Page 23 of Vicious Spirits

Junu’s eyes widened. “Oh no, definitely not.”

Hyuk let out a chuckle, a surprisingly warm sound. “I figured that out. But you’re sticking around for her. I wonder what it is about her.”

“I owe a debt,” Junu said. “And apparently I have seven days to repay it.”

“I’m giving you this chance because I know your word is good,” Hyuk said. “But you know mine is as well. And if you can’t get rid of the connection between that energy and that girl, we’ll do it. I can promise you that.”

“And who is ‘we’?” Junu asked, though he had a feeling he knew. When he’d known Hyuk before, they tried to pretend they were separate from the worlds that claimed them. Junu’s world of supernatural creatures that roamed the earth. And Hyuk’s world of the jeoseung saja—beings that reaped souls of the dead and brought them down Hwangcheon Road to the afterlife.

Soon those worlds did come back to claim them. They were fools to think otherwise.

And Junu wasn’t in the mood to meet Hyuk’s reaper friends. Or to watch them come and take Miyoung to the afterlife.

“Fix it,” Hyuk said, instead of answering Junu’s question. “Or we will. You have seven days.”

He left Junu alone among the bandages and clean bedpans in the cramped storage space.

THERE ONCE WASa boy named Sinui who grew into a fine man, then a great general.

Though he was accomplished and respected in life, he wanted one thing above all: to cheat death.

One day, a jeoseung saja came to Sinui’s house, and Sinui knew that the reaper had come for his spirit. The jeoseung saja tried to enter Sinui’s house, but he couldn’t cross the orange trees that surrounded it. In his studies, Sinui had learned that oranges warded off evil. So he’d planted them around his home.

For three days, the jeoseung saja could not enter. But on the fourth day, he found a peach tree, a plant of evil. The jeoseung saja crossed the walls using the peach tree.

However, when the jeoseung saja entered the home, Sinui stood with a silver pin piercing on his head. Sinui had learned that silver warded off evil gods.

The jeoseung saja did not leave, but he hid himself under the floors. When Sinui went to wash his face, he removed the pin, and the jeoseung saja appeared and reaped him with an iron hammer.

So Sinui was taken to the underworld, but he was not done fighting. For he was a clever man and had prepared for this eventuality. He fought the gaekgwi, the spirits between the underworld and the mortal world that barred reentry to the landof the living. And with his great fighting skills, he defeated them and reentered the mortal world.

However, when Sinui reentered his body, he found that his family had already buried him. He had not prepared a way to escape his own grave. So he suffocated, returning to the underworld once more.

Because no matter how Sinui fought, the reapers had marked him for death. And no spirit can escape the grasp of the jeoseung saja once they set their eyes on you.

11

MIYOUNG FELT LIKEa burden. She’d lived her whole life trying to be unassuming, to be invisible. And now she was the center of attention as Ms. Moon hurried around her apartment, cleaning up for an unexpected guest, rambling about going to the store to buy oxtail for soup. Jihoon’s small white dog, Dubu, jumped around, stopping every once in a while to snarl in Miyoung’s general direction. Dogs hated foxes, and Dubu had always seen Miyoung for what she really was.

Somin and Jihoon were arguing over the best way to set the table for family dinner. The excuse for why Miyoung had to come here after the hospital. Ms. Moon said they used to have family dinner every Sunday when Jihoon and Somin were younger and claimed she wanted to start the tradition again.

She almost got up and left half a dozen times, but every time, she could feel how weak her legs were. How her head spun. How she couldn’t seem to quite catch her breath. The doctor had said she was sleep deprived. That seemed like an understatement. She was afraid to go to sleep; she didn’t know what her mother’s constant visits meant. But she knew in her heart that Yena wasn’t fully gone, at least not for her. And a part of her worried that the dreams weren’t supernatural at all, but a sign that she was going slowly mad.

“Somin-ah, where did you put my shoes, the ones with thetassels?” Ms. Moon called, digging through the shoe cabinet in the foyer. Shoes kept spilling out as she shoved the piles back and forth.

“You threw them away,” Somin called from the kitchen. “You said they made your ankles look fat.”

“No. Those were the loafers,” Ms. Moon called back, taking out a pair of white tennis shoes, studying them, then shaking her head and letting them fall at her feet.

Somin came out of the kitchen and started picking up the mess. “The ones with the tasselswerethe loafers. You threw them away.”

“I did?” Ms. Moon said with a frown, staring at a pair of sandals. “Ugh, I really loved those shoes.”

Somin started shoving discarded shoes back into the cabinet. She took out the pair of sneakers her mother had worn to the hospital and handed them to Ms. Moon. “Last week you called them a waste of money and said you regretted letting the saleswoman talk you into buying them.”

Ms. Moon bent down to put on her sneakers. “Yes, but that waslast week. This week I remember that they’re my favorite.”

“Well, if you still miss them next week, we can go shopping for another pair.”

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