Setting her jaw, Kagome took a step toward him. “Not particularly,” she said, holding out her hand. “But I’ll take that Jewel Shard if you don’t mind.”

Sesshoumaru slipped down from the tree, sleek and silent as a ghost. He looked at the shard in his claws. Then he looked at her.

“I wonder,” he said, smiling darkly still, “how far I could throw it. Into a volcano, maybe.”

Kagome’s spine stiffened. “If you did, you’d have to go and fetch it out again.”

Sesshoumaru laughed, a sound so rich and low it reverberated through her bones. “Would I? I think you’d be the one fetching, miko. After all, this is your quest, not mine.”

“What is your quest?”

“I seek power,” he said, flicking the Jewel fragment up and catching it in his palm. “That is all I seek.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Sesshoumaru’s golden eye seized hers. “Why not?”

“Because you’re standing here taunting me right now, when there’s point and no need. I think you’re just bored. Aimless, even. You’re bored to death, and there’s nothing for it, because you’re an immortal demon. So that’s why you’re here. You’re so bored with your own life that you find it amusing just to mess with mine. It’s pathetic.”

Sesshoumaru’s whole demeanor chilled. Kagome squared her jaw, though inwardly she quailed. She hadn’t meant to berate him quite like she had, even if he deserved it. But given an outlet, her temper had run away with her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “that wasn’t fair—”

“Answer me this,” he said, stalking toward her. “Answer honestly, and I’ll give you this shard and leave you be.”

For now hung unspoken in the air between them. Kagome met his eye levelly, prepared to be honest, and a little indignant that he’d insinuated she might respond otherwise.

“Okay,” she said, “what’s the question?”

“What do you suppose caused a great daiyoukai like my father to go hounding after a mortal woman?”

Taken aback by the question, Kagome remained silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “She must have caught his eye, I guess.”

Sesshoumaru’s gimlet eyes glinted. His sculpted mouth curved.

“That’s not good enough.”

Kagome bristled. “I answered you honestly—what else do you want from me?”

“You need to be more specific.”

“She must have challenged him,” Kagome said hotly, off the cuff, not even knowing where the words came from, let alone pausing to scrutinize them. “Even though he’s a demon, he’s not the gods’ gift to the earth. She looked at him and saw him for who he really was. She made him feel like a man.”

Sesshoumaru’s unblinking eyes blazed. Kagome’s breath froze in her throat. He crossed the scant distance between them, circling close to her as he dropped his mouth to her ear. So close she could feel the phantom stir of his breath, the graze of his ethereal presence. He glowed like moonlight, and the scent of him was cold and clear, like crisp mountain air.

“Good,” he said, dropping the shard down the neck of her blouse. “You’re so good, Kagome.”

He vanished into the dark behind her. Against her breastbone the Jewel shard thudded, purifying to a bright, blushing rose.

She returned through the well in a hopeless delirium. Whatever her mother and brother and grandfather said to her in greeting went in one ear and out the other. She went through the motions of eating dinner with them, then fled upstairs to her bedroom, sinking down against the plane of the door and sitting there stunned for what felt like hours on end, until she finally picked herself up and went into the adjoining room to bathe.

But in the bath she just felt worse. The warm water was like a conduit to the tumultuous emotions that were coursing through her. With trembling fingers, she reached down between her twitching thighs and felt just how puffy and slick she was between them. She felt feverish to her own touch, and mortified at it. This was wrong, so wrong, but it felt so good as she sank down and soothed her fingertips over her inflamed flesh, replaying Sesshoumaru’s hooded look and murmured praise in her head until she came gasping and sloshing in sudden, all-consuming release, the likes of which she’d never known before.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 9/17/23