InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Bloodlust ❯ Blood and Change ( Chapter 39 )

In the midst of unknown sorrow, Sango experienced a realization of new joy. She went in the morning to Kaede, in the first minutes past the rising of the sun, and the glow in her eyes and in the pinkness of spring brushed cheeks outshone the gold and pink horizon. Even at her age, Kaede still rose to the charge of her duties as a miko, and when she saw the young woman coming to her home in the early hours of the day, she did as Sango asked, her examination quick with the ease of experience.

"Yes, child, you'll have a child of your own, soon. Best tell Miroku he's finally got a woman to bear his child."

The glow on Sango's cheeks did not dare to diminish and a slow smile full of secrets added the simplest and most pure of a woman's pleasures to her face.

"Truly, Kaede? I worried that I would bear no child, that to fight as I have fought would have broken my body. There have been so many deep wounds…"

There was tenseness in the joy, a momentary pain of memory that melted almost instantly.

"But I will have a child now, a child of my own, a hearth mate for Kagome's pups and someone to teach, that the ways of my village will not be forgotten, that the memory of my father may be honored when I am gone."

Kaede smiled her miko's smile, that could hold deep secrets and yet give no offense, the smile of someone who understood.

"You have had deep wounds, and deep healing, Sango. The memory of your father, and the memory of you will last far longer than you might suspect. Choose wisely, child, and you may find that to be a mother can be more honor than you could possibly know."

"Sometimes, I wonder why you bother to say these things, Kaede. I never understand them until a moment when I have to make a very difficult decision - and it does not make the decision any easier knowing that it is important as well as difficult."

The smile returned to the old miko's face, and she nodded gently at the door.

"Go to your husband, Sango. There will be time for deep things later."

The Taijiya stood quickly and bowed her thanks, and went with light laughter out the door. Miroku's sharp and joyous shout of abandoned glee broke the dawn quiet in contrast to Sango's private happiness - but no one seemed to mind.

There were tears in Eldest's eyes when she pulled the blue bladed knife from its place by the seeing pool, but there was a hard light behind them and she handed it hilt-first to Kagome. She let the younger youkai pull the blade through her palms, leaving thick crimson-purple blood to slip down her hands and coat the knife blade, and the glimmer in the steel shifted with subtle violence and a shower of sparks to match the color of Eldest's life.

"Am I to take her life with this blade, Eldest? I am not skilled in knife-work."

The woman flinched away from Kagome's words, and shook her head.

"That knife you must give to Kinawai. As her mate, he must be made to see what she has done and who she really is. If he does not take her life himself, he will suffer the blood rage at the loss of his mate, and would take Kasuka's vengeance upon himself - he would try to destroy your mate."

Kagome stood perfectly still, a statue-image held motionless by the mention of Sesshomaru.

"Where…is Sesshomaru, Eldest?"

"I sent him back to lead his army while you healed - and to see if you mind and heart would heal towards him before you saw him again. Have you healed, sister-daughter?"

Kagome only smiled.

"I love him, Eldest. It was not me he struck at - it was the Kasuka; I will revenge myself on her, not my mate."

She strapped the glimmering blade to the sash of her kimono, retying it to hide the bloody tear where her wound still showed against the paleness of her skin.

"Eldest, if ever I may repay my debt to you, for saving my life and the life of my pup - do not hesitate to ask."

The elder youkai nodded, and gestured Kagome towards the still pool in the corner.

"Before you leave, sister-daughter, know that this pool is the Glynynn, the Pool of Seeing. To those with the power, these waters will show many things - connections between events, faces from the past or the future, places that one might need to be. You have the power, Kagome, you are the last true daughter of my house. If you choose, you may seek its secrets before you depart. Will you seek the soul of the water?"

Kagome stepped forward through the room to the edge of the pool, and peered down into clear rippling depths. She saw only her reflection, but her reflection was not surrounded in the water by the reflections of those things which surrounded her - there was blankness, the dark pulsation of an abyssal call.

"Eldest, why - "

"Ehh! Watch!"

Kagome watched, but she did not see. Instead the water of the pool rushed up and over her, whether in her mind or in reality she could not tell. In a dome of that was made of a pale glow, tinted fine, translucent amethyst, she saw appear before her a vision that mixed nightmares with paradise.

--Sesshomaru lifting her newborn pup - A horde of dragon youkai tearing the castle walls to pieces - Kouga flying into a bloody rush of battle and not returning - A cry of terror - A mist of honey sweet scent and soft skin and oh! InuYasha - Kasuka with the hand of her first love - Sesshomaru, dead beneath an incredible magic onslaught - the marriage of a different pup - Kinawai falling dead with her teeth in his throat - The full moon - Kasuka on a battlement wall, holding a black bow - Sess-chan! Against the wall and no one to help! Sess-chan! -

The vision collapsed in front of her, and she staggered back, blinking back images, the beautiful and the terrible, forcing them from her thoughts into memory.

"Eldest! I must go to him, I must! The choice runs both ways!"

Her words made no sense, even to her, but Eldest only nodded, and Kagome was gone like a whisper on the breeze.

Kagome relied on the persistent tug of her mating bond to guide her, to go closer and closer to the presence of his energy that shimmered to her like the waves rising off summer heated pavement. The came in the air after a short while the taint of blood scent, a reminder of carrion feeders and a foul decay - battlefield odors that grew stronger the farther she went. She traveled for two days, pushing her body through the haze that sometimes flowed through her, the haze of pain from her unhealed wound. There were moments of convulsive pain, that heaved groans of agony from her throat and pushed drops of blood through the edges of her wound. She ignored the whipping slash of knife-thin pine branches past her cheeks, the thorns that pierced her feet as she passed with swiftness over the freezing ground.

Twice she met hostile beast-youkai, and twice she slew them, not even pausing in her western journey. In the dawn hours of her second days travel she turned to the south and detoured to hunt. Alone and unaided she brought down a bear, ate its meat raw and tasted the honey-fed sweetness of its flesh, apple crisp juices flowing in its veins. She drank the life-power from its blood, and sped her running feet on the freshet of energy that burst into her consciousness. With the fixed though of surviving long enough to save her mate, her eyes faded slowly into red and stayed that way, pressing in abandoned pulses at the one barrier of her youkai that she had not yet managed to overcome - because she did not know it was there.

Sesshomaru reached for Histaru's wrist, and slit a thin river of red into his flesh. It poured deep into the swirling whirlpool of blue energies, that flashed purple at the unfamiliar boy-youkai who had never before fed the ravenous Spring. The Taiyoukai pulled Histaru away from the void and stood himself at its edge instead, spilled his blood and watched through dull eyes the resounding flash of sudden red that dove in a bright wave like a fountain of blood-water and disappeared into the earth. Histaru swayed, feeling the loss of his life's strength, but Sesshomaru, who had given so much more, fell ice-pale to the floor and lay still. By his master's side instantly, Histaru found a low and pounding pulse, and stood a weary and wary guard over Sesshomaru's body.

At the edge of the forest which encompassed the northern edge of Sesshomaru's lands, Kagome stopped, fighting her pain in silence. The ripped flesh in her abdomen had sealed finally with a layer of new, freshly scarred skin, a starburst that sometimes caused deep pain, and sometimes forced unwanted thoughts into her head. She had seen a scar to match it once before, in the flesh of memories. She was hard pressed deciding which agony was worse.

The trees in front of her rose tall into the dark sky, her third night alone since she had left the sanctuary of Eldest's `dreaming woods'. A green loamy scent rose from the earth, natures first warning of the approach of Spring, and enjoyed for the first time with youkai senses that scented paintbrush of nature's promised beauty. The low sweeping brush of fronds of fern against her ankles tingled with new life, and she followed the aged trunk of one great tree with her eyes, caressing growled bark with one pale, clawed hand. The focus of her sight drew her gaze to the stars, and she became gradually aware that the night was unusually dark, that the sky was cloudless and moonless and lit only by the gentle glimmer of far off stars.

The view turned her thoughts in the direction she had tried so hard to avoid, and she slowed in her movements, walking with half shut eyes that glimmered with tears. Only then, months after the fact and days after the fiction did she finally admit to herself that despite brave words and demeanor she had never forgiven herself for killing InuYasha. Over and over again the worst battle of her life replayed itself in her mind; the terror when Sesshomaru fell, the rage at his heart, the feel of flesh parting beneath her claws and the scent - flood of his life's blood as it had spilled in a night hot flood down her hands, unstaunchable.

Kagome's thoughts were tormented by the pull and pounding of memory she did not want to believe in, but the evidence of her senses was too horribly strong to doubt. At the end of her control, unused to the powerful crescendo of youkai emotions, Kagome ran - and as she ran, she screamed her anguish in a despairing howl that sounded with cruel clarity in the cold night. Around her as she ran went her howl, the cry of a heartbroken hound from lips that had never before uttered other than human sound, and the deeper her pain penetrated into her soul, the faster she ran.

Trees passed in a blur around her, and she dodged those in her path by sheer instinct, disregarding the cuts that were sliced into her legs by whipping branches, outlining the markings on her body in red, red blood. Though she had felt it before, around Sesshomaru and then around Kouga, Kagome did not realize the significance of the nowhere-wind around her until her youkai pulsed and she felt a hot pain in the flesh of her insides, a tearing, ripping sensation that was at once the most terrifying of pains and the most illicit of pleasure.

She felt with the pure intensity of new sensation every lengthening bone, the tug of heavier, stronger muscles pulling themselves over new height and form. The dagger-sharpness of her claws shifted, and she watched her hands shift into paws that were just as lethally armed. More shallowly, she felt the spiraling warmth over her skin that was the silver softness of lush fur. Complete in her new form, Kagome was unsteady only for a moment, and then the instinctual knowledge born into all of her kind took over, and she thudded swiftly towards the Castle of the West, hearing in the distance of a miles the disturbance of night silence that could only be born of the clash between close encampments of enemy forces.

Shades of remembered battles wallowed through the air, suddenly caught as though in a finger woven net of terrible power that roared through the earth and shuddered in the air with a whine of warning. It shocked her motion from running to stillness, and woken by a depth that was familiar to its blood, the pup in her womb kicked and twisted, betraying a new awareness as the moment of its awakening drew near.

Ahh! So sorry to all my readers! Started a new job, and I've been working sixty hours a week…doesn't leave much time for writing. I have a few more chapters finished, and they'll be posted in the next few days! Thanks for putting up with me, please review!