Random Snippets by LadyGoshawk

Rage

They had stolen her from off his lands, killed soldiers of the West to do so, and used the basest of magics to conceal their identity and path. His followers had proven unable to find the trail, but he had not left it up to them. As soon as he received the news, he took to the sky. Even he, a consummate hunter, had found the track nearly impossible to follow.

Still, he pursued them. He could not let the slight go unanswered, even if she had somehow escaped the carnage he’d found at the fortress where they had parted. That she had gone missing and none of his people knew exactly when or how made so much as a moment’s delay untenable to him.

He could not, would not leave her in someone else’s hands. Quickly, he discovered that she had faith he would follow. She had left marks of her power, far between and very faint, to guide his pursuit.

They led him to a dark, foreboding castle perched high astride a mountain pass. The place reeked of humans, but the scent seemed old, faded. He stalked through the blood-spattered halls, enraged but aware that battle had touched this place, too.

Most of the stains had dried, dark and aged, at least a week old. Most, but not all. The Killing Perfection followed the freshest blood scent, aware that he had yet to encounter a single body, living or otherwise, unable to curb the low growl of fury that rumbled deep in his chest.

He followed a scent, her scent, as familiar to him as his own, but it had already begun to fade. Fresher than all other scents in the place, it still seemed at least two days old. That sole fact did not bode well for the outcome he desired, but he refused to consider it, yet. Instinct demanded he find her, first. He would act upon what he found.

The place felt coated in her power, another fact that grated on his already-raw nerves. A heavy dusting of reiki lay over everything, fading more quickly than the scent of her blood, just as it had in his fortress three days ago. When he noted the sheer weakness of the traces she’d left for him, he’d wondered if she had deliberately made them small to keep her captors from noticing or because she had expended too much of her energy in the battle over the outpost and had little left to use. Now, he knew…and knew, too, that she had used even more, here.

Logic suggested that she must certainly be weak, if she had not died. Instinct insisted that she would not, must not die. Either way, the situation had gained another level of urgency. So, too, had his rage.

After two days of tracking her, of not knowing, the evidence mounting under his very nose had his legendary control slipping. He felt certain his eyes had already tinted red with rage. Regardless of the outcome, someone would pay for this. Messily.

The scent of her blood led him up two floors, to the very top of the structure and the single room at its center. The shōji screen remained closed, but the paper had torn in several places. One tear gaped large enough, its edges coated in her blood, he could see into the room. In a pool of sunlight at the other end of the space, she lay on the tatami-covered floor.

Her head faced the door, eyes closed, skin far too pale, and hair in wild disarray around her. She did not move. If he could not hear her labored breath and the slow, faltering beat of her heart, he might have believed her already dead. He swept the shōji out of his way with a brittle snap that heralded the frame’s demise.

In half a heartbeat, he knelt at her side. Golden eyes swept over her, taking in the torn and bloodied state of her kimono. It had slid off one shoulder entirely, and parallel scores marred the skin beneath in deep, bloody gauges. The obi seemed only loosely wrapped around her middle, its knot long since lost.

A large, black bruise lay atop her left cheekbone, her eye swollen and brow split with another cut. Her lower lip showed similar damage. His control slipped a little more, his vision taking on a faint red film. Keenly aware of how fragile her humanity made her, how much more so she must now be, he brushed hair out of her face and laid his palm gently against her upturned cheek. “Kagome.”

To his surprise, her eyelids fluttered open, the left a little slower than the right. Glittering sapphire met his gaze, and the corners of her mouth turned up in the faintest of smiles as her lips parted. “…maru…” she breathed. Quickly, her eyes darted to something over his right shoulder. “Behind you.”

He had sensed the presences in the room as he entered, but had ignored them in her favor. That she had awakened to his touch, to his voice, and her first act was to warn him meant that she had not yet given up. That she would refuse to die here with every fiber of her being, every gram of her considerable will. Relief and rage set his heart to pounding as he whipped around, tearing Bakusaiga from its sheath at his waist with his right hand as he lashed out with his dokkasō from the left.

The blade met flesh, parting skin, muscle, and bone like silk. Blood splattered. Cut neatly in two and sizzling as the blade’s poison continued the damage, a body dropped to the floor with two wet thumps. His hand wrapped around a traitorous throat he recognized, claws sinking into flesh as he lifted the fool off the floor. He jerked the male he held closer, snarling in his face.

“Why?”