And now, Hirokin thought with a twitch of lip, as he traded the deadly company of his liege lord for that of his mad wife, for the hard part.

But, as usual, as much as he was dreading this confrontation, Hirokin was anticipating it as well—a conundrum, indeed. As he mounted his dragoness Ohana and soared high through the icy skies toward Kagome’s tower abode, he laughed with dark delight into the whipping wind. 

She might well fry his balls off for this, in the end, but in the moment, he couldn’t have cared less.

She wasn’t in her rooms, he found, but rather out in the lowland gardens, where here and there hopeful courtiers loitered about, seeking audience with the Immortal Priestess. Some out of idle curiosity. Most out of fearful compulsion. Others out of the desire to forge new inroads with Sesshoumaru. A few, perhaps, for the mere pleasure of courting her favor, so to speak.

At Hirokin’s advance, they one and all had the good sense to make themselves scarce. Though his youki was suppressed, the look of withering contempt in his eyes was not. Flying high on the wings of his success with Sesshoumaru, Hirokin’s good humor was fast dissipating. He felt annoyed—more at her than at them, the hapless fools, for she was the one who encouraged them in their idiot designs. And not simply to keep herself entertained, he knew.

And so he was rather surprised—and a touch mollified—to find her standing alone in the heart of a flowered glade, an hourglass of raven hair and red kimono against that ghostly field of whites and blues. He’d expected one of those crooning boot-lickers to be plying her with empty little gifts and even emptier little promises at every turn, but here she was, curiously unattended.

“If you are looking for an ally in that lot, my lady,” Hirokin said waspishly as he approached her, crushing the downy spirit-blossoms underfoot, “you are wasting your time.”

Sunlight waved down the dark fall of her hair as she turned toward him. Compared to the sparkling blue of her eyes, the backdrop of sky behind her looked pale. She smiled slyly at him.

“You never know,” Kagome said, with a pointedness that chafed, “one of them might turn out to be useful for something.”

Drawing to a stop before her, Hirokin said, more waspishly still, “I doubt it.”

Her small white hand fluttered up to him, lighting on the hollow of his throat. His breath hitched at the unexpected lightness of the touch. Her fingers trailed down to the coral necklace he wore and tugged it toward her like a rein.

“Jealous of my admirers, Hirokin?” she murmured, teasing.

“Is the dragon jealous of the worm?” he scoffed, catching her by the wrist. “But, my lady, you shouldn’t give their prying eyes a show.” His voice lowered huskily. “Let us retire to your chambers.”

“What prying eyes?” she said to him, and now her own were truly sparkling. “They’ve been looking all over for me, but they haven’t found me. Don’t you see?” She rose on tiptoe to bring her mouth to his ear. “I’ve been waiting here for you alone.”

And now Hirokin felt like a fool. In his agitation, he’d been blind to her spell, but now he felt the fringes of it, subtle though they were. There was a barrier around this glade—a barrier spelled to permit his demonic signature alone. To the eyes of all other demons, this was nothing but an empty glade.

“And now you’ve gone and chased them away,” she said, her lips brushing soft and tickling against his ear, “when they were supposed to be part of the fun.”

“The fun, my lady?” he spoke into her silky, sun-warmed hair.

Kagome nodded against him, turning her head toward one of the youkai in the distance. “Mhm. Haven’t you ever wanted to fuck around in plain sight? We could be doing it right here under their noses, and they’d be none the wiser.”

Hirokin chuckled, getting hard at the thought. He put his arms around her, drawing her flush against him so she could feel it. 

“Well, Kagome-sama, by all means, call them back.”

She dropped the barrier briefly—just a moment was all it took to have their fading youki flaring in fresh hope again. Hirokin dipped his smirking mouth to hers. He kissed her hungrily, greedily, as she squeezed at his cock through the layers of silk separating them, pinching the tip between her nails in just the way he’d come to crave. As she turned her thumbnail into his slit, he groaned. She bit down on his ear, hard as she could with her blunt little teeth. Then, with the white-hot edge of her reiki she drew blood.

“I am the dragon, Hirokin,” she said as he hissed in pain, “and you are the worm I choose to burn.”

He shuddered against her in lust, even as he frowned. “You hold me in such contempt, even now?”

“Yes,” she said, drawing back from him to look him ruthlessly in the eye, “but I hold something for you. That’s better than nothing at all.”

Perverse though it was, she was right. Perverse though it was, now that the sear of her mouth was gone, the relief he felt in its wake was tantamount to bliss. The absence of pain was the purest of ecstasies. He longed for the punishment of her mouth again.

So he caught her baleful little face in his hands and kissed her hard—truly hard. He gave her a demon’s kiss, full of venom and fang—and in the split second before she purified the hell out of him, he saw her blue eyes flare wide. It was a satisfaction he clung to as he reeled aside clutching at the blackened, smoldering ruin of his face.

“Now there’s a look that suits you,” Kagome spat, her own soft lips beautifully bloodied and torn—though the power of Sesshoumaru’s mating mark was fast-mending her mortal flesh.

“Fuck…” Hirokin panted through the rends of his mouth and cheeks.

He sank to his knees in the ghost grass. He pressed his palms flat to the pale-flowered earth he was drenching in gouts of smoking black blood. He felt for the veins of water flowing deep beneath the soil and summoned them to the surface, dousing himself in the restorative essence of his being. When he stood up dripping from the ground to face her, he was whole again—and harder than ever.

At the fringes of the glade, bewildered youkai milled about, straining their senses to no avail. The spectacle within remained invisible to them. Hirokin grabbed Kagome around the waist with a laugh that was as barking mad as she was.

“Your dimwit audience is here, my lady,” he said, pinching the nipple of her swollen breast so sharply that it wept. “Let’s fuck like animals.”

She smacked his pinching hand aside. “Not so fast, Hirokin. Don’t you want to see what else I’m holding for you?”

“Whatever it is, it can wait,” he said with a gravelly undertone, as his inner beast got the better of him. With his other hand, he was already ripping away the knot of her kimono. “I’m ready to rut you into the ground.”

“No,” Kagome said, pushing down on his shoulders as the layers of her kimono drew apart, revealing a sliver of breast and belly. “Get down on your knees.”

Irked, Hirokin did as she bid him. With his throbbing cock straining through the silk of his hakama, he watched impatiently as she shrugged out of her magnificent dress like a sloughed-out skin. In the light of the sun she stood as naked, fair and sleek as though she’d been born again. The dark thatch between her legs was dewy with her desire, wicked into ringlets that glistened as she opened her thighs and showed him the golden chain that was dangling from the little pink mouth of her sex, disappearing up into the depths of her. 

As Hirokin stared, she slid her knee up onto his shoulder, giving him the view of the breadth of her—the damp rosy ruffles of her tender inner flesh, the ripe red bud of her clit, and the tiny elliptical pit of her slit, with the delicate glinting chain descending from it. He breathed in the sweet rich musk of her, distinctly female, but also distinctly her, and so therefore enticing to him. He could not help but to marvel at the novelty of this yet again.

“I’ve been saving this for you for hours,” she said, as her slim fingers reached between her legs to grasp the small golden loop at the end of the chain. “Open your mouth for it, and you can thank me, later.”

Hirokin opened his mouth as she pulled. A slick golden ball emerged from within her, widening the slit of her entrance into a perfect little ‘o.’ It was the same shape his parted lips took as a milky gush of trapped cum flowed in the ball’s wake—Sesshoumaru’s cum. He caught the drip like a precious elixir as it fell, then clasping her by the hips, he crushed his mouth to her spread seeping slit, lapping at her shamelessly, gluttonously. She laughed at him as he did.

“You just can’t get enough of it can you? Well, drink up—because this is the closest you’re ever going to get to him, and you know it.”

Hirokin’s sharp nails bit into her soft hips. Oh, how he hated her…

But then as his questing tongue pressed deeper into her, she squeezed those smooth, slick inner muscles of hers, obliging him with a few more precious drops of this taste he’d never hoped on his life to know. Yet through her he had, and no matter how much he might resent her for lording it over him, the fact remained.

He gleaned her of Sesshoumaru’s leavings, and gorged himself on her cruelty, impaling her on his tongue so that she cried out in something like commiseration. He buried the whole of his face into the warm wet silk of her sex, wallowing in it as she bore down on him. He buoyed her up with his youki, freeing up his hands and bracing her knees so she could fuck his smothered face as she pleased. His neglected cock needed tending to—desperately—and he didn’t care whether she held it against him or not.

He was so rabid for release he gripped himself right through his hakama and squeezed—wet silk above, wet silk below. He relished the friction in the vise of his hand, mapping her cunt with his tongue while she smothered him, remembering how it had felt to be sheathed alongside Sesshoumaru inside her, remembering how his shaft had swelled, how his mouth had ravished, how her womb had quaked—

Hirokin gasped mutely into her as he exploded in his fist. The release swept over him in a deluge that would have taken his knees out from under him if they weren’t already bent to the ground. Hot seed slicked heavily through the silk. Above him, Kagome stilled, frowning down.

“Great,” she muttered. “So much for fucking like animals.”

He tried to kiss her lower lips in apology, but she was already pushing back from him, attempting to clamber down from the buoying mists. He dispersed his youki, and she fell into his lap with a yelp, straddling his hips so that her wet sex kissed into his instead.

“Not to worry, my lady,” Hirokin said wryly, though in all sincerity, “I’ve no intention of letting you down in that regard. I was merely taking off the edge.” 

When she continued to look sullen, he wrapped his arms around her, rocking his half-hard bulge into her clit, making her respond despite herself. He smiled into her hair at the temple, as he dipped a hand to cup and squeeze her ass, lifting it up and into him and fondling at the cleft below. 

She moaned when his fingertips found her soaking center. He drew them damply back and played with the soft little rosebud of her ass. The puckered entrance soon yielded to his prodding. She relaxed against him with a husky sigh. He dipped in a finger, testing the smooth tightness of this back channel, knowing just how nicely it could grip and milk his cock. He’d bedded a legion of females, or at least he’d undertaken to, but hers had been the first ass he’d plumbed in his life. So, understandably, he was partial to it.

But her womb was what he craved.

Already he could feel it—dense like a piece of lead resting in the root of his cock—the building pressure of a mating plug. Another first of his he’d given her. Now that he was more accustomed to the sensation, he recognized that this would be the biggest plug yet. He imagined the pain he’d feel in passing it through that slim, stinging channel of his, and the dark anticipation of it had him nearly back to full hardness again. No, she’d need no golden ball to hold his seed in place at the mouth of her womb. The plug’s palpitations would have that hidden mouth dipping into the pool of his cum in orgasm again and again. Alas, the lips of that mouth were sealed firmly shut.

With his finger wedged in her ass to the hilt, he caressed that slim divide into her womanhood and said, “I’ve spoken to Sesshoumaru-sama, my lady. I put forth my request to sire a girl-child by you, and he has given his tacit consent—provided that you wean Saitou off you with all due haste.”

Kagome shoved up and off him with a flush-faced start. Her eyes flashed blue fire down at him where he knelt.

“You’re unbelievable,” she said, balling her fists. “He might’ve killed you.”

“He might have,” Hirokin allowed, “but he didn’t.”

His equanimity only seemed to exasperate her further. Arms crossed at the chest, she stalked back and forth before him across the glade. The ghost-flowers she treaded underfoot in her flaring distemper breezed out sweet soft death-sighs. Her nails bit bright red crescents into the flesh of her naked arms. 

“Unbelievable,” she said again, beside herself. “Gods, you have some nerve…”

“And yet the gamble paid off. I have my life—and his ear.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Kagome said, glaring down at him from on high with a look of pure, scintillating murder.

Hirokin smiled. Oh, how he loved her…

“I am yours, Kagome-sama,” he said, inclining his head. “Do with me what you will.”

“You think I won’t do it,” she said, low and dark. “You think I won’t kill you.”

Boldly, he met her eye. “If you were going to kill me, you’d have done so already.”

“I still might, someday.”

“Perhaps,” Hirokin said, “but not today.”

“No,” Kagome said, relenting. “Not today.”

Her arms fell back to her sides, dangling there listless. She looked infinitely weary to him. Infinitely sad. Hirokin took her hands up in his, beseeching. 

“Isn’t it something to you, that I’ve managed to persuade him? Just imagine, Kagome-sama—a child of our own, how singular she would be! You said it was impossible, but winning Sesshoumaru-sama to our cause is the crucial first step.”

“Our cause?” Kagome shot back, ripping her hands from his. “Don’t make me laugh, Hirokin. This is all about you, just like everything else you do, you relentless, conniving prick. No, I’m not at all surprised you convinced him, even of this. You’re the most manipulative creature there is. Nothing will stop you from pressing your course. You’ll wear through solid stone if you have to.”

“Forgive me, my lady,” Hirokin said dryly, “if this tirade of your smacks to me of praise.”

Kagome’s fuming face reddened. “It most certainly is not. You’re so damn self-absorbed you don’t even pause to consider my feelings in all this. What makes you think I even want another child, let alone a demon one? Giving birth to Saitou nearly killed me.”

“Ah,” Hirokin said, rising to his feet to clasp her to him, “but, my lady, that isn’t true at all. My seed will be gentler to bear than his, I assure you. And besides, I should tell you that my mother carried me inside her for a score of years or more. That’s some decades of relief from your lord husband and the worst storms of his lust—that is what I am offering you in the bargain.”

Kagome’s eyes widened up at him. “He doesn’t know that though, does he?”

“No,” Hirokin said, threading his fingers through the fine hair at her nape, “but it is I who will suffer his displeasure for it, not you. This pain I will gladly bear. And in the meantime, I vow to you, my love, I will find a way to save you from despair. I am your ally, now and always. Your one true friend in this life.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her, and she let him. Naked in his arms, she felt so small, so fragile. When he drew back and looked down at her, she smiled up at him, and it was like porcelain breaking.

“How sad for me,” she said.

Hirokin frowned. “Don’t say that, my lady. I beg you.”

“I won’t say it, then.”

“Don’t think it, either.”

Kagome said nothing. She turned her eyes away from him.

“Look at me,” he implored her, but when she did, he wished he hadn’t—

The look in her eyes was full of bitter hate.

“Finally,” she said, in a whisper so soft it was cutting, “I’ve figured you out. I see now what you are, and it’s deviant beyond belief. You’re the lowest of the low, Hirokin, the worst sort of sick pervert, and has nothing to do with sex. You’re perverted in the soul.”

Hirokin’s eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”

“You’re so twisted and fucked-up inside you can’t even see it. All this scheming, all these lies and machinations—and for what? Just to heap more complications on yourself. You’re a miserable creature. You’re the most miserable, wretched thing I’ve ever seen. You’ve contrived to be miserable, and if that weren’t bad enough, you’ve contrived to drag the rest of us down with you.”

“Hysterical nonsense,” Hirokin said, shaking his head. “You’re raving like a lunatic, my lady.”

“Am I?” she said witheringly, shoving her face up toward his. “You don’t really love me. You don’t really want me. I know that because you had your chance, and instead, you sold me out to him. You threw me away with both hands, and if you had another chance, you’d do it all over again. You only want me now because you can’t have me. You only want Sesshoumaru because you know he’ll never want you back. You only want what you can’t have—that’s your curse, Hirokin. That’s what makes you such a wretch. You’ll always choose to throw away happiness with both hands, and the world be damned!”

The air around them sparked with her fury, stinging his demonic flesh. Hirokin grimaced, wincing. 

“Stop it, my lady,” he said sternly, reaching for her. “You need to calm down.”

Kagome’s aura lashed him as she stepped back. “No! I won’t ‘calm down.’ You just want me to stop because you know what I’m saying is true. You know deep down in the black rotten snakepit of your heart that the only reason why you even long for your own mother so much is because she’s dead!”

Hirokin blanched, then darkened thunderously in rage. “How dare you…”

A tempest of youki rose around him, clashing with hers. But Kagome was undeterred.

“If Haname were still alive,” she pressed ruthlessly on, “you wouldn’t want her, either. You don’t love her. You never did. All you love is pain.”

“Bitch,” Hirokin seethed, slashing out at her in blind rage. “You fucking bitch—I could kill you…”

His surge of youki caught her in the chest, knocking her back as she deflected it. Winded, she threw back her head and laughed unhinged into the maelstrom.

“I wish you could, Hirokin! Then I’d be free, and you’d love me forever!”

Hirokin growled as his youki turned inward upon him, fraying his flesh into scale, his hands into claws. His bestial vision bled into red as he flew at her, half-transformed, splitting the glade apart in the tidal wave he summoned up from the ground. Kagome fell to her knees in the one clear patch that remained, her hands clasped before her as she held it and braced herself for the furious crash that knocked her nearly sideways—cracking at the second barrier she’d raised around herself, a dome within the dome.

But she dropped it a split-second too soon, just as Hirokin knew she would. He wasn’t in the wave like she’d thought. And before she could puzzle this out, he came up from the ground behind her and tackled her down into the flooded ghost-grass with a splash. 

“I should never have bothered with you!” he panted out raggedly, shoving her face-down into the drowned, sighing field. “I should have left you for dead, you thankless cunt!”

Thrashing out from under him, Kagome spluttered, “…W-what?”

“Fuck you,” Hirokin yelled, tackling her again, “that’s what!”

The sodden field churned to inky mud beneath them as he wrestled her under him again. He was far swifter, and physically far stronger, but against the force of her spiritual pressure, his was no match. She scorched him raw as he fought to bury her, and to his simmering ire, he knew that she was hardly exerting herself. Instead, she writhed under him in the muck in frustration, yelling at him to ‘cut it out already,’ her bare skin growing brown and slick as a seal’s in the struggle.

Maybe in part because of this, a depraved sort of hunger began to stir in him, fast-eclipsing the smoldering dregs of his rage—or perhaps simply redirecting them. The pink of her naked holes winked out at him through the mire of mud and twisted limbs, and he found himself as ragingly hard as he’d ever been. Shredding his hakama in his haste, he freed himself and fell upon her, mounting her like the bitch she was.

Kagome let out a shriek. He held her fast by the hips, thrusting into her even as she burned him. Every muscle in him snapped taut, his breath hissed out through his teeth at the sharpness of the pleasure, which seemed to be stabbing into him as much as he was stabbing into her. Gods, but it felt good to bury himself in her, at least.

She put up a show of ladylike protest at this rough taking—more thrashing and shrieking and scalding. But her heart wasn’t in it, he knew. 

“This is what you love, Kagome-sama,” he said, snapping his hips hard into hers where they lay tangled together in a filthy heap. 

Melting under him at last, she moaned, insensate. He battered his cock against the unyielding gate of her womb, and her reiki pooled out like blood. 

“This is why you love him,” Hirokin snarled, grabbing bruisingly at her breast, pawing cruelly at her clit. “This is why you chose him, unto death. It’s the beast in him you love.”

She dug her reiki-edged nails into him, cuttingly. She arched her spine and bent her head to glare back at him, as her reiki cracked over him like a many-tailed lash, knocking the breath right out of him.

“You’d better fuck me like your life depends on it, Hirokin.”

“It’s your life that depends on it,” he blazed back at her, his thrusts growing wilder as he neared the blessed end—one way or the other. “My regard for you—go on without it, and see what becomes of you. See what monster it is he puts in you that finally rips you open from belly to breast, you big-mouthed, churlish sow—”

But whether Kagome heard him or not, he did not know. Because before the end of this, she was coming apart, and by the end of it, so too was he, dragged under by the torrent of her lust. He was lost in it, adrift in it. Reborn in it, as he gasped to life again with birth of the mating plug bursting from his cock into her.

And then they were adrift again together, the hapless two of them, intertwined in the drowned field in their ebbing bliss. 

There is no such thing as forever, my love, he wanted to say to her, as the pleasure began to dim. There is only the present moment, even for the likes of you and I.

But he could not summon forth the will to tell her so. And though neither of them spoke a word to one another for some time after this, he learned that she had, on that very night, begun to wean her son.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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