For a silent eternity Sango stood transfixed, waiting for Inuyasha to move, to sit up, to swear at her, to do anything. Many times in the past she had seen him shrug off wounds that would have killed a mortal man instantly, but now he lay motionless, a small dart wedged between his ribs. On an ordinary night it would have been but a minor annoyance to Inuyasha, but not tonight. Tonight the moon had hidden itself away and the stars seemed to stare down out of the night sky like the shining, hateful eyes of a thousand lurking demons. Now his demon blood lay dormant, and he was a mortal man, and Sango knew well enough that wounds he would ordinarily ignore could now prove quite fatal. Blood oozed lazily out from beneath his unmoving form.

Finally her shock gave way to horror and she rushed to his side. She frantically checked for the pulse in his neck and found it beating weakly. Though she was teetering on the edge of panic, her years of combat training were taking hold. With some difficultly Sango managed to roll him onto his back. Covered in blood, the wound was difficult to see in the poor light, but it looked more or less like any other puncture wound she had encountered. Only a small fraction of the dart was still visible; the rest had been pushed into Inuyasha's chest when he collapsed onto it. She saw with some relief that the dart had struck him too high on his chest and too far from his breastbone to have pierced his heart. Sango gently lay two fingers on either side of the protruding weapon and grimaced a little as she felt it pulsing. By the pulsing she guessed that the dart was either resting against or actually piercing a large blood vessel, and in either case she dared not remove it for fear of causing uncontrollable bleeding.

Inuyasha's face was cool and clammy, a product not only of shock but also of the demon centipede venom that was racing through his veins. Though the poison itself only caused paralysis, Sango feared that it could cause serious problems when combined with the copious bleeding the dart had caused. She quickly untied her sash, ignoring the scabbard of her katana as it clattered to the ground, and used it to gingerly wipe the blood away from the injury. Though new blood began to well up around the dart, its flow was not as steady as she had feared. Deciding not to take any unnecessary risks, Sango removed Inuyasha's cloak with minimal struggling and tightly knotted her sash around his slender upper body to bind the wound. It was far from an ideal bandage, and she had to be careful not to tighten it so much as to hinder Inuyasha's breathing, but it would have to do for the time being.

Although it was almost crazy to be distracted by such things given the situation, Sango found her eyes lingering on Inuyasha's body. While his demonic blood flowed through his veins, his muscles seemed to be tightly bound around his frame like perpetually draw bowstrings. In his human form, despite his lean, muscular appearance, he seemed somehow softer, more vulnerable. It was a strange sensation to see him like this, and the cascade of black hair that spilled out beneath his head and clung to his sweating shoulders made it seem all the more unreal. Then he convulsed a little, as side effect of the poison working itself through his system, and Sango realized for the first time that she was crying. She drew his head up onto her lap and draped his cloak over him to protect him from the chill of the night.

"I'm sorry Inuyasha," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."

Kirara watched Sango and Inuyasha from a distance, and whether by instinct or intellect she knew to leave them be. The yokai willed herself to change into her smaller form and quietly kept vigil over her companions. The scent of blood hung thickly in the air, but Kirara was well aware of the salty scent of tears that mingled with it. Kirara sat silently for a moment, and when Sango began to sing quietly, reciting from heart a song that even Kirara remembered from long, long ago, she cocked her head to listen

Undetected even by Kirara's keen senses, a soul collector floated listlessly above the trees, its serpentine body twisting on night wind like a silver ribbon. It had been sent by its mistress to watch over a certain soul, and despite its minimal intellect it was puzzled by the change it had sensed in its quarry. It wheeled in a lazy circle trying to discern what was going on below it. By instinct it knew that the soul hadn't disconnected from its mortal container, but something strange had happened. After a long period of indecision, the creature turned away from its erstwhile target and flew off in search of its mistress.

Kagome awoke midway between the bed and the floor, and her surprised gasp was cut off as she landed clumsily on the rug. Her light was still on, and the paperback she had gone to bed reading, Ends of the Earth: The Truth Story of the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, lay on the floor next to her. A warm wind blew lazily in through the curtains, bringing with it the clean smell of a summer night. For the briefest instant a fragment from her dream intruded on reality and she thought she smelled smoke on the breeze, but the illusion passed quickly as the nightmare dissolved from her mind.

I must've fallen asleep, she thought to herself.

Kagome absentmindedly picked up her book and dog-eared a page near to where she had drifted off. She sat on the floor for a while, reading the back cover and trying not to think about the dream. Except for Kikyo, it wasn't unlike the usual nightmare, the one that had come to her sporadically since she was a little girl. She set the book back down on the floor and drew her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. Her left forefinger popped loudly and she frowned. It was funny, in a way, that her family didn't think she remembered what happened when she was four even though her left hand would always serve as a reminder.

It was a memory she didn't enjoying reliving and she rarely spoke of it, but the truth was that what had happened was always lurking on the periphery of her mind. In the feudal era it somehow seemed less important, just one more encounter with a demon in a world full of demons, but in the modern era it was seemed so much closer. Having a large fragment of the Shikon Jewel hanging around her neck certainly did nothing to ease her mind. She was sure that she had felt it grow warmer for no reason, and once she awoke and would have swore it was tring to pull away from her in the small hours of the night. A shudder rippled through her even now as she mulled over the matter.

She thought that maybe it was because of all the demons in the feudal era that she had never told Inuyasha about what had happened. He'd have just given her that cocky, lopsided sneer and asked her why she was afraid of that demon more than any of the others. Maybe it wasn't the sneer she was worried about, for she had seen that sneer hundreds of times and had come to admire the fiery sparkle it brought out in Inuyasha's eyes. Kagome thought, looking back, that she wasn't afraid of his derision but of having come to terms with the fact that there were some things about her Inuyasha would never understand.

She had come close to telling Sango once as well, but it seemed silly to tell someone who was trained from birth to slay demons about a recurring nightmare and a bad experience from her childhood. She knew that Sango wouldn't think the less of her for it, but the truth was that she admired Sango more than any woman she had ever met, except perhaps her mother, and telling her about the nightmares would only confirm in her own mind that she would never be as strong as her friend.

Inuyasha and Sango are both so strong, Kagome thought, sighing quietly. Maybe that's what drew them to each other. Inuyasha always did say I just got in the way…

She closed her eyes for a long moment, then reached up onto her desk for her pen and notebook.

I may not be as strong as Sango, but I'm not just going to run away either.

The blue flames swirling in her vision gave way to a sea of stars shining down from the velvet blackness of the night sky and Kikyo realized that she had been dreaming again. The dewy grass clung uncomfortably to her bare feet and she was surprised to find her bow in her hand. Her eyes narrowed in annoyance at the thought of herself wandering around in her sleep, all the while having yet another nightmare. Still, she couldn't help but wonder if encountering her reincarnation was just another fantasy or it had been, in some perverse way, real.

Before she could consider the matter any further, something appeared in the sky, undulating on the wind as it passed over the edge of the forest. It was a soul collector, the one she had sent to follow Inuyasha.

Kikyo possessed a rudimentary empathic bond with the creatures, just enough to communicate with her servants on the most basic of levels, and as the demon drew nearer she could feel confusion and agitation in its mind. Once the creature was close enough, Kikyo tried to ask it what was the matter, but it was difficult to communicate with the soul collectors on so complex a level. Instead, the soul collector twined around her, pulling her in the direction of the forest.

"Inuyasha," Kikyo murmured to herself, "are you mine at last?"

The priestess reached out with her mind, bidding her other servants to appear. A half dozen soul collectors descended from the darkness above her and wrapped their snakelike bodies around her, lifting her into the air and carrying her towards what has once been called Inuyasha's Forest.

"We must always return to this place, mustn't we, Inuyasha?" Kikyo said quietly as they passed over the Bone Eater's well.

A butterfly flitted close to his face, and Inuyasha was transfixed by gentle beating of its incandescent rainbow wings despite his initial urge to swat it away. He realized, in small degrees, that he was laying in the grass, his head resting on something warm. He strained to see beyond the insect that danced in his vision, but it glowed with a soft golden light that his eyes could not penetrate.

What the hell?

Little by little the butterfly's radiance increased, and a fine glowing powder began to fall onto Inuyasha's face. With a jolt Inuyasha realized that the insect was not a butterfly but a moth, a moth with the wings of a butterfly, and that the powder was its shimmering scales.

Moth poison, Inuyasha's weary mind screamed at him, and he strained to lift his arms, to swat the creature away.

Try as he might, Inuyasha was unable to move. At first he fought agonizingly to resist to the falling powder, but slowly he felt his anger and panic melt away into a calm warmth and his ferocious will to fight dissolved into a peaceful stupor that had the sensation of slowly waking up. By and by the moth seemed to grow larger, its wing beats slowing and its flitting dance changing into long lazy circles in the sky above. Soon it was as big as bird, then even larger, filling Inuyasha's vision with its radiant colors and the strange golden light that it cast off. He felt as if he watched the moth grow forever, until finally it blotted out the entire sky.

Suddenly, as the moth reached a size that seemed nearly impossible to comprehend, Inuyasha's vision was flooded completely with its golden light. It was dazzling, though not painfully so, and Inuyasha closed his eyes to escape its brilliance. When he opened them again, a pair of soft brown eyes, watery with tears, were staring down at his own. A gentle hand cradled his head, and he was dimly aware of a finger tenderly caressing his cheek. His heart jumped in his chest as he realized who was watching over him.

"Sango…?" Inuyasha whispered, reaching up weakly to touch her face.