The Worst Partner
Blue Hawk Security Company had parked a trailer truck by the roadside and was waiting. As one of Korea’s leading security teams, Blue Hawk was thorough not only in simple bodyguard work but in every kind of service as well. Once again, they had not betrayed Row’s expectations.
“You’ve arrived, Mr. Row Gibson.”
A female bodyguard wearing non-prescription security glasses greeted him. Of course these were the people hired to assist Yoon Mi-hye. Female bodyguards for a woman, and a trailer truck treated for ballistic protection—this firm looked as if it would hold its own even in America.
Inside the trailer, fully armored with composite plating, a double weave of Kevlar and Spectra, and a special polymer layer wrapping the whole, there sat an incongruous mountain of women’s clothing.
And inside with the clothes was the lawyer who had brought them. Kim Chang-su, dispatched from the firm L&J, served as legal scrivener, management consultant, and even butler for every legal matter that arose during Row Gibson’s stay in Korea.
“I’ve prepared everything as instructed, for now.”
“Well done. Ah, Bodyguard Miss—help her change. We can’t keep her in hospital gowns forever.”
Row Gibson spoke and placed what he held into Kim Chang-su’s hands. The copper-alloy heads of 7.62 mm rifle rounds, crushed out of shape, still caught the light.
“These are…?”
When Kim Chang-su looked puzzled, Row lowered his voice.
“In a flash he put six rounds downrange. Every one of them aimed at a human.”
Row Gibson said it and shook his head. Fortunately he had been able to stop the bullets. Had he not been there, Yoon Mi-hye’s cervical spine would have snapped, her brain would have come apart in pieces, and she would have died in the middle of the street.
Silvester’s sniping had been that precise… and the rounds carried power. Phantom had used his dark arts to shield himself, yet the concentrated fire of six shots had finally punched through the unholy barrier weakened beneath the sun, torn through his arm, and drawn blood.
Still, they had been ordinary bullets; that much was lucky. Had silver rounds wounded him, he would have been unable to reclaim the blood, and even the fine particles flowing from the wound could have begun the transformation of humans into vampires.
Did the bastard show a little consideration in his own way? Ridiculous.
Row Gibson—no, the Jinma Phantom—thought that and adjusted his sunglasses. A Jinma hunter who worried about vampires. Or had he simply worried about this woman?
Streetlights began to flicker and stretch as though waking. Pale mercury vapor lamps, jaundiced sodium lamps, multicolored neon, and the bright orange wash of headlights—countless lights were dyeing the night city.
It felt exactly like the rush after inhaling Psychedelic Moon: an endless banquet of color. The only difference was that the outlines looked blurred. That hardly mattered to Se-gun. He tossed the empty can behind him.
A dry metallic clang answered. Score—one stainless-steel park trash can accepted the little can without so much as a shudder.
“Haa… only thirty thousand won, huh?”
Se-gun sighed astride his motorcycle. The moment the work ended, strength drained from his whole body. Especially for him—he had worked without any clever technique simply to build raw power—so the exhaustion hit harder. No matter how thoroughly one trained with martial arts, labor still had its own laws.
People gathered in the night park. High-schoolers from nearby cram schools sat on benches secretly drinking canned beer. Se-gun glanced around, then mounted the bike and started down the park steps.
The creak of every stair told him this RX-125 would not last much longer. It felt hollow that the careful tune-up his brother had poured himself into had been ruined by a single accident.
Of course, after someone picked a motorcycle up like a toy and flung it, there was no way it would still be whole. Still, sinking all that repair money into it now looked like pure folly…
“Should I just buy a new bike while I’m at it?”
Se-gun muttered. He had money, of course. But if he spent it all there would be nothing left for living expenses, and that was the problem. He could probably scrape by if he was careful, yet the anxiety was larger, so he could not bring himself to touch it.
“Damn it. I need to sell the vampire blood soon.”
One pouch had already gone for Yong-jin. Only a single pouch remained, and any vampire he could beat without Psychedelic Moon would not have very high purity.
The idea of hitting the Sangdong faction again crossed his mind, but they would certainly be on emergency footing by now. Poking a wary enemy was a guaranteed net loss.
“Ah—over there!”
Just as Se-gun rounded the corner lost in thought, a girl he had seen once before called him to a stop.
“Huh?”
Jin Yu-mi was calling him. They had met only once; he had never given her an address or told her where he lived, yet here they were meeting on the street again. If it was coincidence it was a strangely neat one, but…
“Ah, my legs are numb!”
Jin Yu-mi said it and vigorously rubbed her legs. She had been squatting for hours in front of the convenience store where they had parted, so of course. Se-gun smirked at the sight.
“You could’ve gone inside and sat somewhere. That park over there, for instance.”
“What… More importantly—where are you going?”
“Home. Gonna sleep.”
Se-gun answered roughly. Yet she came toward him full of open goodwill.
“Where do you live?”
“Don’t ask that. More importantly, your friends?”
“Yeah. Everyone went to meet their boyfriends. Some went home too.”
The thought that this was a runaway-girl pack crossed his mind, but Se-gun said nothing more. He had never lived a model-student life himself, yet he had never stopped looking toward tomorrow the way these kids seemed to. Above all, hearing a girl say “let’s sleep” straight to his face had been a shock.
But thinking about it, I’ve heard that line plenty from the biker gangs, haven’t I?
Only the target had never been him. That might be why he found this girl so off-putting.
“I’m wiped from the part-time job. No energy to hang out.”
“Really? Where do you live?”
“A goshiwon. Even if I work myself to death, once the rent’s paid there’s barely enough left to eat. So leave me alone.”
“Goshiwon?”
She fell silent for a moment, thinking. She could not originally have been this slow, but organic solvents—thinner and the like—had melted her brain and left her with cognitive damage; she no longer knew what the civil-service exams were or what a goshiwon even meant.
“Just say I board for money. Boarding… she probably doesn’t know that either, does she?”
Se-gun muttered, looking at her. He could not understand what kind of home would leave a girl in this condition unattended. Did she even have parents?
“Where’s your home?”
“Are you treating me like an idiot?”
“Just answer the question.”
When Se-gun spoke, she pointed toward the studio apartment she had once dragged him to. He looked that way and asked again.
“Your parents?”
“Don’t have any.”
“You mean you’re an orphan?”
“Yeah.”
She said it and closed her mouth. She clearly wanted no more talk on the subject. The vacant-eyed girl showed a sudden hardness there; he could gauge how fierce the feeling must be.
“In that regard, we’re the same.”
Se-gun muttered. Whether she had missed the words or not, she went “Uuung~,” lifted her head, and demanded he say it again.
“Get on the back. I’ll take you.”
Instead of answering he simply looked at her. Of course she did not refuse the offer.
Jin Yu-mi’s place sat quite high up the slope. At first Se-gun had thought it was merely a studio, but he could tell now that it was truly her home.
Jin Yu-mi had originally been an ordinary delinquent girl attending H Girls’ High School, a self-proclaimed member of the “Seven Princesses Clique.”
Why girls were so fond of calling themselves Seven Princesses at the drop of a hat he had never understood, yet that was the unoriginal name under which H Girls’ High’s delinquent circle had operated.
Then her parents died in an accident. The authoritarian, tyrannical father; the mother and daughter who had been little more than his possessions. It had never been a harmonious family, yet even those bonds had shattered completely.
The girl threw herself into frenzy. She inhaled industrial glue for cheap hallucinations and, high on them, slept with delinquent students little better than thugs. After one pregnancy and stillbirth left her body unable ever to bear a child again, she grew even more extreme.
Her house became a communal crash pad for runaway delinquent girls and a place for orgies. Thinner drinking, glue huffing, cigarette butts piled into towers. Soothing her ruined body and mind with solvents, she finally slid into mental disorder as well.
She saw hallucinations and suffered headaches. Compared with the bleeding and pain of her periods, however, that was nothing.
Stillbirth…
As if the dead fetus had cursed her on the way out, her menstrual pain was literally like stab wounds. The sensation of a keen blade tearing through the uterus was something words could not capture. At those times she simply got dead drunk.
If she drank herself senseless she could pass through without feeling the pain, and ignorance of suffering was certainly a kind of happiness for her.
“……”
Se-gun stood in front of the house listening to her rambling, disconnected story. He had only meant to hear a little of it once; she told it with far too much enjoyment.
Favorite celebrities, the life she had lived, stories about her friends… the tales seemed endless. Even when boredom rose inside him, Se-gun forced himself to endure.
“Yeah. Right. I see.”
He answered half-heartedly while staring at the house. Inside, the delinquents would be gathered holding their own Sabbath. Because she did not want to go in, she kept repeating the same stories over and over.
“Well… then I’ll go.”
Se-gun said it and started the motorcycle. In the end she was she and he was he.
It was not as if he could live her life for her, and he could not stand here listening forever, could he? He mounted the bike and left her behind.
“Hey… when can we meet again?”
Jin Yu-mi asked suddenly. Her voice held a note of anxiety. It was only natural to fear as her Kurt Cobain prepared to vanish into the city.
Han Se-gun lifted his head for a moment. Whether the moon was hidden by clouds, by smog, or simply not rising that night, it was nowhere to be seen. He spoke without looking back.
“Dunno. My part-time job ends at six.”
He said it and twisted the throttle.
Se-gun did not head straight back to the goshiwon. After a single day of thirty-thousand-won labor he had felt the value of money carved into his bones. That made him want to offload this blood all the sooner.
But Old Man Ju, the dealer he had seen when working with Deok-yeon, refused any transaction with the underage Se-gun. That left only one option: find another dealer.
To learn properly who else dealt besides Old Man Ju, Han Se-gun turned toward Arjuna.
“Ah, damn. This goddamn motorcycle…”
Once he had refused even to replace the frame, thinking of it as his brother’s keepsake… now his mind had changed. No matter the sentiment, a bike that had suffered a major crash was unusable. It had to at least roll if it were to remain a memento; riding it like this would only leave him making mementoes of himself as well.
A loud screech of worn brakes cut the air. Se-gun stopped the motorcycle abruptly and stared hard at the object ahead. Like a nearsighted man who had lost his glasses, he peered intently and unconsciously let out a soft sound of recognition.
A Corvette Coupe. A black Corvette Coupe stood parked in front of Arjuna. Se-gun swung off the bike and ran straight inside.
Arjuna’s automatic door slid open slowly. What met Se-gun’s eyes as he stepped through was Silvester seated in a chair, drinking coffee. Clad in a jet-black cassock, the man did not even glance up; he simply sipped and studied a file.
“Silvester!”
“Hm?”
Only then did Silvester raise his head and look at Se-gun. Wearing an expression of infinite annoyance, he pointed with his chin toward the opposite sofa.
“The coffee tastes quite good. If the occult-shop business is slow, turning the place into an occult café might not be a bad idea.”
“That requires a completely different permit, so it’s a hassle. Cafés count as public food establishments.”
Kim Seong-hui answered, then looked at Se-gun and asked what he would like to drink. Se-gun was in no mood for tea.
“When did you come back to Korea?”
“Not long ago.”
Silvester spoke without looking up from the file. Inside were several photographs, newspaper clippings, and student records. The records of the human who had been sitting beside the Jinma Phantom—Yoon Mi-hye’s file.
“Yoon Mi-hye, is it. Interesting. So—what brings you?”
Silvester finally looked across at Han Se-gun. For Se-gun a tangle of feelings rose that words could not quite hold. This was the man who had saved him and set him on the path of a vampire hunter… yet he could not resent him. Se-gun was here by his own choice.
“Fuck.”
Se-gun slammed his fist onto the table. Teacup and saucer clattered with the bright sound of porcelain. Several photographs slipped free of Silvester’s file.
“Oh-ho… so you’ve made up your mind to die, have you? Hm?”
Silvester regarded Se-gun with startled eyes and then fell silent. The photographs he was looking at showed the perpetrators of the Yoon Mi-hye rape-instigation case… exactly those faces.
“Why is this photo…?”
“Do you know someone?”
“……”
Se-gun only nodded.
There she was—a girl still in possession of her mind, staring at the camera with a rebellious gaze. Silvester covered his eyes with one hand at the sight of him.
“Dear me… it seems this time’s partner is going to be an unmanageable brat.”
“?”
Han Se-gun had no idea what Silvester was talking about. Well, if anyone could reconstruct an entire case from such fragmentary scraps, that would be stranger still. Even so he could read the atmosphere. But partner?
If it meant partnering with a Jinma hunter, did that mean these people had some connection to vampires? Se-gun looked at the photograph once more.
Far fresher than the girl he knew now, a cold light in her eyes—Jin Yu-mi had clearly been pretty. Pretty enough that a man walking past would have turned for a second look…
“The worst.”
Silvester’s sigh escaped him.