After Inuyasha left, Kagome paced around the hut. She tried to keep her restlessness under wraps. Just a few more hours, she told herself, and then she’d get some relief. Her nails dug into her crossed arms. Her mouth salivated, out of control. All the while her stomach growled, like there really was a cranky pup trapped in there.

Without even realizing it, she’d find herself peeking into empty jars, crouched heavily on all fours peering under the table for crumbs. It was insane, the way she was acting. Shaking her head, she huffed and picked herself back up. Only the sheer shame of it prevented her from going next door to beg her neighbors for scraps.

She wasn’t really hungry—how could she be, after how much she’d already eaten? She tried fiercely to reason with herself, but it seemed her bottomless pit of a stomach was deaf to all lines of logic. Raking a hand through her tousled hair, she darted her eyes around the room as she tapped her foot, desperate for some sort of distraction.

But she’d already mended the clothing, stoked the fire, swept and re-swept the one-room dwelling. She’d trimmed the fresh winter herbs, ground the dried ones. Made enough poultices and reiki-laced infusions to treat the sick of Edo three times over.

When she caught herself eyeing one of the ginger salves a bit too long for her liking, she tore her gaze away with a growl of her own.

“Ugh, that’s enough!” she said, snatching up her shawl and weapons as she strode toward the door. “Maybe some archery practice will clear my head.”

Maybe, too, she’d encounter one of her friends along the way. Maybe even Sesshoumaru, who was almost too distracting…

At the door, she heard a warble. As Kagome turned, Taiyoutori flew up from his nest in a shower of red-gold sparks. Feather-light, he landed on her shoulder. His long trailing tail plumage spilled warmly down her back, like soft sunbeams.

“You want to go out too?” she said, meeting his golden stare. “All right, but it’s going to be cold.”

She’d said this mostly to brace herself as she pushed through the door, all the hut’s cozy warmth swallowed up in the wintry chill beyond. Kagome shuddered, drawing her shawl tighter about her shoulders. A thick blanket of snow covered the porch, pristine except where Inuyasha had trampled it in his departure. Picking her way carefully down the steps, Kagome did her best to follow in his tracks.

From there, she was on her own, trudging her way through the snow drifts to the forest glade where she and Kaede kept their targets. Squinting as she stood there, Kagome frowned. She crossed the glade, dusted snow from the pockmarked wooden posts—only to find them glazed over with ice.

“S-shoot.” Her teeth chattered as she stuffed her icy hands back into her sleeves to warm them. “That’s no good.”

There was a rustle as Taiyoutori left her shoulder. Just as she was missing the sunny warmth of his presence, he alighted on one of the wooden posts. With a crack of his golden beak, he shattered the ice, which dissolved into steam as it fell.

“Wow.” Kagome blinked, then smiled. “Thanks a lot!”

Head cocked, he gave her a sidelong glance before he flew off to perch in a fir tree high above. Either he was really starting to warm to her, Kagome figured, or he was really just that bored. Whichever it was, she was grateful as she fit an arrow to her bowstring and took aim—before a flicker of movement in her periphery arrested her.

Bow drawn, she turned to find a winter hare nibbling on a patch of withered grass poking up through the snow. Dark-eyed and frosty-furred, with its silky ears slicked back and its little velvet nose quivering, she’d normally have found it an adorable sight—but when she looked at the bunny now, all she saw was rabbit soup, spicy and savory with winter greens and starchy slices of wild root bobbing alongside the chunks of meat. Her mouth watered, her fingers twitched. 

She gasped in shock as her arrow struck. The bunny gave a short despairing cry. It shuddered and sank, seeming to meld with the snow where it fell. Blood blossomed out from it, so starkly red against the white. Kagome’s arms lowered as she closed her eyes and swallowed.

She didn’t know what had come over her. It frightened her, but there was nothing for it now. Frowning, she cut a path through the snow toward the spot where the bunny lay, its almond eyes so dark and glassy and wide. She knelt down, stroked her hand over its soft coat. She pulled out her arrow and touched her fingers to the warm wet wound in its side. 

Hunger gnashed in her stomach, so sharply she dug her fingers into the frozen ground for purchase. The iron scent of fresh blood pervaded her mind, tunneled her vision. She panted, feeling wildly agitated. Beneath her heavy clothes, she was sweating, shaking. Gritting her teeth, she took a knife from her satchel, gutted and field-dressed the rabbit as best she could for all her hands were trembling.

The discarded guts and organs lay in a gory, steaming pile. She saw Taiyoutori there, though when he’d arrived she couldn’t say. As deftly as he’d cracked the ice on the target post, he snapped up a grisly, congealing hunk of viscera and bolted it down. His blue forked tongue flicked out to rasp the blood on his serrated beak away. Kagome stared at him, gruesomely captivated.

There were knives in her stomach, stabbing, tearing. Saliva threaded from the corner of her mouth. A terrible craving overcame her, more savage and raw and urgent than anything she’d ever felt. With a snarl ripping from her throat, she lunged.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi