Double Take by The Committee

Disclaimer: InuYasha is the property of Rumiko Takahashi.


Chapter One—Stalkers and Housebreakers

………

RING! RING!

She picked up the phone with a growing sense of dread, afraid of what she would hear on the other end. "Hello?" she asked tentatively.

No response.

"Who is this? Why do you keep calling?"

There was a distinct click as the person on the other end of the line hung up. For the fifth time that afternoon.

Kikyo slammed the receiver back down on its cradle and pushed a lock of ebony hair out of her face, tucking it behind one ear. There was no point in tracing it—she'd already tried and the number was blocked. She had half a mind to phone the police and report the strange calls, but she knew her father would disapprove. He didn't like the police to be involved.

Ever.

A side effect of being an overly paranoid multimillionaire, she decided. Everyone, including the authorities, was out to get a piece of his pie. It wasn't true, of course, but the old man would never admit it. Ten years imprisoned in a wheelchair had done nothing for his personal sanity. He felt weak, vulnerable. The two of them had moved here soon after the accident, hoping to forget the past.

"Accident," Kikyo snorted to herself derisively. There was nothing accidental about the bullet that had pierced her father's spinal chord and had landed him a life-time role as a paraplegic. That the bullet had been meant for her mother was an entirely different story.

Still, they always referred to it as an accident, and the world at large had been told that Ryutaro Higurashi had been thrown from the saddle when his horse had balked at jumping a hedge. That was how millionaires were supposed to land themselves in wheelchairs, not by jumping in the way of a bullet meant for a former lover and current wife. What had possessed him to sacrifice himself for a woman he had stopped loving long ago, Kikyo would never understand.

The phone rang again, shattering the quiet of the mansion with its peal. She wasn't going to answer it this time. And her father had better look into getting Caller ID, she added mentally. She waited as the fourth ring sounded and the machine picked up.

"You've reached Kikyo Higurashi," she listened to her own voice say sweetly, "I can't come to the phone right now, so please leave your name and number after the tone." The machine beeped a flat A and she listened apprehensively, waiting to hear if the caller would leave a message. The only sound that came was a heavy sigh. A tired sigh. Then the phone hung up.

Kikyo stood puzzled for a moment, wondering if that could possibly have been the same person that had been calling all afternoon. Curiosity got the best of her and she strode over to the phone, picking it up and punching in the callback code.

"The number you are trying to reach is out of this area," a mechanical operator intoned. Long distance? She inwardly cursed that she hadn't picked up this time. Who would be calling her private line long distance? Maybe they would call back. She'd tell one of the maids to answer that line for the rest of the day, not wanting to risk another run-in with the silent prankster.

The long distance caller didn't call back, though the local idiot had another few go's until he (she presumed it was a he) finally figured out that the maid was now answering the phone. Kikyo herself holed up in the library with a fleecy blanket and a copy of Wuthering Heights that she was supposed to be reading for her English class. After a few chapters, she decided she preferred Charlotte to Emily, and went in search of her copy of Jane Eyre. Outside it started to rain as the sky darkened into a sullen gray night.

………

A sinister figure sidled up to the pale young woman at the computer, her nearly white skin bleached colorless by the light of the monitor, the only light source in the room.

"What's the word?" he inquired in a low voice, watching with disinterest as her fingers flew over the keyboard.

"They missed her," the woman replied tonelessly, never missing so much as a stroke, her eyes never straying to the man at her shoulder. "The apartment was empty, with only signs of a hurried departure. I'm checking flight itineraries right now for several aliases."

A vehement curse escaped his lips, dripping with venom. "Notify me at once when you find anything," he commanded as he turned on his heel and strode from the dark room. "This has taken far too long as it is."

The young woman paused momentarily to shift a lock of snow-white hair behind one ear before resuming her fluid typing. It was going to be a long day.

………

The morning sky glowed a beautiful topaz blue, all signs of the previous night's storms having been swept off into the horizons like a pile of dust being hidden under the rug. The birds were singing merrily, an early spring breeze was blowing…

And Kikyo was late for school again.

Cursing under her breath, she skidded out of the bathroom connected to her bedroom, dripping wet and having only a towel to cover herself with. She had fallen asleep in the library, dreaming of Jane and Mr. Rochester, only to be rudely awakened at 7:30AM by a maid who was stupidly wondering if she had the day off from school.

"Whoever heard of a day off in the middle of March?" Kikyo growled under her breath as she struggled into her school uniform, conveniently forgetting that wonderful March phenomenon known as Spring Break. That wasn't until next week anyway—the maid should have known as much.

She dashed downstairs in her socks, nearly slipping and breaking her neck in the process. Grabbing a piece of toast from the immaculately-set breakfast table, she clutched it in between her teeth while trying to simultaneously hop into her shoes and put on her jacket. Her wet hair had been carelessly pulled back into a ponytail, but it was dripping down the back of her uniform, and she was freezing.

Snatching up her car keys, she vaulted out the front door and across the lawn to the garage. A minute later, her junky little Geo Prism went tearing down the driveway and out into the street. Kikyo loved her car.

The tiny white hatchback zipped in and out of traffic, heading toward the private school like a bat out of hell. It was the only thing she had ever bought with her own hard-earned money. Silly, some people thought, when she could have easily asked her father for a Mercedes or a Jag and gotten it without him so much as batting an eyelash. But the Prism—in all its cheap, tin-can glory—was hers. No one had loaned her a cent to buy it. It was sort of a matter of pride more than anything else. She had worked hard all last summer, saved her money, and this was her reward. And it didn't hurt that the thing was such a piece of junk that she could treat it like crap, even total it, and not have any real regrets.

At the moment, she took advantage of the space between two cars who were pulling a Nebraska roadblock, zipping her tiny vehicle illegally through amid honks and swerves from the two startled drivers. What were they so worked up about? She had a good inch to spare on either side of her. She hadn't even scratched their paint jobs.

Without so much as a backward glance, she continued on her way, tearing into the school parking lot and pulling into the first empty space she came to. She still had five minutes to spare before class started, in which she had to dash to her locker and collect all of her books.

Any aggression Kikyo had within her was taken out on the road. Behind the wheel she was bold, even something of a menace, but once on her own, she became quiet and timid. Even as she ran to her locker, she kept her eyes downward, not wanting to meet the eyes of any passing students. She accidentally clipped someone's side and muttered an apology as she hurried on.

"Watch where you're going, wench!" a voice she clearly recognized yelled after her, and indignation welled up within her chest.

Inuyasha. If she weren't running late, she might have given that jerk a piece of her mind. As it was, she didn't even have time to cast him her trademark smouldering glare. She reached her locker, rolled through the combination in record time and jerked it open, piling in the books she wouldn't need for the first half of the day. She almost failed to see the note flutter to the ground.

Frozen in the act of zipping up her backpack, she watched it settle on the floor. The next instant she snatched up the scrap of paper and slammed her locker door shut, her eyes fixed on the scrawl of words.

Don't like phone games, do we?

Kikyo whirled around, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever had put the note in her locker. Surely they would have hung around to see her reaction, right? But the bell had already rung and the sweep music was blaring across the loudspeakers. She had less than two minutes to get to class, or she would spend the next hour in study hall.

As the second bell rang, she barreled through the door and slid into her desk chair, dropping her bag on the floor and looking attentively up at the teacher, Mr. Seikai.

"Nicely done, Miss Higurashi," he complemented with raised brows and a nod. She blushed slightly, feeling a little self-conscious as the entire room focused on her for a moment. The teacher drew their attention back to himself by demanding their homework from the night before.

She went through class that morning warily watching out of the corners of her eyes for anyone suspicious. Someone was calling her house, and now that same someone had put a note in her locker. Were they trying to scare her? Or was it just a sick joke? She could think of a handful of people that would want to see her humiliated. Inuyasha Taisho was at the top of that list, along with his two closest friends, Miroku Houshi and Sango Taijiya. Sure, they all hated her, and vice versa, but would they really stoop to using such juvenile scare tactics?

And yet, juvenile as they were, weren't the scare tactics working? Already she was looking over her shoulder everywhere she went. She actually jumped, startled, when innocuous little Hojo said hello to her as they passed each other in the hallway between classes. If she wasn't careful, she would become as paranoid as her father and end up locked in a little room with a pistol and a maniacal gleam in her eyes.

Okay, so he hadn't come to that yet, but he wasn't far.

Totally off the subject, she inwardly chided herself. She needed to figure out who was trying to harass her. Or maybe the note was just a one-time deal.

She went to her locker before lunch to trade out her morning books for her afternoon ones, and her heart sank as her eyes caught sight of another scrap of paper lying on the metal floor of the compartment.

You belong to me, it read in the same scrawled writing. Whoever had done it was trying to cover up their handwriting, probably scribbling the note with their non-dominant hand. She crumpled it up, feeling suddenly angry. This jerk had some nerve.

Kikyo jumped as someone wrapped arms around her from behind.

"Whoa!" said a familiar voice in her ear, and she relaxed into the embrace. "I didn't mean to startle you there."

"Sorry, Koga," she replied quietly. "I guess I'm a little on edge today."

"Well, are you just going to stand by your locker for the next hour, or are you gonna come get something to eat?" he responded, releasing her and coming around to lean against the wall so she could see him quirk an eyebrow.

She looked into his handsome face, his blue eyes and long black hair that he kept in a ponytail, and she smiled softly for the first time that morning. "Yeah, I'm coming," she said shutting the metal door and shouldering her backpack as she fell in step beside him. At least with him she could feel safe. No sleaze-ball would harass her while her almost-boyfriend was around, right?

Unless Koga was the sleaze-ball, said the rational voice in the back of her mind, causing her to stop suddenly in the middle of the hallway and stare at his still-advancing form. He couldn't be, could he? she found herself asking uncertainly. He was a little possessive at times, even though they weren't officially dating, but there was no way that he would try terror tactics, right?

At some point he realized she wasn't beside him any longer, and he turned to give her a quizzical glance. "Are you okay?" he asked, adorable in his confusion.

Her doubts dissolved in an instant. No one that cute could be a psycho. "I'm fine," she smiled, and received a dazzling smile in return. "I just keep zoning out. One of those days, you know?"

"We all have them," he nodded. Like an old-fashioned gentleman, he offered her his arm. "Shall we?"

"We shall," she answered, latching on and progressing toward the cafeteria.

If her morning had been bumpy, her afternoon was no better. She had her two worst subjects: French and PE. It wasn't that she was stupid or anything, because she got good grades in all her other classes, but something about the French language just didn't take in her brain. This was her third year studying the stupid subject, and she still was having trouble with the basics, much to her teacher's irritation and her own chagrin. And as far as PE went—well, she had never been an aerobics sort of girl. She was lucky that she had the type of metabolism that kept her slender without exhaustive exercise, because she had never had the physical endurance to run or jump around or whatever other crazy thing the sadist PE teachers made them go through. She liked activities that didn't require much movement, like archery or yoga.

"Yoga's for sissies," their butch instructor Ms. Urasue had snorted on the first day of class, her bulging eyes glaring at them all with a wicked glint. Kikyo had inwardly groaned and rued putting off her required PE credit until her senior year. If she had just gotten it over with as a freshman, she could be doing something more enjoyable, like art, or a second hour of French, or perhaps even unanesthetized self-dentistry. Not that she needed a root canal, mind you, but it would have been preferable to this torture.

"Having problems, Higurashi?" Sango inquired smoothly as she passed by for a third time since they had started running laps. Sango was the athletic type—all-star volleyball and women's basketball, practically a school hero.

Kikyo's chest felt like it was going to explode, but she wasn't about to let an enemy see that. "Move it along, Taijiya," she managed to retort without panting too much.

Sango suppressed a chuckle but kept running. In all honesty she wasn't so very bad. The two of them mostly got by just ignoring one another. Kikyo couldn't even remember why they hated each other—aside from the fact that Sango was good friends with Inuyasha, and that she and Inuyasha despised one another with enough fire to keep hell going for the next few millennia.

Kikyo remembered well enough why she hated him. The arrogant jerk had cozied up to her a couple of years back, acting like he liked her, playing with her heart. She had fallen head over heels in love with him—until she found out from one of her friends that he was only pretending to be interested in her because of a bet between himself and his perverted friend Miroku. She had dropkicked his sorry butt the next day without even giving him a chance to explain. What was there to explain anyway? Sure, every other girl in school would have swooned if he cast his dreamy violet eyes in their direction, even if it was just because of a silly bet. Kikyo, however, had some self-respect. And even if he did have such luxurious black hair and such a well chiseled body…

She ground her teeth together and started running a little harder. Okay, so he was near perfect, but she hated him all the more for it. That conceited SOB had made a fool of her, and no amount of good looks could ever make up for his rancid personality.

There was another note in her locker when she went to put her books away after school—she crumpled it up without even looking at it, tossing it into the bottom of her bag with the first two. Today was Thursday, and that meant only one more day left until Spring Break.

………

Friday afternoon finally rolled around, and she sped home in her Prism, relishing the idea that she had a whole week to herself. Her father had generously offered to let her run off to Mexico or Europe or something (well chaperoned, of course), but all she really wanted to do was curl up in bed with a stack of books.

There had been notes in her locker again today, but she had ignored them, just shoving them into the bottom of her bag without so much as glancing at them. She figured that would be the best way to annoy whoever was sending them. After all, someone was going to the trouble of sneaking to her locker and slipping in those pleasant little missives. What better revenge than to make their efforts futile by ignoring said notes? It sounded good in theory, at any rate.

She had just picked up a worn paperback novel when the maid came in, bearing the phone.

"Miss Kikyo? Someone to speak with you."

Kikyo took the receiver and said pleasantly, "Hello?"

Silence.

"Hello?" she repeated. Whoever had called had obviously spoken to the maid and asked for her by name. "Is someone there?"

"You don't seem so fond of my little notes," said the voice on the other end. It was deep and distorted, making Kikyo's blood run cold.

"Who is this?" she demanded, trying desperately to quell the fear that came surging up within her.

"You'll find out soon enough—maybe I'll pay you a little visit." The voice then launched into the filthy things he would do when he next saw her.

Kikyo quickly hung up on him, her heart pounding and her hands clammy with sudden sweat. Some psycho was stalking her, she realized fully for the first time. This wasn't some juvenile prank. This guy was serious! The phone rang again.

"Don't answer it, Mayu!" she instructed hastily as the maid reached out to pick it up. The girl withdrew her hand again and looked at Kikyo curiously.

"Don't answer it anymore."

Mayu obediently nodded and left the room. Kikyo wandered back to her own room to hang up the handset, just in time to hear her answering machine beep.

"Kikyo," his voice drawled onto the recorder, savoring the sounds of her name like they were a succulent treat, "you can't avoid me. I've been watching you." He rumbled out a low, evil laugh. "I can't wait to see the fear in your eyes when I—"

His voice cut out as she jerked the phone connection out of the wall. Okay, now she was officially creeped out. How long had this guy been watching her? Or was it just a bluff? Part of her stubbornly clung to the idea that this was just some idiot playing a prank and that nothing more would come of it. The other part rolled its eyes at the first part's gullibility. Then, she instinctively started looking around, wondering if there were hidden cameras in her room or something. What was she going to do?

An hour's worth of pacing later, she still hadn't come to any real conclusions. She had gone to confide in her father, but found him sleeping, and aside from not wanting to wake him, she thought the better of telling him someone was stalking her. For one thing, he was paranoid enough. For another, even if her life were in danger, he still wouldn't call the police.

The sky outside was darkening as another evening storm began, a chill wind howling as water pounded on the roof and windows.

Away at the front of the house, the doorbell pealed loudly.

Kikyo froze in mid-stride and stared in the general direction of the front door. The doorbell rang again, this time more urgently. The servants had Friday nights off.

No way in hell was she going to answer that door.

Creeping out of her room and down the hall, she listened to see if the visitor would ring again or give up. The house was deathly silent. She crawled to the landing and peered over the balustrade down into the entryway. A flash of lightning revealed an empty front porch through the window.

She slowly let out the lung full of air she had been holding.

CRASH!

Profanity escaped her mouth as she jumped about four feet in the air at the sound of shattered glass from inside the front drawing room. She scrambled to a nearby closet, wrenching it open and grabbing a baseball bat out, then dashed down the stairs and sidled up to the drawing room door, watching its handle warily.

It started to turn.

The door swung silently inward, and Kikyo raised her weapon high overhead, steeling herself to bring it down upon the intruder. She didn't like violence, and at the moment she was trembling so much that she doubted any blow she dealt would do any good, but she would try nonetheless. She had no other choice.

A shadowy figure started to emerge, but even as she swung the bat downward, a hand shot up and caught hold of it. The two struggled over the weapon before Kikyo was flung away across the floor. Clambering to her feet, she flipped on the overhead light to get a good look at her attacker. What she saw made her stop dead in her tracks.

It was like looking into a mirror, only the mirror image was dressed all in black and soaking wet. The bedraggled ebony hair may have been cut shorter than her own long tresses, but those dark brown eyes, the straight nose, and that cupid's-bow mouth slightly parted—that was certainly her own face looking back at her.

Kikyo's voice caught in her throat, but she finally managed to croak out a single, bewildered word.

"Kagome?"

………