Chapter VIII: Black and deep desires
They could hear the sharp smack to his head from half a lane away, and the reproach that accompanied it: "I realise you've felt somewhat deprived as we've been living in a village where I'm the
only woman around, but could you at least behave with dignity? Your tongue practically reached the ground – no wonder the poor girl was terrified."
The explanation that glided out in response to that accusation was as smooth as ever: "My dear Sango, I was only admiring the print of her yukata. And I believe it was the ferocious look on
your beautiful face that frightened her."
"I should have known that marriage wouldn't change you one bit."
"Hey, Sango!" Inuyasha yelled from the doorway of Kaede's hut at the two figures up the lane. "Don't give him such a hard time – he
must have changed if he only looks now and doesn't touch!"
"Inuyasha!" Sango and Miroku called in unison, their faces lighting up under the afternoon sun.
He walked out to meet the monk and slayer, pleased to see that under the superficialities of their comfortable squabbling, they looked deeply happy to be husband and wife. Sango no longer wore the haunted look on her pretty face that had shadowed it when Kohaku was under Naraku's control; Miroku's countenance glowed with contentment, despite the sore new spot on his crown.
"It's good to see you!" Miroku said warmly, grasping his shoulder, as they came together along the lane.
At almost the same time, Sango gripped his other arm and exclaimed: "You're looking well!"
"You two look like married life suits you," the hanyou remarked.
Their spat forgotten, the couple glanced at each other with smiles in their eyes, and it gave Inuyasha a small pang to think of what could have been if Kagome had stayed. But he eased the twinge aside to focus on his friends, and asked: "Did Kohaku come with you?"
"No, he's been hired by a village ten miles north from ours to help them kill a demon that's been eating their cows," Sango replied. "He's doing very well – he doesn't need me with him any more for jobs like these."
"And that's good," Miroku said. "Sango and I want to start a family very soon, so it would be best for her not to go flying all around the country slaying youkai."
Sango coloured. "Must you share our family-planning details with everyone? You've told Kaede, Kohaku, Hachi, Myoga… you even told Shippo and Rin!"
"That's because I can't wait for you to have my children, Sango," Miroku said sweetly, in mimicry of the days when he would clasp the hands of any passing female of childbearing age to give her his spiel. Those hands, which at this moment clasped Sango's, were bare now, free of the sealing wraps and prayer beads that had once covered the Naraku-cursed, all-consuming hole in his palm. He was free of that, and blessed many times over with Sango in his life.
"You're impossible," she chided, leaving it at that as Kaede, Shippo and Rin stepped out to welcome them into the hut. Shippo hopped into Miroku's arms while Sango took Rin's hand and asked her how she was, and how Lord Sesshomaru's plant was faring.
It was eight days ago that Kaede, Shippo and Rin had come back to the village, so it was surprising to see Sango and Miroku making a return visit so soon.
"Not that we aren't thrilled to see you," Inuyasha said as their little group seated themselves on the floor of Kaede's hut around the spot where they usually ate. "But I get the feeling this visit isn't entirely social? The fact that Sango's in her demon-slaying garb gives me just a hint that something's come up."
Since getting married, Sango had spent much more time in simple yukata and skirts than her curve-hugging taijiya's outfit, as she gradually handed over demon-slaying duties to her brother.
"Something
has come up," Miroku admitted. "I presume Kaede-sama has told you about the apparition we saw at our village?"
Inuyasha's and Shippo's ears pricked up. "You saw it again?" the kitsune asked.
"No, we didn't," Miroku said. "However, we were troubled enough by it to investigate further, so we visited neighbouring villages to ask if they knew anything about it, and it transpires that they have seen it too – the same child-like apparition, searching for something, but no one knows what. They in turn have heard from other villages that have sighted it. So it's obviously been going from place to place all around this region."
"Did they say if it looked like a girl- or boy-child?" asked Inuyasha, the only one of their group who had not seen it before.
"No one is sure, and neither were we when we saw it – its facial features and dressing were neutral enough to resemble either a female or male child."
Kaede glanced at Rin while pouring out the tea to see that her eyes had grown as big as well-stuffed onigiri, while Shippo looked worried to hear that the apparition had been seen in so many locations.
"Maybe the children should leave the hut while we talk about this," the old miko suggested.
Rin took her suggestion at once and ran outside to the garden with her teacup, but Shippo bristled, insisting that he was no longer a child, and was an experienced enough warrior to take on any apparition.
"Yeah, sure, from the safety of Kagome's arms," Inuyasha snorted.
Everyone fell silent at the mention of Kagome, fearing that the hanyou had spoken her name unconsciously and would start mourning her loss all over again once he realised it.
"Hey, enough of that," Inuyasha said, when he noticed everyone staring into their teacups. "You don't have to tiptoe around the subject of Kagome. I miss her, and I'm not giving up on her, but I won't mope about uselessly any more. I wouldn't want her to mope over there, and I know she wouldn't want me to do that here, so I'd like to think we can both get on usefully with our lives until we work out a solution. Now, what have you learnt about this apparition thing?"
The relief in his friends' eyes would have been almost comical to him, if the situation hadn't been quite so sad, but he was taking Sesshomaru's words seriously, and refused to let himself sink into misery.
"When we saw the apparition that night, the glimpses we had of it were too fleeting for us to notice anything other than its facial features and dressing," Miroku said. "But when we spoke to the monks and miko at the temples and shrines of the villages we visited, a number of them told us they had observed that it carried something that looked like a vessel of the kind used for storing potions."
Sango chimed in: "They too didn't sense any signature youki from it. But like us, they felt its presence purely from the tingle in the air that told them something that didn't belong was nearby. And we all agreed that it did not seem to be shikigami in nature – if it were, Kaede-sama would have known it immediately."
Kaede nodded. "If it had been such, I would have identified it as that. But while superficially similar, it gave me a very different sensation from the shikigami that shrine miko know how to control. This had a touch of the dark occult about it."
They were familiar with these things, not least because Kikyo had kept a pair of shikigami helpers after Naraku had tried to destroy her at Mount Hakurei.
"It's impossible to track something that only makes a tingle in the air while present, and leaves no trace once it's gone," Miroku sighed. "However, the vessel gives us a clue. I've read reports of such cases in temple records – these apparitions are usually conjured up to carry out tasks involving the collecting of specific essences."
"Eh? Essences?" Inuyasha asked.
"The apparitions are controlled by witches or warlocks who send them into places like battlefields, graveyards, even bedrooms, using the vessels to collect strong lingering emotions like hatred, rage, grief, lust or love, which can be used to create potions."
"But if it's an apparition with no physical body, how can it be carrying a vessel?" Inuyasha asked. "And how do you collect an emotion?"
"The vessels too are conjured up by the witches and warlocks to act as energy traps for the specific essences they want to harvest. These vessels are as bodiless as the apparitions are – but so are the emotions they are designed to glean – and some reports say that once they are returned to the master, he or she can extract their contents and add them to actual potions, which they use on their enemies, or sell to the rich. It's not an easy craft; few occult practitioners can truly master it."
"But if it's just for potions, then we have nothing to be concerned about, right? I mean, it doesn't sound like it's working for someone seeking world domination," Inuyasha remarked.
Miroku replied: "Unfortunately, I
am concerned. The few cases I've read indicate that these apparitions need only collect a small amount of whatever they seek for their masters to make a few potions to sell or use. One visit, and they're out of there.
This apparition has been all over the region, so it is either collecting a great deal of something, or seeking the highly unusual. And whether it's harvesting enough to equip an army, or trying to gather something that could occur only in rare situations, it gives me an uneasy feeling. Imagine, for instance, someone distilling enough wrath to sprinkle over the entire countryside and drive every person for miles around into a rage – the consequences would be horrendous. We've been hoping to track down its master somehow and question him or her, but we haven't had any success, and no one we've asked has any idea."
"We're still searching for clues, but as we found ourselves nearby, we decided to drop in to see you, and to keep you informed about the situation," Sango added.
"I could join you," Inuyasha offered.
"Me too!" Shippo chirped.
"We considered that," Sango began with a smile. "But we don't have Kirara with us, so we would travel far too slowly for you. It took us seven days just to wind our way down here!"
"I could carry you while Miroku runs, you know," Inuyasha scoffed. "Forget Shippo – he floats along so slowly, he might as well walk."
"Carrying me and my heavy old hiraikotsu is hardly the same as carrying Kagome and her tiny pack of food and books, you know," Sango laughed as Shippo tried unsuccessfully to pummel Inuyasha. "Kirara's fine because she flies – you can't. By the time we find what we're looking for, you'll be too worn out to help us fight it!"
"I would not!" Inuyasha scoffed. Again, he had to ease away the tug at his heart as he remembered Kagome on his back, her bare thighs pressed to his sides, her face close to his. "What do you think I am? Some kind of weakling?"
Miroku chuckled. "How about this, then – I would be jealous of seeing my beautiful wife clinging so intimately to another male."
Inuyasha flushed and shot a glare at Miroku. "Huh. You know I wouldn't touch Sango inappropriately, unlike
someone I know before he married her."
Miroku laughed, and then suggested: "Why don't we wait here a couple of days to see if Hachi comes by? If he does, we might be able to persuade him to carry us about. Kohaku is probably done with his mission, but he moves on to other areas to keep demon activity in check once he's finished a job, so we are unlikely to be able to borrow Kirara."
"Speaking of our flying friends," Sango said. "We ran into Sesshomaru-sama riding his dragon when we were going about our investigations. He actually landed to talk to us, to our surprise. He too had heard about the apparition and was looking into it."
"Oh? When was this?" Inuyasha asked, with interest.
"Three days ago. He didn't say much, as usual, but judging by what that ugly little follower of his was rambling about before Sesshomaru shut him up, we gathered that they'd been investigating it for a few days by then."
"Oh," the hanyou said, suddenly feeling irrationally pleased.
He had neither seen nor heard from Sesshomaru since the morning he had left him with a kiss. Although his brother had driven home well the lesson that he had to live his own life, as two days without seeing him became three, and three slid into four, Inuyasha had not been able to help feeling just a bit like an abandoned lover.
Immediately after Kaede's return, he had spent three days pottering around the village doing every odd job in sight just to be useful, and to stop himself daydreaming like one of Kagome's silly schoolgirl friends with a crush. Then he had spent the next three days hunting cattle-eating youkai in the area to get his mind off it all, and returned to the village a couple of days ago to throw himself into more odd jobs, earning more meals than he, Kaede, Shippo and Rin could comfortably eat.
To hear that Sesshomaru had been away for a good reason, and wasn't avoiding what he surely thought of by now as his disturbingly wimpy, weepy, clingy hanyou half-brother, left him feeling nicely warm inside.
"Er… what's the matter with you?" Miroku's voice interrupted his rumination, making him look up with a start to find all his friends staring curiously at the dreamy expression on his face.
"Are you all right?" Sango asked. "You look strangely…"
"Happy," Miroku concluded. "You look happy, which is nice, but it's strange that you would suddenly look that way for no obvious reason."
"Ah… I just thought of… the meat we're having for dinner. The village headman gave us a massive chunk of venison this morning after I relaid his entire roof yesterday."
"
Venison makes you
that happy?" Miroku asked slowly, in disbelief.
"Actually, I prefer beef, but I'll take what I can get."
The looks they gave him – Shippo's mouth had fallen open slightly – were the kind of looks people gave those whose insanity they found too bizarre to politely ignore, but had decided to humour anyway.
He reflected that perhaps the venison excuse was a mite surreal, but it was probably still a good deal less surreal than the truth.
** *** **
Later that night, after the happy-making venison had been eaten – and everyone made certain that Inuyasha consumed an extra-large portion – they turned in for the night, covering every inch of Kaede's floor space with mats and blankets.
Shippo and Rin huddled close together, still unnerved by the earlier talk of the apparition, but Sango and Miroku's presence contributed to the comforting warmth indoors.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Inuyasha heard a familiar slapping sound, followed by Miroku's whispered protest: "But Sango, we're
married!"
And Sango's hissed-out answer: "We are
not doing anything obscene in front of
all our friends!"
"But it's
dark!"
"You
do realise that Shippo and Inuyasha can
see in the dark? And the others aren't
deaf, you know."
In that darkness, Inuyasha smiled to himself.
It was good to have friends.
