Both girls turned to look at him with the same expression, give or take a few degrees of personal flavor. The specifics differed — Yui's version was more openly exasperated, Yukino's more contained and precise — but the underlying sentiment was identical. It was the expression of two people who had just heard a grown man describe a stranger's bedroom as a girl's boudoir and were united, briefly and completely, in their assessment of him.
Rin noted this without particular concern and turned back toward the dressing table.
He crossed the room in a few easy steps and stopped in front of the mirror. Up close, the presence behind the glass was more distinct, the way a sound becomes clearer when you stop trying to hear it over the background noise and simply listen. The Eye Demon had settled into the mirror the way certain things settle into old houses — quietly, over time, until it became difficult to say where the object ended and the inhabitant began.
Rin raised his right hand, curled it into a loose fist, and knocked against the mirror's surface. Once. Twice. Not hard enough to break it. Just hard enough to make a point.
"This mirror," he said, to no one in particular, "is not quite what it looks like."
He knocked again. A little harder this time.
The shriek that came from inside the glass had no business belonging to anything in the visible world.
"OW. OW. THAT HURTS. STOP THAT."
The voice arrived before the creature did — indignant, high-pitched, carrying the affronted energy of something that had been quietly minding its own business and deeply resented the interruption. Then the surface of the mirror rippled, the way still water ripples when something beneath it decides to surface, and the Eye Demon came through.
It was a small, shifting thing, translucent in the way that deep water is translucent — you could see through it but couldn't quite see into it. Its shape was difficult to hold in the eye for more than a moment, edges blurring and reforming, but its general outline suggested something between a large floating jellyfish and a bad dream that had achieved partial sentience. It spun into the room's air and immediately began complaining.
"Wretched human! That HURT! Do you have any idea how long I'd been in there?!"
Yui Yuigahama screamed.
It was a full, committed scream, the kind that comes from somewhere below conscious thought, and her body had made the decision to grab the nearest solid thing before her mind had finished registering what her eyes were seeing. The nearest solid thing happened to be Yukino Yukinoshita, and so Yukino found herself suddenly and comprehensively embraced by a person who was vibrating with genuine terror.
Yukino's response to this was to stand very still, which was all she was really capable of at that particular moment, because the entirety of her attention was occupied by the thing floating in the air three meters away.
She had been certain, in the way that intelligent and well-educated people are sometimes certain about things that turn out to be wrong, that the universe operated according to principles that did not include this. Kamen Riders, she had already been forced to revise her position on. Monsters with Shocker insignias, she had processed, with difficulty, as a category of biological anomaly. But a ghost. A visible, audible, complaining, translucent entity that had just emerged from a mirror while loudly protesting about physical pain.
This was a different order of revision entirely.
Her face, at that moment, would have been genuinely remarkable to anyone who knew her. The composure was still technically present, the way the frame of a building is still technically present after the walls have come down. The expression underneath it was something that had no practiced shape because she had never needed to practice for it.
It's real, some part of her said, very quietly, to some other part of her that was still insisting on a rational explanation. It's right there. It's real.
On the other side of the room, Rin watched the Eye Demon's agitated flight path with the calm of someone watching a moderately interesting weather event. The creature was small, unformed, more startled than threatening. It wasn't the problem. It was the announcement of the problem.
He walked over to the two girls, stepping around a fallen cosmetics bottle that the demon's emergence had knocked from the dressing table. "Well," he said pleasantly, looking up at the spinning creature, "there's your ghost."
Yukino's eyes snapped to him. Something about his complete and utter composure in this moment had apparently crossed a line she hadn't known she had. "How are you calm right now?" The words came out with more heat than her usual register, a crack in the careful management. She caught it, pulled it back, but didn't fully recover her evenness before she continued: "What do we do?"
"Wait a moment. You'll see."
The answer was unhelpful, and he knew it, and his expression made no particular apology for this.
The Eye Demon in its floating form is the preview, he thought, tracking the creature's movement across the ceiling. What comes next is the actual problem. And both of them being here to see it might, for once, be useful.
The Eye Demon had arrived at the same conclusion.
Its agitated circling slowed. The complaints stopped. Something in the quality of its movement changed, becoming less panicked and more purposeful, the shift from startled animal to something that had remembered what it was and what it could do.
"Wretched. Humans." The voice dropped several registers, losing its indignant squeak and acquiring something darker underneath it. "You think you can expose me and walk away from it?"
It dove.
Not at Rin. At the mirror.
It hit the glass surface and went through it like smoke going through a keyhole, and for a single breath the room was still. Then the mirror lit from within, a cold and silver light that had nothing gentle about it, and the surface buckled outward, and what came through was not the small, floating, complaining thing that had gone in.
The Mirror Eye Demon filled the room the way a storm fills a street, its body assembled entirely from reflective surfaces, dozens of mirror-panels shifting and interlocking into something vast and jagged and wrong. Every surface caught the room's light and returned it at cruel angles. Rin could see himself reflected in it, fragmented across twenty different panels, each piece of his reflection slightly offset from the others. The sound it made was the sound of glass under pressure, a sustained, high keening that sat just at the edge of hearing and made the back teeth ache.
The floor cracked where its weight settled. A framed picture fell from the wall. The plants on the windowsill shivered.
Yui Yuigahama looked at the thing that had been her mirror.
Then her legs made a very sensible decision and she went down.
Yukino caught her by reflex, arms going around her before the conscious directive to do so had finished forming. She held Yui upright for the half-second it took to realize that upright wasn't happening, and then she was lowering her to the floor, one hand behind her head, moving with the careful efficiency of someone who does not have time to be frightened because there is something immediate that needs to be done.
The Mirror Eye Demon turned its attention toward them.
Rin stepped between them and it.
He didn't move quickly. He didn't need to. He simply took two steps to the left and was now standing in the space between the monster and the two girls, his back to them, his face toward the thing made of broken light and fractured reflections.
"You two," he said, without looking back, his voice carrying the particular quality it had when he was being direct about something and had decided that politeness was a secondary concern. "Take her and go. Out of the room. Now."
Yukino looked at his back. At the set of his shoulders. At the easy, unhurried way he was standing in front of something that had just cracked the floor with its presence.
I've seen this before, something in her said, half-formed and insistent. This specific posture. This specific quality of someone standing between danger and everyone else and treating it like the most natural arrangement in the world.
She didn't finish the thought. There wasn't time.
She got her arms under Yui's and moved.
After the door closed behind them, the room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when the only people left in them are the ones who aren't worried.
Rin exhaled. A long, slow breath.
"Honestly," he said, to the Mirror Eye Demon, to the room, to the mildly inconvenient reality of his afternoon. "I knocked on the mirror twice. You could have just talked to me." He reached to his side, and the Ohma Zi-O Driver materialized with a sound like a key finding a lock, settling into place at his waist with the familiar, grounding weight of something that had always been meant to be there.
The Mirror Eye Demon roared. The sound hit the walls and came back from every reflective surface in the room, multiplied and layered into something enormous.
Rin raised his right hand and pointed at it. Not a gesture of aggression. More like an introduction.
"Eye Demon," he said. "You've outstayed your welcome in this house. These people's time belongs to them, not you." A beat. "I'll be correcting that now."
The Driver pulsed once, warm and gold, against the afternoon light.
Let's make this quick, he thought. There's still tamagoyaki waiting in that activity room.
He transformed.