Chapter 1

Kimura Yuu was not a happy woman. At 16, her parents and most of the rest of the world considered her a girl, but in her mind she was a woman. And that's what's important. Nick, however, didn't seem to care what she thought on the matter, and that bothered her more than she liked to admit. So, to clarify the matter, she brought the subject up and confronted him directly with it. It was after school and late in the day, her parents had left Tokyo on a business venture for a few days, and the two 16 year olds were alone. She had set the stage perfectly, fresh from her bath, hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, wearing nothing but some very provocative red lingerie that she had been hiding from her mother and one of Nick's t-shirts. The shirt that was a snug fit on Nick's broad shoulders and long body actually covered more of her skin than most of her dresses and certainly more than any of her skirts. Some of those skirts were as provocative as the red lingerie, if not more so.

Now understand: the young Ms. Kimura was "tiny" in no way, shape, or form. Yuu's father, Yoshito, stood just a little taller than six feet. Kimura Yoshito was built like a blade, long and sharp. Thin as a rail and with a face made up from sharp angles and nothing else, he looked as much a foreigner as his Norse wife and the strange guest in his house. In everything but height, Hilde was her husband's polar opposite; 6'3", all softness and curves, pale-skinned, white-blonde hair, and stunning corn-flower blue eyes. Her tongue and wit, however, was every bit as razor sharp as her husband's face.

The Kimura clan traced its heritage to a lone Mongol soldier, nearly 800 years past. Left for dead by his fellow soldiers, the man crawled away from the site of the Mongol's expeditionary forces only skirmish with the Japanese army. The Mongol tribesman eventually made his way to a small village. The residents, specifically one young woman, took pity on the wounded man, and nursed him back to health. The man decided to stay with the village, became a hunter and trader, and took that young woman as his wife. Several years later, the two were "gifted" with a daughter. No one is really sure how the founders of the Kimura House actually felt about having a daughter, but, in a nod to "politik" and tact, we'll say they felt 'gifted'. The daughter grew up and married a minor government official by the name of Kimura.

And thus we have the Kimura Clan.

In nearly a millennium, Yuu was the first of the Kimura's to even appear half-Japanese. Yet another point of pride for the young woman. In coloration and features, Yuu was unquestionably Japanese, but as for her eyes and proportions, she took after her mother. Her mother's cornflower-blue eyes, hair blacker than night, two inches beneath six feet and very well endowed (38-29-37 with DD-cups), she didn't just turn heads, she gave men whiplash.

When she confronted Nick, clad only in red unmentionables and one of his shirts, he was in her father's dojo, sitting in the lotus position and meditating. Bare-chested, he was heavily muscled, but not in the manner of body builders or even athletes. His were the broad and flat muscles of a natural fighter, gained by constant fighting as opposed to any training regimen. She silently slipped into the dojo and lay down right in front of him. As quietly as she could, she rearranged the shirt to reveal as much of her legs and curves as possible and still maintain at least a semblance of innocence and the demure school girl. Hoping to be able to surprise him, Yuu struck her pose and, in naturally sultry and dulcet tones, she finally spoke to him:

(Note****unless otherwise noted, all of the following dialogue will be in Japanese, however, I find keeping track of all their honorifics horribly annoying, and so I will ignore them)

"Hey, Nick."

"Yo," rumbled out of nearly motionless lips. Otherwise, Nick remained utterly still, the picture of classic Buddhist meditation. Her elbow on the hard floor of the dojo, her hand supporting her elegant neck, she reached out to him with her free hand to run a delicate finger along the thin and ugly scar that encircled most of his neck (the exception being a smooth expanse, three inches broad, at the nape of his abused neck).

"What did you say your voice was called? I mean if you were a singer?" Innocuous in her question, innocent in her tone, her finger strayed from his throat to trace the line of his strong jaw and sharp chin, only to drift again to the odd puckered scars that dotted his chest and abdomen. The only remnants of seven bullets that had briefly intruded upon Nick's body, having exited just as quickly as they entered. Another rumble:

"It was Basso Profundo*(* = not in Japanese)." Only now did Nick deign to open his eyes. She had been waiting for just this moment intent to see what part of her his eyes would adhere to. In this, Nick managed to disappoint her yet again; his eyes immediately fastened upon her own. Not to say that the contact wasn't exciting in its own way, it just wasn't what she had expected. It should be explained that Nick had very strange eyes. Even when opened wide, unlike most people, Nick's eyes showed very little white. The iris covered almost all of his eye, at least most of what was visible to observers. His pupils were proportionally larger than most peoples' as well, able to expand to cover most of the iris.

"Thanks Nick, I can never remember." Yuu had gotten used to him not quite meeting her expectations and didn't let it faze her. She continued her one handed exploration of his chest and shoulders, letting her gaze drop from his own to follow her fingers as she traced the paths of his scars. "'Basso Profundo.'* What is that? Italian? Greek? Maybe Latin?"

"You expect me to know?" An arch tone, his eyes still focused on her's. Yuu was thinking that although his eyes were undeniably blue, they were such a different shade that they might as well have been red for all the similarities to her own eyes. His blue eyes were dark and cold, but the way that the light always caught them, they could have been small blue flames, dancing in his head. Cobalt was the closest she had come to matching the color, but that didn't quite work either.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do expect you to know." Her tone was light as her fingers began to tread the portions of his body unmarred by scars. His golden/olive hued skin bore no other form of blemish. She glanced over his face, taking in the mane of deep auburn hair that fell to his shoulders, the unique cant of his full lips, the well-proportioned size and angle of his not quite Ethiopian/Arab nose, his heavy and very definitely Slavic brow, the perfect arch of his eyebrows over the deep set sockets, and the oriental cast of his almond shaped eyes. His face, like her father's, was a thing of strong angles and sharp edges. However, while her father's face was razor sharp, Nick's face drew the eye to the planes between high cheek bones and sharp jaw, square chin, and broad forehead. She reflected on the strange history of the family that produced Nicholas Szen-Wei and decided that it made her otherwise rather exotic origins wonderfully mundane.

"Hah! Well, I'm sorry to inform ya that I am equally ignorant of the phrase's origin." The rumbles had smoothed to bone thrumming resonance.

"You're lying to me Nick."

"Indeed, I am."

"So... the truth now." Her fingers continued their exploration.

"But Yuu, I have given you the truth 'now'."

"What?" Only now did her fingers stumble for a moment. They resumed quickly enough to make one wonder at the pause.

"I admitted I was lyin' to ya."

"You know that wasn't what I was talking about."

"Indeed." Sonorous was the intonation, blank was his expression.

"I was asking about the 'Basso Profundo.'*" A reproof.

"Indeed." Sonorous and blank.

"So..." Imploring.

"'So, ' indeed." Sonorous and a hint of mirth.

"Bastard." Affectionate.

"HA! You've got no idea, girl. No idea at all."

"You know, Nick," her eyes were downcast and demure, "we're all alone tonight." She drew her legs up and under herself and scooted closer to him on her knees. Both her hands were tracing little circles across his knees through the heavy canvas of his pants. She leaned forward, affording Nick a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage through the shirt's wide collar. She let her hands drift across the line of his legs until she rested her palms atop his thighs. Her face inches from his, through her eyelashes, she finally met the still motionless Nick's inquisitive stare. "I'm not a girl anymore, Nick. I—"

"What?" His sudden and sharp response set her back. She rested her magnificent rump on her heels, and her hands finally left his body to take hold of the shirt at her lap and start to wring it in anxiety.

"Nick? What is it?" Running through her head right then was 'he thinks I'm ugly... oh God he hates me, he doesn't want me, he thinks I'm ugly—that's why he wasn't moving—I'm too ugly for him to feel that way about me, that blonde girl in America, he wants her, he thinks she's pretty, oh God why couldn't I look more like Mom—'. She watched him, seeing he was holding himself rigid now, whereas before he had simply not been moving. A faint look of panic crossed his features. She could feel tears beginning to form and blur her vision. In a heartsick voice he asked:

"You've sprouted male genitalia?"

His question banished all thought from her mind and her tears weren't even a memory. In their place, a hazy sort of anger, outrage, and indignation reared up.

"WHAT!?" was the only thing she could manage to say and even that was tinted with a snarl.

"You haven't—oh thank Christ." He let out a heavy sigh, his legs slipping out of their tangled position, and he slumped forward to wrap his arms around his knees. "I know some weird-ass shit happens around me, but that would just be too much. I mean, I know some guys have fantasies and get turned on by the thought of a woman built like you having a penis and all, but not me. I'm a simple boy—I see a pretty woman, we talk, we touch, we explore a variety of interesting positions, and that's about the extent of my fantasies. I'm not even all that interested in the idea of two girls at once; a fact that would have many questioning my manhood. But anyway, pretty girls leave my insides tied up in knots, send my mind reeling and my tongue stumbling. And Yuu, you are stunningly beautiful, freakin' drop-dead gorgeous, and I'm surprised I can be coherent whenever we're in the same room. If you suddenly weren't simply the most beautiful woman I knew, but something else, I'd have to reevaluate everything. I don't want to have to do that, I'm perfectly happy having you be unutterably beautiful, and I don't want to complicate things."

"You think I'm beautiful?" She had been listening to his relieved explanation rather selectively: 'most beautiful woman', 'unutterably beautiful', 'stunning', and 'gorgeous'. Her thoughts: I can work with that.

"Good, good," Nick was nodding to himself, "beautiful 'she-males' are a bit beyond me, but beautiful and dumb I can handle." Nick's sudden grin belying the words, and a quick duck and weave saw him past her half-hearted retaliation.

Thusly was it that another of Kimura Yuu's assaults in her campaign for Nicholas Szen-Wei's body and soul was overturned with nary a drop of blood shed by either party. (Ha! I like that sentence! It's grammatically correct, but, for rhythm's sake a few words should be shortened and traded (e.g. 'o'ertuned').) And so it was that the friends spent the evening trading words and naught else, those words leading them deep into the night. They spoke of many things, mundane and extraordinary: the differences between Tokyo and Baltimore (Nick's home), the girl for whom Nick pined (who was back in Baltimore, but more of her later) and Yuu hoped to steal him from in the final month he remained in her home, and, finally, Magic. It was magic they were speaking on when the terrible crash interrupted them.

A fear-laden darkness swept through the House of Kimura, a physical presence that could be felt, even tasted, that seemed to creep and fill the dojo with horrible pressure that grew and grew. Through the terror that gripped her, Yuu finally understood what the crunching sounds that continued to grow must mean; the approach of whatever had caused the darkness that drained the warmth from her body, and drained her mind of everything but fear. She had to force herself to breathe. In seconds the darkness covered everything save a single stray beam of a strange shade of blue. Yuu turned to find its source and only found Nick, sitting once more in the lotus, clenched fists in his lap. The light seemed to make flames dance in his eyes, even as it illuminated the lines of his face, drawn in an implacable and bleak anger that promised nothing but death. He spoke:

"Demon." Although she understood what he had said, it wasn't Japanese he was speaking. She focused on understanding the word to draw herself away from the strangling darkness. It wasn't English or any other language she knew or knew of. That single word was, at once, sibilant and guttural, soft and harsh. She tried repeating the syllables Nick had uttered, but all that came out was "Demon", and nothing approaching Nick's word.

And suddenly the ability for any thought at all was beyond her. The 'Demon' had arrived. The creature just stepped through the wall, flooding the room with oppressive and dull orange illumination. It stood over ten feet tall at what can only be assumed was its shoulder (it is a bit difficult to discern specific body parts with demons). It was a stomach turning mix of fur, flesh, scales, and chitin. Lacking any hint of symmetry or proportion, it looked nothing like what you would think a demon would look like. The creature was so far removed from humanity and the world that its features were simply incomprehensible.

This one has come for your Name, human. Relinquish.

The words reverberated through Yuu's skull, dissonance and sheer volume that felt like razor blades. But suddenly Nick was standing between the Demon and her and the clamor in her mind was quieted. She had not seen him move, not when he rose to his feet, not when he stepped past her, and not when he positioned himself between her and the thing that had invaded her home. He was, at one instant, sitting a foot behind and away from her, visible from the corner of her eye, and the next he was ten feet in front of her, breaking her contact with one of the Demon's eyes ('one' is stated as it seemed to have several dozen). She decided that it was safer for her to try to figure that out than to try and deal with the Demon.

"Beast, know ye not who I be? Surely thou mustn't, to invade this House that I call mine. Make ye purpose clear, Beast, for this Invasion be grounds for War between ye Kin and Me an' Mine." Nick's strange speech was delivered with chilling detachment and a horrifying sense of gravitas. Each word carried with it the sound of a sledgehammer striking concrete; heavy, powerful, and the promise of destruction. Yuu was having difficulty believing the change that had come over Nicholas. Her Nick was calm, quiet in both his words and actions, and possessed of a constant and, usually, subtle humor (sometimes not so subtle). Almost nothing phased him or even surprised him, and not a single thing in the world could make Nick worry. Their conversation earlier that night had been the first time she had seen him taken by surprise. In all of this, however, Nick was warm. He projected a sense of warmth, kindness, and care. The man who stood between the beast and her was not warm—not that she was complaining, of course.

The Demon was laughing; a feeling like waves crashing assaulted Yuu's mind. Long has it been since this one has heard the bastardized Speech of this realm. The intensity of the creature's words seemed to be further dampened by Nick's presence, making them a dull ache rather than razorblades. Amused this one may be, but this one has not the time nor inclination to trade Words with you, Mageling. Relinquish the female and this one shall not Devour you. Fear tore at Yuu anew with the Demon's proclamation.

"The girl be Mine, Beast, and none shall be taking her from me." Rigid with rage, Nick delivered his own proclamation in a growl that shook the room. His words removed all fear and thoughts of the Demon from Yuu. In their place, warmth and satisfaction suffused her. He called me his own; he wants me. Not even the Demon's sudden attention could dampen the feelings that now gripped her and she found a tight grin spreading across her face.