Boneless, Kagome sank down into the tub. Water rose to drown her ears. With her eyes just above the surface, she listened to the haunting dampness of every fleeting motion. Even rising to breathe, she felt submerged still.

It was a feeling that persisted long after she’d dried off and dressed. The heaviness dragged at her like a current from within. Desperate to escape from its pull, she took up a bottle of sake from the shelf near her bedside and cracked it open. Down her throat, the alcohol scourged, setting fire to the pit of her stomach.

Slaking herself of a thirst that was visceral, if not physical, she began to feel lighter by the second. With disinterest, even disdain, she peered around at her home. Silks and trinkets lined the shelves, spilled onto the floor from trunks already crammed to bursting. Like the wine she was drinking, they were gifts from wealthy transplants, from merchants and craftsmen, from scholars and even displaced gentry, who had sought refuge in Edo and credited her with restoring them to safety and prosperity.

Not a little of the tribute was from her own friends and neighbors, who had let out their farms and fields to the refugees and grown rich in the process. Several had offered to build her a new house, a great house like their own, but Kagome had refused. What need did she have for a big house in town? At least here, in this remote little place, Inuyasha’s presence lingered. This was the home they had shared together, if only briefly, and bereft as it was, she would feel only that much more so in the halls of some strange empty place.

Not to mention, she needed the privacy.

Sourly, she drank to dispel these grim reflections. Like a puff of smoke, they vanished soon enough from her perception, and she relaxed against the silk pillows of her bed. No matter how she’d come about it, she felt calm, even surfeited. Loosening the ties of her robe, she basked in the coolness of the air against her flushed skin, and thought about nothing at all.

In truth, she’d forgotten Kanako completely. Even when the girl peeped in at her through the door curtain, Kagome remained casually reclined, still sipping on the dregs of the wine. With creeping steps, the waif entered. Quietly, she headed toward her bed of blankets in the corner, before Kagome’s voice drew her short.

“Come here, Kanako-chan.”

The teenage girl went deathly still, her large grey eyes swiveling toward Kagome in clear apprehension. But the miko smiled easily, beckoning her with the crook of a finger. Wary, yet unable to resist, the waif tiptoed toward her. With lowered eyes, she knelt at the bedside. For a while, Kagome simply considered her, the girl’s heart hammering in the silence that thickened between them.

“Kagome-sama…” she whispered out at last. “I—”

Dashing the empty bottle against the wall, Kagome pounced upon her. The girl shrilled like a banshee as the miko seized her by one clammy ear and twisted.

“How dare you speak to me,” Kagome seethed, pushing Kanako’s face into the tatami. “How dare you come slithering back into my house, you nasty little snake.”

“Forgive me!” Kanako shrieked, the sound nasally and muffled as it squeaked out from around the edges of her smothered mouth. “Kagome-sama, please!”

But the miko didn’t let up in the slightest. “Who have you told?”

“No one!—not a soul, I swear it!”

“Don’t lie to me, you wretch.”

“I’m not lying!” Kanako gasped, writhing. As Kagome’s pressure at her ear relented a fraction, the waif peeked up at her with one wide, watery eye. “Please, Kagome-sama, I would never betray you…you must believe me!”

“Spying is the same as betrayal,” the miko bit out, digging her knee into Kanako’s back, “baka.”

“But…! Kagome-sama…I…I am a lowly snake, it is true—I am a worm! I go about on my belly…but only for your sake! Only out of devotion to you! That demon…lord of demons…I hear him—extorting you. I hear you…martyring your holy self!” By now the girl was outright sobbing, though Kagome had ceased to torment her. “Would that I could lift your burden—would that I could take your place!”

As if burned, Kagome recoiled from her. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“He will be wanting more, Kagome-sama,” the waif whispered tremulously, her round eyes shivering with foreboding. “It chafes at a man…to give himself pleasure. He cannot abide it for long…”

Kagome glared, a tendril of unease wending through her. “That’s ridiculous. And what would you know about it, anyway?”

As though still pinned, Kanako lay strewn on the floor. Her normally wan features were flushed, her limp hair tousled so suggestively that Kagome drew back from her a step further.

“I did not know then, when the fever took Okaa-san,” the waif began, her silvery gaze as glassy as a trout’s. “We suffered, Kagome-sama, my Onii-san and I. But I did not understand, when my suffering grew less and yet his worsened. I did not understand what it meant until I caught him in his shame. He nearly killed himself for it—it was so great!”

Kagome stared, her mouth running dry in helpless dread.

Heedless of this, Kanako babbled on, “Though he did not wish it, I made him tell me what our mother had done for him. I let him use my mouth as she had, and because I had not yet bled, I let him use the rest of me, too. How well he was, after! How happy I was to serve him, my dear Onii-san.” Propping herself up on her elbows, she gazed at the frozen miko in misty-eyed rapture. “How happy I would be to serve you, Kagome-sama.”

The miko could not speak at first, afraid that if she went so far as to open her mouth, her gorge would rise and overtake her. Despite the sake that bubbled in her stomach, Kanako’s horrific words had sobered her like a splash of ice-water to the face. Yet as abhorrent as this story was, it wasn’t altogether shocking. In those sorts of insular, backwoods villages such things were not unheard of—mothers and sisters seeing to the so-called ‘needs’ of their unmarried male relatives. Sickened and saddened in equal measure, Kagome slumped back onto her futon, all the fight gone out of her—though she would never see Kanako in the same light again.

Heavily, the miko sighed, averting her weary eyes. “I don’t want to hear any more of this talk. Go to bed.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi