The Demonic Year

Hello, I'm sure all of you hate me for that cliffhanger I left, but I had to.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the next chapter!

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Last time:

Hiei's eyes widened and she stopped struggling. It was impossible, utterly impossible, but there was no way in Makai that this was a coincidence.

The figure behind her chuckled and set her back down on the ground and turned her around to face him. Hiei's mouth dropped open and her mind was flooded with sudden thoughts and questions. But only one thing came out of her mouth.

"Father?"

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The man in front of Hiei let out a heartfelt laugh. He stepped out of the shadows and bent down to ruffle her hair, giving her a fanged-smile. Hiei's eye twitched and smacked the hand off of her head.

"What the hell? How are you – why are you – arrgg!" Hiei paced in a circle, unsure of what to do or how to react to the person in front of her whom she had always assumed to be dead. She wanted to kill him, but she wanted him to answer so many of her questions.

"You seem a bit confused." Hiei wheeled around on her heel to face the very source of her frustrations.

"You! Why are you here?"

Hiei's father gave her a questioning look before he answered. "So I can bring you back to the Makai to be my heir."

"You idiot! You can't do that!" Hiei shrieked at him. Hiei's father gave her a curious look.

"Why not?"

"I'm on a mission, for one. Secondly, I'm already someone else's heir. And finally, because I just met you. Where the hell have you been all this time?"

"In my kingdom in Makai. I didn't know you were claimed by someone else. I'll remedy that later. What about your sister?"

"You know about Yukina too? You knew about us this whole time and didn't bother to lift a finger to help your own offspring? What is wrong with you?" Hiei was screaming in frustration by now, her face was red and she was struggling to breathe from yelling so hard at her own father.

The smile on her father's face slipped into a frown, he walked up and grabbed both of her shoulders and brought his face mere inches away from hers.

"Yes, I knew about both of you, but there was nothing I could do. When I went to meet up with your mother, the person I had treasured above everything else, only to be told that she had given birth before killing herself because they threw one of her twins off of the island, I searched desperately for you, leaving your sister behind in the care of your mother's best friend. Do you know how I felt when I couldn't track you down? I felt like the worst father to ever have been placed in the Makai, and that's pretty low. I couldn't tell where you were because I was so desperately looking for a power source that felt close to either your mother's or mine, but I'm only one demon, the only one who knew what your mother's felt like anyways, and to search the entirety of Makai is completely impossible. I sent out so many of my guards and subjects just to look for you, and every time they came back empty-handed I felt like a failure as a father! I was constantly thinking that you were dead, and I couldn't go back for your sister because she belonged with the people of her own kind, and it's not like they would let me leave with her anyways. Please, I know you're confused and bitter and all of that other stuff, but I want you to know that I do care so much for you, don't you dare think otherwise!"

At the end of his rant, Hiei's father let go of Hiei's shoulders and stepped back to give his daughter a bit of room. He knew it was a lot of information to absorb and he didn't want her to stress herself out, but it had to be said; this was an emotional reunion for him too, maybe he shouldn't have brought it up. This was his first time dealing with his own kid, after all. He sighed, it wasn't like he could take it back; plus, if she could survive on her own in the Makai, then she should be able to handle this. Maybe. Would other parents have done this? The demon gave himself a mental shake, being a father was hard!

Hiei let herself calm down, restoring her face back to its natural pale complexion. So, there had been one person who had cared. The news brought her spirits up a bit, but guilt started to flare up for blaming her father, whom she had just met, for her and her sister's suffering. She lifted up her head to get a better look at the man. The first thing she noticed about him was that he looked like the taller version of her male self, except there was this happy overtone about him that she never had around herself.

"Let me introduce myself properly. Hello there, I'm Takeshi, king of the Downlands*." Hiei made a mental not to herself to remember that before introducing herself.

"I'm Hiei. Now, let's get down to business. How did you find me, or this place to be exact?"

"How could I not find it? It's right next to this big forest." Hiei slapped her hand to her forehead at that, the school was supposed to be magically protected and he had just waltzed in as if it were nothing? "But, I was finally able to find you when your spiritual pressure let out that signal."

"Signal? What the hell are you even talking about?"

"Did anything happen yesterday that let out some weird kind of spiritual pressure?" Hiei nodded her head in response, and her father let out a short bark of laughter. "Then that's the signal I was talking to you about. Let me explain, when you are in some sort of terrible mortal danger or having an extreme mental breakdown, then your spiritual pressure sends out a signal to me, as your father, so that I will know something bad is happening. By the way, what happened to cause that signal? Does it have to do with why you are hanging around a bunch of humans?"

"No, it does not pertain to the reason that I am surrounding myself with humans. In fact, I'm fine, what's done is done, and I never wish to speak of it again. The reason I'm here, truthfully, is that I'm on a mission. Seeing as I'm a member of the Rekai Tentai, I get employed by Koenma to do these stupid jobs and work with three other morons."

"Employed by Koenma? As in the kid of Enma, the king of Rekai? That's, uh, different."

"You suck at lying." Hiei's father let out a small laugh and grabbed Hiei by the shoulders, pulling her in for a hug.

"You're funny kid, did you know that?" Hiei lifter an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. "Anyways, who are these three teammates of yours?"

"One is an incompetent human and the other two are technically half-demons. Kuwabara, Kurama, and Yuusuke." When she finished her sentence, she felt her father freeze up a bit. Had he already meet one of them or something?

"They are all boys?" Hiei looked up to her father in confusion. Of course they were all boys, seeing as they all had male names.

"Yes." And that's when Hiei felt all of the oxygen leave her system. Takeshi had pulled her into a bear hug and started shouting curses at something or another. After a few minutes, she was finally able to pull herself free, but not without having to set them on fire, again.

"How are you the only girl in the group?"

"I don't know, I'm not in control of what gender everyone in the three worlds gets to be!"

"I want to talk to them." Hiei now looked at Takeshi as if he had grown another head. He couldn't meet them because, well, she didn't know, but there shouldn't be a meeting anyways. This man just shows up out of nowhere and demands to see the idiots that she works with! Why did she have to be here?

"No."

"Don't 'no' me young lady. I'm your father, and I demand to see the three boys."

"Only two of them are here."

"I demand to see those two boys." Hiei let out a defeated sigh. The man already went through all of the school's barriers and could probably come in whenever he felt like it and try to find Kurama and Yuusuke by himself, which would most likely end in disaster. She might as well just get it over with.

"Fine."

"Good. I'm glad we agreed on this." Rolling her eyes, Hiei started to lead the way to the school building, that is, until her father placed a hand on her shoulder.

"I'm going to warn you, like any good father should do, that while you repeatedly set me and yourself on fire, your clothes burned off." Hiei's eyes widened and quickly looked down, only to discover that her fire-proof undergarmets where the only thing covering her body. She felt a blush rise and forced down a good bit of it.

"I'll just telepathically call them over here, then, and make sure they bring me clothes." Her father nodded in satisfaction before sitting down on the ground to make himself comfortable. Hiei sighed and opened her Jagan eye.

"Yuusuke, Kurama, I need you two to come to the forest with some clothes and prepare yourselves for an interrogation."

Hiei didn't wait for a reply before shutting the Jagan eye closed and sitting on a nearby tree stump.

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Yuusuke rushed down from the Gryffindor common rooms after Hermione had gone up to her and Hiei's shared dorm room and gotten Hiei's extra clothes. He had nearly run into other students and professors walking around the castle and practically tripped down all of the stairs. It was really hard to rush down stairs that moved. Yuusuke soon saw Kurama hurriedly walking the same way he was, towards the front door, and joined him as they opened it together.

"What do you think Hiei was talking about? I didn't think that she would let a demon live long enough to interrogate it."

"You're right. It's quite strange, but everything about this place is. Maybe Hiei is a bit more rational as a girl."

"I don't think there are enough miracles in the three worlds to be able to do that."

"I didn't think so either, but what other excuse is there?"

"Well, we are about to find out, aren't we?"

Both boys had hurried to the edge of the forest and were feeling around for Hiei's demonic signature, when Yuusuke ran straight into what looked to be Hiei, but taller, and not female.

Yuusuke was just about to point it out to him, when the real Hiei, seeing as she was a girl and the right height (and nude, his brain added), popped her head around the corner.

"You sure took your sweet time getting here." Neither Yuusuke nor Kurama responded, as both were focusing on the tall Hiei look-alike staring straight back at them.

"Are these the two boys you work with?"

"Yep." Both Kurama and Yuusuke were looking back and forth between the stranger and Hiei, and they both suddenly figured out that they weren't doing the interrogating, but the larger Hiei was.

"Let's get this over with. Yuusuke, Kurama, this is my father, Takeshi. Takeshi this is Yuusuke and Kurama."

Yuusuke jerked his head around to face Hiei: since when did she have a father?

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Notes: The Downlands, where Hiei's father lives and rules is in a special place in Makai where only demons who have been born there and demons that prove their trustworthyness can know where it is and how to get in. This is why no one else knows where it is and why it has its own king, who just so happens to be Takeshi. Also, the reason Takeshi's clothes didn't burn off is because he is a king, and can therefore buy his own fireproof clothing.