A Father Disqualified
Driving with a phone pressed to his ear instead of using hands-free—it was a miracle he hadn’t crashed yet. Then the line went dead.
“Huh? Did the call drop?”
Detective Sim Gu-jin thought about dialing again… but decided to hunt down the gift first instead of flipping his phone open. Of all things, though—a computer webcam? That was for video chats. What did a thirteen-year-old girl need with something like that?
“Damn it. Little brat’s just like her mother—precocious little smart-ass!”
So the detective spat out his curses. The same soft-headed fool who’d been busy bragging about his daughter to strangers a moment ago was now talking like this; even a man who never shut up about his kid couldn’t bridge a generation gap. Though in this case it was less a gap with his daughter than leftover venom aimed at his ex-wife.
Arjuna, reborn as an occult café, was still surprisingly empty even with Christmas upon them. Owner Kim Seong-hui’s coffee and cooking weren’t half bad, so why so few customers…?
“Guess on Christmas everyone just heads for a hotel or a love motel, huh?”
Se-gun grumbled as he examined his arm. The ugly, swollen bite left by the spider stood out starkly. Just then a waitress set a cup of hot chocolate down in front of his table.
“What are you muttering about? People will think you’re a pervert if you talk like that. No—that’s sexual harassment at that level.”
“Calling it sexual harassment is a bit much.”
Se-gun shrugged. He was in an excellent mood—not because of Christmas, but because he had taken down three vampires alone and still had a body left to stand on. Of course the festive atmosphere didn’t hurt, but that alone could never have made him this happy.
“….”
Deok-yeon, Silvester, even Arjuna’s owner Kim Seong-hui—none of them were more than business acquaintances to Se-gun. In the end, he was alone in the world. Claiming loneliness was sad was a joke. Unless you’d been steeped in children’s fairy tales, nursery songs, and every other media campaign designed to force social bonding on kids, you already knew: human beings were alone by nature.
For a vampire hunter who lived balanced on the edge of a blade, that was only natural. And yet finding joy not in the world’s holidays but in standing superior over blood and slaughter…
A throb…
Se-gun felt a stabbing ache under his eyes and in his throat and closed them. Was it because he’d been doing so much mucosal absorption? His throat burned.
“Hey, are you okay? What’s wrong?”
Arjuna’s waitress, Lee Jin-hye, noticed something off about him and stepped closer. Se-gun lifted the cup and muttered,
“Too sweet…”
“At your age I couldn’t get enough of anything sweet.”
“That’s why you’re still alone on Christmas—because you’re that childish.”
The words earned him a smack from her tray.
“You little—! I’ll have you know I’m only—”
Bzzzzzt!
But Se-gun’s phone vibrating on the table cut her excuse short. He shoved the tray aside and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“….”
Strong wind noise poured through the line. Se-gun was on his feet in an instant.
“Where are you right now?!”
“Well… heading into Bucheon…”
“Call me again when you get to Bucheon!”
He shouted it and bolted for the café entrance.
“Hey! What about the hot chocolate?!”
“I’ll pay when I get back!”
He yelled it over his shoulder, swung a leg over the XR-250 parked out front, and kicked it to life.
Vrooooom!
“Damn it! I’ve got a bad feeling about this—a really bad one!”
He roared it as he tore away. The thick flakes that had been falling were turning into a full blizzard.
Se-gun cut across sidewalks and roadways alike, racing toward Bucheon at reckless speed. Plenty of cars sat clogging the streets like sluggish caterpillars, but he wove between them with astonishing quickness.
Whiiiiine.
Even with the helmet clamped down, his ears rang and the wind howled. He’d been stabbed by the Sangdong faction and drained by a blood spider—his body was in no condition for this kind of abuse—but the ominous premonition only pushed him faster.
Once he crossed into Bucheon, even Se-gun, sealed inside a racer suit, began to shiver from the drop in body temperature. Punching through a blizzard at that speed made a sharp plunge in heat inevitable. And after losing so much blood lately…
“Tch.”
He pulled the pack strapped behind the bike, dug out a slim inner bag, and drew the American-made samurai sword of 420 stainless steel. His AUG Steyr had broken, but he still had plenty of rifles. He just couldn’t commit the atrocity of loosing NATO rounds in the middle of downtown Bucheon. Silvester might fire a Barrett right in the city streets, but Se-gun didn’t have Silvester’s special abilities.
“All right—this far for now. Time to try calling again?”
He dialed Detective Sim. For some reason, the detective didn’t pick up.
“….”
He’d already poked the Tetra Anax nest, and now the detective wasn’t answering. Se-gun ground his teeth as the bad feeling solidified into reality. He should have gotten the address earlier. Not that he knew Bucheon geography that well…
“Huh?”
His phone rang again. Se-gun answered.
“Hello?”
“Han Se-gun!”
“Where are you?! I’m already in Bucheon!”
“Past Wonmi District Office—LG Village.”
“What a fantastically named apartment complex…”
Se-gun muttered it and twisted the XR-250’s throttle. Snow clinging to the tires sprayed out left and right like parting waves.
As a rule, visiting your ex-wife on Christmas Eve wasn’t something a decent man did. But that was mostly true in the West, where divorced women remarried at high rates; in Korea it wasn’t nearly so damning—especially when she hadn’t remarried and there was a child involved.
Detective Sim Gu-jin had long since lost any dignity as a cop, but he had never quite surrendered his pride. Dealing with vampires had finally stripped even that away. Of course, under ordinary circumstances he himself would never have believed vampires existed, which was probably why discarding his pride had been so easy.
Or maybe he simply hadn’t registered the humiliation. Only after the vampires themselves had twisted the higher-ups and he received a direct personnel order did he understand he had done something a police officer should never do. Looking the other way for a guy plastered with illegal weapons and narcotics, then sitting on what he’d learned… the pride he’d protected all these years by refusing promotions felt like it had blown away completely.
“Damn it all.”
All he had left was family. The marriage hadn’t been smooth; he’d lost custody of his child to his wife. Even so, he loved them. So even if it wasn’t exactly what he wanted, he had bought the computer camera his thirteen-year-old daughter asked for, wrapped it prettily as a Christmas present, and brought it over. After a stretch of thoroughly exhausting chaos, he just wanted one day that actually felt like a holiday.
“You know—Silent Night, Holy Night, and all that.”
He muttered it while waiting for the elevator. In a twenty-five-story apartment building, the car took a long time to arrive.
“Shit, look at this face.”
He scowled at the elevator mirror, cursing as he tried to tidy himself up. Hiding like a rat from vampires had left him looking like hell. Of course, anyone who could keep their dignity after that probably wasn’t human—but for a father seeing his daughter for the first time in nearly a year to show up looking like this…
“Damn it!”
He clawed at his chest inside the elevator. Against creatures like that, was the only option to shut your mouth and stay still if you didn’t want to die? Then what was the point of being a cop? He’d have been better off just stacking money and living large—at least then he wouldn’t feel so cheated. He knew perfectly well the world never ran the way you wanted, so why did it still rankle this much?
With ordinary political scandals and big corruption cases, if you stuck your neck out they just transferred you or dumped you in Juvenile Division to argue with kids and take the same tired false affidavits from schoolteachers. Stick your neck out on a vampire case and it would snap—and that was what cut his pride the deepest.
A detective, afraid of a death threat. But that only proved how thoroughly he had been coasting on the quiet safety net the badge usually provided.
“Ah, hell!”
He stepped off the elevator and rang the doorbell. No answer from inside.
“What the hell is going on?”
He used the spare key he’d prepared and let himself in.
“…!”
The moment the door opened, a violent stench of blood punched into his nose. It was so vivid it felt like someone was digging the inside of his nostrils with a rusty nail.
“Ghk—!”
He drew his pistol at once. Juvenile detectives rarely carried guns—theft risk, and the job seldom required it—but after everything with the vampires, he’d brought one.
“Ae-jin!”
He opened the girl’s room first. Empty, of course. Detective Sim Gu-jin slowly turned toward the living room. The living-room window stood wide open; wind hammering the high-rise made the howl even sharper. If the blood-scent could linger even in a gale like this, whoever had bled out was beyond saving.
Ordinarily he would have called for police backup right there. Now he doubted it would help. He knew vampires existed. He knew they would come for him soon. If the enemy was a vampire, calling for backup would only pile up more police corpses… or turn him into the lunatic at the center of some grotesque massacre. In a situation like this…
Without thinking, Detective Sim Gu-jin lifted his phone and called Se-gun.
“Hey—Han Se-gun! Han Se-gun!”
Even though a cell tower sat close by, the call took forever to connect. He clamped the phone to his shoulder, heart in his throat, pistol in a sweaty grip. His hand was slick; his shoulder felt ready to cramp—and still the damn thing wouldn’t go through.
Beep!
At last the line connected.
“Hello! Where are you?”
“Well… heading into Bucheon…”
At the exact same moment, a young girl walked out of the kitchen. Startled, Detective Sim dropped the phone.
“Ae-jin!”
He cried his daughter’s name in shock. Slowly, the girl lifted her head.
Thup.
A lump of flesh nearly solid with blood slipped from Sim Ae-jin’s hand and hit the floor.
“Son of a bitch—!”
A vast darkness seemed to swallow him whole. Years of police work let him read the scene for what it was. He knew exactly what was happening… but how was he supposed to accept it? That his own daughter had become a vampire who murdered her mother?
“D-Dad. The present?”
“….”
Detective Sim Gu-jin said nothing. He simply lifted the bag. Inside was the gift she had wanted, of course—and a present for her mother as well… But the mother would already be dead. Only mother and daughter had lived here. Whose blood could possibly fill the house like this?
“Hhk.”
He flung the gift aside, snatched the phone from the floor, and retreated. He sprinted for the elevator and stabbed the button.
Whiiiiine.
It would take a long time for the car to arrive. And in that time… Sim Ae-jin came closer.
“Dad… if you throw it, it’ll break. But I don’t know where Mom went?”
“That—”
He muttered it and closed his hand around the pistol.
Ding.
The elevator arrived at last. He lunged inside and spun around at once.
“Dad!”
Ae-jin was coming toward him. An elevator didn’t go down just because you pressed a button. So he…
Bang!
He fired. The bullet tore through Ae-jin’s neck; she stared at her father with an expression of pure disbelief.
“Ah—!”
Bang! Bang!
Two more rounds. Ae-jin staggered backward and went down. They weren’t silver, but the bullets still carried more than enough force to wreck a body. He watched his daughter fall beyond the elevator threshold and shut the doors.
“Guess that makes me a failure as a father, too.”
What kind of father put bullets into his own daughter? The thought sat heavy as he cracked open the revolver’s cylinder. Protocol said the first round should be a blank… but he’d loaded whatever he felt like, so punishment was coming either way.
He reloaded while lifting the phone. When it came to vampires, Han Se-gun was the professional—getting his advice was the smart move. He’d already fired a gun inside an apartment building; the police would be swarming soon enough.