“What happened to Jakken?” Shin asked, pulling back from Kagome’s embrace.

“I sent him flying,” she replied, glancing west.

Shin squinted in that direction. “How far?”

“Not far enough,” Kagome said dryly.

Shin grinned toothily. “Listen, Kaa-san: I know a way we can leave him in our dust.”

Kagome laughed, ruffling his black hair and tweaking his black ear. “Roger that, but first let’s get your clothes back on you, Batman.”

As she said this, she held up his ethereal blue youkai garments. Shin pursed his lips at the sight of them, crossing his arms at his bare boyish chest. But then after a moment of her imploring look, he relented with a sigh and shoved back into his hakama and haori—before transforming in a swirling rush of youki into his big, beastly self.

Shin lowered his shaggy, snowy front quarters, and Kagome clambered aboard. She settled comfortably behind her son’s neck, finding easy handholds and footholds in his dense, spark-shedding fur. The sparks fizzed against her light as soda bubbles, making her giggle as they rose from the ground and soared high away through the clouds, toward the eastern horizon.

No matter how far they wandered, Shin never had any trouble finding his way back to the Bone-Eater’s Well again—nor, indeed, to any place that they’d traveled. His canine senses lent him an uncanny knack for navigation by scent and memory. So, when not far from their destination, he veered suddenly in midair with a questioning growl, Kagome knew that it wasn’t because he’d lost the way.

“What is it, baby?” she asked, leaning toward his large pointed white ear as she spoke through the whipping wind. “You picking up on some trouble?”

Naturally, Shin had a superhuman ability for catching bad whiffs. Even outside of his beast form, there were times in their travels where he’d stop suddenly at a point in the wilderness—or even the road—and say to her, ‘We should be careful, Kaa-san. I’ve got a bad feeling.’

Kagome had learned the hard way to defer to his inuyoukai instincts.

Presently, she said, bracingly, “Well, then, let’s go.”

Shin descended then, somewhat off course, landing in the thick of the trees—right on top of a group of oni bandits who’d cornered a young, frightened human woman against her cart. Digging her knees into her son’s hard flanks, Kagome had an arrow nocked and at the ready as they fell upon the unsuspecting youkai marauders, rending them apart with claw and fang and purifying arrow.

When the demons were felled, Kagome slipped off Shin’s back as he transformed into his human self. Together, they approached the young woman huddled in fear against her cart. As their shadows fell over her, her wide eyes strayed up at them, and then beyond them, at the scattering of dissolving oni corpses. The young woman’s mouth fell open in surprise.

“Miko-sama, you have felled these foul demons here,” she gasped, her eyes glossing over the little boy Shin and latching upon the white-and-red clad figure of Kagome entirely. “But—that great terrifying white demon, where has it gone?”

Shin shrugged, somewhat miffed. “Guess it got bored and flew off.”

The young woman’s eyes flicked to him then, and he smiled smugly. Kagome rolled her eyes, thinking, Here we go.

Sure enough, Shin sidled right up to the pretty older girl and started right in on her: “Say, where’re you from, onee-san? If you’re lost out here, we can help you find your way back home. We’re expert travelers.”

She flushed and smiled back at him, charmed or grateful or both. As it turned out, the pretty flustered ‘onee-san’ didn’t need want for directions home so much as an escort. Of course Kagome and her girl-crazy son were only too happy to oblige. 

As they set off together through the wilderness with cart in tow, Shin chattered away with the young woman nonstop, so that Kagome felt distinctly like an afterthought. And so, as her mind and eyes were free to wander, she saw with a start, as the girl’s home village drew into sight through the trees—

The formerly abandoned village in the woods where her own son had been conceived.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi