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        The little she-bitch would die. She had decided that the moment she
had found Crystal, broken and beaten, in the alley behind the arcade. From
where she had knelt beside her, she could still hear the faint sounds of
cheering and laughter as Dave and Anna hammered it out against C-55s and BU-
12Bs on two BGC-DOOMS while Lenore and Angela screamed insults at one another
with as little real animosity as usual and the others milled about, waiting
for other games to be free and all keeping an eye out for one another. It was
useless to try overtly to watch their leader's back; she was as likely to
flatten anyone who suggested she couldn't cope with anything that came her
way, especially now. Crystal's helpless whimpering had stopped as she'd
reached a hand to her cheek, then the blue eyes had opened to look up at her.
For a moment they'd regarded one another, her own gaze frigid with the promise
of revenge for this. Then she was on her feet, flying back towards the arcade,
screaming for the others.
        That had been a mere ten minutes before. She had not waited for the
ambulance; she couldn't afford to wait. She had headed straight for Faegan's,
hoping to reach the drug-hole before they realised the mistake they'd made in
pushing her this far and went to ground for the duration.
        She had been lucky. Gema and the goon-squad were still there, probably
waiting for Harrison to call to let them know what she and the others were
doing after he'd finished with Crystal. She'd found that idea amusing.
Harrison would never talk again. Lenore and Michael should be just about
finished with him by now; just about.
        It had been easy. All she needed to do was to remember little, fiery
Crystal's helpless broken form and that she was dealing with drug-trafficking,
gutter-licking filth and she didn't have to hold anything back. She had
smashed the first of the hired help, a Viet she noted fleetingly, into the
brick-work of the club's entrance with such force that the impact had
shattered his spine like kindling. Kicking the semi-automatic from the hand of
a huge jamaican with a snap that smashed his wrist to pulp, she leapt, flipped
and landed, slamming the third bodily through the plate-glass door, flicking
out the tiny stiletto even as she followed, driving the fine dart-like blade
to the hilt through his spinal chord just below the neck before wrenching it
free and diving over him, already running before his body had tumbled to a
stop. She was through the club and out into the darker passages behind almost
before the panic had begun. Then there was the dimly lit stairway and the
voices from the room at the smaller passage's farther end. Racing for the
closed door, she had slammed it open, leapt through and hurled the blade into
the throat of the first of Gema's personal guard even as he looked up, turning
only to smash the other over a table and through the window on the room's
farther side before she was beside Gema, another blade already at her throat.
        "Lock the door." She snarled softly.
        The little she-cat ducked, trying desperately to twist towards her, a
knife in her hand. Dropping her own blade, she slammed her to the table and
slapped the knife to the farther side of the room. Something cracked and Gema
screamed. She ignored her, pivoting to the door in time to flick her last
blade through the left eye of the gunman in the doorway.
        "You should have used that." She said calmly as she retrieved his
weapon and the tiny knife, pitched the dying body from the room and slammed
and locked the door.
        "Now then, where were we?" She inquired almost pleasantly, moving to
Gema's groaning form, pausing to retrieve her other blades and re-sheathe them
before dragging the dealer-hit-girl up by her hair.
        There was a crash at the door, then another and a moment later it
burst inwards. She smiled as three blades flew and three men screamed and
fell. Then the fourth entered with a pistol in his hand.
        "Put that down." He snarled quietly, jerking a finger at the last
blade she held to Gema's throat.
        "We'll go together, your little pay-mistress and I." She said calmly,
her eyes never leaving his face, her own expression utterly devoid of fear.
        "If that's how you want it. Doesn't matter to--."
        The knife slashed his jugular before he'd finished, embedding itself
in the door-jam behind him. He screamed, a thin gurgling sound, even as she
whirled, pausing only to crack Gema's neck with a quick twist of her hand.
        "You f***in' bish." Came a gurgling slur from behind her.
        In the midst of her leap to the window she half turned, in time to see
the man, blood pulsing between his fingers as he clutched uselessly at his
neck, stagger up, the pistol still in his hand. Her feet hit the sill and she
hurled herself forwards, somersaulting towards the alley below. Then there was
a crack from behind her and the world exploded in reds and yellows, even as
she plunged towards, then through the street to fall, choking back a scream of
shock, into the oblivion beyond.
                                     ** ** **
        Dark Chronicles
        An anime/Manga Cross-over
                                     ** ** **
        Chapter 2:
                                     ** ** **
        When he was a boy, Johnathan Liam O'Reilly had loved the journeys home
late at night after a visit to one of his seemingly innumerable relations.
Curled up snug and warm under a blanket on the back seat of the family Rolls
Royce, he would lie still, eyes closed, listening to the soothing rumble of
the road beneath them and the gentle purr of the big engine and drift in a
half-dream, watching the patterns that danced upon the very verge of sleep,
listening to his parents' quiet talk and imagining that an as yet unnamed
brother or sister he'd always wanted, to be settled at his side or waiting in
the huge, too-empty house for his return. They could stay awake far into the
night and talk about the Shire or Narnia and perhaps one day they might find
some ancient cave that would lead them to Middle-Earth or a secret door into
the land of Aslan where they might journey to the beautiful castle of Kair
Paravel at the margins of the sea or even to the far country of the great Lion
himself. He would always wake a little as his father drew into the long, tree-
shrouded driveway, then stir still more as he was lifted by him or his mother,
still wrapped in the blanket, to be carried into the house and up the wide,
curving stairway to his huge yet cluttered attic domain, a domain that should
have been a nursery for a large and merry family of children. Then alone in
the dark he would lie awake, listening to the faint ticking of the grandfather
clock in the hall, one of four the house possessed, and pray silently and with
fervour to the lord and the virgin that a brother or sister might be there
when he awoke the following morning, or that at least some new boy or girl
might be at school, a boy or girl who could share dreams that no one seemed to
understand and for which the other children laughed at him and threw peals and
called him mad Paddy and feather-head and book-worm, or stepped on his school-
bag and took his lunch when he wasn't able to stop them.
        He had hated them, not simply for their teasing, but for the fact that
they liked all that stupid screaming rap-music and Michael Jackson and Death
Leopard or whatever they were and it was all out of tune and rubbish and they
were all halfwits and cads and they didn't know toss about when something was
in tune and well played and he just hated them all and wished that a black
rider or nine would simply appear and carry every last one of the stupid,
idiotic, worthless, vile, horrible, slimy rotten little dirty Orc-faced rats
off to some dark fate that would see every one of them gone forever and then
some.
        Johnathan had not liked the children with which he had been forced to
go to school, he had not liked them at all. Things would be better, he had,
for a brief time, believed, when he began at thirteen in his new school, but
he had been mistaken. He had always been small for his age and at thirteen he
had discovered that he needed glasses and that, contrary to what his father
had assured him, his growth seemed to be slowing rather than hitting the spurt
for which he'd been waiting for what seemed to be as long as he could
remember. He found friends of a sort, some few introverted, book-bound boys
like himself who would at least talk to him, but they had interests other than
his own and, being an only child and forced more or less without respite to
play alone, he was no longer capable of any real compromise. If there were any
differences, and these usually came down to some music other than the Irish
and Celtic influences he loved or a disinterest in classical history or, most
hurtful although not most important, comments concerning his own hopeless
physical ineptitude and inability to defend himself in a fight, Johnathan
would erupt in a quick explosive flare of wild Irish temper followed by a very
un-Irish-like sullenness that discouraged any further intimacy.
        Johnathan had drifted through his later school years, concentrating
his time ever more completely on his own dreams and fantasies, not caring to
exert himself, deliberately under-achieving both to avoid notice and to spite
the too-rich parents who gave him all he wished save for praise and attention
and the teachers who knew his true abilities but refused to try to understand
him, whilst secretly devouring everything the school, then the public,
libraries had to offer.
        It was during his fifteenth year that he first began seriously to
write, and with that, to imagine her, a wild, perfect anima to his own
loneliness, isolation and perceived inadequacies. Joanna Marina O'Reilly
became in his mind part the sister and part simply the confidante he would
never have, an invisible presence able to understand his troubles and into
whom he could channel all the rage and frustration he had not the power or
confidence to show.
        From the first she was an impossibility, a street-wise virago with a
heart laced with pain and bitterness and the need to escape the life of
deprivation she was forced to lead, beaten mercilessly as a small child by
parents who could not have cared less about her until at last, on her ninth
birthday, when her twisted parody of a father had tried to make the almost
daily physical abuse into something more, she had driven a knife at his throat
at a critical moment and sent him crashing screaming through the bathroom
window of their tiny eleventh-storey flat to a broken, bloody end in the alley
behind the tenement in which they lived, threatening to see the mother she
hated but from whom she refused to run to the same end should she not swear it
to have been his own drunken lust that had killed him.
        From that day forth she had set herself to pay her mother back a
thousand-fold for every day of suffering. By the time Joanna had reached her
twelfth year, Marina O'Reilly was in perpetual terror of her daughter,
cringing whenever she attracted her notice despite an attempt at callous
authority long since lost to her, surrendering with shaking hands nearly all
the money she made from selling her despicable, whoring body to any filth, man
or woman, Johnathan decided, sick and perverse enough to indulge in such
corruption and take her, so twisted as to enjoy and even seek out such
attentions, while her daughter spent her days winning back the self-confidence
her parents had tried to take from her with a frigid, righteous ruthlessness
that soon had every child she knew and some far older either in wide-eyed awe
or terrified of her and every teacher desperate for her to be placed anywhere
but under their jurisdiction.
        Joanna's fourteenth birthday, Johnathan decreed, saw her celebrate
with the killing of a dealer five years her senior who had tried, none too
subtly, to convince her that it might be in her interests to sell just what he
wished, when and where he wished, including at her school and especially to
those so stupid as to consider a cheap little street-bitch like her able to
protect them, in fact, she might sell something else too, he had leered.
Having determined her, by that stage, to have been training for years in every
form of martial art and physical combat of which she could learn, Johnathan
took great pains to have her humiliate the underworld filth, to have him plead
and beg and scream for mercy before he died whimpering at last like the
gutter-slime his kind were. He could picture clearly the absolution of
triumph, contempt and disgust that filled her face as she left him at last to
choke and moan his last.
        Like all those of her circumstances, his anima grew up too quickly,
her reputation for almost inconceivable righteous, unrelenting brutality and
bloodshed towards dealers, pimps, whores and any underworld pig-swill that
dared so much as think of her, soon so infamous that they both avoided her and
set a very high price on her head. She gave no quarter, beating, and, when
possible with impunity, killing anyone who crossed her with a savagery and
inventive flare that had even the coldest and most depraved soon too terrified
to consider touching her. So she grew in his mind, a girl of his own age, an
avenging bean-sidhe almost eleven inches taller than his pitiful five-foot
one, an impossibly, devastatingly attractive amazon with long flaming red hair
and blazing, emerald eyes, a savage, desperate creature convinced that she was
both physically plain, bordering on repulsive (and heaven help anyone who
dared call her beautiful as she knew herself not to be and they must be trying
to gain some perverse advantage over her) and incapable of any emotion save
rage and vengeance, supremely confident in her ability both in the destruction
of any enemy and the certainty that, no matter what, she would shape her own
destiny, a perfect singer and a player of the celtic harp, a soul whom,
beneath the wild, raging exterior, in a part of her mind scarcely acknowledged
even to herself, cried out through the pain of the music of her celtic
ancestry and the fantasies she would create in the quiet darkness when none
could see the hurt or the tears, raging at the injustice and sickening
perversity of her circumstances, longing only to escape to a place where she
could find peace and happiness.
        Such over nearly two years was the anima he had created and the finer
points of whose history now held his attention as he sat, staring moodily at
the note-book Pentium on his lap, trying to decide just how much of her story
to include in the fantasy novel he had recently begun to write to the
detriment of his final year of schooling. She, of course, would be the
character shifted from his world to the universe of magic and darkness, a
being far more worthy than he to be given such a chance, yet still close
enough to him in those ways that mattered for him to understand that, in every
way that mattered, it would be his ideal, the supremely confident self, that
would make the journey. Not that he had even the tiniest flicker of a desire
to be female, indeed quite the reverse. He already knew himself to be more
than hopelessly smitten by his creation, that was part of her appeal and a
necessary result of his own pain and trouble. She was his perfection, a
creature lost and lonely as himself who could, despite their differences,
understand him and whom he could draw from the ruin of her life to a new
beginning.
        Johnathan sighed. His parents were talking easily in the front of the
car, as usual ignoring the small, frail youth with too-thick glasses and
quick, jerky movements who had been such a disappointment but who could, it
seemed, be placated with enough of an allowance to buy virtually anything he
could wish. Johnathan wished that they would simply shut up for five seconds.
It was proving impossible to concentrate with all their mindless prattle about
lord Rutherford's dismissing of his butler or what lady Madeline had worn to
the ball to which he had been forced to go that evening and which had put him
in a mood more foul than he had thought was possible, or why their son was
such a hopeless incompetent when it came to girls. Naturally, no girl had been
interested in him, nor could he have cared less about any of the shallow, air-
headed makeup-ridden shrews his parents now despaired that he should ever
attract. He was a hopeless dancer in any case and, usually an elegant speaker
(if nothing else, his years of reading had given him that), he seemed simply
to lose all ability to think or react when a girl spoke to him.
        "...and I just couldn't believe Johnathan ignored her!" His mother
continued. "To think that he could be so impossibly, disgracefully impolite
when it was perfectly obvious Mariane was willing to dance with him."
        `Willing to dance!'
        Johnathan fumed silently. The vicious little she-cat was trying to
show him up in front of all her friends, just to see him squirm. He had heard
the giggles and seen the pointing and if his mother thought he was such a
blind, hopeless fool --. He glared and turned back to the note-book. That did
it. Joanna was about to gain more of his rage and with it, abilities beyond
the capacity for purely physical mayhem far sooner than he had originally
intended. She would meet such a little she-bitch soon after entering his
created world and tear the twisted, vicious little cat to shreds. Johnathan
moved his hands to the keyboard, and the machine flashed another battery
warning and a moment later, went dark.
        "BakaBakaBakaBakaBAKA!" Johnathan swore savagely under his breath.
        Manga and anime were a recent experience for him and he, being a
strict and practicing Roman Catholic and refusing to swear both because he
didn't like it and because everyone else swore, had begun to use such terms,
especially within hearing of his parents, who were convinced they meant
something very unpleasant and who would get furious, much to his satisfaction.
        With another glare at them, after all if they hadn't distracted him he
could have had more written, Johnathan put the note-book away and sighed
again. They were all but home, he consoled himself. At least then, once he'd
bathed and dressed for bed, he could settle in his room and, under the
pretence of some homework or other needing to be finished before the school
camp that was to begin tomorrow, he could get back to the epic again.
                                     * * *
        "and see that you put the clothes *outside* your bathroom door."
        His mother's voice was the cold clipped tones of righteous
indignation. "I've told Sonja not to take them if you don't. Then when you
have no uniform tomorrow--."
        `I'm going to kill her, I'm going to kill her so much. She'll be so
dead they'll have to find every ancestor she ever had and kill them too just
to make up the difference.' Johnathan thought helplessly.
        "Alright, alright!" He said, his small weedy voice almost shrilling.
"Do you think you haven't told me that every night this week." He continued in
a mutter. "Baka! I said I'd take them down myself, what's the matter with
you?"
        "Don't you use that tone of voice to me Johnathan." She snapped, her
own voice, he noted furiously, although not raised nearly so much as his,
still managing to carry far more volume and authority. "And stop glaring and
muttering to yourself. If you learned a little courtesy perhaps Mariane might
have considered you a little more worthy of attention tonight."
        `Oh for the lord's sake will you just shut up about Mariane!' He
thought wildly. `She's a shallow, narrow-minded, mean-spirited, vicious, vile,
nasty little--.'
        "Johnathan," His father roared. "Are you ignoring your mother?"
        Johnathan gave up, turned and shot upstairs. His parents heard the
slamming of several doors, then faint sounds as Johnathan banged things as he
prepared for a bath and bed.
        "I'm going to kill you both!" He raged helplessly. "I'm going to kill
you and make a pact with the devil to bring you back just so that I can kill
you again and again, and then I'm going to--."
        He stopped, a little shocked despite himself, and anyway, what was the
point? He had better things to do. Gathering up his dressing-gown and night-
shirt, Johnathan left his room, restraining himself from slamming that door as
well, and made his way to the bathroom which no one but himself and the few
friends who had stayed very infrequently, had used. Some half an hour later
and hoping that he had used enough hot water to see that at least one of his
parents would have a cold shower, Johnathan left the spar and, just to be
sure, spent another ten minutes washing his hair. Satisfied at last as he felt
the water beginning to turn cold, he finished drying and dressed quickly for
bed. If he was lucky, he might get an hour's writing done before his mother
sent Andrews up to see that he was in bed. He was not.
        `Just how old did they think he was?' He thought as Andrews left and
he settled himself. "Nearly seventeen and they treat me like some baka ten
year old!" He fumed to himself. "Gods I wish I was anywhere but here."
        With a sigh, he reached for the note-book again, trailing its supply
as he settled himself more comfortably and switched it on.
        "You're going to get a power-boost, my wild bean-sidhe." He said
softly as he called up the historical information he had determined for his
anima. "I'm in a particularly bad mood and you're about to benefit. I hope you
appreciate it."
        And smiling, he began to write.
                                     * * *
        It was so dark, and more deadly cold than he ever imagined was
possible. Johnathan shivered again, staring through the icy, cloying fog,
trying desperately to see his way.
        "Please Azusa-chan, you can't do this." The scream came again, a
faint, thin sound, surprisingly precise in the cloying, stifling dark.
        `Fog shouldn't carry sound like that.' He thought numbly, searching
desperately with eyes that could barely see six inches before his face. `I
have to find them, I have to find them.' He kept screaming to himself.
        The wild, maniacal laughter tore through the terrifying, numbing cold.
        "Save what strength you have left to scream." The voice was lost and
wild.
        Then the world exploded in red and Johnathan heard the screams begin.
        Gasping, Johnathan tore himself awake, his heart pounding wildly,
hands clutching desperately at the blankets as he shot into a sitting
position, his stomach still clenched in a tight knot of fear. A movement and
crash nearly made him scream, then he realised that the note-book had tumbled
from the bed.
        "Chikusho!" He gasped, fighting down the fear and reaching for the
lamp.
        A moment later he was on the floor, lifting the note-book with a sense
of hopelessness. It just had to be damaged, things like that always happened
to him. For once however, his pessimism proved ill-founded as the little
machine fired up without a problem.
        Sighing with relief, Johnathan switched off the computer and packed it
and its supply back into its case in preparation for camp in the morning. Then
he turned, glancing at the tiny antique travelling-clock he always kept by his
bed. Only half-past two. He had slept for barely two hours, yet the thought of
going back to sleep after the nightmare he had just escaped was not something
he relished just yet. He knew he was being irrational. He had suffered from
nightmares and the far more terrifying night-terrors for as long as he could
remember and was more or less used to at least two of the former and one of
the latter each month. Nevertheless, this one's end had been particularly
nasty. No, he would get up and go down to the kitchen for something to drink
before going back to sleep.
        Snatching his dressing-gown from a chair, moving quickly to shake off
the remnants of the horror of the dream, Johnathan moved to the open door,
pausing only to turn on the hall light before stepping out into the passage.
The floor protested beneath his feet and Johnathan fumed silently. His father,
still more than likely working in his study, would be bound to hear the
movement from below and demand in the morning to know what his son had been
doing. He had just passed the bathroom door when he noticed the light.
        "Blast it, I know I turned that off. Why can't Sonja leave things
alone up here? I've told mother time and again I'll clean the thing myself."
        Still muttering, Johnathan opened the bathroom door and half stepped
into the room, reaching for the switch.
        "Gods its cold in here!" He muttered as he flicked at the switch, and
stopped short.
        The thing was already off. Stepping full into the room, Johnathan
lifted his head, and stared. The light wasn't coming from above, but from
something small and half-seen that lay blazing in the middle of the spar.
        "What on earth?" Johnathan gasped, this time switching on the light
and moving quickly to the tub. "Chikusho, but its cold!"
        Kneeling by the tub, Johnathan leaned forwards, reaching for the
indistinct, glittering thing. But the spar had no bottom.
        Johnathan managed one shocked, choked intake of breath. Then, as he
somersaulted forwards into the abyss, his world exploded in red and Johnathan
heard his own screams begin.