Kagome felt worse than wretched about locking Ikiryou away. But she didn’t know what else to do. With the way things were now, she couldn’t very well keep an eye on him every second.

Deep down, she blamed herself for his aberrant behavior. She’d known this castle was no place for him, yet she’d kept him cooped-up here anyway. He’d probably only been attacking those other dogs out of frustration and neglect—and the men who’d laid hands on him out of fear.

The guards’ belief that he’d gone mad wasn’t one she was willing to entertain. She’d seen the look in his eyes, as they’d led him away—what ‘mad dog’ could have a gaze as solemn and steady as that?

When her tasks for the day were finished, she went straight off to visit him in his isolation. As she opened the door of the kennel, he perked up from the bed of rushes he’d been curled-up in. Kagome smiled as he padded toward her, his red tongue lolling out.

“Good boy,” she said, ruffling him behind the points of his ears.

His broad slimy tongue licked her all over the face.

“…Yuck,” she said, frowning as she looked over his coat, which was still caked and matted with dirt and dried blood. “Let’s clean you off, okay?”

With Ikiryou following along behind her, she led him out of the kennel and over to a nearby trough. With a scrub brush and a pail, she got him sorted, exclaiming a little when he shook himself dry and flung stale water all over her. For a while Kagome watched him roll around in the brittle grass, happy as could be. Then, when he was content he’d undone at least half of the bath with all that wallowing, he trotted over and flopped down beside her on the low wooden porch. Petting him, Kagome was reassured.

No, she decided, Ikiryou wasn’t mad. He’d just been acting out, and needed to cool off for a while. After that, she would figure out how to keep him near her more.

Leading him back to the kennel, she pointed in. Tail between his legs, Ikiryou slunk inside and bedded down in the straw. Kagome closed the door behind him, and made her way back toward her quarters.

As she crossed through a wilder stretch of the palace gardens, which was more like an extension of the surrounding forest than anything else, a curious glimmer of motion caught her eye through the trees. Frowning, Kagome made her way toward it, her senses alert.

It wasn’t so much the glimmer, but the aura of surreal stillness around it that drew her attention. A distortion in the fabric of earthly reality. For powerful demons, this was often the best way to sense them. Even with auras suppressed, the sheer weight of their presence was like a gravitational pull.

But this demon wasn’t making all that much of an effort to hide anyway, at least not from someone of Kagome’s spiritual caliber.

At the edge of a pool whose waters were overrun with browning lily pads, Kagome spied the source of this unearthly depression. Beneath the draping, yellowing boughs of a willow tree, the daiyoukai sat upon a bench of weathered stone. Catching Kagome’s eye, she rose, the train of her lavender silks and ivory fur rustling faintly.

One glance at the tails of that streaming silver hair, that crescent brow-mark and that cool, familiar smile, and Kagome knew this demoness at once—

“You’re Sesshoumaru’s mother, aren’t you?”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi