Chapter 1: Cold is the Night

Kagome Higurashi was in deep shit.

"You didn't really think you could get away, did you?" his voice slithered through the phone. His tone was almost chiding, laced with mock concern as though for a misbehaving child. She could almost see his raised eyebrows, the sneer curling his lips.

Kagome's entire body went rigid. Despite herself, her pulse quickened, heart pounding a painful stuttering rhythm in her chest. She inhaled a hissing breath through clenched teeth. "Funny," she spat into the receiver, "I think I already have."

She was moving even as she spoke, leaping off the motel bed and shoving her arms into the sleeves of her green hoodie. She grabbed the sandy yellow duffel bag she always kept within reach and slung it over her back, the strap a thick diagonal across her chest.

"Tsk, tsk, Kagome," he crooned, still with that goddamn paternal censure. "You won't get far. You never do." He paused, and his voice deepened, as though he relished every word. "I'm only telling you this for your own good. You know that when you're caught you'll have to be punished."

Her heart gave a particularly painful thump as she threw open the door of her motel room, her car keys gripped tight in her fist. The neon-lit night air punched into her lungs. She could feel her breath growing shallow as her chest constricted. Her temples were beginning to throb in tandem with the rapid beat of her pulse.

But she wouldn't give that bastard the satisfaction of knowing she was scared.

"If you just come back," he was saying, voice smooth and dark as an oil slick, "it'll be easier on you in the end. You won't—"

"Shut up," she said, ragged and guttural, the words ripped from her very core. "The only way I'm ever going back there is in a body bag."

She snapped the flip-phone closed and tossed it into the bushes lining the motel's exterior—it was a burner cell phone, she'd have to get another now—but she didn't do it quickly enough to miss his whispered promise.

"That can be arranged."

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As she peeled out of the motel parking lot—the engine of her decade-old Honda Fit chugging to keep up with the sudden acceleration—she tried to figure out how he'd gotten the number of her burner cell. She wasn't stupid, she knew burner cells didn't guarantee anonymity. But it was a new burner. She'd only had it for a week, and hadn't used it for much of anything yet. Not for fake credit card applications, not for hotel reservations or car rental paperwork. This number she'd kept to herself. She didn't even have the phone turned on most of the time. And he'd still found it.

Her breathing was still too rapid and shallow, her heart still beating an abnormal jerky rhythm. She needed to calm down. She needed to plan her next steps. If she didn't, she risked making a stupid mistake that might get her caught.

As she turned a sharp left onto the Shuto Expressway—going much too fast if the squeal of her tires was any indication—Kagome forced herself to take deep breaths and relax her shoulders. She tried to focus her mind on the measures she'd taken in the last month to avoid his detection.

She'd learned from painful experience that if she wanted to disappear, it wasn't enough to just cover her trail. She had to keep her hunters busy, too. Keep them preoccupied with looking for her in the wrong places.

Disinformation was a powerful tool. Kagome had learned that if she left enough bogus trails behind her, she could give herself the precious advantage of time. A head start. All it took was the right paperwork trail: an application to rent an apartment, resulting in a credit check from the landlord, creating an inquiry on her credit report. Any tracker running a credit report on her would see the inquiry and follow it back to the apartment's location. And by the time they'd traced her there, she'd have already developed a whole mess of fake information to keep them tangled in deadends for awhile: applications for utilities and phone service at the apartment she would mysteriously never move into; a fake employment address at a large local company that would require investigation to verify; small bank accounts opened in her name all over the area.

It was all about wasting their time, so she could give herself more time to get further away.

And it had been working. For the last month she'd kept two steps ahead of him.

So she just had to do it again, that was all. She had to start another fake trail. Maybe this time it would be another bank account, another credit card application.

It didn't matter that he'd somehow gotten her burner number. She'd just get another. And another. Maybe a burner SIM card this time, so she could actually use smartphones again.

Exhaling long and slow, Kagome finally felt her heartbeat return to normal. The throbbing in her temples eased, and she could think more clearly.

She just had to keep doing what she'd been doing. Fake trails, constant moving, never staying in one place—or even one region—for too long. She'd been doing fine, and she could keep doing fine if she just played it smart.

She'd never allow Naraku to catch her again.

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Kagome Higurashi only allowed herself enough possessions to fit into her yellow duffel bag. Three pairs of jeans, four shirts (two white t-shirts, one knit sweater, and one nice floral blouse for the right occasions), one hoodie, one pair of sneakers, one pair of thick rubber-soled boots, five pairs of underwear and three bras. She kept a thick winter coat in her car, in addition to a pack of water bottles and emergency food supplies in the trunk.

She didn't carry a purse. She had one leather trifold wallet—with RFID blocking, of course—in which she kept no more than ¥30,000 in cash; three state-issued ID cards, one real, two fake; six credit cards, four under fake names, two under her real name for the sake of bogus trails.

She had a passport. She had basic hygiene supplies—toothpaste, face cleanser, shampoo, tampons. She had two screwdrivers and one wrench. She had exactly one picture of her family, tucked away into an inner pocket of her duffel. She had one novel, dog-eared and spine-creased. She had a 9mm pistol and four boxes of ammunition.

Whenever she stayed in a hotel, she kept her duffel within easy reach. Always ready for a quick exit. She never unpacked it. Never. If she was feeling especially anxious, she would use it as a pillow, or sleep with her legs draped over it.

The duffel was one of the last things she'd grabbed before she was taken. Somehow having it with her felt like having a tiny piece of home.

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Over the next few days, she made her way steadily north, towards the Miyagi Prefecture. She'd taken a detour and left some fake trails to the south around Yokohama. Now she wanted to head in an entirely different direction. She didn't know how long it would take Naraku's hunters to find the Yokohama trail, but she wanted to be far, far away when they did. Hopefully they would think she'd kept heading south.

She'd found a car junkyard on the outskirts of Tokyo, where she'd snuck in after hours and lifted the license plates off a few junkers. As a precaution, she'd swapped her car's license plates that night, and she planned to do it again after her next stint on the expressway.

The next day she stopped in a little suburb an hour outside Fukushima. She hoped to get her hands on a burner SIM card—surely this place had a decent electronics store?—but first she had another problem to fix. She was starving.

She walked around until she found a decent-looking ramen shop. It was small and cramped—a stretch of bar long enough to accommodate eight stools, behind it a kitchen partially hidden by curtains—and it smelled heavenly. She sat at the bar and ordered a bowl of chuka soba.

Sōta's favorite.

But, delicious though the ramen turned out to be, Kagome began to feel more and more uneasy the longer she sat there. She glanced around her. The shop was nearly empty. Two old men sat on the farther side of the bar, noisily slurping their noodles. The man in the kitchen, half obscured by the curtains, had his back turned to her as he stirred something in a huge stock pot on the stove. And anyway, nobody had hardly looked at her the entire time she'd been here.

She turned her head enough to look behind her, through the sliding glass doors of the shop. The street beyond was quiet. A handful of pedestrians passed by on the sidewalk as she watched. An occasional car swept by.

But the unease turned to a persistent hum of anxiety, prickling along her skin. She couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her.

She tried to ignore it—it wasn't as though paranoia was new to her—but it kept getting worse. Soon the ramen started to taste like cardboard in her mouth; a cold leaden weight settled in the pit of her stomach.

Scrubbing her hands down her face, Kagome sighed. She stubbornly willed away the prickle of tears she felt collecting in the corners of her eyes.

Crying was a distraction she couldn't afford.

Pulling her wallet out of her back pocket, she dropped the Yen she owed onto the counter of the bar and left the shop.

Kagome retraced her steps to where she'd parked her car. Out on the street, she watched the people milling around her without looking like she was watching them. Her ears were hyper-sensitive to the street sounds: every pedestrian's footstep sounded like it was right on her tail, every voice felt raised and aggressive, every vehicle on the road seemed to brake right when it neared her. Her shoulders were hunched up to her neck. She tried to relax them.

She rounded the corner of the street where she'd parked. Her eyes sought the familiar shape of her little Honda—and suddenly she came to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk.

A man was leaning against the passenger door of her car. And he was looking right at her.

He was tall, maybe six feet. Lean athletic build. His muscular arms were crossed over his chest, legs crossed at the ankle as he casually lounged against her car. Shoulder-length silver hair. Yōkai ears—dog? cat?—sat atop his head, angled towards her. Claws tipped the fingers that rested against his arms. And his eyes—still staring directly at her—were gold.

Kagome sucked in a breath. She felt the muscles in her shoulders bunch up again.

Her thoughts started whirring as panic squeezed her lungs. She shouldn't have stopped. Shouldn't have acknowledged his stare. She should've kept walking as though she hadn't seen him, as though that wasn't her car at all. She might have blended in with the crowd if she hadn't just made herself so obvious. She hardly could've given herself away any faster, except maybe if she'd shouted "Hey, look at me!" How could she salvage this now?

He'd already noticed her, and unless he was a complete idiot, he knew she was suspicious—probably knew she was afraid. She couldn't take that back by trying to blend in.

Her only hope here was speed, and maybe the relative safety of being in public.

Kagome abruptly whipped around and ran.

She'd barely made it ten feet before she felt a large hand clamp down on her shoulder. It spun her around with a strength that nearly sent her toppling over on the sidewalk.

On impulse she opened her mouth to scream—but his other hand smothered her lips, stifling her cry.

Golden eyes narrowed down at her. "You Kagome Higurashi?"

She jerked fiercely against the hand on her shoulder. It didn't budge.

A small smirk lifted one corner of his mouth. "I'll take that as a yes," he said, his voice a deep rumble.

"You're coming with me."

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A/N: Hello lovelies! This story idea hit me outta nowhere. Decided to run with it, even though it's a bit darker than my usual. I hope you enjoyed it!

I make no promises about update schedules (I'm also working on the next chapters for You Are My Shelter and for Since You've Been Around), but I'll work on this whenever the inspiration strikes. My vision for it is that each chapter will be roughly drabble-length. Short and punchy. Not sure why, but that's the idea I had when I started writing this. Guess we'll see how it goes!

Let me know what you think~