Kagome cleaned up the spattered blood and bits of scale. But the dead snake she kept, removing it carefully from the house to the yard. Its fanged maw yawned, rigidly askew—frozen in what looked like a final scream of terror. Kagome’s stomach turned as she dropped it to the grass.

Back inside, Shin was nestled in his fresh-made crib. He looked for all the world like a perfectly normal baby. Perfectly sweet and innocent and not at all like whatever cold-blooded fiend had mangled that snake into shreds.

She touched her son’s rosy cheek, seeking reassurance in its warmth and softness. His blue eyes opened sleepily as she did so. 

“You’re a good boy,” Kagome whispered, wondering who she was trying to convince.

Gazing up at her, Shin smiled vaguely.

When Inuyasha returned home later that day, Kagome told him the whole story, exactly as she remembered it—though to be fair, her impressions were hazed in distress. The furrow in his brows steepened as she spoke. She told him she’d kept the snake so he could see for himself. She led him outside to where the viper lay sprawled in the shadow of the house. Inuyasha crouched down next to it, his silver ears pricked. He sniffed the air as he prodded its mauled, ropy corpse with a clawtip.

“That’s Shin’s scent, all right,” he said after a minute. “And these piercings here—see?” Kagome bent over to look at where Inuyasha was pointing, a slim set of gouges near the base of the skull. “Those are youkai fang marks—there’s no mistaking it. The miasma’s melted the bone like candle wax.”

Kagome’s eyes weren’t keen enough to notice that level of subtlety in the snake’s gross mutilation, but she took his word for it. As she nodded, Inuyasha sat back on his haunches, his lips quirked at one corner. Where Kagome had been rattled by her son’s display of violence, Inuyasha seemed distinctly pleased.

“Got his old man’s killer instincts, doesn’t he?” Proudly, Inuyasha stood, brushing grass blades off his hakama. “Don’t know how he managed it, but he’s a natural.”

Kagome frowned heavily. “He’s only a baby, Inuyasha. He shouldn’t be killing anything—and I think ‘killing’ is putting it mildly. He thrashed that snake into pieces. It’s almost like…like he enjoyed it.”

Inuyasha shrugged, scoffing. “Well, yeah. So he likes a little bloodsport—what demon doesn’t? What man, for that matter. Kid had every right to enjoy it, if you ask me. Big mean bastard like that,” he said, cutting a glance at the dead viper, “threatening his mother? I’d have done the same.”

Kagome considered this. Could it be, that while she’d been scrambling to protect her baby, he’d acted to protect her? It was true that Shin must have attacked after she’d run for the door, with the enraged snake hissing at her heels. The timing was so slight, the events so fogged in panic in her mind that she couldn’t be sure of anything except the most concrete facts. But she did feel slightly heartened as she followed Inuyasha back inside the house.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 8/22/23