---

Golden eyes close briefly. “I see.”

---

It was the scent that drew him.

Foreign, yet familiar. Enough to pique his interest, to stir something in him.

It was the scent of blood—

Ripe and red and in season.

Humans were always coming into season, it seemed. They bred like rabbits because their lives were short and fraught with peril.

Yet by chance or by circumstance he had never scented her in such a state. Kagome, the Shikon Miko, his half-brother’s intended—or so Sesshoumaru had assumed.

For if so, why would Inuyasha have abandoned her, in the unclaimed heat of her blood?

It was a dangerous way to leave her.

---

“A young woman, alone in the wilderness at night.”

---

It was the blood that had brought him to her, as if summoned.

She could not sense him yet, and so he observed her. By the way she was sprawled upon the ground, she must have fallen. Another thing humans were always seeming to do.

It occurred to him, as his eyes scanned over her prone form, searching for wounds—of which there were several, though minor—that he had never before encountered her apart from his half-brother. In Inuyasha’s absence, he found her surprisingly nonirritating.

He found her rather…intriguing.

It was not the lewd attire she wore, nor the bizarre supplies she carried with her, nor even her strange manner. Those for him had lost their lurid novelty some time ago. He understood that she hailed from afar, and so her outlandishness was to be expected.

No, it was the girl herself who made him narrow his eyes in contemplation. It was more than her uncommon beauty, more than her assertiveness or her alacrity. Uneclipsed by the shadow of his half-brother’s presence, it was her effulgent power which arrested him—

Transfixing him in a singular, unmistakable resonance of spirit.

It was unlike anything Sesshoumaru had ever experienced before.

It disturbed him, moved him. It made him want to turn upon his heel.

It kept him rooted to the spot as she went suddenly still and trained her azure eyes upon him.

---

“Caught unaware, perhaps.”

---

“Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

Her tense posture relaxed. Her grip on the bow at her hip fell slack, though Sesshoumaru doubted she was even consciously aware she had seized it. Nor of her galling lack of decorum toward him.

She addressed him casually, almost crassly. Yet oddly enough, he took no true offense. It reminded him of how Hirokin had used to speak to him, when they were young.

As if they were equals.

“Where is Inuyasha?” Sesshoumaru asked, stepping down to meet her as she stood from her crouch.

Thunderously, her expression darkened. It was an amusing sight.

“I don’t know,” she bit out, banding her arms across her chest. “I mean, I do know, just not exactly…” Exasperated, she glanced away with a huff, concluding shortly, “He’s with Kikyou.”

Ah, the clay priestess.

Genuinely perplexed by this preference, Sesshoumaru mused aloud, “Why?”

“…Probably because she puts out,” Kagome muttered. The toe of her sandaled foot ground viciously into the silver-grey dirt.

Sesshoumaru arched a brow. As usual, her phrasing confounded him, yet from her attitude, he could infer her meaning well enough. For one who dressed and acted so provocatively, her remark struck him as ironically prudish. Perhaps realizing this, Kagome flushed.

“I hate to impose,” she said sheepishly, tucking a ribbon of raven hair behind her ear, “but I took a little tumble down the hillside and twisted my ankle. Would you mind giving me a lift back to camp?—it isn’t far.”

“A ‘lift’,” Sesshoumaru repeated. His gaze trailed slowly over the length of her. “Very well.”

---

A predatory softness suffuses the tone. “Or, perhaps, simply too trusting.”

---

“Umph! I was thinking of, you know, your magic cloud,” Kagome groused as he scooped her unceremoniously over his right shoulder and strode off into the woods. “Not for you to literally lift me. What am I, a sack of potatoes?”

Sesshoumaru ignored her thankless grumbling. Of course, it would have been more expeditious to fly, yet for some reason, he did not wish to be parted from her so soon.

Her scent was pleasant, and he was starting to find her entertaining.

“Hey!” she yelled suddenly. Sesshoumaru cringed at her shrillness. It was all he could do not to muzzle her with his fur as she cried out again, “Wait!—we left all my stuff!”

“Stop shrieking,” he growled. The claws at her back pinned her down sharply as she thrashed in his hold. “Or I will drop you.”

“But, what about my bow and arrows?” she whimpered, sagging. “My backpack?”

“I am not a pack horse. Send Inuyasha to retrieve them when he returns.”

“…Okay,” Kagome said glumly. Sesshoumaru halted in place as she began to fidget with his hair.

After a moment of pause, he recovered from this latest presumption. Even he would grow old in this forest if he dwelt upon her every impertinence toward him.

“I wish Inuyasha was a little more like you,” she murmured, still absently twining his hair through her fingers.

Sesshoumaru’s jaw ticked. ‘A little’?

“In what sense,” he pressed her, his curiosity outweighing his indignation.

“In the sense that you seem to know what you want. That you’re not hot-and-cold about it. Even after getting beaten down so many times, you still kept coming after Tessaiga.”

Sesshoumaru frowned. It was not an unfair assessment. He had never been afflicted with indecision. Still, he marveled at her ability to compliment and insult him in a single breath.

“You wish that Inuyasha would choose either Kikyou or yourself,” he easily surmised, judging by her wounded inflection.

Kagome stiffened, then squirmed. The thin slip of fabric concealing her midriff tugged up at the motion. Sesshoumaru’s claws skimmed along the smooth, warm skin of her lower back. He made no move to adjust his hold.

“…Anyway, how is Rin-chan?” she asked, over-brightly.

For a time, they conversed in this way. Typically surrounded by sycophants and schemers, Sesshoumaru found this guileless, open discourse refreshing. Kagome was young, naive—yet well-spoken and sincere. Learned even, which he had suspected before, yet now confirmed, through the introspection she expressed in her various anecdotes.

If his pace had slowed, if his touch had settled into the dip of her spine, it was incidental to prolonging the conversation between them.

“I don’t think I’d want to live forever,” she said, “even if I could. It seems like life would become incredibly boring after a while. Once you’ve seen and done everything, what’s even the point of living anymore?”

He wanted to tell her that perhaps she should reconsider her attachment to Inuyasha. But what he said to her instead was, “You think this way, because you are mortal. Your outlook is necessarily limited, the events of your life necessarily condensed, to fit within the scope of your existence.”

She was quiet for a moment, reflective. “I suppose you’re right. There are plenty of insects who really only get to live for a few days’ time. They hatch, they mate, they die—it’s a full lifetime’s worth of experiences for them, but even for a human like me, it’s over in the blink of an eye.” Her hands were sifting idly through his fur now. The fine hairs charged at the contact. “It’s all relative, really. You’re almost a thousand years old, and you don’t seem that much more mature than I am.”

“I do not think you appreciate how demons mature,” Sesshoumaru said briskly.

“No,” Kagome conceded, her tone mild, “I’m sure I don’t. Where I’m from, humans tend to live longer. So that buys me, what, a hundred years or so at best?” A soft sigh left her lips. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, after all, to live forever—if it’s really just a matter of perspective. There are people only a little older than me, back home in Tokyo, who already seem tired of living because they have no passion for it, no ambition. They’ve closed their eyes to the possibilities. That’s what the future is, isn’t it?—an endless set of possibilities? When I look at it that way, I don’t think I would ever get bored. I think, I would be happy.”

Sliding his hand around the bone of her hip, Sesshoumaru agreed. “For you, a hundred years seems far too few.”

Her fingers curled pleasurably into his fur. Though he couldn’t see her smile, he could feel the way she lit from within, an effusive radiance of the soul.

“Wait,” she said suddenly. “…Shouldn’t we have arrived by now?” Pressing her palms to his armor, she pushed herself up, no doubt to study the darkening sky. “What the…we’re even farther west from where we started!”

---

“Too inexperienced to appreciate the danger, until it is too late.”

---

Sesshoumaru’s lips curved at her belated assessment.

So they were.

“Are you so eager to return to your empty bed?” he asked her dryly.

Kagome slumped back against him. “…It’s not that,” she mumbled. “I just don’t want my friends to be worried about me.”

Pulling her down from his shoulder to hold her to his chest instead, Sesshoumaru wondered whether Kagome had ever once worried about herself. From the wide-eyed way she was staring up at him as she clutched his armor, it seemed unlikely.

“One last detour,” he said, youki gathering beneath them as they rose, “then I will take you back.”

By air, it was only a short distance away—the enchanted meadow. It was not a place for mortal eyes to see, but Kagome was no ordinary mortal. Landing at the edge of the silver-barked trees, Sesshoumaru released her.

Kagome wandered forward a few hobbling steps. Her lips parted in wonder at the sight.

It was then, standing behind her, that Sesshoumaru noticed the shredded seat of her lower garment. More than the glimpses of creamy flesh he stole through the rends in the fabric, it was the thin red scratches which drew his eye. How keenly they resembled the marks that his own claw and fang tips might make.

Untying his obi, Sesshoumaru let it flutter to the ground. The sound of his swords and armor thudding after it had her head whipping around in surprise. Anxiously she watched him as he removed his outer haori and offered it to her.

His eyes flicked to her exposed hind cheeks. “You are indecent,” he said.

“Oh gods,” she groaned, snatching at the haori and hugging it about her. “I totally forgot—I’d gotten used to it…”

As she ventured red-faced into the clearing, Sesshoumaru followed after. Glittering and luminous, the field of moon lilies stretched beyond sight, an endless, shimmering fabric of snow-white blossoms. Trailing her fingertips over the cool, silky petals, Kagome turned toward him, her smile as bright as the one Rin had worn on the day he’d brought her here, to cheer her.

“This is a lovely surprise,” Kagome said. Her lashes descended as she bent down to inhale the flowers’ subtle fragrance. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to seduce me.”

A beat of silence—

“And if I am?”

Her tone had been light, teasing.

Though Sesshoumaru had intended it to be, his was not.

Registering the distinction, Kagome tensed. Her eyes snapped open as she slowly straightened.

---

“Under such circumstances, an attack follows naturally.”

---

The corners of her lips twitched upward, though her gaze remained wary and hard. “Very funny, Sesshoumaru. But we both know you don’t care all that much for humans.”

In general, this was true.

He had certainly never felt attracted to one before. He seldom felt attracted to anyone, anymore—sex being so inextricably bound with suffering in his mind.

Yet as his eyes swept over the curves of her figure, the fairness of her face, the dark silken tumble of her hair, attracted was precisely how he felt. Softly illuminated by the flowers around her, she seemed to exude an irresistible feminine sensuality.

It was overwhelming his reason, this sensation. This pull of the flesh, the spirit, the blood.

“I am finding rare exceptions,” he rumbled, stepping toward her.

Kagome’s expression faltered at his advance, yet she held her ground, a hint of steel entering her voice. “…You can’t be serious.”

Drawing to a stop before her, Sesshoumaru tilted his head in consideration. “Perhaps I simply wish to explore a new possibility.”

She gasped as his arms went around her, as his mouth crushed to hers. Her small, muffled sound of shock provided him with the opening he needed to be inside her, to taste her heat and silky sweetness, to wonder feverishly at how soft and hot and sweet the space between her legs must taste. Arousal crashed through him as he ground against her stomach—before she forced him back with a surge of reiki.

Sesshoumaru growled at the sting of it, though it did little to dampen his excitement. Quite the opposite…

Shaking, Kagome glared at him as she dashed a wrist across her slick, swollen lips. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea, but I’m not that kind of girl.”

Wrenching his haori from her, she threw it at his chest as she stalked past him toward the edge of the clearing—or what she must have assumed to be the edge of the clearing. For now the landscape had changed, and the view ahead of her was just as seemingly infinite as the one at her back. Her spine went rigid at the sight. A deep frown weighed her lips as Sesshoumaru circled around her.

“Yes, Kagome, perhaps I mistook you, if you are the sort of woman who would rather pine for the one who left you behind,” he said lowly, hooking a claw beneath her chin, “than embrace the one who stands before you.”

Kagome swallowed as he tilted her face toward his. “Drop the spell, Sesshoumaru, and let me go.”

His lips brushed against hers. “Let me have you.”

Her aura flared as she reared back, knocking his hand away. “You can’t ‘have me’,” she said fiercely. “I’m saving myself.”

Sesshoumaru smiled thinly. “For Inuyasha?”

“No,” she growled. The savage timbre of her voice made him desire her that much more. “I’m saving myself for my husband.”

“Is that so.”

Catching her around the waist, Sesshoumaru hauled her to him. His features twisted with the primal need to take possession of this woman, to take possession of himself. Frozen, Kagome stared up at him in alarm. She was not a demon, yet there was no doubt she could sense the intent in his rising youki.

It was the answering lash of her power which drove him to madness.

It was the challenge in her eyes that made his own go red.

---

“The tragic consequences are not difficult to envision, even for one such as she.”

---

 

To be continued…

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 4/17/23

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