“I’m sorry,” she said. “For my mother, for your halmeoni. For everything.” She gripped his hand tightly until her wounds burned and her knuckles turned white.
“You have to wake up, you have to.” Shame blazed through her until she thought it would burn her to nothing but ash.
Jihoon’s hand jerked in hers, and her eyes flew to his face. He convulsed so violently that Miyoung jumped back. The machines beeped rapidly, as if screaming at her to do something.
Nurses raced through the door. Miyoung was pushed aside as they pulled the bed rails down.
“You should leave.” It was the same kind nurse who’d spoken to her before.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“He’s seizing; it can happen after a trauma,” the nurse said. But Miyoung was an experienced liar; she knew when someone was only telling her part of the truth.
She retreated to the hall, where her legs gave out as she sank onto a bench along the wall. Something wasn’t right. She’d felt an energy in Jihoon, something familiar, something strong.
Miyoung knew now that the bead wasn’t gone.
It was inside of Jihoon.
* * *
• • •
“He didn’t die.” Yena sat next to Miyoung in the waiting room. Even though the medical team had revived Jihoon, she hadn’t dared return to his room.
“No,” Miyoung confirmed.
“What did you do?”
“I used the bead.” It wasn’t worth lying. Her mother would find out eventually.
“Stupid girl.”
“You lied to me.” The heat of anger rose up in her, and she embraced it because if she was angry, at least she wasn’t feeling any of the other emotions she wanted to ignore.
“What?” Yena’s voice was low and cold.
“You said that yeowu guseuls don’t exist. If you’d told me . . . if I’d known—”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you were too immature to know. And I was right because you lost yours and have now put it in that pathetic boy.”
The truth of Yena’s words deflated Miyoung’s anger. And without it, Miyoung felt completely drained.
“What do we do now?”
“I want to rip it out of his chest.”
Miyoung twisted to see a look of resignation on Yena’s face.
“But you can’t do it without hurting me, too, can you?”
“It could damage the bead,” Yena confirmed. “I don’t care about the boy’s life, but I won’t risk you.”
Miyoung should’ve been grateful, comforted even. Instead she felt empty.
“You can’t be around him,” Yena said. “If he holds your yeowu guseul, he holds control over you.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me. I trust him.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re telling me to leave him alone. His only family is dying down the hallway,” Miyoung said.
“I didn’t kill the old woman.”
Miyoung sighed, because her mother was right. The blame for that lay squarely on her own shoulders.
“If I feed, will it hurt him?” Miyoung asked.
“There’s no way of knowing that.” Yena spoke like a politician skirting the topic. It made Miyoung’s suspicion expand tenfold until she had no room for anything else, like air or rational thought.
“The bead is connected to me, even in Jihoon. What do you think will happen to him if I feed and it makes the energy of the bead flare up, too? It could kill him.”
Yena shrugged, clearly uncaring of what happened to Jihoon. “Without your bead you have to feed more often and you have to feed directly from your prey’s flesh. No more of this sifting energy. It’s the only way you can guarantee you’ll survive.”
“I won’t feed.”
“What?” Yena’s eyes narrowed.
“You ruined Nara’s life to feed. You didn’t need to kill both of her parents. Did you never think about what it would do to her?”
“I don’t check the family status of all of my prey,” Yena answered, so flippantly it squeezed at Miyoung’s heart.
“I won’t feed tonight.”
“Why? Because I killed that shaman’s parents? Or because of that boy?”
“No,” Miyoung said. How could she explain to her mother that she’d always struggled with the idea that others had to die for her to live? How could she explain that she just didn’t believe her life was worth more than the lives of her victims? How could she explain that tonight hadn’t just hurt because of Nara’s betrayal, but because Miyoung could understand why the young shaman had done it all. Revenge for the unjust death of her parents. It was true what the shamans thought. Yena and Miyoung were the bad guys in this story. Their choices had a ripple of consequences that even they couldn’t see. And people ended up hurt, like Jihoon.