Disclaimer: No ownership claims on anything, no monies changing hands, no basis for litigation…

Chapter 15

Two and a half hours of voice exercises and rigorous application to her Russian language-learning cd's – Kagome had taken notice that Russian operas were becoming more and more popular internationally, whereas her own career had been largely limited to Japan and the U.S., so improving her enunciation of the lyrics as well her understanding of the feelings behind the lyrics could only improve her overall marketability, and maybe even break her into the European market – and Kagome was more than ready for a break. She slipped a folk music cd into the sound room's player as she pulled out her cell phone to check for messages.

Her agent was wrong – Kagome was no real Luddite, despite the fact that she still carried cd's around. She truly appreciated modern technology; her cell worked as a camera, calendar, message center, and mp3 player, but ear-buds and headsets made her ears itch, and the studio's sound system was incredible, allowing her to hear nuances that were lost without some spatial distance to develop within. She didn't understand it herself; all she knew was that it worked! As for avoiding her agent's emails, well, most of the time she felt a bit intimidated by them. She was more than half-convinced he'd incoded all his emails to send him a "received notice" once she opened them, and Kagome liked to take time to fully consider her options, particularly when it applied to her singing career. If she failed to respond to his emails in a timely manner… Well then, it was because she was always hesitant to open them in the first place.

The same concern did not hold sway when she saw a message from an otherwise unknown sender. She and Inuyasha had not formally exchanged cell numbers when she'd left that morning, both too enamored in each other's goodbyes to think practically. But she had given him her email account, and her phone could easily access email.

A message from "Nobody's_pet" spoke volumes: "Hey, Angel: Don't make me take 'no' for an answer, and meet me for dinner at Buddy's, 7pm. Just us. And if you want more onion bagels I'll lay in a long-term contract! Just say the word… Inuyasha."

Kagome's heart warmed several magnitudes, but she delayed responding until noon, when she accepted the invitation, along with a suggestion that her tastes were broader than mere onions. She temporized any suggested rebuke he might feel by including her cell number, and then considered the clock as to her options for grabbing a bite out before settling in the studio with her voice coach for her twice weekly lesson.

I like him. I like him asserting himself – letting me know that he's still interested even though we've already slept together. I like his suggestion that he wants time to get to know me, and that he's telling me he's available for the long haul. Maybe he's lying, but damn! That has to be the most romantic thing anyone has ever sent to me!

"Damn. You're good. I mean, I never know how far to go in telling someone I want to see them again" Kouga sneezed – as far as he was concerned, Inuyasha had never gotten to that point before, and only had this time because Miroku had composed the email for him.

Inuyasha continued in his exuberance over reading Kagome's text-message, "Cause I know it's bad to sound too eager, but I think I would fucking kill myself if she wouldn't go out with me again!"

"Asshole!" Kouga smacked the backside of Miroku's head as he spoke. "You knew I was interested in her, too, and you still gave the idiot advice! I should geld you!"

His friend shifted an annoyed glance at the business writer as the threesome pulled out I.D. in preparation for entering the paper's building following their lunch together. "'Yash won first honors and gave me a good overview of their 'date' so I could help him decide his next move. You never made it to first base, let alone get contact info and, to top it off, abused me in absentia. Tell me why I owe you squat?"

"We both know 'Yash is an idiot when it comes to women. Don't you think you're doing her a disservice by fooling her into thinking he's worth spending time with?" Koaga didn't waste time with spurious arguments; His younger friend had thought he was gods' gift to women as least as long as he had known him, and was notoriously sly as to sharing his talents. The only sure way to reach him was to suggest he was somehow either wasting his own time or bothering the half of humanity he had taken it upon himself to adore. Surely forcing a lovely young woman to endure time spent with Inuyasha counted among the latter.

Miroku's smile was indicative of the failure of Koaga's argument, "Ah but, Inuyasha's an idiot because he's ignorant; he's never really cared that much before."

Miroku's smile broadened. "Actually, near as I can tell, so far the only thing either of you've cared about is your mutual competition – not the women you've been competing over. Which is why neither of you've ever been really mad at me – when I walk out with the lady on my arm - or at the reality that neither of you has ever managed to win over the other, despite the fact that you're both reasonably successful on your own, that is, when you're not competing." He spoke almost off-hand as they entered the elevator, and Inuyasha was almost provoked to protest. Certainly, Miroku seemed to favoring his case with Kagome, but his friend was putting him on a par with Koaga, for gods' sake!

Miroku continued, "This girl who went home with him had every opportunity to choose you, Koaga, and we all know you are quite capable of representing yourself." Miroku smothered a smirk. He already knew that Koaga had had more than his share of romantic successes over the years – far more, actually, than the younger Inuyasha, and for the sake of his continued friendship with the man he was not about to mention how often he'd sweet-talked a lissome lass out of Koaga's bed and into his own (Koaga may be the better man at tennis but…). This discussion was not about asserting sexual dominance. "So, we've already established that this time the lady preferred Inuyasha's rougher, if perhaps more… sincere, charms. Really, Koaga. Was it any contest?"

This was too much for Inuyasha. As if there had ever been any question! "Fuck. Do I have to repeat myself? She went home with me!"

The two young men subsided like the canines they were, merely growling at one another. This was, to Miroku's eye, a reasonably good sign.

Their office floor still beckoned some floors above in the elevator, and Miroku took these few seconds of relative silence to bring his own inner state into full reflection of his outwardly calm demeanor. This was, in point of fact, the first time in some years that Inuyasha had asserted himself as to a woman's affections. Miroku himself had made sure of that, having made a practice of seducing almost all of Inuyasha's lovers away from him since they had met, purely to satisfy his own bias against his perception of the athlete as yet another member of the privileged class.

Even after he had learned better, habit was hard to break.

A drunken revelry shortly before graduation had exposed the ugly truth, and, for the period thereafter and ending only with the two men confronting each other before Kaede's desk in San Francisco more than a year later, had severed their friendship.

Miroku had found himself oddly defensive of Inuyasha's lovelife ever since, although he would never admit such. If Inuyasha never before had walked out with the girl, well, Miroku had always seen to it that Koaga didn't beat him to her. At least, not until last night.

"Each day is an act of faith" It wasn't Buddhist in origin, of that he was reasonably sure. Probably Catholic – it seemed to resonate with those early years when his mother was still alive and trying hard to instill in her oddly wary child something of the morality that had been a driving force in her own life. So she had enrolled him at St. Isabella's Elementary, where the catechism was taught along with phonetic reading and the times tables. She'd hoped it would make up a bit for her own absences as she pursued ever elusive prey in civil rights litigation.

At first it had seemed to work. Miroku adapted to the routine and rigor of a religiously-based education as if born to it. He memorized the prayers almost on first hearing, and amazed his teachers with his ready application of each reading to the applicable church teaching. It was only later that they realized how his quick mind could find application of his readings to more subversive activities. The resident nun still remembered how fiercely a seven-year-old Miroku had defended the appearance of a shallow bowel of avocado dip, all too precariously balanced upon the brow of the chapel's statue of St. James. Something about traditional pilgrimage, the blessed apostle's reaching out across cultures to non-believers, James' love of the Savior as his brother and the pranks brothers pull on one another, and some nonsense about skateboards and the man with the best aim…

Each day is an act of faith. The monks in the monastery had made that a reality, and the young Miroku had been all too aware of this fact when he had been uprooted from his busy urban existence upon his mother's death to join their ranks as a dependant, if not a novitiate. Searching for relevance, Miroku had mapped what he had learned from the Catholic nuns against the monks' existence, and found interesting convergences. The reality that this cloistered existence was so easily breached by a secular world merely confirmed what the young boy had already observed of his own childhood. It didn't escape him that the abbot as often as not would introduce him to whatever luminary from the outside world had dropped in to savor the on-premises vineyard's renowned products, and from those experiences he'd learned more about his then-still-living father than his mother had ever said. And of her own reputation.

Miroku had made friends along the way. Santa Barbara was an eclectic community. There was nothing odd in a Buddhist monastery existing within an easy bike-ride from a centuries-old Catholic church. Especially when the two entities shared a mission of providing sanctuary for political refugees, even though the nearest border was still hundreds of miles away. Sister Annabella was a perfect example.

As a Guatemalan refugee with some ten years of official dispensation at the time Miroku had come to live in Santa Barbara, she was all too aware of the fickle arm of the law. Having been funneled for many days from one site to another after finally crossing the border, she had been more than surprised to find that her first official place of work would be in the wine-tasting room of an august Santa Barbara Buddhist monastery. Annabella had already taken her vows as a Catholic nun – it had been her tiny church's activities that had driven her abroad in fear of her life as its only survivor – and to find sanctuary in a bastion of another faith was, well, incongruous at best.

But in seven years, working her way up from shifting bottles from the storage vaults to the tasting room to assisting in customer service to finally running the tasting room herself, all while maintaining her faith and her devotion quite openly, Sister Anabella had helped enumerable families cross the border into the U.S.

She had also kept up a running feud with the Monk Mushin, and between the two they had been young Miroku's primary influences as he moved from prepubescence to adolescence.

Annabella, obedient servant of God that she was, had had no qualms about transferring to an impoverished San Francisco diocesis after her stint in Santa Barbara. This dutifulness was amplified by an occasional recognition of faces now and then that she had helped to find their way in the U.S. after crossing the border. A mother here, a father or brother there, all in positions of various safety in the Bay Area, gave Sister Annabella surcease as to any qualms she might have had in breaking international laws.

Two years ago, as she had emerged from an evening's service at a soup kitchen on the Embarcadero, Sister Anabella had almost stumbled into a young man in military dress as he strode down the broad sidewalk. That the two should recognize one another was, as Miroku would say years later, more than dumb luck. Kohaku had been no more than a child when Sango had brought them both across three international boundaries into the hinterlands of Texas. But he would never forget any face that made the journey easier.

Annabella had been one of those faces.

More than a decade later, as he put foot-to-pavement in the interest of bringing to life Miroku's files, Kohaku had been shocked to see a familiar face in the rounds that made up Miroku's circle of long-standing friends.

In hindsight, he realized that he shouldn't have been so surprised. There were, after all, a limited number of activists, even within liberal California. He already knew that Miroku was a scion of a recognized liberal family, and that despite an adolescent flight to the East Coast, Miroku had returned to his parents' home territory. But Miroku had spent eighteen years living in the shadow of his parents' past – yeah, Kohaku thought from his own experience, that could be enough to drive one away – a past rife with involvement in workers' rights, civil rights and often enough, civil disobedience. It was no real surprise that they should have been at least tangentially involved in illegal immigration.

Kohaku had, on one level, already determined as much, but it was one thing to indulge in forensic analysis and objectively draw conclusions. It was something else entirely to discover how those conclusions might resonate with his own life.

And for the first time, Kohaku seriously considered the consequences of Naraku's decision to bring his sister into the case. Initially, his conscience had been only mildly tweaked. Kohaku was a history major, and understood all too well how much and how often his adoptive country's military forces had breached Constitutional paradigms, all at the behest of presidents later given historical recognition. As a naturalized citizen granted access to an elite military education, Kohaku was all too aware that this put him in a precarious position.

Then there was Sango's involvement. He had not been surprised when his boss had recruited his older sister – always more talented physically and better able to read her opponents' states of mind – for this assignment.

Despite her many complaints as to her handler's instructions even from the beginning, she had risen within the ranks of elite forces. Sango objected to the morality of her assignments even as she performed them to exactitude. But then, Sango had spent much more time with the various nuns and priests that had brought them across deserts and hinterlands from their impoverished and oppressed homeland to a new home in the United States. She had been the one to help dig graves with every failure that had overlapped their own journey, while he had been sent to gather wildflowers. And so she had sworn herself to this new country with a vengeance her brother could only hope to match. This dedication had underlain every achievement of the two siblings since they had been finally identified by then-INS agents in Phoenix, just one year shy of Sango's attaining her B.S., and while Kohaku was still in high school.

Some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Homeland Security agent had actually looked at their records before they were deported, and a deal had been offered. Neither had ever looked back.

Even so, Kohaku grimaced as he considered Miroku's ties to Sister Annabella – Annabella who had introduced him to sushi (okay, now, he still thought that was kinda weird. She'd always said that this kid she knew loved it so he probably would too – oh shit! Could that kid have been Miroku?), Annabella, who read "The Federalist Papers" to better help her understand why America was so different from any other place in the world, and had gotten him interested in the writings behind the history books. Sister Annabella, whom Kohaku could finally admit to himself hovered up there with Sango to abridge that "mother" space in his mind that had never been filled, since his own mother had died with his birth. So what the fuck were Miroku's ties to Sister Annabella, anyway?

By now, Kohaku's investigation into Miroku had become very personal indeed. At the same time, he felt like his boss figuratively had him by the balls. He couldn't act against General Naraku without jeopardizing his own very existence. And yet, to save Sango, who had done so much for him with so little reward for herself… Kohaku reconsidered his priorities. If he could save Sango, than he really didn't give a damn as to what happened to himself. As for General Naraku's fate? How many men had he consigned to death in the various war zones he oversaw? Even one death probably justified the general's own.