A Grand Bargain Sale
“Well, damn it all. I’ve been thoroughly done in.”
Chang-woon shuddered as he looked down at his split-open chest. Unlike Juk-yo, he possessed no mutation ability; once he released the binding force of his blood and tore his own torso apart, every wound remained entirely his own.
He and his elder brother Juk-yo had become vampires at the same time, yet temperament, constitution, and a host of other factors had given him a power of an entirely different nature. The same held true for every vampire. A vampire’s abilities were determined by the lineage to which he belonged, yet even within the same bloodline many developed divergent powers.
In short, the further the generations descended, the more mutations appeared. Even so, no one could deny that the original True Vampires—the Jinma—remained overwhelmingly powerful.
So what am I even doing right now?
Chang-woon asked himself the question and sank forward onto his knees. He had barely managed to close the wounds left by the silver-haired priest when splitting his own chest had reopened everything. Even for a vampire with regenerative power, losing twenty percent of one’s torso and expecting a complete recovery was absurd. One need not invoke the law of conservation of mass; the blood he had spilled would have to be replenished from somewhere.
“Ugh!”
Footsteps sounded again. The spacing was too wide, the tread too quiet for a human—the silent gait unique to vampires. Sensing danger, Chang-woon readied himself to fight. In every respect meticulous and relentless, Juk-yo had always preferred thick, layered waves of attack. The ones earlier had been, by the standards of Juk-yo’s subordinates, mentally deficient—discarded stones in a game of go or chess. The real pieces were coming now.
“They say the day you set out is market day. This really is a grand bargain sale. I feel like I’ve put myself on the clearance rack.”
Muttering about his own predicament, Chang-woon drew a length of Kevlar thread from the pouch at his waist. Blood still seeped from the unhealed wound in his chest; organs hung precariously between the fragments of his sternum, ready to spill out at any moment. In this state he could never conceal himself from other vampires. With a touch of resignation he focused his mind and wound the Kevlar wire around his arm.
Stronger in tensile strength than steel, Kevlar suited his wind arts better than any other weapon. Firearms would of course have been simpler and more effective, yet a man who traveled the entire world could not casually carry tools whose border crossings were so troublesome.
Then it came.
Waaaaaaah—!
Sirens blared as a fire engine and a rescue van raced up the main road from the west. Someone must have reported the overturned car.
“Ah!”
Chang-woon carefully retreated into an alley to avoid human eyes. Whoever had called it in, the presence of ordinary people would keep Juk-yo’s faction from moving freely.
From the opposite end of the alley came the screech of a car slamming on its brakes. On the street across from the block where the emergency crews had arrived, a Volkswagen New Beetle appeared. The little car drifted to a stop as if it had leapt out of a racing game; the door flew open and a woman stepped out.
“Chang-woon-nim! Over here!”
“You—who are you?”
“Hurry!”
She flung the door wide. The moment Chang-woon climbed in, the car was already moving, the door not yet fully shut.
After getting Chang-woon into the car she parked in front of a small motel and checked her watch. The hands had just passed three in the morning. Roughly three and a half hours remained until sunrise—enough time that the vampires would not yet risk large-scale movement. Unlike Jinma, who could act even by day, ordinary vampires were bound by the night; their hours of activity were severely limited.
When the sun rose they would have to flee to safe shelter. Returning in short order to a refuge completely protected from sunlight was never a simple matter.
“But are you all right, Chang-woon-nim?”
She looked at the man in the passenger seat, eyes closed. Whether from trust or simple necessity, Chang-woon kept his lids shut and devoted every scrap of concentration to healing.
“Aaah. The only luggage I brought is this body. Anywhere will do.”
“That’s not what I mean. You know better than anyone where I belong.”
“……”
Her voice was so plaintive that it told him everything she left unsaid. She had become a resident of the night under Chang-woon’s guidance; hatred for him would only have been natural. To a vampire the one who turns them is a parent. Yet Chang-woon had never fulfilled a parent’s duty; he had handed her over to Zein. She had every reason to despise him. Still she only watched him with those sorrowful eyes, and Chang-woon answered with silence, pouring himself into mending his wounds.
“Tachihara, was it?”
“Your memory is excellent.”
She stepped out of the Volkswagen New Beetle and walked to the motel counter. The building was designed more for love-hotel purposes than ordinary lodging; in the lobby a clerk with gleaming hair oil chewed bubble gum while a cable channel flickered on a screen.
“Welcome. Two of you?”
“Any room, so long as the blinds are good.”
In that regard love hotels were unmatched. No sunlight ever entered; they were perfect both for secret trysts and for hiding from the sun.
She laid a credit card on the counter and glanced back at Chang-woon. His wounds had largely closed; outwardly he looked almost normal, yet he could not hide the pallor of his face. The clerk paid no attention whatsoever and returned the card.
“Pay later. How long will you need the room?”
“Until sunrise, I suppose?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The clerk slid a registration form across. She filled it with casual lies, took the key, and left the lobby.
The moment Chang-woon entered the room he collapsed onto the bed.
“Do you need anything?”
“No. I’ll manage.”
He answered with one hand still pressed over the wound.
“Why are you helping me?”
“For someone asking that question, you got into the car rather readily.”
“Well…”
Chang-woon lost his words. To claim it was because she was his child would have been too shameful; he had no memory of ever acting like a proper parent.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”
With those words he sank into sleep. She let out a long breath and leaned back in the chair.
“Has it been eighty years? You’re still wandering this world. You poor man…”
Yet the one more pitiable was she, who could do nothing but watch him. Eighty years earlier, when she had suffered a seizure of vampirism in Kyoto and writhed in confusion and pain, it was Chang-woon who had saved her. He had completed her transformation, taught her the arts of seeking the dark—and then abandoned her.
An incurable wanderlust (of course Juk-yo’s relentless pursuit and attempts to annihilate him played no small part) had driven him across the world for so long that even he no longer knew the span of years.
In the end she, turned by Chang-woon, had entered Zein’s Vanishing Blood and become one of his kin. Kinship among vampires meant sharing a bloodline, yet Zein was the sort who would stop at nothing to expand his power; anyone with ability was welcome.
Still, to meet again like this felt bitterly ironic.
“How long until sunrise?”
She looked at the clock and exhaled a quiet sigh.
Atop a building construction site a man stood. An ordinary person would have suffered stress-induced breakdown merely climbing there; he balanced on the tips of his toes upon precarious rebar, leaning dangerously forward like a figurehead on a sailing ship. At thirty stories the wind howled mercilessly, yet he stood as lightly as a being exempt from the laws of physics, surveying the surroundings.
A single bat flew across the smog-choked city and alighted on his arm. In the next instant the creature melted into his body through the flesh of his limb.
He clenched and unclenched his fist as though confirming the bat’s absorption, then let himself fall forward from the rebar. To any observer it looked like suicide, yet in mid-air he twisted, planted his feet on a wooden plank, and landed with elegant precision. The steel-pipe scaffolding swayed under him like ropes on a boxing ring.
Crunch, crunch.
Where he had descended, the banquet was already under way. Vampires who had dragged humans from the neighborhood were holding them down and feeding. The homeless, those whose resident registrations had been erased—people who would cause no trouble if they vanished—the marginalized and the sickly: this was the raiders’ feast, and they felt not the slightest guilt. Their sire, Juk-yo, was himself rather faithful to desire and never restrained such behavior.
On the contrary, he led by example.
“Hmph. The impure ones never know their own fate and keep chattering. But Chang-woon was wounded. Why?”
From the shadows a young male vampire stepped forward and draped a coat over Juk-yo’s shoulders. He was “In,” a vampire Juk-yo had created personally and kept as a close attendant.
“According to our information, it was the work of a Vampire Hunter.”
“Is that so? Even if Chang-woon is a half-baked fool, he shouldn’t fall to a mere Vampire Hunter.”
“It was the famous Jinma hunter—Silvester.”
In regarded his master with an inwardly anxious expression. Juk-yo possessed absolute strength, yet his temperament was… problematic. Then again, among vampires none could truly claim sanity. Anyone forced to live for ages by drinking the blood of beings identical to themselves would inevitably lose their mind. Those who genuinely disliked killing could of course drain without murdering, or substitute animal blood when necessary.
But that was only at the beginning. After a few years most of them slaughtered humans with numb indifference—simply because it was less trouble.
If even young vampires were like that, how could Juk-yo—one of the twenty-four Jinma, said to surpass even Tetra Anax in age—possibly be sound of mind?
“Will you attack?”
“No. Not tonight. Still, that Jinma hunter bothers me.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like the insolent name. ‘Jinma hunter’—it’s ridiculous.”
With those words Juk-yo walked among the vampires. The construction site, branded XX Dream Town, was a high-rise that a developer, unable to weather the building-industry slump, had thrown up in a near-gambling spirit. The attempt had been bold, yet the aftermath of bank mergers had crushed it. A thirty-story skeleton could not simply be abandoned, of course, but Juk-yo, with a vampire’s peculiar resourcefulness, had turned the place into a temporary lair.
“We’ve located Chang-woon. Some motel, it seems. A vampire of the Vanishing Blood went in with him—a woman, no less.”
A blond, blue-eyed Westerner smirked as he spoke. Among vampires the distinction between male and female mattered little; their sexual drive was weighted far more toward blood-drinking than penetration. Yet habits formed at three last until eighty; the libido that had ruled their human years remained intact after the change. Or perhaps in this case it was merely harmless Yankee humor. Juk-yo, however, did not smile.
The vampire who had been grinning with a lewd expression lost his enthusiasm and withdrew.
“Lord Juk-yo, your orders! Let us strike at once and finish him this time!”
When In spoke, every other vampire turned toward Juk-yo as one. A single word from him would have launched a war; the atmosphere was fanatical. That applied only to the core members of the clan, of course. The ghouls and lesser vampires were still busy licking spilled human blood and filth from the floor.
Juk-yo made no effort to hide his contempt for them as he walked toward the heart of the building, into the darkness.
“For now we watch a little longer. Considering how much time we have already invested, there is no need to rush. Besides, Tetra Anax’s reach has not yet extended to this Korea. The mess you lot made… hmph!”
He did not continue. The smog over Seoul thickened further.