Prologue

I sit, calmly staring out at the forest around the cave I am taking shelter from my enemies in. Kanna and Kagura are both behind me, Kanna staring silently and Kagura muttering to herself. She hates me, I know, and it amuses me so very much. She amuses me with her plots, her hopes that one of the sons of the Inu no Taisho will, in the end, kill me. And maybe they would... but not before I destroyed everything either of them cared for. That is something that none of my incarnations and not one of my opponents understands yet. I want to win, but I can accept it if I don't. The most important thing to me is the absolute destruction of the ones I hate.

Kagome.

She is my biggest fear, my most dangerous opponent. Kikyou thinks it is her that I fear, but she hasn't yet learned that Kagome is the true Protector of the Jewel. She is arrogant, that woman. It is her downfall, as it was fifty years ago when I used that arrogance to turn her and Inuyasha against one another. Kagome does not suffer from that particular affliction. It is Kagome whose purity I must taint, her soul that I must destroy. It will not be easy, as I found when my infant first attempted it, but I will enjoy it all the more for that.

I hate her. It is a hatred so profound that it is a peculiar form of love. Yes... love. After all, is not one emotion a twisted reflection of the other? I hate her, and I love hating her. Because of all that she is to me, she will suffer. I will make sure of it. I have learned from the mistakes I made with Kikyou. I will not attack Kagome in the same way, I will attack her body first, and then through the pain I inflict on her body I will attack her soul. This time I will personally take a hand in the tainting. I will twist and rend her, make her truly suffer. This is another thing that my enemies do not understand about me. They think only of killing. I want Kagome to live. Death is a little thing, after all, and once it's over, it's over. That is too easy. In order to reap the most enjoyment out of her destruction, I want her to live, for a long, long time.

Inuyasha will suffer, too. Maybe even more than Kagome herself.

Because it is his betrayal that I will use to destroy her.

This is called malice.

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A/N: I have been slowly working on editing and re-working all of my stories to better reflect the skill I have gained over the last four years of writing. While editing Malice, my cat walked across my keyboard and managed to delete it entirely from this site, and so I am having to reload the entire thing as though it were a new story. And in some ways it is. I reworked quite a bit of it, cleaned up grammatical errors and typos, as well. No one's perfect, so I'm sure there are still mistakes, but they should at the least be minimal.

All that to say that Malice is now being re-loaded two chapters a week until it is back online in full. I hope those who enjoyed this story in its first incarnation will still enjoy it now.

Amber