her amusement hadn’t died away.  In the end, she straightened up, held up a hand with her index finger up straight before hurrying out of the room.  He wasn’t sure what she was after, but he tapped his foot impatiently.  After having subjected himself to her brand of coffee, he desperately needed to get something of better quality, and fast.

‘You know, it’s worse than that.’

Cartham scowled at his youkai-voice’s rueful assessment.  ‘How’s that?’

The voice snorted.  ‘You saw her coffee maker, too—probably the cheapest one she could find at Dollar General—or a second-hand shop.’

Yeah, he’d seen it, and he didn’t really want to start another debate with her, especially over something like that, but those stupid, cheap things made even quality coffee taste bad.  Too bad a decent set up would cost even more, and, while he might not mind putting up the money for it, she would probably balk at it, perceiving that it would just add on to the amount that she already owed him . . .

Stifling the urge to sigh, Cartham rubbed his forehead, wondering just how irritated she’d be if he insisted that she get a real coffee machine, too . . .