Kagome frowned, glancing away.

“You and I are different in many ways,” Hirokin stated frankly, “yet what we want is the same.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

There was the faintest ripple in the water around her. Lapping her just below the hip, it raised gooseflesh on her skin even before he closed the distance between them, and held the fine, pearly points of his nails to her chest.

“Do you not long for it as I do?” he asked her lowly, the silver-blue shading of his lids glittering faintly as he seemed to study the hidden pathways of her heart. “Beneath this crushing weight, this unceasing tension…” Swift and smooth, youki streamed from his palm to her throat, coiling wisp-like around it. “How deeply have you suffered, at odds with yourself, yearning for that which you dread the most?”

His grip was as light as the water rising around her waist, yet Kagome found herself struggling for breath. Painfully, she swallowed, her voice leaving her in a strangled whisper.

“Yearning for what?”

His eyes snapped to hers, scintillating in their intensity. His spectral hold on her throat tightened briefly, almost ruefully, before falling away.

”Freedom from the yoke,” Hirokin said, as his hand drifted back to his side, and Kagome sagged, bereft in the wake.

Again she shook her head. As her own fingers rose to clutch at the base of her neck, Hirokin’s expression softened.

“There is no need for us to live in terror any longer, suffering at the whims of a savage beast,” he said quietly, gliding back in toward her. “Kagome-sama…” The furling silk of his hakama brushed at her naked legs as he leaned in, a preternatural current tracing like fingertips over her belly and breasts, the shuttered seam of her thighs. “Give me Tessaiga, give me your hand. Between your power and mine, we can create a kingdom of our own and be free of him, forever.”

His sharp-nailed thumb hovered significantly at her cheek, and she knew that this was how he would mark her. Here and now, she could be mated again—

Made immortal again…

“I am the only one who can help you,” he spoke just above her lips. “You cannot defeat him on your own. Take me inside you, and I will release you. Release me from him, and I will be your devoted slave.”

Kagome’s chest constricted. In her mind’s eye she could see them coming together, power for power. Flesh for flesh. She could see the East and the West melding into one as she accepted his claim, as she took his cock like a scepter in her hand and brought all of demonkind to submission in the bargain. She could see herself ruling over him and all the rest. She could see herself ruling over it all—free of death, free of guilt, free to do as she pleased. It would be great—

It would be terrible.

Glaring and trembling, she shoved him back from her with all her strength. “Sesshoumaru is family to me. I won’t betray him.”

Cruelly, Hirokin smiled. “Family is what you make of it, my lady.”

“I know,” Kagome said, drawing in a sharp, bracing breath. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi