A Baited Trail
The street trees that had bared their skeletal frames all winter now hung heavy with clusters of blue-green leaves, as if to suit that common phrase from school notices: “spring, when all things revive.” Hidden in the shadow of those trees, a long-haired woman in black glared across the park at the shop called Arjuna. Unable to mask her anxiety, she kept her gaze moving from the motorcycle parked in front of the café to the interior beyond.
“Hard to see past the cover.”
But drawing any closer could mean disaster. Arjuna was as good as a Jinma hunter’s base camp; no place for a vampire to approach carelessly. Though her eyes had gone wild with the need for revenge for the dead Gyeong, Ryeo had not yet lost all judgment when her life hung in the balance.
No. Maybe I’m just being too realistic.
Deep down she was glad to have slipped free of the deep shadow cast by Juk-yo’s death. Yes—her love for Gyeong had not changed. Yet for a vampire who had walked hand-in-hand with death, revenge for a death felt more alien than a tombstone carved with her own name. Still, she could not claim that the urge to escape Juk-yo’s shadow—so lonely it threatened to drive her mad—had played no part in her decision to rush out seeking vengeance.
“Ah!”
As if determined to scatter her thoughts, the café door opened and a young man stepped out. She spun behind the tree at once, vanishing completely from his line of sight.
The young man, Han Se-gun, glanced around briefly, then mounted the motorcycle with a fluid motion and shot out of the alley.
“Fast.”
Ryeo lost her words watching Se-gun tear through the alley at that speed. True to someone who had once aimed to race bikes, the way he blasted down the narrow lane at full throttle was anything but ordinary. With neither car nor motorcycle of her own, she had no way to pursue him.
“Even if I did, that human… that’s his specialty.”
She shuddered, remembering the night Gyeong died. Han Se-gun had lured the vampires onto the road and cut most of them down. They had dismissed him as a green vampire hunter and walked straight into the trap he had prepared.
Given that, chasing Se-gun by vehicle would only put her life at risk. For now she would have to content herself with the transmitter she had planted. Greed, as always, was the shortest road to ruin.
Ryeo carefully slipped out of the park where Arjuna stood.
At the mouth of an alley washed in the pallid glow of sodium lamps, a young man paced around a motorcycle, holding a device no larger than a small flashlight up to its frame. To any passerby it would have looked highly suspicious, but the motorcycle belonged to the young man himself, and the device in his hand was a transmitter-and-bug detector.
“Tch!”
Se-gun scowled at the beep. He had only run the detector after reaching home, and it had immediately picked up a transmitter. With people around in front of Arjuna he had simply ridden off—never imagining that skipping one check would let someone plant a tracker in that short span.
“This is ridiculous. So that’s what she meant.”
Only then did Se-gun understand what Kim Seong-hui, the owner of Arjuna, had meant by “You’re popular, huh.” He felt a flicker of resentment that she hadn’t warned him sooner if she knew, but with customers present it must have been hard for her to speak of such things.
In any case, his hideout now had to be considered exposed. And the only vampires who would go this far to track him were surely the remnants of Juk-yo. Every other vampire would be frantically hunting the Jinma known among humans as Lee Jeong-ah and among their own kind as Jeong-ya.
“Fine. Then I might as well use this as bait.”
Se-gun left the transmitter where it was and kicked the bike into motion. The idea of using the motorcycle to lure vampires and snipe them with silenced firearms seemed promising. Strangely, the moment he realized someone was after his life, the emptiness, the sense of defeat, and the bottomless black solitude that had ruled him until then vanished without a trace. In their place came excitement—an excitement so full throughout his body that he almost wondered whether the feeling itself was a kind of fulfillment.
Even he had to admit he was thoroughly insane. But for someone left with nothing but a shattered everyday life, the ability to take joy in aberration was a precious asset. If it wasn’t fun, how could he keep doing this?
“I’m one hell of a crazy bastard, aren’t I.”
Se-gun took out the Bloodstone Pendulum and nicked his finger with a knife, smearing the stone with blood. This was the only means he had of detecting approaching vampires. It was useless beyond twenty meters, but Se-gun was the relative underdog who had to exhaust every available method.
“Huh?”
But what was this? The moment he applied the blood, the pendulum began to sway left and right, if only slightly. At first he thought it was simply from taking it out and coating it, yet side to side rather than front to back?
“Don’t tell me already?”
Thinking that far, Se-gun immediately went into his hideout. He was in a residential neighborhood, passing through the city center, so he had not properly armed himself—if a vampire attacked him now, he was dead. But this too was a residential area; could he even use firearms here?
Vampires dream too. Even bodies activated by the vampire factor possess a metabolism similar to humans, and as long as their consciousness remains under the brain’s rule, dreaming is inevitable.
But no tears flow even from the saddest dreams. And such dreams usually leave no memory upon waking. To wake from an extremely sad dream, forget the memory, and have no tears with which to savor the lingering emotion—that is the height of emptiness.
Ah. So I’ve stayed here again today.
Jeong-ah opened her eyes inside the old boarding house as midnight raced toward dawn. Only two strands of quiet breathing filled the room. With a vampire’s eyes that pierced the dark she looked at the sleeping man, Chang-hyun. Even if she lacked the insight of other Jinma, she was still a vampire. No matter how much she tried to deceive herself with optimistic excuses, she could not deny that this was a bad situation—the harbinger of vampirism.
Vampirism, huh.
It was a symptom that came from the destruction of the Anima. When cracks formed in a human soul and life force drained away, the vampire factor grew like poisonous mushrooms along those gaps.
Whether she was truly the reincarnation of the Jinma Jinya—Jeong-ya—she did not know. But that she too would suffer from vampirism and was fated to become a vampire had been foreshadowed by the dizziness that assailed her one day two years ago.
“Foolish man.”
She thought of Chang-woon. A person. Yes—a person. Chang-woon the vampire, more human than any human, had fought alone to protect her for the sole reason that Juk-yo had targeted her. Unlike Juk-yo he had never even sired children, and when that lonely wanderer of the wilderness found her and arrived in Seoul, he was a vagrant without passport or identity.
How warily she had regarded him then. Well—in suspicious times, if a full-grown man in tattered beggar’s clothes approached a grown young woman, it would have been stranger not to be cautious. That was not kindness; it was simply a lack of proper social education. Yet even after persecution and cold treatment, Chang-woon had protected her at the cost of his own life.
It was no exaggeration to say that because of him she had found the courage to go on living without taking her own life, even as she became a vampire.
“Ugh…”
The man called Chang-hyun tossed and turned with a groan. Jeong-ah watched him in silence. This man shamed her. Of course the difference between man and woman had manifested as a difference in position, but he had taken in a woman reduced to vagrancy, and not out of any physical exploitation or self-interest. He had simply brought her into his home purely out of concern for her body.
At this rate I look like the bad person.
In truth, though she felt sorry toward Chang-woon, she had been consoling herself that anyone would have been helpless in that situation. But this man had splendidly broken that situation. And at the same time, judging by how he suffered from vampirism like her and kept fainting, it would not be long before he became a full vampire. Without any wariness of the sun he would burn to death. If he burned to death in a boarding house like this, it would probably be reported as a fire from improper electrical use, and the world would go on as if nothing had happened.
But what if I tell him and he treats me like a crazy person?
Who would believe such a thing if not the hunters and vampires and various other mythical monsters that roamed beneath the mad moon? But the condition of the man called Chang-hyun was quite serious. If left like this, he would die before long.
Ah—she was not merely cunning but pathetic. She rang an alarm against her own foolishness. She herself had not believed in vampires and had eventually become one. To flee for fear of facing a moment’s distrust—in other words, using the excuse that she was scared of being scolded.
Thud.
Then a faint footstep reached her ears. Caught up in this and that thought, she had lost track of time until she snapped fully awake. She had forgotten that she was being pursued.
What—what is it? Doesn’t seem like a vampire?
She pressed herself to the wall and rolled up her sleeve just in case. A man walking with footsteps silenced like a cat’s—yet her keen hearing was already painting his movements. He climbed the wall. A thief? No… but the metallic scent mixed with the rank smell of heavy oil. In other words, a human armed with firearms.
“……”
The owner of the cat-like footsteps was approaching this boarding room slowly but surely. She hesitated for a moment. She had never fought a human before. Of course, as a woman hiding from vampires and people, she inevitably had to protect herself from violence at times, but with her superior physical abilities she could resolve such matters amicably.
But if the opponent was a vampire hunter, it was different. There could be no amicable resolution without killing. Even if she left him alive he would leak information to the others, and as someone in hiding she had to be prepared to kill to silence him if necessary.
For a moment the surroundings sank into silence. She could not ignore the sound of the electric meter spinning or the boiler running, but that was due to a vampire’s keen hearing; to a human it was at least silence.
“Ah!”
In that instant the glass window shattered, and its fragments poured into the house.