The Scarred Healer
“Damn it!”
The young man who had so boldly flung his helmet aside snatched it back up again. Motorcycle helmets were expensive enough to make your eyes water; even while bleeding out and sliding toward death, the thought of losing it still stung.
“Pwahaha. What the hell am I doing?”
That young man—Han Se-gun—started laughing at himself. He had just stormed the Sangdong-pa office, taken a knife for his trouble, and was now standing on the edge of dying. A vampire hunter killed by ordinary humans—it was almost funny. But no matter how many supernatural enemies you faced, a hunter was still only human. And Se-gun was still a green rookie who could barely claim to pull his own weight.
He checked his arm again. Blood from the upper arm where the sharp knife had punched through showed no sign of stopping. A tourniquet held the wound, yet the blood kept pouring out like water over a broken dike. If a human body leaked like this, how absurd was that old story about plugging a collapsing levee with a single arm? Even as the blood loss made his mind flicker in and out, Se-gun chuckled at the thought. Of course, if he got to a hospital right now he wouldn’t die. The wound was only in the arm, nothing vital, and the bone was intact. But showing up with a stab wound meant questions from the police; staying out here meant his life hanging by a thread.
“Somewhere… I heard there was a black-market doc around here.”
Se-gun forced his blurring thoughts into reverse and kept walking the streets. He had burned through or sold off every last drop of vampire blood, so he had no way to treat himself. Should he go to Deok-yeon for more blood? Buy some from Old Man Ju? The ideas crossed his mind, but there simply wasn’t time.
Riding the motorcycle might have gotten him somewhere, yet he could barely walk—how was he supposed to drive? His last hope was the rumored quack who practiced medicine illegally, and he had no idea where to find the man. He was certain he had heard about it from Deok-yeon; all he knew was that it was somewhere nearby.
“Tch.”
Betting his life on information this fuzzy. To yank his fading consciousness back into line, Se-gun cracked open a capsule of Psychedelic Moon and tossed it into his mouth. Unbearable nausea slammed up his throat and churned his guts, but after a moment the drug’s fire returned enough vitality that he almost forgot the anemia.
“Khhrrr…”
A groan slipped out on its own. Psychedelic Moon did not flood you with the raw ecstasy of heroin. What it did was exactly what the name promised: it let you see psychedelic visions, and those visions became spears that stabbed straight into the heart. The hallucinations laid bare the ugliness inside you, yet the pleasure they brought was as full and complete as any sense of triumph.
“Hahahaha.”
Se-gun laughed. Colors melted and dripped, pooling underneath into blood. His brother’s corpse, his family’s corpses—unrecognizable chunks of meat—rose to the surface of the color-pool. Without the knowledge that they were corpses, the image was so unreal it almost looked like tofu floating in soybean stew. That was why the laughter came. Like a wounded wild dog or a wolf, like a demon that had no business existing in any city where people lived, Se-gun wandered the black streets.
“Ah!”
Then a soft exclamation came from behind him. The same “ah,” yet the inflection was subtly different from any ordinary person’s. Se-gun spun around, startled.
A blonde woman stood there. Classic Slavic features—gold hair, pale skin—and even the silhouette alone in the dark gave the impression of striking beauty. But when she stepped into the circle of light from a mercury lamp, the hideous burn scars across her face became plain.
“Kh…”
Had she seen him take the drug? The thought made Se-gun tighten his grip on the motorcycle helmet. Then the sharp, unmistakable smell of disinfectant rolled over him.
“Patient?”
“……”
Awkward accent, but perfectly understandable Korean. Se-gun lifted his head. Inside the chaos of light and perception the drug created, the White Russian woman looked like something out of a Picasso cubist painting.
“You a doctor?”
“My, what a remarkable customer.”
She murmured the words, stepped forward, and supported him. Se-gun closed his eyes in relief.
“I’m type AB… just so you know.”
“How high-handed. And such a young boy.”
Her scarred face twisted into an even deeper scowl.
A Hyundai Accent sat parked on the street. It was a quiet residential block with little traffic, yet a clear No Parking sign stood right there; parking brazenly in front of it would have been hard to justify—except the driver was still sitting inside, so he at least had an excuse.
“Damn it. What the hell is this?!”
The middle-aged man inside the car held up a plastic bag, turning it under the streetlight, squeezing it from the outside… wasting time, by any ordinary measure.
It could have been coincidence. Once is coincidence. But when coincidence stacks on coincidence, it becomes necessity.
Detective Sim Gu-jin was living inside that necessity right now. Eyes followed him everywhere—sometimes birds, sometimes cats, sometimes dogs, sometimes people. The constant pressure of those gazes had driven him to the edge of a cliff. They never killed him. They had more than enough power to end him, yet they never did. That pressure alone was enough to drive a man insane. Anyone with a history of mental illness would have broken into fits long ago; if Sim Gu-jin had not been the slippery bastard he was, he never would have lasted.
“How the hell is something like this even possible?”
He muttered the question. Even now he felt eyes on him. Whether the feeling was real or pure paranoia no longer mattered. Keep this up and a full nervous collapse in two days would be the natural result.
“Shit. Trying to use a head I never use is driving me crazy.”
He stared at the metal fragment that had been pulled from the pigeon’s body and let out a long breath. If he just threw it away, the watchers would be satisfied. Whether that satisfaction meant they would leave him alive was another question, but it was clearly the direction they wanted. The same people who had controlled a pigeon to erase evidence were almost certainly using that power to keep him under surveillance. Throw it away… pretend the supernatural never happened. The scrap of metal in his hand was useless as evidence anyway.
The plastic bag trembled as if a wind had hit it. His own hand was shaking—how could a human arm shake like that? Sim Gu-jin looked at the quivering limb and sighed again.
“You sons of bitches! Don’t look down on a low-rank detective!”
Even while trembling he muttered the words with stubborn pride. The Accent’s headlights flicked on and the car shot off toward the police station.
Superintendent Lee Jeong-gi was an elite officer currently serving as chief of the forensic division. Year-end wrap-ups left him swamped, and on top of that he was the secretary for his police-academy class reunion, so the work piled on in triple layers. Still, a man who was exacting with himself, he drove toward headquarters with a face so composed it bordered on severe. Then the figure of a middle-aged man standing at the main entrance caught his eye.
The man wore plain clothes, yet years of police work made it obvious he was a detective. And even without those years… they already knew each other.
“What’s he doing here?”
Lee Jeong-gi pulled up and looked at the classmate who had dropped by after so long—Detective Sim Gu-jin. The two of them had graduated the police academy together; Sim was still only an inspector while Lee had already reached superintendent—a full three-rank gap. It was not that Lee had rocketed upward on special promotions; every academy graduate started as an inspector. The gap existed solely because Sim Gu-jin had somehow managed to stay in the upper ranks’ bad books.
“Ah, you son of a bitch… look at those eyes…”
Sim Gu-jin muttered and glared at the Podori police mascot sign standing in front of headquarters.
How did a man like this ever graduate the police academy as an elite?
The thought crossed Lee’s mind, but it was far too cruel a feeling to direct at a classmate.
“Oh-ho. So I get to call an elite like you my classmate? Fun. Looking at a successful classmate is always a treat.”
Sim’s voice dripped with sarcasm. Lee’s face tightened with discomfort. The superintendent who was about to be promoted again was sitting in a Magnus sedan. Superintendent was not a low rank, yet the pay was still not generous enough for luxury cars. The mockery in Sim’s tone was unmistakable.
“Why don’t we go inside? Unless whatever you have to say can be handled right here.”
“Nah, it’s nothing that big…”
Sim glanced around. The downtown streets, already buzzing with Christmas and year-end crowds, were as chaotic as ever.
“I need a little cooperation on the Seoul downtown shooting spree case.”
“If that’s what it is, go through proper channels. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
Lee pressed the accelerator. Sim immediately ran after the car, shouting.
“If it was something I could do through proper channels, I wouldn’t have come begging to my high-and-mighty classmate!”
The words soured Lee’s mood instantly. A low-rank detective waltzing up to a superintendent with a private request? Christmas was coming, but that did not make him Santa Claus, and being classmates did not mean he had to accept personal investigative favors.
“I’m not nearly as high-and-mighty as you seem to think. I can’t sit here blocking the headquarters entrance all day.”
Lee’s voice was ice-cold as he glared at Sim and drove inside. Sim, who had pinned real hope on the man, was left standing in blank despair.
“Damn it. This is a living hell.”
He crumpled the plastic bag in his fist. The bullet fragment was vital evidence if the investigation was to continue, yet every previous piece of evidence and data had a way of vanishing inside the police station itself. He had come to his newly elevated classmate the way a drowning man grabs at straws—and all he got was “follow official procedure.”
“Shit!”
He kicked the ground in pure frustration.
Flap-flap-flap
The loud sound of wings beating the air cut through the night.
Harsh sunlight stabbed his eyes. His body still felt as heavy as waterlogged cotton, yet Se-gun forced himself upright. Outside the window, the sun hung between unfamiliar apartment blocks. At a glance it was impossible to tell whether the light was dusk or dawn.
“Where the hell is this?”
He muttered the question, then winced as a brutal headache hit. When he tried to move his hand, a pain far worse than the headache raced up his right forearm. Only then did the raid on the Sangdong-pa come flooding back—how he had fought well at first, how the throwing knife had found him, how he had bled his way across the city to this place.
“Well, shit.”
He looked at his arm. Bandages wrapped it cleanly; every movement brought a tight, awkward sensation that suggested the stitching itself had been perfect. Too clean for a black-market doctor.
“Is this actually going to be okay?”
Anxiety about the injury flickered across his face. Still, for someone who had charged straight into the Sangdong-pa headquarters, the wound was minor. He ought to count himself lucky it had ended this lightly.
“Where’d the doctor go, though? I doubt this is free.”
He pushed himself up. An IV needle was still taped into his forearm, making movement awkward. Holding the drip bag, he rose and wandered around the place with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child visiting someone else’s house for the first time while holding his mother’s hand. A simple surgeon did not need mountains of equipment.
Perhaps that was why the apartment held plenty of medical tools, yet even more ordinary household objects—underwear hanging on the veranda, a cheap reproduction of Gauguin’s Tahitian Women on the wall. A Russian woman running an illegal clinic probably lacked the money to keep her practice and her living space separate.
“Hmm.”
Hunger drove him to the kitchen. On the gas range sat a large special-glass pot filled with scalpels and hypodermic needles. Anyone who had ever seen a baby-bottle sterilizer would have understood its purpose at once. Se-gun’s brow furrowed.
“Even for a quack, how many patients can she possibly get that she has to reuse this stuff?”
He muttered and opened the refrigerator. Inside were bags of glucose solution, blood, various drugs—and, thankfully, convenience-store sandwiches, milk, and a few eggs as well.
He pulled out a sandwich whose expiration date was anyone’s guess and shoved it into his mouth.
“This reminds me of that bit in Nadia where the fridge is called the triumph of civilization or whatever.”
At least the sandwich had not gone bad. Se-gun laughed under his breath at the memory of the classic NHK anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. A refrigerator, however, could not make bad food taste good. He started hunting for a frying pan to cook the eggs—then stopped.
Click.
The heavy front-door lock disengaged and a woman stepped inside. Long blonde hair grown, it seemed, mainly to hide her face; milk-white skin; a slender figure—the classic Russkaya. Only the terrible burn scars on her cheek kept her from being beautiful.
“Standing up two days after a wound like that. Impressive.”
She set down the plastic bag she was carrying. A carrot poked through a tear in the black plastic.
“How much do I owe you for the treatment?”
“The bill was taped to the head of the bed. And you—you still look underage. Where exactly did you pick up that injury?”
She asked the question while walking into her own room. Twilight poured through the window and painted the space a deep red. Compared with the living area the room felt almost impersonal—existing only for sleep—and the faint scent of disinfectant that clung to everything calmed her.
“……Isn’t the rule that you don’t ask how the wound happened?”