c010

"You're going to cut open a vein? Why?"

Seokga sighs a long-suffering sigh from where he stands next to the forensic pathologist, the weary-looking man in a black lab coat named Lee Dok-hyun who'd met them at the apartment and had accompanied them back to the morgue. "Because," he says very slowly, as if Hani possesses the mind of a snail, "I want to see what's inside."

Hani stares at the bulging black veins covering Euna's limp body. "Oh," she says in a small voice, feeling suddenly queasy. "I see."

"You can look away, if you want," Dok-hyun offers gently. "I understand that this must be an overwhelming first day for you."

"Better yet," Seokga purrs, "you can quit."

Irate, Hani straightens. "I'm not quitting," she snaps back. If anything, this new development has strengthened her desire to remain working as Seokga's assistant. Because that, lying prone on the metal table, is one of her little sisters. A gumiho just barely into her human form. She died alone. She died scared. And Hani will not walk away from her in death. Not until whatever did this is sent to the depths of the Seocheongang River. Whatever did this is an Unruly she will help Seokga catch. "So stop asking."

Seokga shrugs. "It was worth a shot," he drawls. "You can't blame me for trying."

Dok-hyun glances amusedly between the two creatures. "I see that you've finally made another friend, Seokga. Congratulations seem to be in order."

Emerald fire blazes in Seokga's gaze. "I was not aware that we are friends, Dok-hyun. And since when have you spoken to me in the informal?" He cocks a brow. "Remember your place."

Hani watches as Dok-hyun ducks his head and bows in apology. "I'm sorry."

Seokga's eyes flutter upward in obvious annoyance. "As you should be."

"You're a ray of sunshine, huh?" Hani says dryly, crossing her arms and staring at Seokga in disgust. "He's cutting open a vein for you. I would say that he warrants your respect."

Seokga pointedly ignores her.

"Aish," she mutters under her breath. Gods and their superiority complexes.

Dok-hyun clears his throat. "I'll make the incision now," he says, pulling up his face mask. "I'll cut this vein, here." He taps one of the black veins creeping up Euna's bare shoulder.

Hani holds her breath, watching as Dok-hyun pinches a thin silver scalpel in between his fingers, the sharp blade hovering just above the vein. The doctor narrows his eyes in concentration as he presses the scalpel onto the affliction, the blade piercing the tissue—

Inky shadow seeps from the cut, floating into the air and hovering, a small black cloud below the fluorescent lights.

Hani presses a hand to her mouth, unable to look away from that mist of darkness that continues to emerge from Euna's body. "What…" Her voice is barely more than a whisper. "What is that?"

Dok-hyun hastens to seal the cut. "Detective Seokga," he says, his voice frayed by confused panic. "Detective Seokga—"

But to Hani's immense suspicion, the god doesn't look even remotely surprised. Instead, he eyes the shadows with no small amount of annoyance, his mouth a hard line. "Wonderful," Seokga the Fallen mutters. "How completely, absolutely, positively wonderful." He raises a hand to swat at the swirling darkness, and Hani gapes as it disappears, fading into nothingness and leaving only a few lingering wisps of smoke behind.

"What just happened?" Dok-hyun pants.

Seokga cuts him a glance. "You tell me, Doctor."

"I-I made the cut a-and a shadow came out." Dok-hyun grips the golden embroidery on the left side of his lab coat—the rendering of a haetae in its proud beast-form.

"Not a shadow," Seokga corrects, his tone hard. "Darkness."

"Darkness?" Hani repeats. "What do you mean, ‘darkness'?"

"I mean," the god replies, turning his grim gaze toward Hani, "that this was done by no ordinary Unruly. This was done by something far more sinister." Seokga looks at Euna's body, limp and lifeless on the table, the morgue's harsh white light highlighting her colorless and graying skin. Hani follows his gaze with a lump in her throat.

"What is it?" she asks hoarsely. "What did this to her?"

When Seokga meets her eye, his gaze lacks the casual cruelty and malicious mischief that it so often possesses. Instead, weariness flickers there. An eternal sort of weariness that only an immortal god can possess.

"Eoduksini."

Eoduksini.

The word is whispered all over the precinct that day in voices hushed with fear. Eoduksini. Eoduksini. Eoduksini.

"Eoduksini," Hani says slowly, rolling the word around in her own mouth as she sits at the desk next to Seokga, filling out Euna's paperwork. Seokga is scanning the city's security footage from the night prior beneath lowered brows. "I never thought one would enter New Sinsi." In fact, she never thought one of the darkness demons would crawl up to Iseung at all. The creatures used to frolic about in the Dark World, but ever since it was locked up, the demons are supposed to be confined to Jeoseung. There, they torment souls far, far away from the living realm. Hani was prepared to meet one eventually…when she was dead. Not alive.

If an eoduksini is in New Sinsi, then the city is in very big trouble indeed. From what Hani has heard through her years on Iseung, the demons are creatures of death and darkness. They are a parasite, able to worm their way into the minds of others and produce horribly realistic visions—nightmares—that their host cannot escape from. Nightmares based on their host's most horrible fears, most terrible memories.

And once their victim is in their clutches, that is when they feed.

Usually, in Jeoseung, eoduksini feed on souls. The remnants of one's consciousness, one's energy. But it seems that on Iseung, eoduksini feed on life. On pure, undiluted life, on anything living. They eat humans and non-humans alike, adults, babies, haetae, dokkaebi…Nobody is safe from their hunger. Nobody.

Euna died during one of those nightmares.

And then she'd been fed upon.

The markings on her body, the black veins, are proof of what the poor girl endured. Euna's soul had been disoriented due to the way she'd died. Trapped in an alternate realm, a nightmare, with no sense of space and time.

But how in the world is an eoduksini on Iseung?

Hani risks a sidelong glance at Seokga. Sensing her attention, the god scowls. "What?" He's been acting shiftier than usual, if such a thing is possible.

"The eoduksini," she says slowly. "What else do you know about it?"

Seokga smiles unpleasantly. "That it would kill you if it got the chance."

Hani glares. "I'm serious," she snaps. "Why is it on Iseung? What does it want? I mean, other than snacking on university students."

The fallen god looks distinctly affronted. "How should I know?" he responds, and Hani's suspicions sharpen.

Hani waits. Seokga mutters something nasty, tips back in his chair, and pinches the bridge of his nose with two elegant fingers. "An Unruly eoduksini," he grinds out, "probably wants what most Unrulies want."

She considers this. Hani is currently a very Unruly gumiho (again), but her motives are relatively simple. When she attacked those men, she was following her nature, being what a gumiho was meant to be before she accidentally created a pesky stigma around the concept of gumiho mealtimes. When she gave Somi the livers, Hani was reminiscing about an easier time, when the nine-tailed foxes were free to chomp on livers whenever they liked.

This doesn't sound like it would apply to many other Unrulies, as inadvertently starting a taboo seems to be a singular experience that, so far, only Hani has been unlucky enough to have.

As if sensing her confusion, Seokga exhales thinly and mutters something under his breath.

"What?"

"I said," he drawls, "that most Unrulies are still a bit mad about the whole Dark World thing."

Hani snorts. "That's an understatement." Everybody knows about how Seokga single-handedly managed to get an entire plane of existence shut down and its denizens thrown out to Iseung. She never lived in Gamangnara (rumor has it that rent was high) but she's known many creatures who would have jumped at the chance to decapitate the god responsible for the locking-up of the Dark World. "You think this eoduksini is part of your fallen army? That it was dragged to Jeoseung when you completely fucked up your coup and now it's escaped?"

Seokga glares. Hani waits.

"All signs point to yes," he finally bites back, not looking too pleased at the thought. "Out of all the monsters, they were the most dangerous and the most capable of destruction. So my brother"—his face twists at the word—"decreed it a necessity to store them in the underworld, where there is high security. Although we can all see how that turned out," Seokga mutters.

"Hmm," muses Hani. "If that's the case, that means it's probably going to come after you. Retribution for the Dark World, and all that."

"Please. Nothing can kill a god."

"It's on a quest for revenge," Hani continues, narrating in a deep, documentary-esque voice. She speaks into her pen like it's a microphone. "It has reached its breaking point—"

"Ironic." Seokga gives her a coldly pointed look. "As I am growing closer to mine by the minute."

"Really." Exasperated, Hani clucks her tongue. "Do gods have no concept of humor?"

"Do gumiho have no concept of the fact that provoking a god is very, very dangerous?"

She sighs and sets down her pen. "I would be careful how you speak to me. One day, I might just poison your coffee."

"You think that you haven't already?" Seokga asks, turning back to his computer and clicking through another round of video footage, narrowing his eyes at the grainy records. "First with too much milk, and then with too much sugar."

"But never with bleach," she reminds him sweetly. "Not yet, anyways."

"It's better if you poison it with bleach," he replies icily, "than if you throw it all over me and wreck my favorite suit." He scowls, giving her a vicious side-eye. "What do you want?"

"I want to know what you're looking for on those tapes," Hani replies steadily. "Isn't the natural form of an eoduksini incorporeal?"

A muscle in Seokga's jaw pulses, as if he's debating whether or not he wishes to continue speaking to his unwanted assistant. Hani arches a brow and waits. Spit it out, she silently urges him.

He sneers. "Its natural form, yes. In Jeoseung, eoduksini are nothing but shadow. But the rules of hell are different from the rules of Iseung. However the eoduksini arrived here, I am assuming that it had a very limited amount of time to find itself a host. Without a body of flesh and blood, the eoduksini would not be able to remain in this realm for long."

"So you're saying that it possessed someone," Hani says slowly.

Seokga waves a hand at her in a clear what else would I be saying gesture. "Obviously." He drawls the word out, and Hani bristles at his condescending tone.

"And you're trying to find out who?" she pushes.

Another what else would I be saying gesture. "But the security cameras trained on Euna's apartment building all mysteriously blacked out last night," he mutters. "Much like the damned moth over the Scarlet Fox footage."

Hani straightens. "There's Scarlet Fox footage?" she asks, forcing her tone to be casual, only slightly interested. Up until now, she's been certain there were no security cameras trained on the actual street that night, but it seems as if she's been sloppy. Out of practice.

"No," Seokga snaps shortly. "The moth that covered the neighboring street's camera is to blame for that." He turns back to his screen, leaving Hani to silently and thoroughly thank whatever moth had decided to take a rest on the lens.

"Do you have any other evidence?" she asks, still doing her best to sound only remotely interested.

"No," he snaps again. "I only know the murder weapons must have been the infamous scarlet daggers."

Ah. Her beloved daggers. Hani has made sure to bury them deep, deep, deep within her underwear drawer. Satisfied, she turns back to the paperwork. "Maybe the Scarlet Fox and the eoduksini are working together," she suggests slowly. It's an outlandish proposition—she would never associate herself with such an unnatural demon—but steering Seokga in the wrong direction is one of her top priorities. "She reappears, and then a few days later…this."

"I doubt it." Seokga glares at her. "And last I checked, you weren't the detective here. Leave the creatures to me, and I'll leave the paperwork to you."

Hani huffs in annoyance. "You're insufferable," she snaps.

"You're intolerable."

"Likewise," she bites back.

"I'm nothing of the sort."

"I see why Hwanin threw you out of Okhwang," Hani replies in a faux-saccharine tone, abandoning jondaemal with gusto. "I would have done the same, I think."

The effects of her words are immediate. Seokga goes rigid in his seat, twisting toward her with a snarl so ferocious that for a moment, the entire precinct falls silent. His eyes flash with hatred—hatred and pain. "Say that again," he hisses, "and I'll hang your pelt in my living room, fox."

Rage heating her blood, Hani cocks her head and curls back her lips. "Your god complex has gotten old," she sneers. "Seeing as you're not one anymore."

Seokga freezes, and his sudden silence is more chilling than any possible retort.

Hani refuses to balk under his fury.

"You," the god finally says, his breathing shallow as he reaches for his cane. "You. Get out. Get out of my sight."

Asshole."I work here now." Hani smiles, even as she itches to stomp on his foot. Hard. Very, very hard. "Remember?"

"You are toeing a very dangerous line." Seokga smiles back, but it is an awful smile, a smile of cold, hard promises and death wishes. "A dog should not bark at a wolf."

"A wolf should not threaten a fox."

"Wolves are stronger," Seokga snaps.

"Foxes are cleverer."

"Is that why they're caught in fox traps so often?"

"Wolves," Hani fires back, "are just overgrown dogs."

Seokga opens and closes his mouth before finally spitting out, "Your argument makes no sense."

She smiles sweetly. "Doesn't it, though?"

"Enough! Both of you!"Chief Shim stalks to Seokga's desk, his cheeks stained red with irritation. "The entire precinct is listening to the pair of you fight like children, and I am sick of it."

Hani holds Seokga's glare. She will not be the first to look away. No, she decides, I will not even be the first to blink. Her eyes water as she holds the green glower, but she grits her teeth and forces her eyes to stay open. Bastard.

Seokga's eyes narrow, like he knows what she's thinking.

Chief Shim makes a noise of exasperation. "What are you two doing?"

Hani leans forward, squinting as much as she can without blinking.

"Seokga. I am speaking to you. Look at me." The detective sounds almost like an insulted grandfather. "Seokga."

"Look away, fox," Seokga mutters under his breath. "Look away."

"Seokga. There is somebody coming to see you," Chief Shim snaps. "And if you give me your attention, I will tell you who it is. You will want to be prepared."

"You can tell me now," Seokga says, his stare still fixed on Hani. "I am listening."

Hani thinks that she sees one of Seokga's eyes twitch. Ha. Good. But wariness prickles her skin as she sees Seokga's gaze glitter with something that looks suspiciously like cruel mischief.

The god leans forward and puffs out a breath of air onto Hani's face.

Startled, she blinks—and then scowls. "You cheated." She's careful to use formal language again, seeing as Chief Shim is glaring daggers at both of them.

"I'm the god of deceit," Seokga replies smoothly, with a cold little smile. "Don't forget it." He turns to Chief Shim as Hani seethes, wishing very much that she hadn't overeaten in 1888. "Tell me, Shim. Who is visiting the precinct?"

"Not the precinct." The chief looks hesitant, almost scared, as he says, "Emperor Hwanin would like to meet with you tonight for dinner."