Raggedly, Kagome sobbed, her throat going raw with hopeless grief. Her bloodied shoulder blazed and throbbed. Her bruised spine zinged with pain. But it was the ache in her heart that threatened to cripple her, as the Beast bit down on her shield with brutal, crushing force.

At the attack, at the sight of his obvious excitement at her suffering, her sadness devolved to full-blown anger. Why should she cry for her own naivety? Why should she mourn for one who had never been?—her ideal of a Sesshoumaru who had never truly existed. This was what he really was.

And yet…

Beneath the lust and animal madness, beneath the violence and greed and shameless depravity, there had been the stoicism, the glimmers of concern, of regret, even of—

Kagome screwed her eyes shut, unwilling to let her misguided sentiments carry her any further away than that. As her barrier began to crack like an egg beneath the splitting pressure of his jaws, her power spiked through it in a vicious burst. Sesshoumaru howled as the cutting points of her reiki stabbed him through, the earth shaking as he backed off from her with a ferocious toss of his head. Smoke billowed from his ivory muzzle. Black blood spilled from his peeled-back lips, his fiery eyes narrowing at her as he paced around her and lashed out with his claws.

Glaring back, Kagome felt the last of her tears burn from her cheeks. She had resolved, weeks ago when her righteous fury was at its keenest and most pure, to fix her brother-in-law. If this crazed beast was truly part of him, then she would exorcise it. She would bring him to heel and make him into the man she wished for him to be.

Though the Beast’s power was unlike anything she had ever witnessed before—even from Sesshoumaru himself—as her will solidified and she mastered her initial despair, Kagome began to detect a disarray in the flurry of attacks bombarding her. Like a fire burning out of control, his youki was disorganized and rampant. Chaotic. Were it otherwise, were his onslaught concentrated and focused, she would have had no choice but to concede defeat—but as it was, she saw her slim advantage like a glimmer of light in the darkness.

She could subdue him. As his raging tempest of youki assailed her, as he raised his paw to strike down upon her beleaguered barrier once again, she stared hard at the sparse ring of prayer beads still encircling his massive neck. Her power flared in them as she furrowed her brow, Sesshoumaru snapping his fangs as though merely annoyed. But Kagome was undeterred. With a clear voice, she called out into the fathomless dark—

“Sit, boy!”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi