The Ball Lands on Zero
“Tetra Anax has only one true enemy — Lilith.”
Vantero said it as he pushed his chips forward. Paolo pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it atop Giovanni Vantero’s stake.
“If that’s the wager, I suppose I can sit in on this game.”
“Oh?”
Giovanni smiled as though genuinely pleased. At that moment the dealer struck the bell, signaling that betting was closed.
The ball rattled across the wheel — and dropped, clean as a knife cut, into the single zero. House takes everything. Paolo shot Giovanni a sidelong glare.
“Huh. Looks like my luck’s off.”
Giovanni plucked a cigar from his case and made a show of looking elsewhere. In the movies, of course, the ball would have stopped right where they’d put their money. Reality, as usual, had other ideas.
“Son of a bitch…”
The mages spat the Korean curse in unison.
A young man in a Fritz helmet and windproof goggles was riding a rather respectable on-road bike along the national highway. The gear didn’t quite match a racing replica, but he held a passable posture as he cut down the road.
“Not bad. Maybe I’ve got a knack for this after all.”
He congratulated himself on the sight of himself astride a motorcycle. Handling an on-road machine like this normally demanded the guts to conquer high-speed fear, the reflexes to rein in the engine’s power, and nerves sharp enough to answer in an instant.
But for a young man born a werewolf — a creature whose speed and reaction time left ordinary humans in the dust — riding the thing was hardly a challenge. The only real problem was that he kept forgetting to shift gears.
“Waaagh!”
Right on cue, Seo Rin lost it in a corner and went down. Handing an unlicensed kid a modified R-1 as a starter bike had, in retrospect, been a spectacularly bad idea. He ought to have begun on a scooter; instead he’d been dropped straight onto a high-spec machine.
“Damn it!”
He got up and righted the bike. Se-gun had built the thing out of leftover parts from tuning his own motorcycle, and the slide had already scraped the paint off the cowling.
“…He’s going to give me hell for this.”
Picturing Se-gun’s foul temper, Seo Rin patted the bike down. Functionally, at least, nothing seemed broken.
The only reason he was out here alone with the motorcycle was that Se-gun had given him permission. Ever since he’d started living with Se-gun, Seo Rin had spent his days more or less locked indoors — cleaning, laundry, studying, training, the same loop over and over. One day the cabin fever had finally snapped him; he’d said he was going out for a while, and Se-gun had agreed with total unconcern.
What, you? If anyone heard you, they’d think I’d locked you up and put you to work.
Se-gun had looked at him as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Which meant Seo Rin had been inventing his own prison and playing the fool all by himself.
“Damn it.”
Plenty of monsters still wanted him, but Se-gun stuck to his laissez-faire rule. Go into the city if you want — just handle whatever happens next with your own hands, and try not to get tangled up with the police.
“Great. Taking life advice from a terrorist.”
Seo Rin muttered as he kicked the bike into gear. Traffic on the highway was light; he was in Seoul in no time.
“…I wonder how Yeong-eun’s doing…”
The moment he hit the city, thoughts of family and friends rose unbidden. But he couldn’t contact Yeong-eun anymore. Every touch only put her in more danger, and families had a way of noticing things — one slip and his true nature would be out.
He ought to tell Doctor Kang he’d moved, too. The man already knew what he was, and the debt Seo Rin owed him was considerable.
“Oh — there’s mail.”
He checked the mailbox outside the apartment building that used to be home. Inside was an airmail letter addressed to him.
“From Dad.”
Something like emotion caught in his throat; he tucked the envelope into his jacket at once. He wanted to tear it open right there, but this wasn’t the time. Letter secured, he headed for the hospital where Doctor Kang worked.
When he arrived, patients were staging a sit-in out front. The doctors were on strike again, and the place was chaos.
“Not exactly the atmosphere for a chat.”
Doctor Kang wasn’t the type to show up out of duty during a walkout anyway. Seo Rin turned around and left.
“Man. Weather’s perfect.”
The rain a few days earlier had left the sky clearer than it had been in a long while. The heat sent him into a nearby shop for a bowl of red-bean shaved ice. Once, he never would have spent the money; lately, though, his income had climbed. Se-gun was strict about these things, but he had decided Seo Rin was worth roughly the combined wages of a day laborer, a cleaner, and a cook, and paid him a salary accordingly.
“Weird evaluation criteria, but the pay’s good enough that I can’t complain.”
Grumbling under his breath, he sat in the café and stirred his shaved ice. The ice was packed into hard clumps — a badly made bowl if he’d ever seen one. He told himself not to come back, raised the spoon to his mouth, and glanced out the window.
“Huh?”
A familiar face. Sunglasses, baseball cap worn backward, glued to a crane game machine.
“…Seong-chan?”
A certain early morning came rushing back — back when Seo Rin still went to school. In a mage’s indiscriminate attack, he’d been shot down right in front of Cho Seong-chan. He’d talked his way out of it at the time, but if they met again Seong-chan was bound to ask about the wound.
“Of all the places in this huge city, why here?”
He clicked his tongue in disbelief. True, that arcade was where he and Seong-chan had run into each other before. Shared geography didn’t make a coincidence this neat any less absurd. Even if you’d planned a meeting, you wouldn’t find someone this easily.
He looked away and pretended not to notice. A moment later, Seong-chan walked into the café.
“…Caught red-handed.”
Seo Rin covered his eyes with one hand. As if that paper-thin trick could hide him.
“Seo Rin?”
Sure enough, the moment Cho Seong-chan stepped inside he recognized him at a glance. Startled, Seo Rin waved him off — but Seong-chan sat down across from him without asking.
“Wh-what happened? Is the wound okay? I heard you quit school. They only told me you’d gone down to the countryside to make money…”
“Shh. Shh.”
Seo Rin gestured for quiet; Seong-chan remembered the other customers and lowered his voice. His eyes, though, stayed fixed on Seo Rin with stubborn intensity. He clearly meant to have answers.
“Ah — well… the wound’s fine. It was nothing.”
Even he thought the answer was pathetic. If Seong-chan bought a story that thin, the internet antis were right and the kid really was a new species of human with tofu and pudding where a brain should be.
“There’s no way that was ‘nothing.’”
Seong-chan stared at him, incredulous. Blood pouring from his chest, clotted blood spilling from his mouth — and he called it nothing? Anyone who walked away from that could probably survive an execution.
“And why… why did they attack you in the first place?”
Seong-chan pressed him, watching through the sunglasses. Seo Rin shrugged. An explanation wouldn’t be believed — and if, by some misfortune, Seong-chan believed it and got pulled in, the fallout would be catastrophic.
“Stop asking. You’ll get hurt. Just being near me right now is incredibly dangerous.”
“…What the hell even are you?”
“Heh-heh. Secretly a North Korean operative, actually.”
He’d meant it as a joke. Seong-chan froze solid. A surly-looking waiter brought a menu; Seong-chan took it with the mechanical motion of someone whose joints had locked.
“….”
“It’s a joke. A joke. Did you actually believe that?”
“No — of course not. And even a North Korean operative couldn’t survive a hole through the chest.”
So he remembered that morning in detail after all.
“But it’s not a complete joke, is it?”
“Yeah. The part about getting hurt if you know too much.”
Seo Rin answered and poked at his shaved ice with the spoon, breaking it into smaller pieces.
“Anyway, crazy that we ran into each other. You a regular at that arcade?”
“Ah — yeah. The crane games are pretty good there.”
Seong-chan scratched his head as he said it. The lead singer of a popular idol group, and his hobby was claw machines. Down-to-earth — or just pathetic? He was pretty enough that girls must swarm him; Seo Rin found himself wondering why the kid was spending his youth like this.
“About those cranes, though. Sometimes I see bottles of whiskey or whole cartons of cigarettes in them. Can you actually win those?”
“Obviously not.”
“Figured.”
Seo Rin nodded and sank into the sofa. Seong-chan studied his face and let out a breath of relief.
“I’m just glad. When you disappeared, I thought the people who attacked you might’ve killed you and buried you somewhere.”
“You’ve got one hell of an imagination. As if. South Korea is a nation of laws…”
He stopped mid-sentence, remembering Se-gun’s war with the vampires. When the vampires and their thralls — half-turned, half-drained — had come pouring in, Se-gun had wiped them out with a savagery that wouldn’t have been tolerated even in ancient Sodom, never mind the Republic of Korea.
His faith in the country slipped a notch; his voice shrank to a mosquito’s buzz.
“A nation of laws. Yeah. Anyway, it’s not something you need to worry about.”
“Still.”
“And don’t try to find out too much about me. You’ll get hurt.”
Even saying it made him feel ridiculous; he crunched the cereal bits in the shaved ice with unnecessary force. Hearing lines like that come out of his own mouth — the kind of lines that only belonged in third-rate movies. Seong-chan, though, took it seriously.
“Okay.”
“Ahahaha. Feeling that tiger energy kick in. I’m gonna go. Seong-chan — I’ll cover what I ordered.”
He stuck a bill into the check and fled. They’d met by accident, but contrary to his fears, Seong-chan’s mouth seemed fairly tight. Not that anyone would have believed him if he’d talked…
Still, talking it through had cleared something heavy out of his chest. Knowing the problem he’d been fretting over wasn’t about to explode felt like clean air.
“Well then — while I’m at it, maybe I should see Hyeok-jin.”
Back on the motorcycle, Seo Rin thought of his old friend. The clean end to the conversation with Seong-chan seemed to have given him a little courage. Living cooped up in Se-gun’s hideout, rifling through vampire belongings and draining blood from vampire corpses, had left him hungry for something ordinary — friends, a little fun, something human.
“…School isn’t out yet.”
He checked his watch and looked around. A movie theater caught his eye; he headed for it. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t be wandering around more than necessary, but after so long cooped up, he wanted to taste a little more freedom.
A flutter of wings. As Seo Rin turned toward the theater, the pigeons lined along the roadside all took off at once.
The theater was running a big Hollywood action picture for the summer. Being a weekday morning, though, the place was nearly empty. Seo Rin bought a ticket and settled in for the first time in a long while. Se-gun’s place had a home theater, and with no neighbors nearby you could crank the volume as loud as you wanted — but movies still tasted best on a real screen.
“Hm?”
Checking his ticket as he moved to sit, he noticed someone strange in the row ahead. A foreign man — coffee-colored skin, striking clean yellow hair.
“….”
These days even the sight of a foreigner was enough to set him on edge; Seo Rin watched him carefully. An enormous frame like a wrestler’s, an oddly mismatched blue vest, and a leopard-skin coat hanging beside him. Nouveau riche didn’t begin to cover it.
Everything about him looked wrong. A mage, maybe? Seo Rin thought about turning around and leaving. Then the film started and every light in the house went out.
“….”
He hesitated, then found his seat and sat. Even if he didn’t want blood on his hands, he couldn’t keep running forever.
He faced the screen and poured every scrap of hearing and smell toward the man. Thick cologne. And underneath it, faint but unmistakable — the smell of blood. No ordinary person. So when would he make his move?
The man did nothing through the entire film. When the credits rolled he even started clapping.
“Bravo. Absolute garbage. Hollywood is…”
Words and actions completely at odds. Seo Rin tried to slip out like a man escaping. But at the exit, where a theater employee should have been ushering people out, a very tall foreign man was waiting instead.
“So it begins.”
Seo Rin steeled himself and checked the gun under his jacket. Han Se-gun had laid a perception-warping charm on it, but that only covered the sound of the shot. There was no defense against being seen.