A Call to Maria
"Ah, hello? Is this the police? I've found an establishment violating the minor employment laws. Yes, a place called Deul-pul. The number is XXX-XXXX. This isn't a prank—make sure you check it out!"
Hyuk-jin finished speaking, flipped his phone shut, and tore it to pieces with his bare hands. He seized the other man's phone as well and shredded it the same way.
"Well then. Thanks for the info. You're free to go."
Only then did the men, finally released from Hyuk-jin's grip, drag their bloodied bodies down the stairs in a shambling stagger. They had been working at a place that employed underage girls; they could neither go to the police to complain nor even think of doing so. Calling in their crew right away was just as impossible—the high school kid had already reported them, and that was the more urgent problem.
"…You son of a bitch. Do you even know what you've done?"
They could have left quietly, but they still had to spit out one last line before they could be satisfied. They glared at Hyuk-jin as if they meant to burn his face into their optic nerves. Hyuk-jin met those murderous stares with a smile.
"I'm a minor. I can raise hell and still walk away pretty clean. What? You want to find out who dies first instead? If a guy your age gets his ass kicked by some punk kid and still has the nerve to keep breathing, he should grab a rope, hike up into the hills, and hang himself. Loser."
"…"
They spat a mix of blood and phlegm, hobbled out of the villa, climbed into their car, and drove away.
"…That guy?"
Seo Rin had been hiding beside the building, listening to the sound of Hyuk-jin thrashing the men. He already knew Hyuk-jin's fists usually outran his mouth, but he had never expected him to use that violence somewhere that wasn't a schoolyard scrap between students. Judging by the state of the men as they limped out of the villa and vanished, Hyuk-jin had gone more than a little overboard.
Seo Rin went straight inside. The moment he stepped through the entrance, the stench of blood and sweat hit him so hard his head swam. Even accounting for the fact that his sense of smell far surpassed a human's, this was excessive. There were actual clots of blood on the floor!
"Ah, I ran them off."
Hyuk-jin lifted his hands with a foolish grin, like a child waiting to be praised. Seo Rin was speechless, but he didn't scold him. A high school kid beating the daylights out of men from an entertainment joint that was almost certainly tied to gangsters—of course it was worrying. But if Seo Rin voiced that worry, it would only wound Hyuk-jin's pride.
Instead, he pounded on the front door.
"Mister! They're gone! Open up!"
There was no answer from inside. Only the quiet sound of breathing, and now and then the sound of someone drinking.
"…He's not dead, is he?"
Hyuk-jin muttered. The first thought should have been that the place might be empty—but Seo Rin moved with such absolute certainty that the idea never even formed. Without a doubt, someone was in there.
"Damn it!"
Seo Rin bolted out of the villa, scrambled up the outer wall, and climbed in without much trouble. Inside, garbage bags of household trash were strewn across the floorboards, along with clothes, a mannequin, and scraps of every kind of fabric. He opened the front door so Hyuk-jin could come in, then headed for the master bedroom.
"Excuse me."
"That's a little more than 'excuse me.' That's breaking and entering."
Hyuk-jin grumbled as he opened the bedroom door. Inside sat a large sewing machine, an ironing board, and a gaunt, half-gray man propped against them, nursing a bottle of soju.
"Shit. I don't even need to look. Textbook."
Hyuk-jin's face twisted with disgust. An alcoholic father and a daughter sold off… The setup was so archetypal it felt unreal, the kind of plot that only ever showed up on those tearjerker TV dramas. Seo Rin understood the shape of the whole case at a glance.
"…Are you all right?"
Seo Rin approached and checked the man's condition. A rotting stench clung to him—he had soiled himself where he sat, unable even to stand. He was still breathing, but only barely; acute alcohol poisoning had him clinging to life by a thread. Judging by the suicide note left beside him, he had meant to die from the start.
"…Pathetic. If you're going to kill yourself, mix in some pesticide. Trying to drink yourself to death? If you're going to die, just die properly. What the hell is the point of selling off your own daughter just to keep that miserable life going a little longer?"
Hyuk-jin read the note and sighed. His wife had run off, his kid was unfilial, his friends had swindled him—the same tired litany, scrawled in handwriting and spelling so catastrophic it barely counted as writing.
"He's lost it. Miracle he isn't dead already. We're calling 119."
"Yeah. Do it."
Under Seo Rin's gaze, Hyuk-jin reluctantly dug out a massive old Anycall flip phone—one of those so-called "tank" models—and dialed emergency services with the air of a man being forced into a chore.
Seo Rin looked at the middle-aged man wheezing under the weight of his alcoholism—Hwa-young's father—and clenched his teeth. He was beginning to understand, just a little, why Hwa-young hadn't wanted to go to the police. If the cops learned her own father had sold her, wouldn't that only bring more trouble down on him? Even now, after everything, she was still worrying about the man who had sold her… Seo Rin's chest ached.
"All right. Let's get out of here before this turns into a headache. The phone number will be on record, so they'll have something to say about it later—but that's a problem for later."
Hyuk-jin walked out with Seo Rin. Seo Rin still felt uneasy; he glanced back at the villa and muttered,
"If she isn't here either, where did Hwa-young go?"
"What do you mean, 'where'? This is the end of the line. What more are you going to do? You've got zero reason to keep worrying about that girl. Right?"
Hyuk-jin laced his fingers behind his head and rolled his shoulders as he spoke. He had a point. Seo Rin could barely look after himself right now—how was he supposed to take on someone else's problems?
"I know, but people can't just cut things off that cleanly."
"What kind of nonsense is that? People are scarier than blades, you idiot. Comparing a person to a blade is an insult to the blade."
Hyuk-jin glared at him as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He knew better than anyone how far from easy Seo Rin's situation was. Why was a guy who could barely keep himself upright throwing himself into other people's messes?
"Well… if you really want to know, take these phone scraps."
Hyuk-jin held out the fragments of the phones he had torn from the men. Seo Rin stared at him, dumbfounded.
"Huh? What am I supposed to do with these? They're completely wrecked."
"I only ripped out the screens. The memory itself is still there. Check the saved numbers and notes and you'll find what you need. And I'm done after this. If you keep hanging around with the guy who just beat those bastards, you're going to catch strays the next time we run into them."
"I don't really care. Mm… no. Okay. Thanks for everything up to now."
"It's nothing worth thanking me for."
Hyuk-jin scratched his cheek, looking embarrassed, then turned and headed off on his own way.
"So. What do I do with this?"
Seo Rin stood alone with the phone fragments in his hands, lost in thought. A display panel connected to the body by copper traces on a film… if he reconnected those, the phone would probably work again.
The problem was that he had nothing to reconnect them with. A bit of copper wire and solder would have been enough for a temporary fix. But Seo Rin's house—where living hand to mouth was not an exaggeration—didn't even have tools that basic.
"I'll have to ask someone for help. But who?"
He muttered as he patted himself down, then pulled out a card with a phone number on it. The business card of the girl who claimed to be a vampire.
"…I've lost my mind. What am I even thinking…"
It wasn't that he doubted she was a vampire. Seo Rin himself was a werewolf, after all. But even granting that she was a vampire, there was no reason she should help him.
If you need help, call me.
She had said that—but the "help" she meant was surely nothing this trivial. Most likely she meant help related to the hunter named Han Se-gun. Still, right now this was the only place he could lean on.
Seo Rin sat on the uneven stone steps and looked around. The stairs had been cut into the hillside and lined with stone walls; last summer's rainy season they had collapsed and crushed a house below. Thanks to that, property values in the area had cratered—or rather, the place had always been awkward to redevelop, so even for Seoul the prices were not especially high.
This was where Seo Rin had first met that vampire girl.
Wait where we first met.
The voice on the other end of the line had been bright and cheerful. Even allowing for a foreigner's different Korean accent, he could tell she was glad he had called. She looked like a cute little girl—but she was a vampire. Remembering that left Seo Rin with a lingering unease.
"Am I stepping onto the wrong road here?"
But he had already made the call. Asking for help and then running away and standing her up—what kind of human behavior was that?
"You really were waiting."
Beneath the sodium lamps, a blonde girl in an old-fashioned lace-trimmed dress appeared. She seemed to drop out of the air itself; she lightly tapped the ground with her toes and offered a greeting in a posture so antique it might have been lifted from several centuries past.
"Ah. Uh, yeah."
Seo Rin stood up awkwardly and bowed in return. Maria burst out laughing.
"What is that?"
"Huh? Oh—no, you bowed, so I…"
"Ahahaha! Did you? Fine, whatever. So, why'd you call me? What kind of help do you need? The Beast came after you, right?"
Maria grinned with a knowing look. Mischievous and playful, she looked every bit the child she appeared to be. That she was a Jinma—a noble among vampires—was astonishing. Even Seo Rin, who knew almost nothing, could tell her standing was very high.
"The Beast?"
"Han Se-gun. Among us, we call him a demon beast that feeds on rage and hatred. Somehow he's even worse than his master, Silvester."
She poured out the complaint. Afraid the conversation would go completely off the rails, Seo Rin waved his hands.
"I don't know what any of that means, but it's not about that."
"Haaah? Then what?"
Maria looked at him with mild surprise. She seemed almost disappointed. Han Se-gun and she had both tried to make contact with Seo Rin around the same time; the fact that he had called her must have meant he was choosing her side—or so she had thought, and been glad. A completely different reason was something to be disappointed about.
"No, it's just… stuff happened, and, well…"
"What kind of 'stuff'?"
"Um… it's a long story."
"Long is fine. Oh—is it the kind of thing you don't want to talk about on the street?"
Maria's eyes lit up. She clearly wanted to see Seo Rin's house.
"It's not really a place a girl should walk into."
Seo Rin turned his head awkwardly, but Maria snorted, put her hands behind her back, and stepped closer.
"I want to see it."
"Well… fine, I guess. The story's going to take a while anyway."
He surrendered under Maria's relentless gaze. The alley happened to lead toward his place; he set off for home.
"Whoa… it's tiny."
The moment they stepped inside, Maria's face filled with open surprise. Seo Rin reached for the light switch, then stopped.
"You don't need it, right?"
"Mm."
Both of them were beings beyond the human. There was no real need for electric light. Habit had kept him flipping switches—but recognizing that Maria was a vampire forced him, inevitably, to recognize that he himself was a lycanthrope.
"First time seeing a place like this?"
Looking at Maria—she radiated the air of a girl from a wealthy house, every inch of her dripping with breeding—her fascination was obvious. But she quickly shook her head.
"Not really. Just reminded me of an old boarding house."
"A boarding house?"
"Yeah. Around the Industrial Revolution, I think?"
Maria smiled bashfully and glanced around the room. Seo Rin could not help but startle. People said Western faces aged more visibly than East Asian ones—but with Maria it was the opposite, wasn't it?
…No. This isn't even about baby faces or looking old.
Seo Rin rapped his own forehead with a fist and stared at her. No matter how he looked at her, she seemed no older than early teens. How had this girl lived for hundreds of years?
"So how old are you, exactly?"
"I don't really keep count, so I wouldn't know. Why are you so shocked?"
"…It'd be weirder not to be shocked. Can all vampires live that long?"
"Of course. There are some who've been around since the early Iron Age. Lycanthropes live a very long time too, even if not as long as we do—why the surprise? Ah, right. You never had anyone to teach you about your own body, did you?"
Seo Rin was left completely speechless.
Maria tilted her head at his rabbit-eyed stare, as if to say he was making a fuss over nothing, then looked around the room again. She seemed to be searching for a chair.
"You can just sit on the floor."
"I—I know that much. Sitting on the floor in India is…"