Six Months Earlier

Kagome knelt before the altar, placing a few fresh sticks of incense into the small burnished bowl. As fragrant smoke rose before the granite face of her husband’s grave, she bowed her head in love and remembrance.

Warm spring air ebbed and flowed around her. A few loose strands of her hair tickled at her cheeks. For a moment, she imagined the gust of his breath, the whisper of his own fine hair against her skin. The image was so vivid in her mind, so real to her in that moment, that her fingers twitched with the impulse to reach out and pull him close to her once again.

“Inuyasha,” she whispered tremulously.

But it was not his voice who answered her–as the air around her stilled and darkened, a pall of deathly silence descending over the surrounding woods.

“Kagome.”

Opening her eyes, she stood, turning toward the one who’d addressed her. In the fading light of dusk, there was a reflective cast to his golden gaze, an elliptical widening of his slitted pupils. His long, silver-white hair faintly gleamed, only a shade or two darker than the pearly silk that clothed him. The dark metals that composed his spiked, plated armor hardened his otherwise ethereal image–along with the wicked sword that hung at his side.

“Sesshoumaru,” she greeted, straining a smile.

At times, it was hard for her to look at him. His resemblance to Inuyasha was so striking in some ways–from his hair and his eyes, to his fangs and his claws. Yet in other ways, they were nothing alike, and this is what Kagome reminded herself of as she stepped forward to meet him.

“You detected me?” she asked lightly, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ve been working a lot on concealment recently, and I thought I had it down pat.”

“No,” he replied, glancing briefly toward the graves. “I simply knew that this is where you would be.”

“Oh.” Kagome’s lashes lowered as she looked aside. “I’m a creature of habit, I guess.”

Barring her absence from the village or some sort of emergency, not a day had gone by over the past two years where Kagome didn’t stop here to pay her respects to her departed husband. What the villagers–and even her friends–had at first considered a touching gesture they now viewed as an unhealthy preoccupation. Even Sango had remarked to her a couple of weeks back that there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on the loss of loved ones. The pointed concern in her friend’s expression hadn’t gone unnoticed by Kagome.

In a more subtle sense, she got the feeling Sesshoumaru disapproved of this ritual of hers as well. But even if he did, she knew he would never say anything to her—he wouldn’t consider it his place.

As she met his shadowed gaze once more, all he said to her in response was, “As am I.”

Kagome’s grip on her upper arms tightened fractionally. There was something decidedly unnerving about her brother-in-law. Though she’d grown more accustomed to him over the years, she still wouldn’t say that she was comfortable around him.

His thoughts and motivations were as obscure to her as his inscrutable, alien features. It wasn’t just her miko senses alarming at the threat of his demonic nature—it was something else, a more basic, primal intuition warning her to keep her distance from him.

But he was the one who was approaching her, his preternatural eyes following the course of her hand with predatory focus as she tucked the trailing end of her bangs behind an ear. A foot or so away from her, he stopped, his claws extracting a small glinting item from the neck of his haori.

“The venom!” Kagome said in surprise, her wariness giving way to sudden excitement as she took the flask of vitriolic purple liquid from him. “You managed to collect some.”

She lifted the vial before her in the dwindling light, her eyes narrowing at the bands of darkness that coalesced and fractured within it. Extending her reiki with careful precision, she purified the lingering demonic aura, the serum’s noxious glare dimming to a muted glow.

“Will it suffice?” he asked her.

Kagome nodded, slipping the thin bottle into her satchel. “I think so.”

Properly distilled, the venom of this particular demonic serpent was a powerful panacea—although extracting it must have been a chore, even for someone of Sesshoumaru’s strength and resistance. With summer fast approaching, poisonous encounters of all kinds were a guarantee. One boy already lay perilously sick from what Kagome suspected was the bite of a spider youkai hatchling. Just one drop of this remedy would be enough to cure him.

If only all misfortunes could be so easily purged away…

With a faint, wistful smile, she met Sesshoumaru’s gaze. “Thank you.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi