PSC Series: The Haunted Celebrity | 5/XX
Title: PSC Series: The Haunted Celebrity
Chapter: 05
Author: アキ
Fandom: the GazettE, SCREW, Alice Nine, more to come
Disclaimer: I don't own the guys. Just the story.
Pairings: AoixRuki, ByouxRui, probably more to come
Genre: AU, horror, supernatural
Rating: PG, for now
Warning: None
Beta: None
Summary: "PSC, which stands for Paranormal Studies Center, is an institution whose main object is to investigate various paranormal and supernatural events. This is the Department of Investigation and Recovery, where all investigative tasks are being done. My name is Kai, and I am the head of this Department. Welcome. How may I help you?"
Chapter 5
“Well, there’s something in it alright,” Byou sank back in his seat, after taking a sniff of the teddy bear that was sitting almost innocently on the table before him.
Kai smelled nothing, of course, apart from the faint scent of his now-cold cup of coffee on the table in front of him. It was only Byou and that special ability that he possessed that no one else in the institute had. He was really good in detecting astral auras with, yes, none other but his sense of smell. He said that each and every supernatural presence had its own specific scent, but no matter how often he tried explaining it to Kai, Kai simply couldn’t imagine a ghost smelling like anchovies or rotten eggplant.
Hiroto, on the other hand, could use his sight to detect otherworldly presences and auras. Those presences took many different shapes and sizes, he said, from the really scary ones to normal looking, almost human kinds. He was usually very good with his ability, but the downside was that it would be useless when he came face to face with a creature that was powerful enough to conceal their aura. This had happened before in several chances, and mostly had put them in deadly situations. In their line of work, not knowing what you were dealing with was very dangerous. Although none had been killed so far, but they had come close to it too often for Kai’s liking.
Kai had been meaning to recruit more people for the Astral Aura Detection team (so far he had only three people in that team: Byou, Hiroto, and Manabu), but the problem was, it was nearly impossible to recruit people discreetly into the institute, let alone his department. The Human Resources Department had been having routine meetings discussing a brand new method of recruitment, one that was effective but didn’t require them to post fake job vacancies on the newspapers. These job vacancies kept attracting the wrong people, and at the moment they were really running out of manipulated reasons to reject those misguided applicants.
“But it doesn’t smell particularly… bad,” Byou spoke again after a while. He was frowning, a look of confusion strewn across his face.
“What do you mean?” Kai asked.
“Well…” Byou said hesitantly. “Remember when I told you that evil spirits usually smelled sour, like something rotten?”
Kai nodded. He also remembered that, according to Byou, good spirits smelled like flowers, or freshly baked bread in case of really friendly spirits.
“This one doesn’t emit ghostly scent,” the blonde man said. “It’s actually pretty… normal-a bit evil, yes, but normal.”
It was Kai’s turn to frown. “Normal how?”
Byou bit his lip for a moment, thinking. “To put it simply: it smells just like you and me, like all of us,” he said afterward. “Like… living beings.”
“Ah, that might explain why the aura looks a bit purplish,” Hiroto commented.
“Purplish?” Kai asked.
“Yeah, just like what I see from girls. Most girls in their normal mood state have basic purple aura, and their emotion will appear in different colors outside that purple one.” Hiroto explained. “On a side note, the color of dead people’s souls is usually black or murky grey. The emotion that died with them comes along with a vague tint above that basic color-it can be red for anger, yellow for happiness, etcetera.”
“And you see purple aura coming out of this bear?”
“Yes,” Hiroto nodded. “It’s a bit vague, like vapor from a cup of coffee, that’s why I was honestly feeling doubtful the first time I saw it-it’s because I couldn’t determine the real color. But now that I can take a good look at it, it looks purplish.”
Byou nodded his head, agreeing to what Hiroto said. He reached out toward the teddy bear and held it close to his nose, sniffing it. “At first I honestly thought the scent was from Ruki,” he said, “You know, because he was the last person touching it. This citrusy scent does remind me of you somewhat, although you smell a bit bitterer than this-no offense, Ruki. This smells sweeter… God, I know I’ve smelled something like this before…”
The group of people-Kai, Hiroto, Ayame, and Ruki-was quiet for a moment while Byou was turning the teddy bear around and around in his hands, as if by doing so he could determine what gave out the scent he smelled. After a moment, it was Ruki who finally spoke up.
“Actually… I’ve learned about one specific method of hexing someone by inserting a part of yourself into an object, and leave the object in the possession of the person you want to hex,” he muttered slowly and almost methodically, as if he was quoting from a book-which he probably was. “It can be a lock of hair, clip of nail, and sometimes, in extreme cases, a vial of blood.”
“Ah… I think I’ve heard something like that, too,” Kai said.
“That’s it!” Byou jumped off the sofa all of a sudden, startling everyone around him. “Shampoo! This teddy bear smells like hair shampoo!”
***
It was already an hour after lunch break was over, but when Ruki’s trainee showed up at the office he was still carrying a large glass of coke in one hand and a half-bitten burger in the other. His hair and clothes looked as if they had been swept by the wind-which was probably true considering he rode his big black bike everywhere he went. His black, skull-patterned bandana, that he never seemed to take off no matter where he was, was hanging around his neck, looking as scruffy as ever. His blue flannel shirt drooped loosely on his torso, and his baggy jeans were hung so low around his hips that it was a miracle they didn’t slide down when he was walking.
But the whole Department had already gotten familiar with Reita-that’s the trainee’s alias name-and had memorized all of his antics. He might be a little older than Ruki, but he had just entered the institute two months ago under the recommendation of a lady in Administration, who happened to be a neighbor of his. There was a local shrine in his neighborhood, and this guy, despite his young age (and his appearance), had been helping out there since he was a kid.
“The head priest is my uncle,” he said, once when one of the staff asked him about it. “He gives me a few hundred yen every time I show up at the shrine and help him sweep the yard, tie the ropes on the charms, or other trivial tasks.”
Disregarding his ridiculous story about his uncle (a priest bribing his nephew to help out at the shrine?), they found that Reita was quite a natural expert in dealing with curses and jinxes. Moreover, due to the years he had spent in the shrine, he had often seen his uncle or other priests there performing curse cleansing rituals so it had become a familiar routine for him.
“I’ve seen just about anything, from dolls to a piece of paper,” Reita said in his early days working at the institute. “The suspects were mostly women, and the motivation was almost a hundred percent revenge. I have never been able to understand why they didn’t just go straight ahead and face the people they’re having quarrels with. Women are so complicated…”
His comment hadn’t received a very nice reaction from Haru and Miho, the two female employees who worked under the same expertise as he was; but as time went by, even those girls finally understood that Reita was just a simple guy who didn’t know how to hold back whatever he wanted to say.
For this opportunity, Kai knew that Ruki would have preferred to ask Haru, Miho, or even Jin for assistance, but unfortunately the two girls were off on an assignment in Niigata since last week, and Jin had not recovered from the heavy flu he caught a few days ago. So the only choice left was Reita. It’s not that Reita was incapable; no, on the contrary, Kai had witnessed the talent that the boy possessed, and it was nothing ordinary. He might still be a trainee for the moment, but his experience exceeded those who had worked a lot longer in the institute under the same expertise. Seeing that there was an increase in the number of cases that involved curses and jinxes lately (Kai could not fathom the reason why people had become so vengeful these days), it was unacceptable not to keep Reita in the team, despite his carelessness.
The only problem was Ruki. Kai knew just how much of a perfectionist his assistant was, and how intolerant he could be most of the times. That explained why Ruki would always put on a sour face whenever Reita was around. While Ruki was an epitome of strictness, Reita was the complete opposite. They were too different to be working with one another.
Kai sighed. He could only pray that those two would get along once Reita became a full employee.
Reita placed his coke on the table, and proceeded to take a huge bite out of his burger. He sat down, munched, and spoke even before he swallowed that chunk of burger down his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was spending too much time at the accessory shop,” he said. “They were showing me all the new items that have just arrived. I really couldn’t stop staring at them.”
By accessory shop, of course Reita meant bike accessory shop. That’s where he spent most of his free time at, and the reason why he always came in late after lunch break.
“Please swallow whatever is still in your mouth and then take a look at the doll, Reita,” Ruki said, not even trying to hide his annoyance.
Reita didn’t seem fazed by the frown on Ruki’s face. Leisurely, he continued munching, and once he was done, he placed his burger on the table right next to his coke, and grabbed the doll. As soon as he touched it, a swift comprehension drifted across his face.
“Ah,” he mumbled. “Poor teddy bear is jinxed. It’s nothing big, though.”
“Nothing big?” Kai repeated.
Reita nodded. “The jinx is not really strong,” he said. “Whoever did it probably didn’t know the rituals that are required to produce a strong, effective jinx. Honestly, I blame the internet for this. Lots of people think they know everything and post stupid things on websites, including stupidly made-up methods of jinxing and cursing. The next thing you know, clueless teenagers are performing the wrong rituals. The lucky ones will only end up with weak jinxes like this, but the not so lucky ones…” He shrugged, leaving his sentence unfinished. Kai could only imagine the worst things that Reita had seen.
Kai turned to Ruki. “In that case, you two can deal with this quickly, right?” he said. “How long do you think you will need to cleanse this doll?”
Ruki was staring intensely at the doll in Reita’s hand. Kai almost thought he was trying to drill a hole through the teddy bear and into Reita’s stomach with his glare.
“Two, three hours max,” he finally answered. “That is if Reita can refrain from talking about his bike until the task is done.”
***
Kai had never thought that talent was a necessary feature for those who work under the Curses and Jinxes section. He had believed every theory that a person might need to handle curses and jinxes could be learned through books, and every practice of cleansing them could be perfected through experience. His assistant was a perfect example of that, because he entered the institute with absolutely no talent and no supernatural abilities; only pure determination and an immense will to learn. Kai remembered the earlier days when Ruki had been a trainee himself; he hadn’t known the slightest thing about curses or jinxes, let alone how to deal with them. But Ruki had proven what a strong-willed person he was, and by the end of his training period, he had learned just about everything a man needed to know in order to handle curses and jinxes.
The same goes to the rest of the staff in that section. Neither Haru, Miho, nor Jin had any special ability when they were recruited (except maybe Miho with her extraordinary skill of finding out about new gossips ahead of everyone else), but just like Ruki, they learned and gained some experience along the way, perfecting their knowledge and skill as time went by.
Back then, Kai had believed talent was nothing important in this specific field. But of course that was before he met Reita.
Reita was really one of a kind, that’s why Kai thought, although he was careful not to mention this in front of Ruki. It was as if this guy was born to handle cursed things and jinxed items-and that might as well be true, considering his upbringing and where he had spent his entire childhood. He had a very strong intuition-or sixth sense in a more popular term; so strong that he didn’t need the guys from Astral Aura Detection to help him find a cursed item from a mountain of random things. And he could tell what kind of threat was planted inside an item with just one touch. That was a really rare gift. Kai had a feeling that Reita’s uncle-the priest that he had mentioned in several occasions-knew about this as well, and that’s why he had been making him work in the shrine as some sort of training for Reita without Reita himself realizing it.
Kai suspected that the same knowledge of Reita’s ability was what had been bothering Ruki ever since the kid entered the institute. Ruki envied Reita who could perform all the work in the section without having to spend so much time learning or practicing like Ruki had to.
Kai heaved a long sigh; he had to try to stay positive and simply be thankful that the work today had been completed successfully. And despite Ruki saying that it might have taken three hours to get the job done, Reita had finished it in approximately one hour.
Kai had watched the whole procession; first Reita had cut off the teddy bear’s head, and then pulled out the Dacron fillings from inside the head. Soon afterward, he had extracted a lock of straight, dark brown hair from within. Holding the lock of hair in his hand, he had murmured a long line of mantras that Kai couldn’t quite comprehend.
“I didn’t bring my things with me today,” Reita had said after he had finished muttering the mantras. “To finish the cleansing I need to complete the rituals, and I can’t do that without my things. Do you need this to be done immediately?”
Kai had said yes-the sooner the task was done, the better. So two hours ago Reita had ridden home on his motorbike with the teddy bear in his bag, and just now he had called Kai on his cellphone, telling him that the job had been done successfully. The jinx was gone.
He took a peek at his wristwatch and saw that it was ten minutes to seven p.m. Some of his staff members were already preparing to leave the office, Byou being the most anxious of them all. He must have made peace with his boyfriend if he was that impatient to go home. Deciding that he too should get prepared, Kai turned off his computer, drank that one last drop of coffee from his glass, and stood up from his seat. And that was when his cellphone rang in his pocket.
Without checking the caller ID first, he picked up the phone. “Hello?”
The voice that answered was unintelligible at first, filled with nothing but stuttered words and trembling gasps. It took him a while to recognize who it was on the other end of the line, because since he met Shiroyama Yuu, Kai had never heard him sound so scared and panicked before.
“Help me,” said Yuu, the fear in his voice was so audible that it couldn’t possibly be an act. “It’s not gone… It’s still here… It’s still here…!”
- TO BE CONTINUED -
Previous chapters: 1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4
Fanfic list here.
Chapter: 05
Author: アキ
Fandom: the GazettE, SCREW, Alice Nine, more to come
Disclaimer: I don't own the guys. Just the story.
Pairings: AoixRuki, ByouxRui, probably more to come
Genre: AU, horror, supernatural
Rating: PG, for now
Warning: None
Beta: None
Summary: "PSC, which stands for Paranormal Studies Center, is an institution whose main object is to investigate various paranormal and supernatural events. This is the Department of Investigation and Recovery, where all investigative tasks are being done. My name is Kai, and I am the head of this Department. Welcome. How may I help you?"
Chapter 5
“Well, there’s something in it alright,” Byou sank back in his seat, after taking a sniff of the teddy bear that was sitting almost innocently on the table before him.
Kai smelled nothing, of course, apart from the faint scent of his now-cold cup of coffee on the table in front of him. It was only Byou and that special ability that he possessed that no one else in the institute had. He was really good in detecting astral auras with, yes, none other but his sense of smell. He said that each and every supernatural presence had its own specific scent, but no matter how often he tried explaining it to Kai, Kai simply couldn’t imagine a ghost smelling like anchovies or rotten eggplant.
Hiroto, on the other hand, could use his sight to detect otherworldly presences and auras. Those presences took many different shapes and sizes, he said, from the really scary ones to normal looking, almost human kinds. He was usually very good with his ability, but the downside was that it would be useless when he came face to face with a creature that was powerful enough to conceal their aura. This had happened before in several chances, and mostly had put them in deadly situations. In their line of work, not knowing what you were dealing with was very dangerous. Although none had been killed so far, but they had come close to it too often for Kai’s liking.
Kai had been meaning to recruit more people for the Astral Aura Detection team (so far he had only three people in that team: Byou, Hiroto, and Manabu), but the problem was, it was nearly impossible to recruit people discreetly into the institute, let alone his department. The Human Resources Department had been having routine meetings discussing a brand new method of recruitment, one that was effective but didn’t require them to post fake job vacancies on the newspapers. These job vacancies kept attracting the wrong people, and at the moment they were really running out of manipulated reasons to reject those misguided applicants.
“But it doesn’t smell particularly… bad,” Byou spoke again after a while. He was frowning, a look of confusion strewn across his face.
“What do you mean?” Kai asked.
“Well…” Byou said hesitantly. “Remember when I told you that evil spirits usually smelled sour, like something rotten?”
Kai nodded. He also remembered that, according to Byou, good spirits smelled like flowers, or freshly baked bread in case of really friendly spirits.
“This one doesn’t emit ghostly scent,” the blonde man said. “It’s actually pretty… normal-a bit evil, yes, but normal.”
It was Kai’s turn to frown. “Normal how?”
Byou bit his lip for a moment, thinking. “To put it simply: it smells just like you and me, like all of us,” he said afterward. “Like… living beings.”
“Ah, that might explain why the aura looks a bit purplish,” Hiroto commented.
“Purplish?” Kai asked.
“Yeah, just like what I see from girls. Most girls in their normal mood state have basic purple aura, and their emotion will appear in different colors outside that purple one.” Hiroto explained. “On a side note, the color of dead people’s souls is usually black or murky grey. The emotion that died with them comes along with a vague tint above that basic color-it can be red for anger, yellow for happiness, etcetera.”
“And you see purple aura coming out of this bear?”
“Yes,” Hiroto nodded. “It’s a bit vague, like vapor from a cup of coffee, that’s why I was honestly feeling doubtful the first time I saw it-it’s because I couldn’t determine the real color. But now that I can take a good look at it, it looks purplish.”
Byou nodded his head, agreeing to what Hiroto said. He reached out toward the teddy bear and held it close to his nose, sniffing it. “At first I honestly thought the scent was from Ruki,” he said, “You know, because he was the last person touching it. This citrusy scent does remind me of you somewhat, although you smell a bit bitterer than this-no offense, Ruki. This smells sweeter… God, I know I’ve smelled something like this before…”
The group of people-Kai, Hiroto, Ayame, and Ruki-was quiet for a moment while Byou was turning the teddy bear around and around in his hands, as if by doing so he could determine what gave out the scent he smelled. After a moment, it was Ruki who finally spoke up.
“Actually… I’ve learned about one specific method of hexing someone by inserting a part of yourself into an object, and leave the object in the possession of the person you want to hex,” he muttered slowly and almost methodically, as if he was quoting from a book-which he probably was. “It can be a lock of hair, clip of nail, and sometimes, in extreme cases, a vial of blood.”
“Ah… I think I’ve heard something like that, too,” Kai said.
“That’s it!” Byou jumped off the sofa all of a sudden, startling everyone around him. “Shampoo! This teddy bear smells like hair shampoo!”
***
It was already an hour after lunch break was over, but when Ruki’s trainee showed up at the office he was still carrying a large glass of coke in one hand and a half-bitten burger in the other. His hair and clothes looked as if they had been swept by the wind-which was probably true considering he rode his big black bike everywhere he went. His black, skull-patterned bandana, that he never seemed to take off no matter where he was, was hanging around his neck, looking as scruffy as ever. His blue flannel shirt drooped loosely on his torso, and his baggy jeans were hung so low around his hips that it was a miracle they didn’t slide down when he was walking.
But the whole Department had already gotten familiar with Reita-that’s the trainee’s alias name-and had memorized all of his antics. He might be a little older than Ruki, but he had just entered the institute two months ago under the recommendation of a lady in Administration, who happened to be a neighbor of his. There was a local shrine in his neighborhood, and this guy, despite his young age (and his appearance), had been helping out there since he was a kid.
“The head priest is my uncle,” he said, once when one of the staff asked him about it. “He gives me a few hundred yen every time I show up at the shrine and help him sweep the yard, tie the ropes on the charms, or other trivial tasks.”
Disregarding his ridiculous story about his uncle (a priest bribing his nephew to help out at the shrine?), they found that Reita was quite a natural expert in dealing with curses and jinxes. Moreover, due to the years he had spent in the shrine, he had often seen his uncle or other priests there performing curse cleansing rituals so it had become a familiar routine for him.
“I’ve seen just about anything, from dolls to a piece of paper,” Reita said in his early days working at the institute. “The suspects were mostly women, and the motivation was almost a hundred percent revenge. I have never been able to understand why they didn’t just go straight ahead and face the people they’re having quarrels with. Women are so complicated…”
His comment hadn’t received a very nice reaction from Haru and Miho, the two female employees who worked under the same expertise as he was; but as time went by, even those girls finally understood that Reita was just a simple guy who didn’t know how to hold back whatever he wanted to say.
For this opportunity, Kai knew that Ruki would have preferred to ask Haru, Miho, or even Jin for assistance, but unfortunately the two girls were off on an assignment in Niigata since last week, and Jin had not recovered from the heavy flu he caught a few days ago. So the only choice left was Reita. It’s not that Reita was incapable; no, on the contrary, Kai had witnessed the talent that the boy possessed, and it was nothing ordinary. He might still be a trainee for the moment, but his experience exceeded those who had worked a lot longer in the institute under the same expertise. Seeing that there was an increase in the number of cases that involved curses and jinxes lately (Kai could not fathom the reason why people had become so vengeful these days), it was unacceptable not to keep Reita in the team, despite his carelessness.
The only problem was Ruki. Kai knew just how much of a perfectionist his assistant was, and how intolerant he could be most of the times. That explained why Ruki would always put on a sour face whenever Reita was around. While Ruki was an epitome of strictness, Reita was the complete opposite. They were too different to be working with one another.
Kai sighed. He could only pray that those two would get along once Reita became a full employee.
Reita placed his coke on the table, and proceeded to take a huge bite out of his burger. He sat down, munched, and spoke even before he swallowed that chunk of burger down his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was spending too much time at the accessory shop,” he said. “They were showing me all the new items that have just arrived. I really couldn’t stop staring at them.”
By accessory shop, of course Reita meant bike accessory shop. That’s where he spent most of his free time at, and the reason why he always came in late after lunch break.
“Please swallow whatever is still in your mouth and then take a look at the doll, Reita,” Ruki said, not even trying to hide his annoyance.
Reita didn’t seem fazed by the frown on Ruki’s face. Leisurely, he continued munching, and once he was done, he placed his burger on the table right next to his coke, and grabbed the doll. As soon as he touched it, a swift comprehension drifted across his face.
“Ah,” he mumbled. “Poor teddy bear is jinxed. It’s nothing big, though.”
“Nothing big?” Kai repeated.
Reita nodded. “The jinx is not really strong,” he said. “Whoever did it probably didn’t know the rituals that are required to produce a strong, effective jinx. Honestly, I blame the internet for this. Lots of people think they know everything and post stupid things on websites, including stupidly made-up methods of jinxing and cursing. The next thing you know, clueless teenagers are performing the wrong rituals. The lucky ones will only end up with weak jinxes like this, but the not so lucky ones…” He shrugged, leaving his sentence unfinished. Kai could only imagine the worst things that Reita had seen.
Kai turned to Ruki. “In that case, you two can deal with this quickly, right?” he said. “How long do you think you will need to cleanse this doll?”
Ruki was staring intensely at the doll in Reita’s hand. Kai almost thought he was trying to drill a hole through the teddy bear and into Reita’s stomach with his glare.
“Two, three hours max,” he finally answered. “That is if Reita can refrain from talking about his bike until the task is done.”
***
Kai had never thought that talent was a necessary feature for those who work under the Curses and Jinxes section. He had believed every theory that a person might need to handle curses and jinxes could be learned through books, and every practice of cleansing them could be perfected through experience. His assistant was a perfect example of that, because he entered the institute with absolutely no talent and no supernatural abilities; only pure determination and an immense will to learn. Kai remembered the earlier days when Ruki had been a trainee himself; he hadn’t known the slightest thing about curses or jinxes, let alone how to deal with them. But Ruki had proven what a strong-willed person he was, and by the end of his training period, he had learned just about everything a man needed to know in order to handle curses and jinxes.
The same goes to the rest of the staff in that section. Neither Haru, Miho, nor Jin had any special ability when they were recruited (except maybe Miho with her extraordinary skill of finding out about new gossips ahead of everyone else), but just like Ruki, they learned and gained some experience along the way, perfecting their knowledge and skill as time went by.
Back then, Kai had believed talent was nothing important in this specific field. But of course that was before he met Reita.
Reita was really one of a kind, that’s why Kai thought, although he was careful not to mention this in front of Ruki. It was as if this guy was born to handle cursed things and jinxed items-and that might as well be true, considering his upbringing and where he had spent his entire childhood. He had a very strong intuition-or sixth sense in a more popular term; so strong that he didn’t need the guys from Astral Aura Detection to help him find a cursed item from a mountain of random things. And he could tell what kind of threat was planted inside an item with just one touch. That was a really rare gift. Kai had a feeling that Reita’s uncle-the priest that he had mentioned in several occasions-knew about this as well, and that’s why he had been making him work in the shrine as some sort of training for Reita without Reita himself realizing it.
Kai suspected that the same knowledge of Reita’s ability was what had been bothering Ruki ever since the kid entered the institute. Ruki envied Reita who could perform all the work in the section without having to spend so much time learning or practicing like Ruki had to.
Kai heaved a long sigh; he had to try to stay positive and simply be thankful that the work today had been completed successfully. And despite Ruki saying that it might have taken three hours to get the job done, Reita had finished it in approximately one hour.
Kai had watched the whole procession; first Reita had cut off the teddy bear’s head, and then pulled out the Dacron fillings from inside the head. Soon afterward, he had extracted a lock of straight, dark brown hair from within. Holding the lock of hair in his hand, he had murmured a long line of mantras that Kai couldn’t quite comprehend.
“I didn’t bring my things with me today,” Reita had said after he had finished muttering the mantras. “To finish the cleansing I need to complete the rituals, and I can’t do that without my things. Do you need this to be done immediately?”
Kai had said yes-the sooner the task was done, the better. So two hours ago Reita had ridden home on his motorbike with the teddy bear in his bag, and just now he had called Kai on his cellphone, telling him that the job had been done successfully. The jinx was gone.
He took a peek at his wristwatch and saw that it was ten minutes to seven p.m. Some of his staff members were already preparing to leave the office, Byou being the most anxious of them all. He must have made peace with his boyfriend if he was that impatient to go home. Deciding that he too should get prepared, Kai turned off his computer, drank that one last drop of coffee from his glass, and stood up from his seat. And that was when his cellphone rang in his pocket.
Without checking the caller ID first, he picked up the phone. “Hello?”
The voice that answered was unintelligible at first, filled with nothing but stuttered words and trembling gasps. It took him a while to recognize who it was on the other end of the line, because since he met Shiroyama Yuu, Kai had never heard him sound so scared and panicked before.
“Help me,” said Yuu, the fear in his voice was so audible that it couldn’t possibly be an act. “It’s not gone… It’s still here… It’s still here…!”
- TO BE CONTINUED -
Previous chapters: 1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4
Fanfic list here.