<continued>

Mika felt the immediate heat against her back, but it wasn’t scorching - they were moving too fast for the wave of the explosion to fully engulf them. When she craned her head around to look at the disaster behind them, she found a wall of black spoke along with the broken wood flying outward. Mika was so focused on the explosion, she didn’t notice their descent until she hit the ground unsteadily.

“Fire department…” Kana said in a breathless rush as her feet also touched the ground.

“Wait,” Kaito stopped her, grabbing her wrist as it was going toward her pocket for a phone. “Let’s get some distance first,” he said quickly before her drawn breath could be released in a protest. “The worst of it is over and there’s nothing too close for the remaining fire to hurt. Plus, it rained earlier in the week so it won’t go far.”

Kana turned back to the building. A large portion of the back and left wall had remained intact, but the front half of the building had been obliterated. The explosion had been loud and produced a lot of smoke, but it wasn’t far reaching and the damage could have been worse she supposed. There were only a few scattered fires still smoldering. She relented with a long sigh and slipped the phone back into her pocket.

“Are you guys okay?” Ayako’s voice sounded from deeper in the treeline. When she was within range of the three, Ayako grabbed up both Mika and Kana in a bear hug. “God, I thought you were both goners. What was that?”

“I told you already we could cause a spontaneous combustion,” Kana answered. “It can happen when the ratio of particles and air is just right and is catalyzed by heat or electricity…” she glanced at Kaito out of the corner of her eye.

“I keep my electricity well under control, thank you,” he replied with a nonchalant shrug.

“It can happen without either,” Kana agreed with a nod. “The day was pretty warm so that probably didn’t help matters. Anyway, we should look to see if there are any hoses at the back of the main campus that would reach this far. I know they added a spicket near the southeast side of the school when they considered building the pool, but we’d need a hose that’s around one hundred meters.”

And so the scavenger hunt began. Kana was left in charge of watching the smoldering fires while the other three hunted for a hose and spicket. Ayako was the one who finally found it in a storage room on the east side of the school.

With Kaito’s help in carrying it, they hooked it up to the water and dragged the end back to the old school building. It was just barely long enough to reach the left side, so they were left with no choice but to let the water run, creating enough of a puddle to finally quench the last of the small flames outside of the hose's spray range.

“So how long are you gonna stay like that huh?” Ayako demanded as the group of four sat down under one of the trees at the edge of the clearing. She ran an accusatory eye over Kaito who still had his shirt looped over his belt.

“Does it bother you?” he replied with a smirk.

“Of course it does! You’re walking around half naked in front of three girls, again! Have some decency. What even is up with all this anyway. You never explained yourself.” Ayako took the end of the left wing in her hand and pulled it out and down.

“Stop it. It doesn’t bend that way,” Kaito complained.

To Ayako, the leathery wings didn’t look like they had that much muscle, but with a slight twitch, Kaito contracted them and ripped it clean out of her grasp.

“Rude,” she huffed.

“It is interesting,” Kana remarked, looking at the wing on his right. “Do you mind if I touch it?”

“Not as long as you don’t pull it around in weird directions,” he answered, relaxing the muscle so that Kana could gently stretch it out. “It does feel strange,” he spoke mostly to himself as Mika lined up behind Kana to run her fingertips over the surface. “Even though it’s a part of my body, I’m not really used to them being there, much less being touched by someone. It’s odd.”

“So why do you have them?” Mika asked. “They weren’t there before.” She wouldn’t be forgetting the last time he’d taken his shirt off in front of them, and as embarrassing as it was, she’d gotten a good enough look at his torso then to be sure he hadn’t had the wings.

“So that I could be the noble prince rescuing the damsels in distress from a collapsing building?” he suggested.

“Kaito!”

He gave a soft chuckle. “The actual reasoning though is a bit... complicated.”

“It’s not like we don’t have time,” Ayako pointed out, sending a gaze over the last couple of fires that were still smoldering.

The other two nodded in agreement and Kaito released a breath. He’d already given them “the big secret,” and he knew that he could trust the three. Still, the less they knew about him, the better. There were good reasons not to tell them more than they already knew, but an irrational part of him wanted them to know, wanted them to understand him in a way that even his own people couldn’t. That being said, despite being a demon, he still looked human to the three girls. Would they think of him differently now?

Kaito’s eyes flickered over them, and it was the bright curiosity in Mika’s that set his indecisive mind.

“Alright,” he took a long pause before continuing, “This.. appearance that you recognize as me,” he gestured down to indicate his body, “isn’t my ‘truest’ form.” He glanced at the three to gauge their expression. Ayako’s right brow rose, but the other two’s faces did not change from mild curiosity, so he continued on, “If I raise my energy to a specific point, I can manifest certain characteristics of my other appearance. That is what the wings are.”

“So you’re a giant bat then,” Ayako said matter-of-factly. “How… wonderful…”

“Wrong,” Kaito refuted in an even tone. “Not even close.”

“How can that not be close when you literally have bat wings on your back?! Are you going to sprout horns and a tail?”

“I could do one of the two,” he replied lightly, playing along with the joke. “But I’ll let you wonder which it is.”

“Definitely horns,” Ayako decided. “The sharp, pointy, evil-looking kind.”

Kaito snorted and rolled his eyes. “It was kind of nice while it lasted,” he said a few minutes later, stretching his wings out to their full length one last time before he contracted them against his back.

“Ah, they're disappearing!” Mika was the one that commented, but all three shifted to stare at his back. It took no more than a second for them to meld to his back and vanish completely.

“Yeah, it’s getting cold,” Kaito said, as he threw his shirt back on. “Are you going to stare at me like that all night? I’m going to get self-conscious.” He raised an eyebrow at the three girls who still had their eyes trained on the spot the wings had been moments before.

Ayako was the one who broke out of the trance first, hissing, “show off” under her breath.

“You know, you guys know a lot more about me at this point than I do about you,” Kaito said after a minute of silence. “I think I should stop talking about myself for a bit and let you start.”

“What do you want us to tell you?” Ayako questioned. “It’s not like our lives are exciting.”

Mika and Kana backed her up with a couple of quick nods.

“Hm, why don’t you tell me how long you’ve been friends, and how you met,” Kaito suggested, addressing Kana and Ayako.

“Ayako and I were in the same class in sixth grade,” Kana started. “I had just moved from Hamamatsu when my great uncle died and I wasn’t doing a particularly good job of making friends here as I preferred to keep to myself. Even more unfortunately, I caught the attention of a few boys in the school who thought it would be fun to ‘bother the bookworm.’ Ayako saw them picking on me one day after school and beat them up rather splendidly.”

“I knocked one guy out completely,” Ayako interjected, puffing her chest up with pride.

Kana nodded. “She did. The other three ran away trying not to cry I think. Ayako was a little worse for wear after the encounter though, so I invited her to my house to get patched up. My parents are both doctors and my little brother is very accident prone, so we keep a fair number of bandages around the house.”

“How did your parents feel about you being friends with someone so violent?” Kaito questioned, ignoring Ayako’s yell of protest.

“Honestly, I think they were happy. Looking back, I’m sure they knew I was being picked on, but they wanted me to be independent enough to sort the issue out for myself. I think they were also grateful that I’d finally found a friend. We were inseparable after that incident and no one bothered me with Ayako around. At this point, both of our families treat us as if we were sisters.”

“I go to Kana’s house a lot after school too since my parents work strange hours. I kept the bullies away from Kana all day, we’d go to her house and study, and then I got to eat with them. It worked out really nice.”

“What do your parents do for work Ayako?” Mika asked.

“My dad is on-call for the police. I can never tell when he’s going to be home and when he’s going to be working. I think he swaps shifts every few days. And then my mom is a reporter.”

“For the news?!” Mika’s eyes widened.

“Yeah, but she’s not on TV or anything. She travels around and does the research, but lets the other guys write the scripts and report it to the public. Her schedule is a little more predictable, but she gets called away to travel a lot so she’s not really around much either.”

“That sounds really interesting,” Mika mumbled to herself.

“So what about you Mika?” Kaito prompted.

“Huh? What about me?”

“Did you have any good friends growing up? Where in Hokkaido did you live exactly?”

“Oh, I lived in Utashinai.”

“Where is that?” Ayako questioned.

“It’s a bit northeast of Sapporo. It’s an incredibly small city, but there are good ski resorts and hot springs there.”

“That’s awesome!” Ayako exclaimed. “You’ll have to take us sometime! I’ve always wanted to try skiing.”

Mika laughed lightly. “Sure. Maybe during winter break or something.” Even as she said the words, she wondered in the back of her mind how it would feel to visit the town again after all that she’d lost. Mika already knew she’d never be able to see it the same way again after going through the deaths of all of her family members.

“Well,” Kaito’s voice shook Mika from her growing sadness, “it looks like we finally made a great pond.”

All three girls turned to the remnants of the old school building to verify what Kaito had said. Indeed the area was completely flooded. A river ran through the front of the school where the door used to be and what was left of the first floor was now under water.

“I cannot believe we actually destroyed a building tonight,” Kana said softly, as the full reality of everything that had happened sank in. They'd trespassed, broken in, stolen property in the form of the light bulb, and then destroyed the school itself.

“Hey, don’t think about it too hard,” Ayako said, putting a light and cheerful tone into her voice. “It was going to collapse anyway if it was that unstable, and honestly, it’s probably better it happened to us and not the next group who decided to go ghost hunting. They wouldn’t have a monster to fly them out of an explosion.”

“I guess… that’s one way to look at it,” Mika said. “By the way Ayako, what did you see your ghost?”

“Yeah! It glowed and floated, but it definitely had a human shape! It was so cool! What are you laughing at?!” Ayako had spun on Kaito who had tried to hide a laugh behind a cough. She gave him a good square punch on the shoulder to shut him up, but he didn’t even flinch.

“Hey, hey, be nice to your savior.”

“As if,” she gave an over dramatic roll of her eyes.

“What was funny though?” Mika asked, breaking between the two.

“It wasn’t a ghost. It - ”

“Was too!” Ayako contradicted vehemently.

“The park lights were shining through the trees to make the ‘floating light.’ It just so happened that it kind of had a humanoid shape.”

“Then what about the whistling, and the groaning?!”

“The whistling was wind coming through a crack in the window, and obviously the groaning was because your heavy self was breaking the floor.”

“No way. I don’t believe you at all.” With a final huff, Ayako crossed her arms and jogged back toward the fence.

Mika gave a little laugh at her friend’s impatience, and followed after her. Before she reached the fence, she gave one last look at the broken schoolhouse. As she stared at it, she could have sworn she saw a small soft light in the vague shape of a human through the trees, giving the group a final wave. Mika blinked, and when she focused back on the spot she’d seen it, there was only darkness.