A/N: Hello everyone :) I don't anticipate updating here again until December because I'm taking October and November to work only on the second draft of my novel. But I wanted to post this short chapter to kick off the final arc of this story.
Six Hundred Years Ago, Joseon Dynasty
The human boy was dead. Strung up on a rope by his own hands, it looked like. If there had been a struggle, Su Gyeong would have heard it, but she'd only woken up in daylight to find the boy dangling from a tree.
The half-fox remained asleep, curled up on the ground. She kicked him awake.
"What the hell is that?" She pointed at the human, and though Rang had a habit of looking down or to the side when she spoke to him, he looked straight in her eyes as he stood, brushing sleep off of his filthy hanbok.
"I did it like you told me to."
"Did what?"
"I made him do it. With my mind," he said flatly. He turned and announced he was going to catch breakfast.
Su Gyeong stared after him as he went, glancing from him to the human and then back to him. The faintest shiver of fear crept up her spine, though she quickly brushed it aside.
How ridiculous.
Her sister had always told her that suicides were the hardest mind manipulations to master because the human brain had to completely turn on itself. Su Gyeong hadn't been able to do it yet.
How could a dirty half-fox do something that advanced, after half a day of trying?
Su Gyeong scoffed and kicked at a pebble on the ground.
He wasn't better than her, human that he was; she'd make sure he remembered that. Still, she'd thought he might be useful, being the half-brother of a mountain god, and perhaps he'd just proven her right, but did he really not know how powerful he was? Had he been playing dumb this whole time?
She didn't think so, but...she'd have to watch him.
Su Gyeong glanced up at the dangling body again; normally, she had no problem with dead bodies, but this one gave her the creeps. She quickly cut it down and tore out the heart and liver before they could expire.
Afterwards, she found the half-fox down by the creek, trying to spear fish with his claws.
"Forget that. Let's go into the village," she announced, stalking up behind him. "There's plenty of fish there we don't have to catch."
In the village, Su Gyeong disguised herself as a middle-aged man with a plain face that no one would remember. Irritatingly—and despite his chilling display earlier—Rang had yet to master shifting into human forms. He could make his hanbok appear clean; sometimes he made himself taller. But he was hopeless at imitating humans at a glance. He could only successfully shift into his brother, but his brother's lavish attire wouldn't do for such a quaint village as this. It would achieve quite the opposite of their desired outcome—namely, blending in. Thus, Rang retained his usual appearance as they approached a fish stall, minus the newfound cleanliness of his clothes.
There, Su Gyeong silently directed the vendor to provide her and Rang with four salted pollocks each, free of charge. If she'd been as skilled as her sister, Mae Chang, she could have impersonated a noble and dined on the sumptuous food at their table, but she'd tried that once and had quickly discovered she didn't know how to speak or act like a noble; neither was she adept at hypnotizing more than one person at a time.
She'd have to work on that.
Presently, she and the half-fox slipped the fish into their traveling pouches; then Su Gyeong hurried them away. She never hung about human spaces longer than necessary—they soured her stomach—though Rang took to them easily enough. A few times he'd corrected her when she'd shown herself ignorant of a human custom, but with enough dirty glares and taunting remarks about his origins, she'd managed to shut him up.
She hated that Rang, for all his fumbling through even the simplest motions of a fox, was much more adept than her in dealing with humans on a conversational basis. He'd initially been raised as a commoner, but his brother had given him the education of a noble. He knew how to read and write, and he could imitate the way his brother had spoken to the point where he could sound quite intelligent. At least to dull human ears.
And now Rang could persuade a human to end their life, a thought that both disturbed and intrigued her with its possibilities.
Back in the woods, she scarfed her salted pollock down raw while Rang roasted his fish over a fire.
She studied his hunched posture as he stared into the fire, neither speaking nor making eye contact. He scared so easily, like all humans. And, like all humans, he was desperate for affection. His desire for acceptance clouded his every expression like mud dirtied water. Like his humanness dirtied his blood.
She could almost taste his desperation, as savory as the heart of a noble and as sweet as the gangjeong her sister had brought her once: a puffy, honey-coated rice confection dotted with sesame seeds that had tasted both earthy and divine as she'd munched on it.
Her sister had taught her that humans were created to be prey. It was in their nature to be weak.
"All humans want love," she would say as she dressed in her blue and green silk hanbok—the one she wore on nights when she hunted lonely male humans. "But if they can't have genuine affection," she would add, applying blush to her cheeks and forehead from a blue-and-white porcelain case, "they will settle for something close to it—approval or flattery, fear or respect, comfort or companionship. If you can figure out what a human will settle for, you can squeeze anything you want out of them."
In Mae Chang's case, this was usually a 'night of pleasure'—whatever that meant; Su Gyeong hoped it involved torture—followed by a meal of fresh organs, but sometimes she would collect hair pins, cosmetics, norigae, and other items of beauty from her soon-to-be-dead suitors. She liked to say that beauty was her greatest weapon, in that it was the mask that all her other weapons hid behind.
For this reason, Su Gyeong always tried to dress herself well, even if she could only manage this by changing form. When she grew up, she would be just like her sister in every way.
Well, in every way except for one…
Su Gyeong had only contempt for human men—she would never seek their company or their trinkets, only their suffering. She would only ever want one thing from them—that they feel all the pain she felt when her sister perished in the fire they set. She would relish burning them inside and out, and, finally, when they had all burned, she would take her place in one of the ten hells and be reunited with her sister there.
She only needed to find the fortune teller first. The one her sister had told her about—an underworld king who wandered the human world in disguise. With him, he carried an enchanted jade ring that enabled its bearer to pass directly into the hell where their loved one resided. Without the ring, she would be doomed to wandered hell forever, lost among the countless faces there, seeking but never finding her sister again.
Su Gyeong would definitely find the fortune teller and acquire the ring. Her sister would not suffer alone, and when they met again, Mae Chang would be proud of her for becoming a true fox—ruthless and cunning and feared.
With that in mind, Su Gyeong turned to Rang, who was scarfing down the last of his fish. In her quest, it would be helpful to have a loyal companion. If not a fox, then a dog.
Rang had finally proven himself up to the task. Perhaps she should throw him a bone.
"You can have these too." Su Gyeong held out her last two fish to Rang. "I'm not that hungry after all."
Rang blinked up at her. She could tell he was surprised.
Good. Her sister had taught her that being unpredictable was the sign of a clever fox.
"Really?" Rang asked uncertainly.
Su Gyeong nodded, her face softening with just the right amount of compassion.
"You did well with the human yesterday. You should have it."
"Oh…" Rang's face clouded for a moment, but he reached out and hesitantly took the fish.
And there it was. That glimmer of hope that she approved of him, a tiny flame in the darkness of his terribly human eyes. A flame that she could feed and quench at will.
"Thank you, Su Gyeong." Speaking in a low voice, he bowed his head in appreciation.
Good puppy.
Su Gyeong smiled, radiating benevolence.
Having already spent a year with Su Gyeong, Rang had thought he could predict her patterns, but offering him a portion of her food was new.
Not new in and of itself. She'd given him food before. She'd given him his first human organ when they'd met. But new in the sense that she'd offered it as a reward. Su Gyeong didn't hand out rewards.
She'd even refrained from teasing him about his preference for cooked food over raw food.
He accepted the fish warily, only because he was perpetually hungry. She never gave anything without asking something in return.
"I noticed a toy vendor in the village," she mentioned. "After you finish eating, we should go back there. I'll let you talk to the vendor this time and tell him what to give us."
Ah, there it was.
Rang lifted his head, slightly alarmed. He didn't think he wanted to invade a human's mind ever again, though he supposed nothing could be worse than what he'd done the night before.
"If you succeed, you can pick out what game we play first," Su Gyeong persuaded him. "We've been traveling around too much. Let's spend the whole afternoon playing games!" she burst out with a brilliant smile.
He'd never seen her in such a good mood because of him and didn't know what to make of it. But an afternoon of games sounded fun. He hadn't spent an afternoon like that since the last time he'd flown kites and played baduk with his brother.
His brother...
Rang swallowed.
He needed to take the image of the dead boy out of his head. And he couldn't say he had any qualms about stealing human toys. Not after all the beatings he'd received in his mother's village.
"Okay," he agreed, mustering his confidence. "Let's play jegichagi first."
Rang found the toy vendor's mind much easier to invade than the boy's had been the day before. Probably because the boy knew who—or what—Rang was and what was happening to him; the vendor, on the other hand—a gray-haired old man who looked feeble anyway—saw only two innocent children approaching his booth. His eyes lit up as he began to rattle off his wares, and Rang took that opportunity to shoot straight as an arrow through any defenses his weak old mind could conjure. With clouded eyes, the man began to move his limbs according to Rang's instructions. Soon, he and Su Gyeong ran off, giggling to themselves, with a collection of spinning tops for paengi chigi and shuttlecocks for jegichagi.
When they'd returned to their camp in the forest, the first game they played was jegichagi, as Rang had requested. They took turns kicking the jegi—a coin wrapped in hanji paper—back and forth with the inside of their foot, the loser of each round being whoever failed to kick it back.
Rang had played the game by himself when he was younger, but it was much more difficult playing with Su Gyeong, who used her extra strength to kick the jegi farther and farther, forcing Rang to use his fox speed and reflexes rather than his human ones. Fortunately, he caught on quickly, and they were soon kicking the jegi up into the trees and back down. They chased each other through the forest, passing it between them, the trees around them blurring and spinning, the sound of their laughter drowning out the cries of birds and animals.
After a while, they both collapsed on the forest floor, still giggling. Rang wasn't even sure who had won the last round, but the jegi had been lost in the brush.
As he stared up at the bits of sky piercing through the pines, he thought maybe Su Gyeong wasn't so bad after all.
Korean Terms:
gangjeong: traditional confection; a deep-fried rice puff, hollow inside and coated with honey as well as nuts, beans, seeds, or spice powders
norigae: traditional knotted tassel accessory originally used to decorate women's hanboks; functions as both a decoration and a good luck charm
baduk: strategy board game for two players played with black and white stone pieces on a board with grid lines; object is to surround more territory than your opponent
jegichagi: traditional game similar to hackysack, in which players use the insides of their feet to kick a shuttlecock back and forth; the winner can be whoever kicks it the most times consecutively without dropping it, or the players can pass it between them; often made from old coins with a hole in the middle and covered with paper, cloth, and bright feathers; traditionally, the jegi (shuttlecock) was made with (handmade) hanji paper
paengi chigi: traditional game involving a spinning top and a stick with a long string attached; the object is to hit the top with the string to make it rotate for as long as possible
