Outside the house a light, sleeting rain was falling.

Kagome screwed her eyes shut against it as she stepped out from beneath the awning. Still sitting hunched below the eaves, Kanako stared after her. Kagome could feel it, the galling intensity of that stare.

“Kagome-sama…”

“Don’t you dare speak to me after what you’ve done,” Kagome said, not bothering to glance back as she descended the porch steps. “I’ve pitied you, but you’re a spiteful creature. I don’t want to see you slinking around my house anymore. I don’t want to see your face for a good long while.”

“No, Kagome-sama, no!” Kanako cried, throwing her thin arms around Kagome’s waist. “You cannot turn from me, after what I have done for you! Such devotion I have shown you—devotion unto death!”

“Get off me, damn you!” Roughly, Kagome shoved her back, glaring. “If you’re really so devoted to me, you’ll do what I fucking tell you to do!”

Kanako’s mouth quivered. “I…Kagome-sama, please…please, do not forsake me…”

Kagome clenched her jaw and glanced away. “Just go. Just leave me be!”

Whimpering feebly, Kanako left.

Standing alone in the sleet and the silence, Kagome’s misery engulfed her. In the distance, through the inky darkness, she could see the flickering lights of the hilltop shrine, and the graveyard that lay beyond it. Her feet moved toward it out of habit, yet at the bottom of the steps, she paused.

A heaviness had settled in her heart like a stone. She was remembering the night before—remembering the heated course Sesshoumaru’s hands had taken over her body, remembering how he’d crushed himself to her back as he’d invaded her marriage bed. And she had let him. She had let him…

Kagome turned her face away in shame. How could she go and pray at Inuyasha’s grave, after what she had done? After what she had allowed.

The miko shivered, her expression forlorn. Her hair and clothes were damp with melted ice as she turned from the steps. Trudging back to her home, she stripped down until she stood naked and dripping behind the screen. Most desperately, she wanted to die. But even more than that, she wanted to live to make Sesshoumaru suffer.

“Everything goes back to you,” she said sullenly when she felt him enter, “and still I don’t know what to make of you. I never have.”

“No,” Sesshoumaru said, pushing back the screen. The ghostly radiance of his form burned behind her eyes. “Yet I understand you completely.”

On a little cushioned stool, Kagome sat halfway dressed once more. Her robe hung open, baring the curves of her breasts, the dark lacy sliver of her panties, which his eyes snapped to immediately, of course. Coldly, Kagome smiled up at him.

“I knew you’d be back here,” she said as she rose and approached him. “Tell me, Sesshoumaru—do you love me, or do you hate me? With the way you’ve wrecked my life, I think I deserve to know.”

“Such words you humans hang upon,” he said, matching her smile chill for slow creeping chill. “How small they are, compared to what I feel for you.”

Kagome’s chest drew painfully tight, her lips trembling from a feeling she couldn’t begin to define. “Down,” she breathed out, in dark exultation.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi