InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Bloodlust: Purity ❯ A Longer Evening ( Chapter 11 )

The forest closed around Kouga like a dark and shivering tunnel. The trees bore claws on twigged and scratchy fingers, reaching for his hair and leaving the dry remains of winter bark. The wolf in his arms had not moved or spoken, not even when he lifted her and wrapped his own robe around her. The dark reach of his thoughts touched on her, and sought identifying characteristics that he might have known in another life, but there was nothing.

No house mark shone on her forehead, no clan stripes anywhere on her body, and though her skin was demon-pale, her long hair and the gleam of her tail were a deep and shining black that faded slowly into bottomless blue. His first thought of her had been a warning, but now that he had come so far without even a taste of danger, that feeling had subsided.

In the past, the village that rose quickly before him between a lip of hills and rice paddies had been the closest thing to home his mother knew and a sanctuary for his brother. Now, it had begun to grow. People came from across the wide country, from over the sea and from strange lands beyond China that had not even been heard of, drawn by this powerful resurgence of old magics and the rumor of returning lights - and darknesses.

Humans said that demons grew more powerful, while youkai watched with darkening eyes as the numbers of the impotent and the ravaging, the mindless and the furious, grew beyond count. How many humans were destroyed or eaten, to sate such lusts? A true youkai was not concerned with humans; in life, or in death.

A flat scowl crossed his face, and his thoughts paused while his feet continued along their chosen path, slowing only to meet the requirements of the narrow, rutted path down the hill into the village. He ran around the edge of houses that had grown out into the open space, and into the edge of trees. A house of many screens and a low, flat red roof loomed suddenly in front of him, and Kouga skidded to a halt.

Jostled by his sudden stop, the girl in his arms finally moved, but only to twist her limbs into a more folded knot and let out another mewling moan. Something was hurting her, though he did not know what - it was an instinctual knowledge that came from the understanding of her sounds and the taunting awareness that had touched him as he found her, fading out of the glow in the sky that had drawn him.

With a foot, Kouga slid aside the screen that blocked his path into Miroku's house, and the Houshi looked up from where he knelt by the hearth-side with surprise and amusement written equally across his face.

“Well, Kouga - this is a surprise. Who is your…friend?”

The Inu-prince shook his head, and held out his armful of wolf-girl like an offering.

“I found her in the trees, between home and here. There was a light in the sky like a pink sun, and I turned aside to see what it was. When I came to the place, there was only her.”

Miroku's eyebrows tensed, and then relaxed.

“Well. I suppose all the other questions that come to mind will have to be put aside for now. Bring her in, and put her in the girls' room. I will go for Teza. She is not as strong with holiness as Kagome, but she is still Miko.”

He ran one hand through his hair, ruffling the gray threads that wound through the black, and squinted up at Kouga as he stood and passed behind him to the door.

“Do not think, son of Sesshomaru, that because I do not ask those other questions now, that I will forget! I am not yet that old…”

Kouga laughed, but unease was more the basis for the sound than anything else, and he passed through the screened rooms quickly. The bedroom for Miroku and Sango's daughters was empty now. Only one of their daughters still lived with them, and soon she too would probably leave. The other three girls were married, with new families of their own, and Sango herself was expecting, closely watched by the miko whom Miroku had gone to find.

He laid his bundle on the floor, and slid open the wall cabinet that held the futon, each rolled bundle with its own pillow. With a snap of one wrist, he unrolled one across the floor, and let his armful down gently onto it. Almost at once, she moved, settling on one side. She ignored the pillow and uncurled loosely backward. It was an odd position to be considered restful, but then she retracted, and lay silent and straight.

Kouga was in him now, holding the reins of his senses, Kouga-who-had-been dominant over the one who owned the flesh. With stalking footsteps, he walked around and around, probing, as though the skin of this unknown wolf held secrets only he could see. While he paced, waiting for Miroku and the miko, he contemplated the girl.

The folds of his tunic revealed more than they concealed, and the long shine of her black hair lay in loops and wisps and thick, gleaming strands. The point of her ears was gentle - only one was visible, delicate and just the tiniest bit more blushed than the rest of her skin. Her tail moved restlessly in whatever dream or sleep possessed her, sweeping her thighs with blackness, gleaming blue at the end of each fine hair.

Minutes passed, and then more. The sun rationed out the last few gleams of light like an old woman with her last bag of rice, and then shot down between the leafless trees, staining the snow. In the sudden darkness brought on by the wait for eyes to adjust, the girl moved, and blinked, and sat up.

Kouga leaned forward through the darkness, a pale figure suddenly looming, and the scent of fear suddenly became a spike driving into his awareness. The growl that broke from him was a soothing noise, the memory-language of pup and mother that lay at the root of youkai instinct. She responded, and the scent lessened, and he pushed a question at her, touching beneath it with the same growling tongue.

“Where do you come from?”

When it came, her voice was low and throaty, lapping at his ears with a sensual softness like the ripples of leaping fish in a deep pool.

“I come from far - you have not heard of my home, or me.”

The tone of her voice was ambiguous, but he could not deny that this was likely, considering the number of travelers who had begun to frequent the area.

“Then what is your name, that I have not heard of it?”

He only knew she smiled through the gathering darkness from the glint of teeth, and her answer was even softer than before.

“Murasaki.”

Miroku chose that moment to return. The screen slid open, and a lantern in Miroku's hands was followed by a candle held between the delicate fingers of a miko, and Sango, who stepped carefully into the room, leaning back with a sigh.
”Well, this is more promising than when I left. Teza, you have not met Kouga before - he is the son of Sesshomaru and Kagome.”

A strange laugh reached between them, friends and strangers, and Miroku held out his lamp to catch the gleam that vanished quickly from Kouga's eyes.

“That I am. It is good to meet you, miko-Teza, but I think we are not so needing of your services as Miroku thought. This is Murasaki, who is wolf. She was not well, but now I think she is growing better.”

The miko turned toward the girl, sitting up now and wrapped more firmly in Kouga's robe.

“I welcome you to our village, Murasaki. You may not expect such from humans, but we have learned that there is a difference between oni and youkai - the mother of your friend taught us this.”

Murasaki looked bewildered, but she took the hand that was offered to her, and then was more surprise when the hand pulled, and she was brought t o her feet.

“Do you suffer pain, or ill-feeling in your body? Are your thoughts ordered?”

She shook her head, and Teza looked askance at Miroku.

“What did you require me for?”

Kouga remained silent, laughing to himself as Sango and the miko castigated the Houshi for his lack of foresight and anticipation - he should have known, of course, that the wolf - Murasaki! - would recover quickly, and was not in danger. Miroku accepted their words, managing somehow to be both unabashed and look repentant.

Perhaps I will stay here for a while. This is near a place I remember - this is near my Den!

His thoughts moved in two directions at once, pulling, and he felt a soft hand on his arm that released the pressure and cleared his brain.

“You should not push so hard, Inu-wolf. You will break all your selves, all of them…”

“Murasaki- “

She silenced him with a smile and a hand that waved away his questions.

“Murasaki must be enough for now. They are returning.”

Sango and Miroku opened the screens through the house, and lit a fire on the hearth. When Kouga turned to her again, her face was peaceful and her shadow stood out against the wall, flickering in the firelight, dancing while she slept.

 

 

“Sesshomaru, I have read them all.”

Sesshomaru looked up at Kagome standing in the doorway of his study, and blinked, faintly surprised.

“Have you? I cannot. There are words that I have no meanings for, and other characters put together in ways that I would not say were words, either.”

Kagome stepped forward, and the glitter of her eyes was intense.

“I know them. They are words out of time, words from the when that was my home. I do not understand how Eldest could know them, even from a vision - I do not understand! Once, when I was lonely for the things I had left behind, I asked Eldest about the power of the well that brought me here, about the Tree that bridges time in a way that is both brilliant and invisible. She would not answer me, and her smile was strange.”

Her arms gathered around each other, and she pressed her claws into herself, feeling the edge of pain and reassured by it in an earthy, primal way.

“I wonder what it is she knows - I want to know how it is that she could tell me the colors that wrapped around my body, how she could think to remind me of the tingle that went deeper than my skin without ever touching it - that felt familiar and pleasant even the first time, in the few moments I had before the Centipede Woman tried to lick the jewel from my body.”

She took four big steps into the room, and caught up the scrolls that Sesshomaru still studied, shaking them.

“Eldest has seen too many things, knows too many things, and I know she will not share them all with me…but this! How can she say that this will answer my questions, when I only been given a hundred more and no answers at all?

The angry frustration in her voice called out to him, but there was nothing in him to answer her. He could not give what he did not have. Abruptly, his head turned to the sound of a patter of running footsteps, and Rin slid into the hall attached to them.

“Kystra is awake!”

Kagome turned as if to run out the way Rin had come, but Sesshomaru stopped her at the look on their daughter's face.

“What is it, Rin?”

She shook her head slowly, and ran her fingers wearily through her hair.

“She is…awake. Her eyes are open - she moves, and you can talk to her. But when she speaks…”

She shook her head again, and turned out of the room, leading the way with heavy footsteps. Behind her, Sesshomaru took Kagome's hand, leading her, but the miko's shoulders were hunched and worry pulsed from her in waves.

Upstairs, they trooped down the long hallway like a funeral procession, and Rin held open the door to her parents' bedroom and closed the door behind them with a bowed head.

“Kystra?”

Kagome touched her daughter's shoulder, and then lifted her hand. The fingers tightened around her hold, and then relaxed. A warm smile touched the corners of Kystra's mouth, which moved without sound, and then Kagome saw her eyes and all warmth and feeling were bleached from her.

They were blue, heavy and deep and empty, blue in the iris and the pupil and without whites. It was not a natural color - it was steely and dark, but blank and without shadows. Sesshomaru's hands on Kagome's shoulders tightened until he pricked her with his claws and drew blood.

He did not notice. He had seen eyes like those once before, in Kagome's face when Kasuka had touched her with dreams. Suddenly, he remembered that Kystra had fallen from a mirror - that a mirror had bound Kagome in the same way. He had broken that mirror, to end Kagome's spell, though he had almost killed her in the process, but Kystra's mirror was already broken.

“Kagome…the mirror. What did you do with the broken mirror?”

She shook her head, caught off guard by a question that seemed not to have sense.

“It is still there, by her altar. The servants will not enter her room - and I do not blame them. They feel what I feel - something lingers there that is not of our daughter.”

She pulled him aside, further from the door and the listening ears of Rin that she suspected, and spoke low.

“When I visited with Eldest, the Glynynn gave me a vision. There was a man in it, who looked on Kystra's face with desire, dressed like a priest but of some order which I have not seen before. In the vision, it all made no sense, but now that I think back on it, I have a feeling like I have sent robes like that before, but not…I don't know. I can't place it.”

She shook her head as if to clear, and then a sharper memory intruded, reminding her of the warning of pain.

“Afterwards, when the vision collapsed, I felt…darkness. Something seeking for me, something touching me with pain.”

Sesshomaru shook his head, confused.

“How could a man in your vision look on Kystra's face? And with desire? She is too young yet for desire.”

“He had a mirror, or at least he stood by one. Her face was bright in it.”

“Ahhh!”

Mirrors again!

With a shout that was also a strangled growl, Sesshomaru swung his fist and buried it in the wall. The marble broke beneath his strength, cracking and powdering into white dust around his knuckles. A red stain seeped outward briefly into the stone from his broken skin, and then stopped.

“Sess-chan!”

“Who is it? Who is it hurting her? I will tear out their throats with my teeth!”

Kagome did not understand the depth of his rage. Mother-panic was dark in her, but it did not move her to such strengths of violent urges. She remembered Kouga, suddenly and without reason, remembered that he had left without a word and that no one had heard from him, or seen him.

The panic grew darker, but while she was full of a barely restrainable desire to find him, she knew she did not even know where to look.

“How do we find them, Sess-chan? Who is that would dare to harm her?”

To have resolve, to have purpose, felt good to her. If she could not help one pup, at least she would try to aid this one. Swiftly, she went to the door and opened it, looking for her other daughter.

“Rin? Rin?”

But Rin was not there, and Kagome was in no mood to follow her and track her down. When she turned back to Sesshomaru, he had crossed to the wardrobe and pulled it open, and she watched him take his armor from where it hung opposite the long mirror.

With practiced ease, and no more effort than if the heavy iron bands were silk, he swung it around onto his shoulders and settled it into place. He pulled the leather straps through their buckles, and tightened them against his breath. Toukijin slid easily into its place by his side, and he lifted Tensaiga hesitantly, feeling the new lightness of his father's sword.

Kinawai had brought it to him, after his fortress had been cleared of dead dragons and Kasuka's darkness. He had found it on the floor of the room of mirrors, quiet and still amidst the torn apart chaos of that windowed room. Kinawai had been left with broken glass on the floor, and blood, so much blood - the scent of fury, and death, and then the silent sword, as if in counterpoint.

Though Sesshomaru no longer knew what powers the sword might contain, it still had belonged to his father - it was still his sword. He was seized with a momentary gratitude, that wherever he wandered, Kouga carried tetsusaiga with him, and thought belatedly that the sword seemed to prefer headstrong owners. From what he had heard, even his father had not summoned tetsusaiga like Inuyasha could summon tetsusaiga. What, then, could his son not do with such a sword?

The pride would have been easier to swallow if he had not also been suspicious, remembering the wildness of the wolf, Kagome's friend, so long his own enemy…and now something other.

Kouga.

Still, there had been no other name he could choose for his son, and the wolf had died for Kagome.

“Rin is gone?”

Kagome made a small startled noise, and then nodded as he turned to her. She had been thinking as deeply as he, and had not expected his voice.

“She must have left as soon as she closed the door - I had thought she would wait, and listen.”

Her attempt at a smile was halfhearted.

“So much for curiosity. I had just decided not to go find her - do you want me to?”

Sesshomaru shook his head, and stared down the long hall.

“She has had enough of stone walls, and empty voices, and callow faces.”

Just as I have.

He hefted Tensaiga, and thrust it into his belt, and then stopped. Kagome's face was wide and listening, distracted from his statement by the face of their daughter, which reflected screamless pain.

“Kystra? Kystra?”

Her mouth moved, but her lips were bloodless, her eyes still captured with that penetrating blue, and the voice was swallowed, somehow foreign.

“How did you learn my name? Will you…call me beautiful again?”

Horror drained the color from Kagome's cheeks, and Sesshomaru pulled her away, out of the room and into the hallway.

“Sesshomaru…Sesshomaru…what is she hearing, who does she see that is not me? Rin…she knows. She heard!”

He nodded and held her hands between his own, stilling the trembling of her fingers, the clutching pulse of her claws.

“She did. And she told us what she could. I am going on walkabout. To go, or stay, that is your choice - but I know that I feel like I am in a cage as long as I remain here, and that I cannot bear.”

Kagome turned away from the door, wrenching her attention back to the present, away from the strange words and the blue eyes of her Kystra.

“What is `walkabout', Sesshomaru?”

The briefest of smiles lifted his lips and lightened his features.

“When you first met me, I was on walkabout. To stride the breadth of my lands, and know the currents of the earth; to feel new, clean winds and taste them for enticing scents; to hear the rumor of all lands, on the lips of men who do not know I hear them, in the growls of youkai who bend with fear when I pass.”

Kagome turned away from him for a silent moment, battling with her thoughts. To leave Kystra, even to find a way to help her, to stop the one who harmed her - if there was anyone who could save her daughter, or salve her dreaming wounds, it would have to be her. But to let Sesshomaru go alone, out into the wide country that teemed with strangers and the workings of distress?

“I will come with you. I need…my bow.”