twispitefic

Title: Hareheyare
Author: LittleCaity/sinestris
Fandom(s): The Twilight 'Saga', Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha (Both Soulless Army and King Abbandon)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 8,769 + Notes
Inspiration: The uncanny resemblance between the powers of the Cullens and the Investigative Powers of Skill and Pagan demons in the Raidou Kuzunoha games
Warnings: Violence, a couple of curses, a rampant OC, time travel and a mad scientist, sodding long
Summary: A pair of Devil Summoners come to Forks. Their mission: destroy the Cullens and save Bella.
Disclaimers: I don't own Twilight, I own copies of Raidou but it ain't my intellectual property (otherwise Narumi/Raidou would be canon), Carmel is the only thing I own here and I'll fight to the death to keep her.

Edward had apparently learned his lesson the previous day and apart from the occasional prodding to see if she was going to let her shields down – hardly bloody likely! – he left her alone and focussed on Bella, who looked blanker and more dazed by the hour.

It was just as well they’d decided to perform the ritual that night. Bella didn’t look like she’d last for much longer, and the weekend would be the perfect time to make a little ‘visit’ to the Cullens. They lived a bit out of town, enough so that by the time anyone noticed anything was wrong the battle would likely be over.

Besides, Charlie would vouch for them. She liked the man; he was gentle and quiet but fiercely dedicated at the same time, and he’d had the common sense to call in the professionals when he realised how badly ensnared his daughter was.

Alice was following her around again, that same hungry expression on her face. At lunch, she could feel the eyes of four of the Cullens on her back, Edward too busy keeping Bella docile and mindless. It was driving her completely insane, being able to sense such powerful demonic auras and not being able to do something about it.

An idea occurred to her, and she bit back a downright evil smirk. Since there hopefully wouldn’t be any Cullens in Forks after the weekend, she could set the groundwork now. Nobody gossiped like teenagers desperate for a distraction from schoolwork.

“Hey guys, come outside with me for a minute,” she said, glancing back at the Cullens and faking a little shiver of terror at the sight of ten sickly-yellow eyes looking at her like she was a particularly interesting bug.

Lauren, Mike and Angela followed her willingly, abandoning the revolting school food back at the table. She dove into her bag when they got outside, pulling out a bag of chocolate chip cookies. “Here, I figured you guys might want to eat something decent.” For all his (many) faults, the boss was an impressive cook.

“Real food!” Mike crowed, not even hesitating, and the smell of chocolate and the sounds of pleasure he made as he ate had Lauren and Angela following suit soon enough.

“Guys, I have to tell you something, but you have to keep it quiet, alright?”

They ended up hiding behind the science classrooms, to ‘keep people from overhearing’. She mostly suspected that Lauren wanted the juicy details all to herself.

“Is something wrong? You looked like you were going to faint when the Cullens all glared at you,” Angela said, and she really wanted to just hug the girl. You couldn’t fake that kind of concern.

“Yeah, it’s about the Cullens.” She faked a nervous glance around and another shiver, letting her hands fidget around each other like she was worried. “So, um, I told you my dad came here looking for a criminal, right?”

“What, it’s one of the Cullens?!” Mike shouted, covering his mouth and blushing when Lauren elbowed him in the ribs. “Shit, really?”

“Actually, he thinks it’s all of the Cullens.” She spun a likely-accurate story of the family moving from town to town, grooming local youths to become slavishly devoted before killing them and moving on once more.

There was a long silence, which Lauren broke with a strangled but emphatic “Fuck.” She couldn’t agree with her more. “Not even Bella deserves that shit... But why would you tell us? Couldn’t that get you and your dad into trouble?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, well, I reckon they’re gonna move on the Cullens this weekend. If you can keep Bella away from them for a day or two, she’ll be safe. The last thing they need is a hostage situation, you know?” A little sigh. “I know she hasn’t exactly been a great friend or anything, but dad reckons they’ve been feeding her some kind of tranquilisers for a long time. Could be you never even met the real Bella, you know?”

Angela’s eyes were shining, Mike looked like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer, and even Lauren looked sad. She had them. “I know I’m asking a lot, but, well... I saw the pictures of the last kid. Nobody deserves that.”

“Don’t worry,” Lauren said, her expression hard and calculating. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

Carmel hoped Bella would one day realise that she had friends who cared.

*-*-*

“Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,” she warbled off-key as she sorted through the ingredients for the ritual. She found the irony of the old folk song having an influence on the rituals of the Yatagarasu – or maybe the other way around – amusing in a distant way.

The aforementioned herbs, vanilla essence, life stones bargained from Victor in return for her participation in a study on the powers of summoners, white, red and blue chalk, twelve sticks of incense, and, for some reason, an entire bottle of good whiskey. Rasputin had had to buy that one; her false driver’s licence had her too young to buy booze.

The concrete floor of the basement had been swept clean and rinsed with salt water to purify it, and she worked quickly, drawing the appropriate lines and sigils with the chalk and sprinkling the herbs in the circle that would hold the spirit and the one where she needed to remain until the ritual ended.

Incense glowed in the darkness, the soft scent making it almost painfully easy to fall into the light trance of ritual magic. Rasputin sat in the shadows of the room, only the sharpness of his eyes revealing him to be more than a shadow himself.

She laid out the life stones around her circle and knelt inside the chalk lines, taking a few deep breaths. When she opened her mouth, the words fell from her lips without any conscious thought. The spell had hold of her now.

Her mind seemed to disappear into the haze of magic and incense, drifting, and she found herself wondering what Raidou Kuzunoha the 14^th had been like. Even though her master seemed to like him, he never spoke of him for long. Would he appear as he had when he died, an old man slowly crippled by arthritis, or would he be the young man her master had both battled and aided more than once?

Carmel returned to her body when the first drops of sweat started beading on her forehead. Her voice echoed in the room, the cries of “Hareheyare” slowly fading away. The life stones flared and the herbs ignited in a sweet-smelling flash, and for one terrifying second she thought her very life would drain away.

Her master upended the bottle of whiskey in the receiving circle and waved the vanilla essence under her nose until she sneezed.

The magic roiled slowly with the addition of the whiskey, starting to tremble and then bubble madly like water boiling in a pot. The entire room smelled like burning herbs and very, very good booze, but there was an increasingly cloying undertone that made her feel sick.

Suddenly the boiling movements became violent, and the magic surged upwards, taking up the entire receiving circle and a good foot around it, coming within millimetres of breaching her own protective barrier before suddenly flaring so brightly that she couldn’t see.

She was still blinking spots from her eyes when the room exploded.

A cat yowled madly, and she felt rather than saw a blur of fur dash past her. A young man shouted, the only word that she understood being a furious “Rasputin!”, and her master replied in the same language. Someone grabbed her shoulder, yelling at her in the same language as the young man, and she was dragged bodily from the circle towards the stairs.

When the sounds of battle reached her ears, she swore softly but comprehensively and found the tube with her Alp in it. It sprang forth the instant her hand closed around the cool metal, running a hand through her hair and giggling.

“Translation spell, please,” she asked, relieved when the shouting was followed half a beat later by a whispered translation in her ear. Her Alp was clever, and from the little tingle of magic she’d laid the spell across all the inhabitants of the room.

The last of the light faded from her eyes, and she realised that they were in trouble. It turned out that the man – the very handsome man with curly hair and a damned snappy suit – had gotten her out of the way to avoid her being caught in the middle of a pitched battle between her master and the young man wearing the same outfit as her Raiho and several demons. A black cat was perched on the stairs, throwing out sharp comments every few moments, most of them to do with the utter aggravation of having to deal with Rasputin yet again.

It didn’t take a genius to work out who the young man was. Her Raiho wanted to be him, after all.

She tried to wriggle out of the tall man’s hold, distantly shocked by the fact that she couldn’t, and started yelling. “Stop it! Stop fighting, please stop!” Her master visibly pulled back, but the young man kept pushing. “Raidou, stop!”

The young man – Raidou, by the gods he was good with a sword – stopped and stared at her, his demons faltering and stopping without his command. She had just enough time to mumble out a “Thank god for that,” before the ritual caught up to her.

*-*-*

Her Alp was more than happy to keep stroking her hair affectionately, and she tilted her head into it instead of considering sending her away. She needed the touch right now.

“You have Shining Ones?” Raidou asked, his sword now sheathed and his demons away but the way his hand hovered by his hip suggested that could still change all too quickly. “And your first thought was to drag us bodily to America?”

“The Herald told us the ritual would summon the spirits of the dead. Not... whatever happened,” she said, looking down at her hands and blushing. She’d never cocked up a ritual on that scale before.

“More to the point, Raidou, didn’t you say you’d caught all of those bastards?” the older man – Shouhei Narumi, his name was, but he insisted on Narumi – said with a frown. “I’d hate to think I wasted all that money on Fatal Bullets just for them to come back.”

“We have pictures.” Rasputin said, tossing the photos down on the table they were sitting around. “The Cullens. Nasty pack, they’ve left bodies across the entire damn country.”

“And it gets worse,” she said, managing to look up and trying not to blush even more at the look Narumi was giving her. It was like he was trying to work out how she worked, to see if she was a threat or an ally. “They’ve got Bella Swan, really badly, and I’m all but convinced she’s an untapped summoner. If they convert her... I told a couple of kids at school that the Cullens are serial murderers, and they’ll try keep her away from them for the weekend so we can take them out, but I’m not sure if it’ll stick.”

“You may be a bastard, Rasputin, but you train them right.” Narumi patted her head, narrowly avoiding a giggling Alp. “How old are you, anyway? You look younger than Raidou.”

“Oh for... Boss! I’m going to dress like an adult this weekend and you can’t stop me!” She grumbled for a couple of seconds before answering the question. “I’m undercover at a high school. But I’m in my mid-twenties and you’ll get no more on the matter.”

Raidou laughed and even Gouto-douji, the exceedingly snarky cat who was not a cat, made a soft snickering noise in between cleaning his ear. “All summoners tend to look young,” he told Narumi, taking advantage of the fact that the spell had worked excellently. “Remember Nagi? She was already nineteen when you met her.”

“Bloody hell!” Narumi glared at Raidou. “You’re still eighteen, though?” His expression when Raidou nodded was one of profound relief.

“You need to befriend another Alp, Raidou. This is terribly amusing.” Gouto went back to preening and smoothing his fur. She wondered just what he’d done to earn being stuck in a cat’s body until the Yatagarasu chose to free him.

Raidou sighed and flipped through the pictures again. “Narumi, isn’t that...” He pointed out Carlisle Cullen, the apparent head of the family. “Remember, he was the one who set us onto the Shining Ones that attacked Tae.”

“Curiouser and curiouser...” Rasputin mused. “Now all we need to know is how you defeated them and we can get to work.”

“Fire.” There was a slightly lopsided smile on Raidou’s face, tiny but speaking of pride and satisfaction. “Catch them after dark, bring them low with enchanted ammunition, then burn them.”

“You’re not leaving me behind,” Narumi said, his hands clenched into such tight fists that a little trickle of blood stained the table. “Not after what they did to Tae. Besides, I’m a better shot than Raidou.”

Gouto stretched and looked up, directing his next comment at Rasputin. “Take him. He used to be in the army.” Narumi shot the cat a dirty look but didn’t speak.

“We should bring Charlie with us too,” he eventually said. “Ammunition is plentiful and we’ll need him to give us legitimacy.”

“I’ll call him,” Carmel said, her smile distinctly sharp. This was the best part of being a summoner. The thrill of planning a strike and carrying it out was the biggest source of satisfaction in her life.

“I love my job.”