From the valley floor, Inukimi gazed up, toward the spot in the sheer rock face where Touga’s severed fang had once speared the usurper Ryuukotsusei through. For centuries, the Inu no Taishou’s power had pinned him there in stalemate. Interred beneath stony scales and petrified flesh, Ryuukotsusei’s malevolence had been sealed safely away. How many times through those centuries had she visited this accursed place, gazed with cold hate upon the mockery that was Ryuukotsusei’s intact form? Whole and preserved, while her beloved had been reduced to hollow bones. It was the hanyou Inuyasha, Touga’s own bastard son, who had succeeded at last where her late mate had failed, and put an end to the scourge of Ryuukotsusei once and for all.

The dragon’s living corpse was gone, blasted away in Tessaiga’s crushing sweep. It was only just, yet Inukimi felt little vindication in the wake of it. Now only a gouge remained to mark the site of Touga’s final battle. A barren wound in the flinty desolation that surrounded it. Unremarkable to all but herself. A scar to match the one she carried within her, deep within the stony recesses of her heart.

A silver thread of river ran at her back, winding through the valley floor. From this river, she sensed a stirring—a gathering of prodigious youki. Inukimi’s eyes slid briefly shut.

“My lady,” a smooth voice said from behind her, sinuous and sibilant as the waters from which its bearer had emerged, “I did not think you would come.”

Her eyes slid open again as she turned in chagrin. “Nor did I.”

From the river bank, Ryuutarou blithely smiled. Bands of glinting silver scale wreathed his tall, stately form, orbiting him like so many undulating serpents. He was gaudily dressed as always, in layers of immaculate green and silver silks. The burnished plates of his armor gleamed as brightly as the many jeweled rings that adorned his steely-clawed fingers. Diamond crystals dripped from the stream of his silver-green hair, studded the hilt of his ancestral sword. The scalloped edges of his ears were cuffed in gold. The fanned mark of his lineage shone from his brow, a pleated chip of dark emerald scale.

Though he was Hirokin’s sire, one must look closely to see the resemblance. Something devious in the curve of the lips, Inukimi decided. A shared shadow of draconic expression. Not that Ryuutarou was unattractive; he was quite a handsome demon, and quite vain because of it. But Hirokin had his mother’s divine beauty.

Haname, the fallen god.

Inukimi had seen her only once, when she had left her watery abode to face execution in the stead of her rebel son. But she was a vision of flowing platinum hair and shimmering pearl skin—as statuesque in her grave dignity as though she’d been carved from both. Her eyes were pure sparkling sapphire. Hirokin had inherited this from her too, along with the spirit of suffering that set them so poignantly aglow.

In terms of temperament, the resemblance between father and son grew muddier still. Both had a penchant for melodrama, she supposed, and the silver tongues to serve it best.

”I feared my son would not relay my wishes,” the River Lord said. His lips pursed slightly as he stepped from the shore in sharp-toed boots of glittering dragonhide. “He is not always a faithful messenger.”

Inukimi’s mouth curled, imagining Hirokin’s ire at the insinuation that he was a messenger of any sort.

“Perhaps it would be better if he had not,” she said, glancing away. “It was foolish to come here. More for you than for me, if Sesshoumaru were to catch wind of this—” Unable to bring herself to say assignation, she settled instead for, “—meeting.”

Ryuutarou’s features pinched briefly. It was no secret that Sesshoumaru loathed him. Between Hiraitou’s rebellion and a litany of other follies and crimes of inaction, Sesshoumaru’s notion of tolerance for his vassal Ryuutarou was unspoken exile. The fool of a coward slithers from my sight, and well he should, Inukimi recalled her son remarking witheringly. Let him rot in that slimy lake of his.

“And yet we are here,” Ryuutarou said as if reading her train of thought. His green irises glinted as he circled leisurely around her in the crunching rubble. “What a splendid pair of fools we make.”

“I should be wiser,” Inukimi said, her mirrored eyes glinting back at him. “My first grandson is soon to be born.”

“So I heard,” Ryuutarou said with a lazy smile. “I envy you, my lady. My own brood cannot bestir themselves to do the same.  I fear I must breed them like dumb beasts if I’m to have any hope of welcoming a grandchild this millennium. Hiraitou would not have needed such prodding,” he lamented. “But the rest are a dull lot—even Hirokin, though he is helping me to mate off his elder brother and youngest sister. But who will help me with him?”

At such peevish rambling, Inukimi’s tone went flat. “If you’ve come here only to complain to me of your children, Ryuutarou, let us part ways at once.”

Ryuutarou’s petulant expression smoothed in an instant. The coy slant of his mouth caused the fine fur draped about her shoulders to prickle.

“Not at all, my lady. I’ve come here because you are beautiful and alluring beyond reckoning, and the brief spell of passion we shared in this place will not let me rest. The memory of your naked flesh bound up with mine haunts me night and day, and being here with you again is the best balm my beleaguered mind could contrive.”

Inukimi’s eyes widened slightly at this, before they slanted coolly away. “So you must say to every female you’ve bedded.”

“Since Haname, there has been none but you.” As Inukimi’s gaze cut back to him, he smiled indolently, giving a careless wave. “Of course, I don’t deny myself the pleasure of looking. I surround myself with beauty. It is a solace to me, in this tedium of existence. Yet to do more than look…” Ryuutarou shrugged. “I’ve felt no great urge to go to the trouble of it.” His smile took on a salacious edge. “If you hadn’t pounced on me, Kimi-chan, who knows how long I’d have remained so chaste?”

Inukimi fixed him with a level look. Gods, but he was a shameless creature. Not without a certain audacious charm to him, however—and not nearly so obnoxious as he was in his many letters to her. This she had to concede. He had yet to refer to her as ‘my pet’, for which Inukimi was grateful, else she might have to flay him. Or at the very least spurn him as she’d come here intending to do.

Her gaze sharpened upon him in estimation. There was boldness in Ryuutarou, but it was a shrewd and fickle thing. What Sesshoumaru saw as a cowardly nature, Inukimi saw as a sluggish one instead.

And the power he commanded when he chose to do so…

This, she could attest to firsthand. How many males had she slaughtered in her lust, before Touga had claimed her? It had been a bloody vicious struggle for him. But for Ryuutarou? In the ferocity of her disturbed grief, she had attacked him here, in this very valley, with more vehemence than she had ever before attacked anyone. For all this, it seemed to have amounted to little more than a bit of fierce sport for him on his part.

“Who knows what all you might have done,” she mused aloud, “had you taken the trouble.”

“Conquest has never compelled me,” Ryuutarou said.

His glib tone aside, Inukimi believed him. He was the furthest thing from a warmonger, content to sit in idle luxury upon his hoard of kin, gold and dragons. Still…

“You slew your father to claim his throne,” she said.

Ryuutarou squinted aside. “Did I?” he murmured. Ryuutarou had come to power well before her time. The old dragon’s memory was notoriously terrible, even when he was not pretending it to be. “Yes, I suppose I must have. But that was ages ago, and it was not for his throne that I slew him.”

“Why, then?”

Ryuutarou’s lips pursed. “I was one of more than a hundred sons, Kimi-chan. My father’s harem was vast indeed. Yet for all his gross excesses” —and Inukimi knew they must truly be gross indeed, for Ryuutarou to call them such— “it amused him to dispose of my mother and even my sisters, after he had used them terribly. This is what stirred me to slay him. The throne I claimed from him was incidental. Necessary only to prevent infighting between my quarrelsome kin.”

Ryuutarou’s expression, generally so unflappably light, was shadowed with these grim recollections. Inukimi regretted that she had pressed him to dredge them up.

“My father disposed of my mother as well,” she said.

Ryuutarou’s gaze slid to her, shadowed still. “I did not know.”

“Few do,” she said. Then as if changing the subject, she said lowly, “You knew my reputation, did you not? For slaying my would-be lovers?”

“There were rumors I’d heard,” Ryuutarou replied. “But even had I known them for a fact, in the heat of the moment you’d not have dissuaded me.”

Inukimi laughed humorlessly. “So the others must have thought, when they came to take me. But I cut them down all the same. Enemies and allies. Cousins and brothers. My father, even. His was the only death I relished, because he killed my mother in his greed to mate me, his peerless daughter,” she said bitterly. “Only Touga succeeded where the others failed.” Heavily, she looked to the daiyoukai before her. “Him, and you.”

Ryuutarou crossed over to her in the desolation. “Our youths were much the same, I think. It was a violent era, those ancient days. Bloody, bleak and incestuous.” Taking her face in his silver-clawed hands, he tilted her gaze up to his. “Such dark times are best forgotten.”

Inukimi’s eyes drifted shut. “Help me to forget.”

He kissed her then, and the taste of him was like a cool draught in the desert of her lonesomeness. Even with Touga, she had been lonesome more often than not. Cursed with the violence of her lust, Inukimi had despaired of ever finding a mate, of ever having the son whose radiant moon sign she had seen in her dreams. Then Touga the barbarian had come along, swaggering and strong, and given her hope for the future. Yet it was the conquest he’d relished, not her. His eye was ever wandering from her, even when they were together.

Had she not been so cursed, Inukimi wondered what sort of mate she might have had. She could have had her pick, she supposed. She could have had a mate who would have loved her, who would have treasured her as Ryuutarou had treasured Haname.

Breaking from her now, he murmured, “You remind me so much of her.”

Inukimi stiffened. Incensed, she pulled away from him.

“I am no one’s stand-in,” she said, a cloud of youki gathering beneath her feet.

Ryuutarou took her lightly by the arm. The wash of his youki swept the cloud away like so much mist.

“I meant it only as a compliment,” he said calmly, “for I loved her dearly, and revered her even more. You have her poise and elegance, my lady. Her keen eye as well. Hirokin must see this too, for he cleaves to you like a second mother. But Haname did not have your strength.”

The iron tension in Inukimi eased slightly. She glanced back to him, somewhat mollified.

“It is your strength that reminds me of Touga,” she confessed. “But he did not have your circumspection. Perhaps it is inevitable,” she ventured with a soft sigh, “to see a shadow of our past loves in the present.”

The corner of Ryuutarou’s full mouth rose slightly from its perpetual pout. “Are we to be lovers then, Kimi-chan?”

“For now,” she said, stepping back into the circle of his arms and taking him by the chestplate, “just kiss me again.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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