The castle courtyard was a ruin. Inuyasha now stood between Kagome and a woman Sango had never seen before, looking like he'd been through a rough fight.

The woman had the unearthly beauty that told Sango she must be a youkai of some sort—another powerful youkai in human shape. If Naraku had been merely another puppet, was this the one that had controlled the corpses of the wolf youkai? If she was, it looked like Inuyasha had been giving her a hard time. She appeared more or less uninjured, but her clothes and hair were in tatters.

Abruptly, she turned tail and fled. A feather plucked from her hair swelled to impossible size and formed a raft that carried her up into the air and away before Inuyasha and Miroku could reach her. As she vanished into the distance the castle itself began to crumble into dust—like Naraku, it had never been real.

Sango couldn't help but notice the scar on the woman's back: enormous, and shaped like a spider. It seemed the others had noticed it, too.

"She has the same as the spider-shaped scar as Naraku does," Inuyasha murmured.

"Inuyasha, earlier you said that Kagura and Naraku have the same smell," Kagome pointed out.

"They do."

Sango glanced at Miroku, wondering what he thought of that, but he was looking at their friends, not toward her. "What does it mean?" she asked.

"Could it possibly be that that woman was Naraku, transformed?" he asked. He sounded almost hesitant to say it, but how could he not think about that? It was, after all, how Naraku had ensnared his grandfather and inflicted the curse of the kazaana upon his family. It made sense that Naraku would fall back on familiar old strategies, much as he had done with by tricking Inuyasha and Kouga into fighting each other, and using a puppet to distract her and Miroku earlier.

"But…" Kagome hesitated. "When she was fighting us, it was as if she was doing it for the first time. If she were really Naraku, why act like she didn't even know who we were?"

"Indeed, what might be gained from such a ploy?" the monk wondered aloud.

Sango considered it, and came up with nothing. "Why do that out here, after luring us with the saimyoushou, and then reveal his puppet to us inside? We were always going to know he was behind all this," she pointed out. Unless, of course, he had thought his puppet could kill her and the monk and slip away without leaving a trace, with the hell wasps somehow conveniently forgotten. If that was the case, he had seriously underestimated them.

"Then what the hell was the point?" Inuyasha asked.

"It's Naraku we're talking about," she replied. "So who knows? But he must have thought there was something to be gained."

"At any rate," the monk added, "this woman's aim was clearly to goad Inuyasha and Kouga into fighting each other. No matter who emerged as the winner, he was likely to be in bad shape. I think it's likely that her real goal was to obtain the jewel shards in Kouga's legs."

"Wait, so she wanted me to do her dirty work for her?"

The monk looked pointedly to where Kouga lay unconscious on the ground, not too far from where the battle had occurred. The leader of the wolf youkai tribe looked to be in very bad shape; at first glance Sango wasn't even sure he could survive the beating he'd endured, even with his jewel shards. He looked even weaker than he had the last time he'd lost to Inuyasha.

So weak, in fact, that Shippou even felt safe to approach him.

"The color of his skin has changed," the kitsune observed. "It's like poison is spreading from that jewel shard in his arm."

Kagome headed over to see for herself. "At this rate, he's going to die…"

"Good riddance," Inuyasha huffed, crossing his arms over his chest with finality. "I think we should take all his shards, so he won't give us anymore trouble."

Even for him, that was a cruel proposition. The wolves weren't friends or even allies, but Sango felt a certain sympathy for Kouga. She knew what it was like to be the last survivor, to see all your kin dead at the hands of your enemy. To be tricked into fighting the people who should be your allies. What she couldn't say was whether it would have been better to die, or to be saved to carry on.

Belatedly she realized that Kagome and Inuyasha were now bickering over the wolf youkai's fate, and that the monk was standing entirely too close to her. Something must have given away the turmoil she was feeling.

"It's the same thing, every time," she murmured. It hadn't hit her this hard when the monk said it earlier. But now…

Something emitted a sudden bright flash. Kagome had slammed an arrow into Kouga's arm, and was using it to dig something out of his flesh. Not just anything—the tainted jewel shard. As soon as Kagome touched it, the shard disappeared in a puff of smoke. "It wasn't real!" she exclaimed, yanking her hand back protectively.

Almost as soon as the shard was removed, Kouga opened his eyes and pushed himself up and into a crouch. "Too bad, dog turd," he said. "Looks like you couldn't kill me after all."

Whatever had happened before, while Sango and Miroku were otherwise occupied in the castle, it was like he had no memory of it.

Inuyasha, of course, was having none of it and rose to the bait immediately. Yet as soon as he made a move to swing the Tessaiga, Kouga turned tail and ran, taking his remaining jewel shards with him and leaving Inuyasha sputtering in thwarted fury. All of which served to distract the monk from watching Sango so closely, which was its own sort of relief in the wake of a battle averted.

"As usual, he's quick to run away when things get tough," Miroku observed.

Inuyasha gave a dissatisfied "hmph" and sheathed the Tessaiga. With the castle gone and their enemies fled, and nothing at all gained, he was probably going to be difficult to deal with for the foreseeable future.