The Demon's Wish
"Oppa... what are you saying all of a sudden?"
When the demon tilted her head and asked, wide-eyed and puzzled, my voice climbed higher.
"Don't play innocent! I-I know... I know you're a demon!!"
Looking into those unblemished, guileless eyes — identical to the ones my sister used to have — only stoked my emotions higher. Anyone watching would have said I was making no sense at all. They'd have been right to call it lunacy. If I were asked to prove my little sister was a demon, all I could offer were words drawn from my own memories.
When Jia had come back alive and undergone every precise medical test imaginable, it had already been proven beyond doubt that her DNA was a perfect match for our family. So for a while, I had genuinely wondered whether I was simply delusional — whether my sister really had come back from the dead by some miracle.
But that unspeakable, chilling feeling I could never shake around her spoke to me with certainty, every single time: That thing is a demon wearing a human face — wearing my sister's face.
"Stop it!! How long are you going to keep lying to me!?"
I pulled the knife I'd hidden in my waistband and leveled it at the demon, shouting.
"O-Oppa...?"
Startled by my sudden movement, my sister flinched and curled in on herself, her face flooding with unmistakable terror. It looked nothing like an act — and for a moment, the knife in my outstretched hand wavered, nearly slipping from my grip. Desperately scrubbing away the thought that maybe all of this really was in my head, I pushed on.
"Wh-what do you want? It's just... it's just you and me here... So be honest with me — what do you want? What do you want!? You put on my sister's skin so you could drag our family into ruin — is that your goal? Or is my soul the price for your little performance as my sister!?"
As I kept pressing her with every scenario I could imagine a demon would want, the demon slowly — very slowly — let the frightened expression melt from her face. The fear that had bloomed there vanished as though it had never existed at all, and a faint smile settled onto her lips. At the same time, she gazed at me steadily, her face like someone intoxicated by something, or steeped in rapture, and said:
"You were warm."
"...What?"
"When I held your hand just now — you were warm. Pressing my skin against yours felt good."
For several seconds, my brain refused to process what the demon had just said. It was so far outside the conversation, and at the same time it was a tacit admission of what she was.
"Your skin is nice. I want to keep holding it."
Slow and yet somehow sudden, the demon seized my wrist. The moment she did, a warm, precisely human body heat traveled along my skin just as it had before, and a fresh wave of goosebumps broke over my whole body.
Smack.
"...Ah."
I slapped her hand away on pure reflex, and the demon's face showed a conspicuous trace of disappointment.
"A d-demon... I knew it, you ARE a demon!... You were a demon all along!!"
I screamed it as I scrambled backward, putting distance between us.
She really was a demon! Th-then what do I do now? Call the police... no — an exorcist... a church? No, no, no... how...!
I hadn't thought a single step past she's a demon, and I stood drowning in fear and confusion when the demon asked quietly:
"What's wrong?"
"...What... do you mean, what's wrong?"
Already trembling, I only grew more bewildered by her cryptic question.
"Why are you so scared?"
The demon was still sitting on the sofa, watching me with a puzzled face. Even her delicate brow drew together slightly, and genuine worry showed through. That expression, that tone of voice — there was no way it was acting. If it were, I knew I would never, for the rest of my life, be able to read what that demon truly felt.
"Did I frighten you? Then I'm sorry."
When she even put on a sorrowful expression and apologized, my ability to make sense of the demon in front of me collapsed entirely. But the scattered fragments of my reason barely held on to reality, and I clutched my fading consciousness with both hands.
"What do you want?"
"What I want...?"
The demon turned my cold question over in her mouth with my sister's face. Something about the sight made my stomach turn, and I raised my voice.
"A demon would want payment, wouldn't it!? There's no way you're sitting here with no scheme, no price in mind!!"
The demon considered for a few seconds, thinking something over, and then seemed to arrive at an answer and smiled softly.
"There is."
I knew it...
"I want to hold your hand. When I took your hand just now, my heart kept pounding."
"...What?"
Stunned by an answer I never could have predicted, I could only stare blankly at the demon as she laid her palm over her own chest, felt the racing beat beneath it, and wore a look of pure rapture.
"Let me hold your hand. When I hold it, my heart pounds so hard. And I love this pounding so much."
The demon reached her hand out to me, her face for all the world like a girl in love. In those languid eyes looking back at me, I could find no trace of any hidden scheme. I couldn't understand why she would look at me with that expression, those eyes — but one thing was clear enough: none of this was an act.
"...If I... do that for you... then what will you... do for me?"
Half my reason had already flown off at the surreal situation and this surreal exchange, and I asked as though under a spell. The demon smiled brightly.
"I'll stay as a member of this family, just like now. I'll stay as your sister. As your mother's beloved daughter, I'll remain."
At the demon's words, a little of my sanity returned.
"You're... a fake, though."
"A fake?"
The demon gave me a look of genuine incomprehension, then asked:
"I have your sister's body, her personality, her voice, her memories — all of it. And I'm a fake? Mom thinks I'm Yoon Jia. Not just Mom — everyone who ever knew me does. And I'm a fake?"
Confusion crept over me. Everyone except me — the only one who knew the truth — saw the demon as Yoon Jia. Even now, half a year on, not once had Mom, who knew Jia better than anyone, ever doubted her. Short of telling her the truth before she died, Mom would almost certainly never learn that the current Yoon Jia was a demon.
And even if I did tell her... would Mom actually believe me?
If she did believe it?
Then she might very well fall into a despair deeper than before and take her own life. Losing a daughter twice would be bad enough — but believing the memory of the departed had been defiled would shatter her reason completely.
The demon as she was now was absolutely necessary for Mom's survival. So there was no need for me to tumble into deep philosophical questions about whether the demon's existence was a false one or a true one.
"How..."
"You wished for it, didn't you?"
When the demon read the question off my face and said it as though it were obvious, my throat closed up.
"I'm a being born of you. So if you truly wished it, I would disappear. If it ever came to that, it would grieve me beyond words... but if it made you happy, that would be enough."
Listening to the demon's unbroken stream of words, I finally understood with certainty the one thing I had only dimly sensed before.
The demon — likes me.
At the very least, she was friendly. At first I'd suspected she was putting on an act with some scheme behind it, but now I knew, instinctively, that wasn't it.
Reflected in the demon's black eyes as she went on smiling and watching me quietly, I sank deep into thought.
"Watching the look on your face... I love it so much. I think I'm addicted to it. The way you're afraid, the way you're puzzled, the way you're lost in thought right now... I could look and look and never tire of it..."
Like someone deeply enthralled, the demon studied my face closely, as if she would not let a single detail of it escape her.
I, drowning in fear and bewilderment, forced myself to sort through the tangle of thoughts and feelings as fast as I could, then fixed my resolve and looked the demon straight in the eye.
"What you want from me... say it again."
The demon blinked wide-eyed, as if surprised, then smiled again.
"For now, I want you to let me hold your hand. And in the end, I only want you to let me stay by your side. That's my purpose, and my wish."
"That's really... all? You won't ask anything else of me? Not even... from our Mom?"
"No. Nothing."
When I asked in a shaking voice, the demon looked me dead in the eyes and put real force into her words. In that answer, in those eyes, I found something like an unearned trust in the demon — and I took the hand she held out to me.
"Haah..."
At that, the demon let out a soft but heated breath that echoed through the living room. For an instant the sound struck me as strangely indecent, and a flush of embarrassment washed over me so strong I was briefly aware of everything below my waist.
With a face anyone could see had turned giddy with happiness, the demon wiggled our interlocked fingers and stroked my hand this way and that. Her touch was almost aggressive, as though she meant to memorize the shape of every one of my fingers.
"I feel so relieved... pressing my skin against yours... it feels so good... I want to stay like this forever."
The demon pressed her cheek against the back of my captured hand, seemed to sense something odd, and suddenly lifted her gaze to look up at me.
"...Oppa."
She had abruptly slipped back into Jia's way of speaking, and the way she addressed me had changed too. I could only stare at her in surprise.
"When I held hands with you, Oppa... it got warm down below. I can feel something... vividly flowing out from inside me."
The demon — no, Jia — wore a face that said even she didn't understand what was happening, her cheeks flushing as she peered at me slyly.
At first I couldn't grasp what she meant, but as the meaning gradually sank in, my face went red and I found myself at a complete loss.
"N-no... what are you suddenly saying..."
"Here."
Still seated, Jia let her knees drift apart and, with the hand that wasn't holding mine, brushed her palm slyly over the front of her dolphin shorts.
"Something hot is flowing out from in here... it's a woman's reproductive organ, right? A pussy — that's what they call it? Liquid is coming out of here... aaah, is this what they call arousal fluid? This is what comes out when you get excited over someone, isn't it...?"
Shocking words kept spilling from the mouth of a Jia who seemed too pure to know the first thing about the ways of adults.
"Humans call this being in heat, right...? That's right, isn't it? I'm... in heat. I'm in heat over you, Oppa."
My sister Jia looked at me with eyes full of longing and flashed a smile laced with something indecent.
Thump.
My heart began to race at this adult, decadent side of her that I had never once seen in a little sister once brimming with nothing but innocence and purity.