Author's Note: Just a warning, this story gets pretty dark sometimes. You will get into the head of at least one psychopath murderer at some point... You have been warned.

Well, here we start anew.

A dark-haired teenager with a prominent cowlick on the back of his head hooked two fingers in the sliding door and pulled discreetly. Before he was even properly inside the room, his senses were flooded with a crowd of smells and sounds: a few dozen heartbeats (which he was able to ignore after years of practice), girls' perfume and lotion, young men's body odor partially masked by cologne, chalk, and various other meaningless finds, but the one important and alarming scent in the whole classroom hit Shinichi first and set both his feeding and fleeing instincts off at once.

Magic. And from three people, going by the separate human scents attached to it.

How long had it been since Shinichi had known of any human with a significant amount of raw power in his or her veins? Too long for him to try to guess.

And the chances of two of them being in the same class? Almost zero.

It was impossible for Shinichi to narrow down the list of possible sources of magic amid the twenty-six students of Ekoda High, class 2B gazing at him curiously from their seats, but a few stood out from the rest. One, whom Shinichi recognized as Hattori Heiji, the famous Detective of the East, one of the most famous Asian detectives subtly examined him with a calculating look from the back of the room. Did that mean the famous young detective could use magic?

The second, a beautiful young woman sitting on the other side of the room and one row up, stared bug-eyed but quickly masked her emotions when she saw Shinichi had noticed. The reddish tint to her eye colour gave her away as a witch, but they tended to keep to themselves, so she probably wouldn't be a threat. The third student was the famous British detective Hakuba Saguru, the Detective of the West, a famous European detective. He had noticed the reactions of the other two and eyed them perplexedly.

Shinichi guessed that most of the power in the room that was not his own came from the girl.

The new student had been in the classroom for about three seconds and his cover was already blown.

What a lovely start this is.

The question was whether they would do anything about it.

But there was another interesting student. What caught his eye was the fact that he looked almost just like Shinichi, minus the traits hidden to the rest of the world by a charm that Shinichi wore around his neck and under his clothes at all times. And the hair was wildly sticking up everywhere, in contrast to Shinichi's mostly flat hair. Also his eyes had a purplish tint to them, a sign of magic just like the witch had though he didn't seem to have noticed anything different about Shinichi.

Shinichi's attention was pulled back to the teacher, a healthy-looking woman not over forty with a kind voice and light brown wavy hair that reached just past her shoulders. She was still going through the standard welcome and introduction for the new student and would soon cue him to write his name on the board.

After he spelled out his name, he faced his new class again, executing the customary bow and greeting. "Hello. I hope we can be friends."

Truthfully, he wasn't very interested in making friends, except for Hattori and Hakuba. When Shinichi was planning on returning to Japan, he heard that both famous detectives were in this class, and his sense of nostalgia couldn't let him pass this up. It's not like he would get too close to them; he really just wanted to stay incognito. Of course, that would be more difficult now with others that sensed magic, but it would look way too suspicious were he to transfer to a different class after only his first day.

At least his assigned seat wasn't near them.

"Kudou-san, why did you transfer?"

"I used to live in America with my parents, but I missed Japan too much."

"Woah, you live by yourself! I wish I could escape from my parents like that!"

"Kudou-san, do you play any sports?"

It was lunchtime, and thus the students' first opportunity to swarm their new classmate's desk. Said classmate was doing his best to answer each as politely and quickly as possible to remove himself from the limelight. Those students currently not within a metre of him consisted of the detectives and his potential human twin, but not many others.

"Kudou-san, are you related to Kaito-kun? You look so much like him. Except the hair, of course."

He glanced toward his lookalike to find him chatting with the detectives, which was what Shinichi wished he was doing. "Ah, no, I'm not."

"EVERYONE SHUT UP!"

The sudden increase in volume made Shinichi wince.

The scream had come from a short girl with medium-length brown hair.

"Give him some space already! You'll get to see him every day for the foreseeable future anyway." Her voice gradually grew quieter as she continued, coming to stand by Shinichi.

"I'm so sorry about that," she smiled sweetly at him, all traces of her previous anger gone, "They were like this when Kaito started here, too. My name's Nakamouri Aoko."

A little dumbfounded by her sudden change in demeanour, Shinichi stood up quicly and bowed in response. "Nice to meet you. Are you by any chance related to Nakamouri Ginzo-keibu?"

Class resumed before Shinichi had a chance to approach the detectives, to his dismay, but he managed to catch them as they were leaving. But as he approached them, he faintly smelled magic.

So one of them did have magic? Probably, Hattori, who had eyed him suspiciously earlier.

"Aren't you two Hattori Heiji and Hakuba Saguru?" he asked.

They shared a look of uneasiness. "Uh, yeah, we are," Hattori replied, "If you're a fan-"

"No, it's nothing like that," Shinichi interjected calmly, "I just recognized you is all. And I heard you both like Sherlock Holmes."

They seemed to relax at that. Hakuba even smiled politely. "Well, Hattori-kun is more of an Ellery Queen fan-"

"But Hakuba here's obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, aren't you?"

At that moment, Shinichi's almost doppelganger appeared with an arm around Hakuba's neck.

At that moment, Shinichi was hit with a powerful wave of the smell of magic.

So the brunt of it was coming from this guy, not the witch? But his initial reaction to Shinichi this morning had been, like most of the class, innocently curious.

But as he neared them now, Shinichi could see an odd quality to his face. The light around it looked just slightly distorted. A tell-tale sign of illusion magic, like what Shinichi was using to hide his nonhuman features and the worst of his battle scars.

But this guy mostly smelled human. What was he hiding?

"The name's Kuroba Kaito, magician."

Shinichi mentally stiffened. Why is he so open about being a magician? And to detectives, at that?

"Yes, Kuroba here is quite the performer," Hakuba supplied, "Now please remove yourself from my personal space."

Kuroba grinned cheekily but obeyed.

Oh, a stage magician. Of course.

"Speaking of which," the blonde mused, "it was rather odd that he didn't pull any pranks today."

"Well, I wanted to give the new student the gift of relative normalcy on his first day," Kuroba smiled lazily, "but don't expect any such reprieve tomorrow, Hakuba."

Only Hakuba's eye twitched in response. "In that case," he drawled, "I'll have to get back at you for it at the heist this weekend."

Kuroba rolled his eyes.

Shinichi knew about the mysterious magician-thief known as Kaitou Kid, mostly from his research of Hakuba and Hattori, but he didn't know Kuroba was involved. "Am I missing something here?"

"This guy keeps saying things like that because, for some reason, he thinks I'm the Kaitou Kid. It's ridiculous!" Kuroba huffed.

Actually, that would be plausible. The Kid was indisputably talented, and Kuroba had a lot of magic in him. But that's not actual proof.

The conversation continued out the door and through the streets of town, followed by Kuroba. It quickly devolved into an argument between Hakuba and Hattori over which of their favourite fictional detectives was better.

Then they heard a high-pitched scream.

"Seriously?" Hakuba groaned as the four dashed toward the source of the sound, a townhouse building only a few metres away. They arrived a few seconds later to a woman, still screaming in the doorway, and a man on the floor. Hakuba quickly confirmed that he was dead. Fortunately for Shinichi, there was no open wounds on the corpse for blood to seep out and bother his nose.

Oh, the nostalgia.

Shinichi hadn't been at a fresh crime scene in so long, and a part of him ached to investigate right away. But he knew that he needed to stay out of the spotlight, so he stood near the back, taking a mental tally of the other two detectives' deductive skills. At least, he would have if Hattori hadn't kept giving him and Kuroba weird looks. He hadn't the faintest idea why he was doing that until it was brought up after the case was closed.

"Hey," Hattori looked at both of them, "have you guys happened to see this kind of stuff much before?" They both answered negatively.

"Then how come you both seemed so…comfortable? I mean, there was a dead person right there and neither of you seemed phased…" he trailed off.

Crap. Shinichi hadn't thought of that.

"…I used to work at a hospital." Shinichi said lamely.

"Woah, really? Me too!" Kuroba looked up at him.

"Yeah…"

This guy Kuroba was definitely hiding something, Shinichi decided. Working at a hospital was not exactly a common high school job. It looked more like he was piggybacking on Shinichi's on-the-spot excuse.

After an awkward second of staring, Hakuba coughed. "I see." Hattori was frowning, but said nothing.

Not long afterwards, the group said their goodbyes and went separate ways toward home.

It was the dead of night, the sun having disappeared beneath the horizon several hours ago. Now was the best time to feed. This had been Shinichi's routine for centuries: wait until all honest and good folk were asleep, then strike.

Tonight's chosen victim was a middle-aged man who smelled of narcotics but clearly did not look intoxicated at the moment. (Shinichi had learned a long time ago to avoid the intoxicated.) It was easy to influence his mind to cause him to walk down a secluded back alley, where Shinichi quickly grabbed the man's head and flung it into the brick wall, rendering the man unconscious.

But just as his mind switched into feeding mode as much as he would allow, Shinichi felt himself being seized from behind in much the same way as he had just done. Then a sharp metal object, probably a knife, was pressed against his throat. It hurt more than a knife should hurt one of his kind.

He was tempted to be afraid. He hadn't been overpowered like this by a human before.

"Why are you here, vampire?" a voice barked, "Tell me what they're planning!"

The acidic voice sounded…young. Very young.

But what was most alarming was the sudden wave of magic that hit his nose.

The scent that came with it was familiar…

Kuroba? What…?

When Shinichi didn't respond immediately, Kuroba slammed his forehead against the wall more powerfully than a human should be capable of. "Tell ME!" he seethed.

This was bad. In his current mental state, with his body ready to feed, Shinichi needed to get away from Kuroba for clean air as soon as possible before something bad happened. Blood with magic was infinitely more appetizing than without. After each breath he could feel his willpower slipping away.

"I...I'm not here for you," he sputtered, struggling to keep a mental grip, "Please, I don't want to hurt-," Shinichi's head was banged on the wall again and he cried out in pain. This time he felt blood trickle down his forehead.

At nearly the same time, Shinichi felt his illusion magic fading, revealing his fangs, wings and pointed ears. How was that possible? Had Kuroba somehow disabled the magic in his necklace charm?

Having himself exposed like this made him feel vulnerable, which in turn made him a little more desperate.

Shinichi tried to use one of his black feathered wings to push Kuroba off him, but Kuroba only slashed at it with another knife. Shinichi screeched as he felt it hit bone. His attacker forcefully turned him around and his head collided with the wall again. His loss of blood made his willpower drain even faster and he knew that he wouldn't last much longer.

"Like I'm stupid enough to believe that! Now TELL! ME!" Kuroba practically screamed at the end.

The face in front of him was that of Kuroba Kaito, except now there was a lot more to see. His neck was covered in vampire bite marks. His face had several scars, the most prominent being a large slash that travelled from the outer edge of his right eyebrow, across his eye and onto the bridge of his nose. The eyes themselves looked like they were almost glowing with a violent mixture of hatred, anger and fear.

"Please believe me," Shinichi choked fearfully. It was getting hard to breathe. "I don't know what you mean by any of this. Now please let me go, before I hurt someone…"

He hadn't been planning to kill the drug dealer. Shinichi wasn't a killer. Not since a long time ago.

Something changed in Kuroba's eyes then. The boiling emotions seemed to…boil just a bit less. He stared at Shinichi for a long moment. By now the vampire was trembling and holding his breath against the cloying and tantalizing smell of magic around him, but his body demanded blood.

Kuroba withdrew his weapon, which wasn't a knife, but a ninja star, he could see, glowing blue with magic. Shinichi fell to the ground. As he brought his face off the pavement, his vision tunnelled and everything started to look red and hazy.

It was too late now.

The vampire stood up slowly. Even in the dim light, Kaito could see his blood-red irises. The creature growled hungrily, baring fang. Obviously, he had given into his feeding instincts and gone into frenzy mode.

Great. Just great.

The magician's battle-hungry side surged to life at the prospect of a fight, but the rest of him knew that this was entirely his fault.

Surprising as it was, this vampire didn't want to kill.

When Kaito had stared into Kudou's still-sane eyes a moment ago, he could sense by his face and his aura that he was telling the truth. This vampire had nothing to do with his enemies. For once, Kaito didn't have to kill a vampire to protect humanity.

Let's get this over with quickly.

But don't take it the wrong way, parts of him really wanted to kill. The part that had always loved danger and battle and power and victory, and the part that still hated all vampires for the hell they'd given him.

At that moment, the vampire sprang toward him head on. Kaito wasn't surprised. In his experience, thirst-crazed vampires weren't very capable of strategy. Feeding time was when they were by far the most vulnerable. He readied a thin blade.

Just as the vampire was about to hit him, he felt a collision – not front-on like his eyes told him there would be, but from his left instead, knocking his dagger away. As the two fell to the ground, the Kudou who had been charging straight for him had disappeared.

An illusion. He still has enough coherent thought in his brain to conjure illusions? This guy may actually be a challenge.

They hit the ground with Kudou on top. The first thing Kaito did was grab the other's hair and wrench the vampire's threatening fangs away from his body.

They struggled like so for a few minutes, even matched until the vampire made a mistake in his hunger-induced rage and gave Kaito time for a few extra kicks. This sent his opponent off him, giving the magician time to pull out his boomerang and throw it, hitting Kudou square in the head again and knocking him to the ground, unconscious.

Kaito picked himself up, dusted himself off, gave his adversary a remorseful glance-over to make sure he wouldn't die, and flew home on his hang glider.

Truth be told, he had enjoyed this in the end, for some reason.

Tomorrow at school was going to be awkward, though…