I do not own InuYasha or any of the characters created by Rumiko Takahashi

Of Monks and Spiders

The silver-haired man heard her singing long before they reached the clearing. The voice was soft, melancholy, and wrapped around his mind as he walked.

Sunshine, and the wind

greet me as I wait alone.

Leaves, golden and red,

how long will you last, clinging,

until you dance with the breeze?

Will he remember,

will he, the days of our spring

when the leaves were green,

days when we laughed together,

not knowing our days would end?

Finally, Kagome heard it too as they neared. "Is he here?" she whispered. "Who - "

InuYasha hushed her with a finger to his lips. "Stay alert," he whispered. "Get your bow handy. Can you feel the youki?"

She nodded and slipped her bow into her hand. InuYasha silently left the road and moved into the brush, disappearing. Kagome, in the red and white of her miko calling, moved almost as silently, following.

The singer sat on the bank of a pool, kneeling primly on a smooth grey stone. Behind her, water cascaded out of a spring in the hill behind her, and the landscape was lush with ferns and flowers and tall trees swaying lightly in the breeze. She wore the white makeup and painted eyebrows of a high born lady, and her robes were layered silk. The outermost was worked in an intricate web design, silver white on pale rose. She was beautiful, like a porcelain doll, and totally out of place.

Even more interesting was what lay at her feet.

Laying there as still as a doll was a shape dressed in black and purple. Wrapped around his middle, binding both of his arms were strands of white silk, forming a broad belt. His legs likewise were bound in the shimmering silk. His eyes were closed. Near them, lay a ring-topped staff.

For a moment, the woman's singing stopped, and she looked down, smiling at the unconscious monk. "Such easy prey," she muttered. "What were you thinking, that such a little piece of paper could stop me?" She laughed, and then started singing again:

"Beware of beauty,

there are days it will catch you

unexpectedly.

Let my silk wrap around you -

Soon, my love, you will be mine."

As she sang, more silver threads began wrapping around him, until only his head and shoulders were visible.

Miroku lay motionless during this process. After she was done, she bent over the unconscious man, pulled his collar away from his neck, and licked her lips.

"No way in hell." InuYasha dropped down from a tree near the pool, his sword drawn and transformed. Light played along the length of the fang. "I don't know who you are, woman, or where you came from, but this is my territory. You don't get the monk."

She looked up at him. For a moment, her eyes glowed red, and she flashed her fangs at him, hissing, but then, she smiled at him, as if she were laughing at some private joke. Even with her mouth closed, he could see her fangs protruding over her red painted lips.

"Such lovely men coming to Tsukitama, two in the same morning. Such a lovely place for me to move to. Do they all want to play with the jorougumo? This one is even more vital than the first." She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. "Is he a friend of yours, hanyou? Or were you too stalking him? I might let you have his flesh when I'm through." She smiled again, showing her fangs. "Or maybe I'll eat you, too."

InuYasha growled, and took a step forward. "Like hell, bitch. If you want to live, let him go and get off my land."

"I don't think so," she said. Light, even visible in the sunshine, began to wrap around her. It throbbed redly, as if driven by the beating of her heart. "His essence will feed me well. As will yours."

White threads shot out from the red light.

InuYasha jumped, and they missed him. "Did I ever tell you how much I hate spider youkai?" he said, swinging his sword in her direction.

Shooting a strand of silk overhead to snag in a tree branch, she pulled herself out of his reach. She shot the threads again. InuYasha jumped, but this time they caught his ankle, and he fell flat on the ground.

"Damn it," he said, jumping up. But even as he stood, other threads began circling him. With a roar, he broke loose. The youki's eyes grew wide, as if not used to seeing her silk defeated, and she began to lose her human form. Her fine silk robes disappeared as everything below her waist morphed into the form of a spider's body. Her eyes grew huge and red, her fangs longer and as she changed, her hair blew in the breeze of her own youki.

"I will eat you," she hissed, towering over InuYasha as she aimed another thread of silk at the hanyou. "I will eat you before I eat the monk."

"You got to get me first," InuYasha said, dodging it. Still too close to Miroku's still form to use any of his sword's power attacks, he lifted his sword over his head. "I ought to - "

"Enough, InuYasha," Kagome said, stepping out from her hiding place behind the trees, bow in hand and arrow nocked. Her aura flared bright pink, brighter than the youkai's red and her arrow glowed. "We've got to get Miroku home."

She let the arrow go, and it flew true, to stab into the swollen body of the spider woman. The spider woman looked at her in amazement for one moment, then exploded into a cascade of sparkling particles as Kagome's sacred arrow purified her into dust.

"What'd you do that for?" InuYasha said as Kagome rushed to where Miroku was laying. Looking very irritated, he sheathed his sword, and kneeling down next to his friend, quickly cut through the webs holding the monk bound.

She lay a hand on the unconscious monk's forehead and checked his pulse. "I kept thinking about how we would explain this to Sango, that her husband wandered off before you and I could go with him, and he got seduced by a spider woman. It just made me angry that he would get caught like that. She's always been a little unsure of how faithful he is after all that wildness he did before they got married."

"You know he wouldn't do anything to anything to hurt his marriage," InuYasha said, turning the monk's head, looking for bite marks. There were none. "I would know, as much time as I spend with him." The hanyou tapped his nose. "If the spider woman trapped him, it wasn't because he was doing something he shouldn't."

She looked up at InuYasha and sighed. "I know that, and you know that, but you know Sango. It'd haunt her all of her life. Knowing that just made me impatient, I guess." She watched as InuYasha checked both of Miroku's wrists, which were unmarked. "I'm sure you could have taken the youkai out." Looking back at the monk she said, "He's breathing normally, and it doesn't look like she bit him yet. It must just have been her youki knocking him out. I bet he wakes up with a real headache."

"I wouldn't have wanted to explain that to Sango, either," InuYasha said. "I'm sorry, Sango, but your husband got eaten by a courtesan spider youki." He let most of his pout go and shuddered at the idea. "I think I'd run away first. But this is what the bouzu gets for sneaking off at dawn to try to find her on his own. He just knew he had the right ofuda for the job. Wouldn't wait until we could get Atae dressed."

He looked up at Kagome, grinning. "At least with you taking her out, we'll get home in time for dinner, and I won't have to put up with trying to get over any spider bites."

"You like that, huh? Better than you having to spend your night with your head in my lap, delirious from the poison?" Kagome said, picking up the monk's staff.

"You mean like when we fought the spiderheads? I was human that night, and damned lucky," the hanyou said, shaking his head at the memory. "Anyway, I have something better planned for tonight than that." He waggled his eyebrows at her.

"You do, do you?" she said. "I wouldn't count on it yet. If he doesn't wake up soon, you may be babysitting. So what are we going to tell Sango?" she stood up and brushed off her hands. "He's still full of spider webs. We'll have to tell her it was a courtesan spider."

"I'll let him wiggle out of that one himself. At least he doesn't have to wiggle out of a full cocoon. I'm sure he'll think of something."

Heaving the monk over his shoulder, InuYasha stood up, and the two of them began walking back to the village.