Chapter Text
"Have you tried, you know," Chaewon pauses to suck noisily at her milkshake straw, the rest of her drink disappearing in one fell swoop, "Running her over with a car?"
Heejin huffs. "Wouldn't work. She's-"
"Unkillable except by a stake of electrum through the heart, I know, you've said."
The exact composition of said vampire-killing stake is thirty-three-point-three-three-three percent pure gold, alloyed with sixty-six-point-six-six-six percent pure silver, because supernatural rules aren't exactly subtle. When she's not trying to kill Hyunjin, Heejin spends her days calling up former Olympian medalists (the ones stupid enough to leave their mailing addresses on their Facebook accounts, at least) and asking them if they'd be willing to sell their medals to her. Those medals aren't even pure silver or gold, so the rest of Heejin's time is spent sweet-talking Jinsol at the university lab to see if she'll purify them.
"But consider this: It's 2021," Chaewon continues, "The world's a lot different from when Hyunjin first walked the Earth."
Heejin doesn't respond, and Chaewon cocks a judgemental eyebrow before muttering Okay then under her voice, and promptly raising her hand to order another milkshake.
"It doesn't work," Heejin finally says. It comes out more pathetic than she'd meant. "The car thing."
"I don't think anything could survive getting run over by a pickup truck, Heejin-"
"She can," says Heejin shortly, and her sad doggy eyes communicate the disappointments she's faced.
Chaewon snickers, coming to the understanding a second later after it leaves Heejin's miserable mouth. "You tried."
Heejin resists the urge to put her head in her hands, and instead begins telling Chaewon the story of how exactly Hyunjin had survived that. It involves the usual elements: Heejin coming home with a new idea and telling Hyunjin, Hyunjin agreeing enthusiastically, Hyunjin laying down a plastic sheet in the driveway before laying down herself.
Then, Heejin got into the truck and started it up. Hyunjin lifted her head and gave her one of those too-sharp-teeth smiles. Yelled, "I'm ready!"
Driving over anything is never a fun sensation. One night on a field trip (read: stakeout, in the most literal sense of the word), Chaewon hadn't been watching the road, and they'd run over roadkill. There'd been a sickening lurch as the car struggled over the deer's body. Both of them had thrown up from the gore and from general nausea.
Driving over Hyunjin is more or less the same experience. One of Heejin's hands fly to cover her mouth when the front wheels roll over what is probably Hyunjin's head. (Hyunjin insisted she lie vertically so that Heejin could have the best chance at killing her.) She presses on, nevertheless, a sinking feeling in her gut- Why is there a sinking feeling in her gut? She should be happy that she's flattening humanity's biggest threat. One of the Old Ones who rose from the Earth eons before Heejin was so much as a twinkle in the universe's eye. In Hyunjin's heyday, she spread carnage through the royal courts of Europe and had nothing much to say of it other than Colonizers, am I right?
Heejin hops out of the truck, fully expecting carnage and gore, and somehow simultaneously knowing better than to think that would ever happen.
Hyunjin is laughing. Heejin just ran over her with a truck and she's laughing. The plastic sheet is slightly creased from where the tires bumped it, but Heejin can't really find satisfaction in that.
"Jesus," Chaewon says, spearing another cocktail sausage with her fork. It splits open the way Heejin would like to split Hyunjin open. "Maybe she really can't be killed."
-
How they met isn't important, because it was a very unremarkable incident. Heejin had been cleaning her wounds and cursing her bad luck at allowing another vampire to slip through her fingers when a knock came at her door.
"Not now, Chae," she'd complained, and was greeted by the sight of Hyunjin at her door. Hyunjin cut a surprisingly respectable figure - most vampires douse themselves in the blood of their prey and barely bother with cleanup, but Hyunjin came to her in a sandy sweater and high-waisted jeans. Only a hunter would have been able to notice something was amiss.
"Try and kill me," Hyunjin had said, and sat down, cross-legged, and began helping herself to the jar of snacks on Heejin's coffee table.
-
Hyunjin isn't in when Chaewon drops Heejin back home. Chaewon would be disappointed if this were any other night - she's one of the few humans Hyunjin actually likes, and the two of them have a tendency to get into long, winding conversations about nothing in particular - but she'd had a prior engagement to get to. Hunter business that Heejin isn't part of.
Just as well, because Heejin wasn't really in the mood to watch Chaewon and Hyunjin discuss whether water is wet. That conversation had taken up the better part of one winter night.
She spends the night as she usually does - a cursory cleaning of her weapons, and then the actual work. She spends a little more time cleaning tonight, sharpening her axes and swords. Really, the axes are for show. Heejin doesn't care for the hamfistedness of an axe, and likes her dagger more than anything in her vast armoury, but she takes extra care to sharpen and clean them as if she was going to bring them into battle.
Hyunjin does live in this house, after all, and it's good to keep her on her toes. Heejin has battleaxes on every wall for this purpose. Some of them are mounted more tactfully, like the one strapped to the underside of her work desk, but the gold-plated specimen on the wall of her bedroom is another story.
She drags the task as long as she can stand it. She succeeds, because Hyunjin steps into the house as Heejin is returning an axe to its post. (Stygian iron, thrice blessed and once hexed.)
"Hey," Hyunjin greets, nudging the door closed with the tip of her foot. She's holding blood bags in her hands, courtesy of her 'contact' at the hospital. (Heejin hasn't quite figured out what Haseul is yet, but if her hypnotic eyes are any indication, she can't be that human.) "Didn't think you'd be home so soon. I got us dinner."
"I already ate," Heejin says, ignoring the fact that Hyunjin doesn't have any human food with her.
"Pity," Hyunjin replies, producing a doggy bag from thin air, "Did you know there's a new rose pasta place downtown? I ate. A lot. And then they asked me to leave because they were running out of food, so I begged them for some food to take home with me."
Heejin chuckles. "And?"
"They said no," Hyunjin pouts, "So I showed them a picture of you and begged again."
"Did that work?"
"Yeah," Hyunjin grins, "They're very fond of you. They said you and Chaewon delivered them from fear- some bullshit like that, I wasn't really listening by then."
She lifts the takeout bag. "And look what they gave me! You sure you don't want any?"
"No thank you," Heejin says feebly, ushering Hyunjin to sit down before she starts eating. Her eyes sting with the stench of the rubbing alcohol she'd used to clean her weapons. One drop had stung a cut she'd forgotten about, and she's looking forward to patching that up before Hyunjin notices.
"How was your day?" Hyunjin asks between ravenous chomps of the rose pasta, and not for the first time, Heejin marvels at Hyunjin's appetite. She's set the blood bags down beside her, and if past events are to be relied on, will wash down her meal with a good helping of blood.
Heejin shrugs. "The usual. Chaewon asked me if I'd tried running over you with a car."
Hyunjin raises her eyebrows. "Did you tell her it didn't work?"
That earns a nod from Heejin, and Hyunjin shakes her head. "It tickled, you know. We should do that more often. So what do you have lined up for tonight?"
This happens every night. Heejin comes home, cleans her weapons, and then heads off to her study to devise new ways to kill an unkillable vampire. Hyunjin comes home, Heejin tells her how she's planning to do it, and they do it. And it never works.
"I-" Heejin shrugs, casting an eye at her workbench. The beaker of silver nitrate Jinsol gave her winks at her from the lineup of deadly chemicals and poisons, and Heejin decides, what the hell. It's not like she has a better idea. "I'm going to give you some silver nitrate."
Hyunjin wipes her mouth clean, the expression on her face morphing into the same seriousness she approaches all of Heejin's assassination methods with. Her lips are set in a straight line, and she leans forward conspiratorially, "What can I expect?"
That gives Heejin some pause. Jinsol had explained how silver nitrate affects the human body, but not how it would affect a vampire. She'd presumed that the presence of silver would be enough to do something, but wracks her brain for something more impressive.
"Humans have a tendency to have their skin turn blue upon ingestion." Heejin grins, resisting the deep-seated urge to rub her palms together in excitement. "It's called argyria, and it's irreversible. You'll experience some gastrointestinal discomfort too."
She winces. That didn't sound very impressive. For one thing, she's pretty sure Hyunjin doesn't need to poop, so half of her threat was dead in the water.
But Hyunjin nods with characteristic stoicism, not taking her eyes off Heejin, and rubs her hands together. "Give it to me, then."
In what must be a rehearsed sequence of events by now, Heejin uncorks the beaker and hands it to Hyunjin. Hyunjin takes a deep drink from the beaker, and downs the thing in a few gulps without so much as a grimace. There's a faint wailing sound, not unlike the voices of every single vampire Heejin's killed screaming in unison. Nothing out of the ordinary.
"Ugh," she coughs when she's done, sticking her tongue out to prove she wasn't hiding any of it in her mouth to spit back out, "That was nasty. You couldn't have added sugar or something?"
Heejin winces again, apologetic. Usually she has enough time to prepare an actual assassination method, meaning that she tends to have the time to add flavouring and colouring to make the poisons more palatable, and more aesthetically pleasing. Tonight's method had been more of an afterthought than a meticulously crafted plan.
She knows not to blame herself. Jungeun would turn up her nose at the thought of aestheticizing her methods, and she's doing just fine. But there exists a certain vanity in all of them, an appetite that demands to be whet with acclaim and awe. Jungeun's own vanity manifests in a clean brutality. Chaewon kills without messing up her hair. Yerim, last Heejin heard, uses a purple-flamed flamethrower to burn her targets to ash instead of the traditional bonfire.
"Sorry. I ran out of time," she says meekly.
Hyunjin waves her off, appearing to have guessed that Heejin's heart isn't in it tonight, "It's okay. What are we watching tonight?"
"I got Disney Plus!" Heejin grins, instantly happier - she and Chaewon agreed to share one account, because Chaewon really just wants to rewatch Frozen. "I heard Mulan's good. You know Mulan, right? It's about a girl who joins the army."
Hyunjin smirks, and opens her mouth to say something.
Then her eyes shoot wide open, and she lets out a hacking cough.
"W-Wait. I don't feel good," she gasps, fists clenched in her lap, knuckles whitening with the strain. Beads of sweat roll down her forehead, some shaken off as she trembles. "There's something in my stomach. It hurts. Heejin-" She's interrupted by another cough, and an inhuman, almost leonine growl.
Heejin's heart thumps in its cage, but she crouches by Hyunjin's side, taking one of her closed fists into her own hand. She prises Hyunjin's fingers out of the hold they're in, feeling her clammy palm beneath, dropping her voice and whispering, "Hey, hey, you're okay."
Who would've thought that this would be how Hyunjin finally died? A year of guillotines and lead and steel-tipped stakes and a common lab reagent is what works? It'd almost be funny if it didn't look so terrifying. Hyunjin is straining against Heejin's hold, the strength leaving her limbs as she coughs over and over and groans and whimpers. It doesn't feel right to celebrate, and honestly? Heejin doesn't want to. She'd wanted to watch Mulan tonight, and listen to Hyunjin's brusque commentary and personal rankings of how hot each actor is.
Instead, she has to watch Hyunjin die. She wonders how she will go about life after this. Vampires' bodies tend to evaporate into ash and dust when they die, failing which hunters burn them, but Hyunjin is an incredibly powerful vampire. What if her body explodes and takes Heejin with her?
That sounds preferable to showing up at Council again, and having to face the others.
"Oh God," Hyunjin wails, and then nudges Heejin away. She staggers to her feet, and Heejin reaches for the dagger strapped to her leg, ready to give chase if Hyunjin tries running. It's not likely she'd be able to get very far, but Heejin is ready.
And then, "Too much pasta," Hyunjin moans, and totters to the bathroom.
When she emerges an hour later, happy and refreshed, she looks the picture of health, and Heejin files silver nitrate under the Useless against an invincible vampire category.
-
She finds Jinsol as she's cleaning up the lab. Jinsol will later complain that none of her graduate students know their way around a lab, let alone how to handle reactive chemicals. She takes her job seriously - once, she asked Heejin for a few choice weapons to threaten her students with.
"Jinsol!" Heejin runs face-first into Jinsol's arms. Jinsol is officially taller than Heejin, but you wouldn't know it with how much she slouches. Still, she makes for a good hugger. "I missed you."
They part, Jinsol's eyebrows raised high. "I missed you too, kid. What's the occasion?"
Heejin gives her a sheepish smile, and Jinsol shakes her head slowly. "You want something?"
"Kind of." Heejin feels around her pocket for the medal. Jiwoo recently got serious with an Olympic gymnast, and though she still won't tell her girlfriend about what she gets up to at night, they're close enough for Jiwoo to steal one of her medals. She'd promptly passed that on to Heejin, making Heejin very happy indeed. "I know I said I'd stop pestering you, but do you think you could smelt this down?"
"Kid," Jinsol says, not patronizingly, but with that air that gives you the impression she is listening to everything you have to say with her full respect, "I'm a chemist, not a blacksmith. You can't keep asking me to do this impossible work."
Jinsol is patently lying. She had her garage turned into a blacksmith's forge. She can't keep the facade up, and bursts out guffawing, "Consider it done."
With a word of thanks, Heejin gets about paying Jinsol back. Jinsol refuses most forms of remuneration (and Heejin's cheques have a mysterious tendency to bounce - her bank defaults to calling her whenever she makes a transaction involving ten dollars or more), but doesn't rebut Heejin's offers to help her with the lab. As a result, Heejin spends a good amount of time every week getting at test tubes with a spout brush.
"You know these medals aren't pure gold or silver, right?" Jinsol asks conversationally, squinting at the latest medal. That's what Heejin loves about Jinsol and her scientific brain - she doesn't probe why Heejin needs a ridiculous amount of pure gold and silver, or why she needs to cast them in the unsettling shape of a stake. Heejin does fill her in on the more important parts, out of a sense of responsibility and light guilt, but as far as Jinsol is concerned - well, that's just it, Jinsol isn't very concerned with the affairs of vampire hunters. All she cares about is that the medals Heejin brings her aren't pure.
"Granted, it'd be difficult for them to retain their shape if they were gold - that's why prospectors used to bite the gold nuggets they found, to make sure they were authentic, did you know that, Heejin?"
"I see," Heejin says, half-zoning out. She squints at the test tube. There's a particularly stubborn stain on the inside of the glass, and she angles her hand so she can hide it from Jinsol's view. Jinsol insists they just toss out stained apparatus, but Heejin has a soft heart, and tries to give all the test tubes a second chance.
Frowning, she presses the brush more firmly against the glass.
-
At some point, she grows frustrated with the lack of ideas in her head, and decides to bring Hyunjin to the museum.
The State Museum of Weapons is a hulking monolith on the edges of the city, and though they've both separately gone before, the museum is hosting a traveling exhibit. Jungeun says there are new, exciting artefacts to look at, and Hyunjin whines until Heejin agrees to let her in the car.
"A poisoned knife," Hyunjin reads off a sign, "This knife was used in battle by cautious warriors who wanted to doubly ensure their enemies' demises." She laughs loudly, "Why would you poison a knife? You're already stabbing them."
Heejin is presented with the image of a shimmering stake dipped in holy water - the only way to kill an invincible vampire - and shrugs. "For the cautious warrior, I guess."
Hyunjin shakes her head, and moves to the next sign. For some inexplicable reason, there aren't any other visitors at two in the afternoon on a weekday, and so Heejin and Hyunjin are the only ones milling about the exhibit. It's dimly lit to protect the artefacts, and coupled with Hyunjin's tendency to walk so silently it feels like she's floating, Heejin gets startled whenever she realizes Hyunjin's looking over her shoulder.
"This one says it was used in the 1600s," Heejin cocks her head, "Were you around back then?"
"Oh, yes. Those were some bad years," and Heejin feels like she's been hit with a freight train. It happens every so often, casual reminders about how absurdly long Hyunjin has existed that are treated as bits of throwaway trivia. Hell, Hyunjin should be in a museum, or at least talk to a curator to offer her own perspectives.
Therein lies the inescapable enormity of Heejin's task. How does she kill an age-old vampire? Where does she find the vanity and delusion to convince herself that she can get it done?
"Humans didn't taste good back then," Hyunjin snickers under her breath, "You taste like ice cream, in comparison."
Heejin's breath catches in her throat, because even though Hyunjin uses the word you as a catchall term for all of humanity, she can't help but believe that she's talking about her specifically. She struggles to divert her own attention from the topic, "You said they were bad years."
Hyunjin walks over to the next display. It's an ancient chalice used to contain the final drinks for humans who were being sacrificed. She whistles lowly, impressed.
Then, "I did."
She clearly expects that to be the end of it, but Heejin is nothing if not determined. Hell, if she's going to have an immortal vampire in her life, she's going to know as much as she can about her. And not just because it'd be easier to figure out how to kill her that way. There's something oddly enchanting about knowing of the lives Hyunjin led before she stepped her bloodsoaked way into Heejin's life. It makes her feel like she's in touch with something intimately dangerous. Something about that is cloyingly seductive.
Chaewon would say it's the result of Heejin getting concussed one too many times as a child. Somewhere down the line, she got her human survival instincts knocked out.
She blocks Hyunjin's path to the ceremonial knives used in the abovementioned sacrificial ritual, brow furrowed in determination. "Why?"
Hyunjin skirts past her and glides up to the knives. The hilts are bedazzled with rubies and emeralds, the blade sparkling as if the wave of history hadn't left so much as a splash of rust. "Hard life. Vampire hunters. Queen Victoria thought I was rude when I met her, so she sent her own army after me. You know, the usual."
Heejin matches her parry for parry. She swerves into Hyunjin's way just as Hyunjin's about to take another step, "Tell me more."
Hyunjin steps back, and says coolly, "You wouldn't be interested."
Heejin steps forward. "I would. Tell me about your life."
For one long, drawn-out moment, Hyunjin observes her coolly, and dread crawls up Heejin's spine. Maybe this was a mistake - bringing Hyunjin to a museum? With weapons? Alone?
"Okay," Hyunjin relents.
A grin breaks out over Heejin's face - her cheeks hurt with the sudden force of it. "Really?"
"Sure. It's not like you'll know which parts I'm making up."
"I would!" Heejin insists indignantly. She likes to think she has a good grasp of world events. The history she learned may have been more vampire-centric than most curriculums, but she's smart! She's a good student! She's, as Chaewon would say it, woke.
"Is that so?" Hyunjin challenges, "Which year did World War Two start, then?"
Puffing up her chest, Heejin says, "1928."
"Wow," Hyunjin laughs, but she starts talking, and Heejin counts that as a win.
She knows this much about Hyunjin: She was born (except vampires are less born and more created from poison and flesh ) in the 16th century, and spent her fledgling years in the care of the vampire who would inspire Bram Stoker to write Dracula. After leaving her mentor, she carved a red streak through Europe, one human at a time, and then dozens at a time when she got really good at it. She started a cult and got bored, so she covered herself in blood and appeared one night to tell her followers God wasn't real. And all that is just barely skimming the surface.
This afternoon, Heejin learns more. First, Hyunjin is technically made of magic, too, dark arts that confound even the hunterdom's best mages, but "It just sounds a little lame to say you're made of magic. What am I, Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls?"
Second, she gave Bram Stoker a few writing tips. "He had a problem with the passive voice."
Those are the two big things she seems to want Heejin to know, but she's not done talking, and makes this very clear as they stroll through the atrium of the museum, dropping sporadic facts as and when it tickles her fancy.
"I took refuge with a hunter's conclave in Japan for a bit. They never did find out what I was, so I left them alone. Okay, I ate one of them, but that's to be expected."
As they're getting lunch at the Ethiopian place Heejin really likes, "The most insulting thing I've ever been called is a witch. Werewolf is still fine - I'll even take goblin, I get that, but witch ?"
Heejin begins to regret her request as Hyunjin's walking her through the intricacies of 1750s ballroom dancing. She's leaning close to Heejin, too far to impose but close enough to fluster, wiggling her eyebrows for emphasis, "Back then, this was basically sex."
Heejin feels her cheeks grow hot, not for the first time today, and she gives Hyunjin a light shove backwards. "Maybe we shouldn't be doing this."
"Sure," Hyunjin says through a mouthful of sambossas. She's managed to fit five at one shot. "Oh, once, a hunter tried to kill me by strangling me with my corset belt. He pretended to court me and whipped my belt off as we danced."
"Did it work?" Heejin quips, grinning, knowing full well that the hunter was probably disembowelled.
Hyunjin's fangs scrape her piece of injera, and she bares them when she grins back, "Oh, you're going to love the time I…"
It's a date, plain and simple. Hyunjin insists on paying when the bill comes, and Heejin puts up genuine resistance to it (trying to get Chaewon to pay her back is like pulling teeth, so she prefers going Dutch as a rule). It goes down like this: Hyunjin hides the bill from her and stashes her card in there. As the waitress comes up to them, Heejin catches on and lunges to stop her. Hyunjin manages to hold her tongue about how she has centuries' worth of portfolio - never mind how she figured out in the 80s to buy Microsoft shares - to pay for the meal, instead leveraging threats of Heejin's looming bankruptcy. She stops short of pulling out the nastily-worded letters from the bank, because Heejin gives in and lets her pay.
Heejin insists on paying for dessert when she sees Hyunjin pass a crisp hundred-dollar note to the waitress. She couldn't have chosen better. See, Hyunjin's favourite dessert place is the backroom of the blood bank. She's been complaining about Haseul hiking up the entry fees recently, which is reasonable, because frankly, no blood bank should have a 'dine-in' option.
-
"Hello," Haseul says pleasantly when they show up on the blood bank's back door. Haseul is by all measures a nice, genial person, whose swirling black eyes subdue struggling patients, but Heejin can't help but be nervous around her. She stands off to the side and behind Hyunjin, praying Haseul doesn't look at her for too long.
"Come in," Haseul says, and Heejin slips her fifty bucks. She curses softly when she realizes she'd pulled a fifty instead of a twenty, but Haseul is gone before she can get her attention.
The blood comes in a heavy beer mug, and Hyunjin, who's been dancing her fingers excitedly on the tabletop ever since they sat down, gives a loud sound of excitement. She grasps the mug with both hands and takes a deep swig. Her throat bobs seven times before she sets down the mug with a loud 'ah'.
"It's half-empty now," Heejin points out, watching Hyunjin wipe her mouth clean with the back of her hand.
"I prefer to think of it as half-full," she quips, and raises the mug again. Another seven gulps later, the mug is empty.
She smiles sweetly, a real smile this time and not a half-baked smirk, "Thank you. I had a good time."
And even though they're in the dingy backroom of a blood bank right now, and even though Heejin's sure Haseul is subtly hypnotizing her from the next room over (Heejin keeps hearing tiny voices chanting 'Give us your blood, do it, it's fun'), she's hard-pressed to disagree.
"You know what would be really good?" Hyunjin chirps, and Heejin has to suppress laughter - she's never heard Hyunjin chirp . "We could watch the original Mulan later."
She wants to say yes - she really does. But then Jungeun calls, the discordant sound of Heejin's ringtone breaking whatever telepathic hold Haseul has over her, and she knows there will be no Mulan watching tonight.
-
"You sure that vampire of yours doesn't mind?" asks Jungeun when Chaewon and Heejin pile into the car, Chaewon in the passenger seat and Heejin behind with Jungeun's (frankly, concerningly large) weapons stash. She closes the door, but the indicator that there's a door open stays on. Jungeun huffs. "Close the door all the way, my car's a piece of junk."
Heejin tries again, opening the door and slamming it hard. She catches a glimpse of Hyunjin standing in the window when she leans out of the car to do it again. Hyunjin waves one lanky arm out in greeting.
Jungeun shudders and crosses herself - it's not a religious gesture but a force of habit. Hunters have little reason to be religious - before putting the car in drive.
"You didn't answer me," Jungeun says casually as they turn out of Heejin's street. Chaewon is fiddling with the Bluetooth controls, head cocked casually to listen in on what will definitely be an interesting conversation, while maintaining the convincing veneer of casual disinterest.
Into the New World starts playing, which seems to distract Jungeun from her hawk-eyed line of questioning for a bit. They get to the first chorus before Heejin answers.
"Why wouldn't she be fine? It's not like she tells me what to do." Heejin avoids looking when Jungeun glances into the rearview mirror. Clears her throat self-consciously, and decides to make a joke. "She's probably happy that she has less competition."
She isn't lying, really. Hyunjin had said that word for word, more or less. Turf wars aren't as common when you're as revered as Hyunjin is, but there are plenty of petty squabbles over hunting grounds that she would be more than happy to see disappear.
"Less competition for prey , you mean," Jungeun points out, eyes narrowed, and Heejin recognizes that look - because somehow, Jungeun always manages to cut to the point incisively. That look is what everyone in the hunterdom is thinking. Are you sympathetic to her cause? Are you not putting all your effort into killing her, Heejin?
She doesn't know, and so she stays quiet, tense in the rigid silence Jungeun's built. She's still smarting from irritation. Jungeun tends to expect her to drop everything when she calls them out for hunts, and Heejin is usually all too happy to come along, but today had been a good day. She's not as excited as she usually would be at the prospect of a hunt.
"Heejin," Jungeun starts impatiently, "Are you-"
Chaewon skips a song to play Lion Heart, and Jungeun proceeds to lose her train of thought in favour of belting along (and to a song that doesn't have any belts, to boot).
Thanks , Heejin mouths to Chaewon when they make eye contact in the rearview mirror, and Chaewon winks at her.
Jungeun's mind is suitably distracted after that - the endless medley of girl group songs doesn't help - and they pull up to the edge of the city an hour after that, stopping where the ends meet the beginning of the deep forest.
Jungeun exhales softly, and angles her body so she's talking to both Chaewon and Heejin, "Ready?"
She passes the weapons out in silence. Jungeun arms herself with a bulky crossbow and a belt of throwing knives she straps to the inside of her hunting jacket, and Chaewon takes a cursory look at Jungeun's weapon pile before gingerly picking a knife from it. Heejin takes a bottle of holy water, safe in the knowledge that she has enough to tide her by.
"Right," she says, and strides into the forest, Chaewon and Jungeun trailing her.
They move in padfooted silence. Heejin's eyes take a little longer than usual to adjust to the darkness, but her companions make up for that by drawing up on her flank. It doesn't take more than twenty seconds for her to see as she should. For all her faults, Jungeun is a good hunter and an even better sister-in-arms, and Heejin knows she is safe with her.
They're ten minutes into their trek when Chaewon coughs discreetly. Heejin takes in a deep breath, and is alarmed when she smells nothing but blood.
The vampires terrorizing their city have become bold. They've moved closer and closer to the edge of their hallowed ground, closer to humanity, and if Heejin knows vampires (and oh! She does!), she knows that they won't stop until they descend like a plague, taking and killing whoever stands in their way.
This is just how it happens, and how things will always be. Hunters are humanity's silent protectors, giving their lives so the rest can live in blissful ignorance, and they get nothing in return for it, nothing but the knowledge that they've bought humanity more time.
That's not why we do this, the Overblade had chided an overeager hunter once, We do not ask for thanks. We do what is hard because it is right. She had promptly stripped the woman of her stripes, and that had been the end of the newcomer's stint to the hunterdom. They are a strict lot - but they are fair. That's what Heejin believes.
She sneaks a look at Jungeun, who's wearing an inscrutable expression, devoid of the usual intensity that dominates her. Jungeun is more closely tied to the hunterdom than most of them. The hunterdom is her life's calling. It stopped being an afterthought and took center stage the day her family was taken from her.
Jungeun's fingers are twitching, and Heejin knows in her heart of hearts that she is aching to kill Hyunjin, too. Which begs the question: How long will she pretend to respect Heejin before she swoops in and takes Hyunjin's head?
With a soft sound, Jungeun nocks an arrow, and juts her chin to the clearing ten feet from them. There's a dark, wet patch on the ground, and Heejin doesn't doubt for a second what it is. The clearing reeks of freshly-spilled blood.
Jungeun lets the arrow fly, and it finds purchase in flesh. The shot rings out clearly, even from where they're standing, and Jungeun exhales before nocking another arrow, this time an incendiary one. There's a pouch of accelerant strapped to the shaft, triggered to break open when the arrow finds its target.
"No! Please!" comes an inhuman scream when the second arrow hits, gargled and ragged, and all three of them look away from the burst of light. The arrow does its job - flames silhouette the writhing figure. "Please!"
"Let's go," Chaewon urges, pressing both Heejin and Jungeun forward. Fire draws vampires, and if there are others, they'll come. Now, they wait.
Jungeun is tense and twitchy, which is a common sight on its own, and doesn't stay still in the time that Chaewon crosses over to the dying man. The arrow has burnt itself out, the fire self-contained and the vampire is twitching and groaning quietly in his death throes. Chaewon mutters something to him, and he groans out something unintelligible back.
"Wait," Chaewon says, going stiff.
Jungeun tenses impatiently, "Chaewon, just end it."
"What's wrong?" Heejin asks, finding that she fears the answer, instinctively concerned at the knot in Chaewon's eyebrows. Chaewon is afraid. She never is, not like this.
"He isn't a vampire," Chaewon says, and ice-tipped fangs sink into Heejin's shoulder, pulling her backwards.
-
Jungeun lets loose two arrows in the time it takes for Heejin to be knocked unconscious. The first one goes wide, whizzing off into the dark of the forest, but the second buries itself deep into the vampire's forehead. The monster rips its fangs from Heejin and falls backwards, taking her down with it, and Jungeun rushes forward, fumbling with her knives, forgoing her bow-
"Jungeun!" Chaewon shouts, and Jungeun ducks just as the second vampire leaps into frame, fangs dripping with drool, clearly too unhinged by the smell of human blood to wait any further. The thing lands with inhuman grace, before turning and rushing at Jungeun again.
This time, it runs onto her knife, and she twists the blade until it shakes.
"Are there any more?" she yells as Chaewon rushes to Heejin's side. Heejin is certainly dead, at the very least incredibly injured, but Jungeun has no time for that now. Chaewon can take care of Heejin. Jungeun has to protect them, to make sure Heejin didn't give her life in vain.
Her heart aches separate from her head. The life of a hunter is never easy. It's too easy to lose your life, to give it in service of a cause that's taken for granted. It must happen, and it will, but it is never easy for those left behind.
She tells herself to grieve later, and slashes at the last vampire who rises from the darkness. He is uncoordinated and clumsy, damning traits in a vampire, and is sliding dead at her feet in less than a minute.
She turns to look at Heejin cradled in Chaewon's arms. Chaewon is desperately trying to stymie the bleeding, stuffing the gaping wound with gauze as best as she can. She's shivering - both of them are shivering, and Jungeun realizes that Heejin is alive.
She's alive!
The moment of grief passes, and Jungeun rides it like the wind.
"We have to take her to the hospital," Jungeun says the dreaded H-word. "This is too much."
The hospitals in this area do not favour the fortunes of hunters, and as a matter of tradition and principle, hunters do not tend to parlay with the healthcare system, reasoning that the matters of day and night should be kept separate. Hospitals are usually vampire-aligned, anyway, since most vampires get their bloodbags from inside sources.
Jungeun has no qualms about going - it's how she's stayed alive this long - and gives Chaewon a desperate, pleading look. She speaks faster, "I know Heejin wouldn't want to, but-"
Her voice falls when she sees the look on Chaewon's face. Heejin would never forgive her if they brought her to the hospital, and Chaewon knows it too.
"What do we do?" Jungeun asks, voice soft and hapless, heart squeezing in her chest.
Chaewon sighs, and, sounding much older than she really is, "Let's take her home."