Archive of Our Own

“I hate Christmas,” Siwon says. He’s frowning, brows drawn together in a tight line as he stares at the heap of snow in front of the swings. He clutches at the chains of the swing with fur-lined gloves; the hood of his designer coat is down, and snowflakes drift from the nearby trees to dust his hair.

Yunho perches on the edge of his swing and scuffs at the grit scattered over the frosted tarmac. The chains creak with cold. The air is frozen, the taste of it clean after the heavy scents of Siwon’s house: the aroma of food cooking, the subtle fragrance of beeswax candles, the mingled perfumes of aunts and cousins, smoke from cigars. The layering of smells only added to the thickness of the atmosphere, the loving tension of a family gathered at close quarters for Christmas.

They’d made their escape just as another guest arrived—a second cousin, according to Siwon, the kind of second cousin one only ever saw at Christmas. Taking advantage of the flurry of insincere greetings, Yunho and Siwon had sneaked away and headed for the park.

They’re all alone here. The familiar landscape is blanketed in snow, with dark, uneven patches cut out of the white where salted grit has been strewn. The slide is impassable; the roundabout barely moves, rusted by frost and groaning under the weight of the snow, so they’ve settled on the swings.

A crow feels a cautious path across the iced surface of the snow. It flies off, cawing, its blackness folding into the grey sky, as Siwon pushes back and swings forward. “Did you see,” he says, “did you see the way everyone gushed over Jiwon just because she’d grown her hair?”

Careful to show sympathy without verbally agreeing, Yunho nods. Siwon’s relationship with his little sister see-sawed depending on the day of the week and whether Siwon was of a mood to tolerate her antics.

“She’s their favourite,” Siwon continues, his expression darkening as the swing slows. “She gets away with everything. And I bet she has more presents than me. Again.”

Yunho sits back, catching the edge of the seat behind his knees. He lets his body tilt, grabbing onto the chains to stop himself from falling. His feet dangle above the ground, his slight weight pulling through his arms. He swings back and forth in this position as he listens to Siwon’s litany of complaint.

“My parents hate me, I’m sure of it,” Siwon says. “They have all these boring rules and they expect me to learn so much weird stuff, and I don’t want to. Family duty and all that crap.” He swings forward and aims a savage kick at the mounded snow. “You’re lucky your family is nothing important.”

This time Yunho makes a small noise of affirmation, because Siwon is expecting it. He knows his family is unimportant. They live on the fourth floor of a six-storey apartment block. His father works in a factory. His mother cooks and cleans for Siwon’s parents. In the normal scheme of things, Siwon shouldn’t be his best friend, but something happened—Yunho can’t remember what, exactly, because it happened ages and ages ago when he was little, but he was very sick for a time and his mother cried and then Uncle Choi had given him some medicine and he got better, and ever since then, he and Siwon have been friends.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Siwon says, sounding sorry for himself. He kicks at the snow again. “You don’t have this stupid family responsibility.”

Yunho sits straight on his swing and shifts it sideways, nudging gently against Siwon in a silent gesture of sympathy. Uncle Choi has a bad temper and often takes it out on Siwon. He thinks of the time he stayed over and they sat up late watching a film and the volume was too loud, and Uncle Choi had stormed into the room and yanked the television from the wall. He’d shouted at Yunho to go and sleep downstairs. Yunho remembers sitting on the living room floor wrapped in his blanket, listening to the sound of Siwon’s sobs as Uncle Choi beat him.

He sighs, his breath fogging. He casts a sidelong look at Siwon. He doesn’t envy him at all. The other kids at school think Siwon has a perfect life full of toys and computer games and holidays and a chauffeur-driven car, but to Yunho it seems that being a rich man’s son is more of a burden than a charm.

“It’s so unfair that they like Jiwon better,” Siwon mutters. “I’m a boy. They should like me more than a girl. Did I tell you, last week she...”

Yunho stops listening, his attention caught by the figure of a man lurching through the park gates. He can’t seem to walk straight, staggering from one side of the gritted path to the other, tripping through the mounded snow. He’s wearing black trousers and a long blue coat with dark fur around the neck. He stumbles against a cherry tree, lifts a hand to brush back his hair, and glances over at them. He looks flushed, eyes glinting, but the thing that alarms Yunho most is the blood around his mouth.

The man topples over into the snow and lies still.

Leaving Siwon mid-complaint, Yunho jumps off the swing and approaches the fallen man. Siwon calls out, but Yunho ignores him. He circles the tree, going closer to the man. There’s something beating at the back of his mind, like the wings of a trapped bird against a windowpane. His skin prickles. His senses are telling him to run, but his rationality orders him to offer assistance.

“Mister,” Yunho says. “Hey, mister. Are you all right?”

The man is curled up on his hands and knees. His breaths sound thick and rasping. His hands are bare, his fingers almost blue with cold. He’s shaking.

Concern overcomes Yunho’s natural caution. He steps a little closer. He knows what alcohol smells like, knows it from the few times his father has come home drunk and angry, but he can’t smell it on this man. “Mister, are you sick? Do you need help?”

The man groans. Shudders.

Yunho stands hesitant. He glances back at Siwon, then again at the man. There’s a phone box at the end of the street. Maybe he can call for an ambulance. He shifts his feet in the snow. “I’m going to get help.”

“Wait.” A hand fastens around his wrist, staying him. The man looks up. He’s as handsome as a movie star, with long-lashed eyes and a wide mouth. Yunho stares at that mouth. No blood. He must’ve been mistaken. He shakes his head, begins to step back.

“Wait,” the man says again, low and breathy. He stares at Yunho, eyes widening, then tightens his grasp on Yunho’s wrist, gripping so hard it hurts. Yunho makes a sound of protest and tries to pull free, but the man is strong.

“Amazing,” the man whispers. “I never thought—”

Yunho whines. “Mister, you’re hurting me.”

The man lets go. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” He smiles, and it’s breathtaking.

Yunho retreats a few steps, rubbing his wrist. Even though the man’s attitude makes him wary, he still wants to make sure: “Are you all right now?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” The man continues staring at him. “Thank you, little boy.”

Stung, Yunho snaps, “I’m not little. I’m nine.”

“I apologise again. That’s a good age.” The man sketches an ironic bow, then gets to his feet, brushing off the snow until he stands straight.

He’s tall. Taller than Yunho’s father, taller even than Uncle Choi. Yunho gapes up at him. “How old are you?”

The man laughs, but doesn’t answer. Instead he looks towards the swings, gaze thoughtful and assessing. “Is he your friend—Choi Siwon?”

Startled, Yunho nods.

Laying a hand on Yunho’s shoulder, the man says, “Take me to him.”

They cross the expanse of white together. The man is wearing boots, Yunho notices; knee-length boots that lace all the way up. Tiny valleys of snow are caught on top of the laces. They look untidy. Yunho wonders if he should brush them away.

The rattle of chains snaps his focus back. Siwon stands on the gritted tarmac, the swing rocking slowly behind him. His fists are clenched, wariness and disbelief stark in his expression. “It’s you,” he says. “Shim Changmin. My father told me about you.”

Changmin inclines his head. “Then you know why I’m here.”

“No,” Siwon says, beginning to frown. “I don’t know anything.”

Yunho looks between them, puzzled. He’s never seen this man before, never even heard his name.

“Think,” Changmin says to Siwon, calmly. “What did your father tell you?”

Something is very wrong here. There’s a tremor in the air, a tilt in existence as if reality is torn apart for a split-second. Yunho feels the heat of Changmin’s hand burning through his winter coat, through his jumper and t-shirt and vest. He shrugs Changmin’s grip from his shoulder and eases away.

“No,” Siwon says again, and now there’s panic in his voice. “No,” his face crumples, “no,” anger chasing back fear, “no!”

“Yes.” Changmin sinks into a crouch. His eyes are black. He’s smiling. “I just killed your family. All of them. Merry Christmas, Siwon.”

Horror drowns Siwon’s expression. Choked denials fall from his lips, and then he turns and runs for the park gates. He almost falls, but rights himself with visible effort, slipping on the ice, fighting through the drifted snow. He runs, faster and faster, and doesn’t look back.

Yunho knows instinctively that Changmin spoke the truth. He shrinks away, terror churning inside him. “Why did you do that?”

Changmin looks at him. “Because I can.”

“Are you going to kill me, too?”

There’s a moment of silence. Yunho freezes, his heart plummeting, nausea spinning up his throat. Changmin tilts his head as if considering. “No,” he says at last. “I’m going to wait until you’re older.”

Yunho tears his feet from the snow and runs.

He makes it halfway to the gate before he makes a mistake and looks back. There’s nothing behind him. When he turns, Changmin is in front of him, reaching for him, catching him up in his arms. Yunho screams, the sound ripping across the park. He fights, but Changmin holds him tight, crushing him against the dark fur of his coat. Yunho draws in another breath and inhales the curdled scent of blood. He gags on it, the stink rich with death, sickening, thrilling, and the sound of beating wings fills his mind once more as darkness sprinkles the edges of his vision.

“Look at me.” The order is hot and sharp with menace, and Yunho stops struggling. He looks up, imprints Changmin’s beautiful face in his memory; looks into his eyes and sees endless black.

“Forget me,” Changmin says. “You will forget me now.”

“How?” Yunho murmurs, the wings beating a frantic rhythm inside his head.

Changmin’s eyes blaze. “You will.”

Darkness creeps, fills every corner. It overwhelms everything.

*

Yunho sits up. He’s in the park, in scuffled snow, and he’s alone. Siwon must have run off and left him.

* * *

The funerals are conducted together. It’s a quiet service, attended by only a handful of family friends. The police outnumber the mourners. They question everyone who comes near the church on the basis that the murderer will surely want to gloat over his handiwork, but no arrests are made.

The media wait at a respectful distance on the other side of the road. The tragedy has made the national news. Every channel carries a variation on the story: a madman broke into the Choi home and slaughtered the entire family. The fact that it’s Christmas adds a marvellous poignancy, as does the fact that Siwon, the sole surviving family member, is now extremely wealthy.

Yunho stays with Siwon the whole time. He doesn’t know how Siwon knew that something had happened to his family. All he can remember is that they were on the swings in the park and then Siwon ran off. A policewoman asks him about that day over and over, but Yunho can’t recall anything strange about it.

It’s only later that Yunho realises that if they hadn’t gone to the park, then maybe they’d both be dead, too. The thought makes him shiver, and he hears the beating of wings inside his mind until he clamps his hands over his ears and makes the sound stop.

Under the terms of Uncle Choi’s will, Yunho’s parents become Siwon’s guardians, though they have no access to his money. The lawyer and Pastor Lee from Siwon’s church control his finances until he comes of age, and their first decision is that it’s too traumatic for Siwon to return to his family home.

“I want to stay,” Siwon says; the first words he’s spoken since the police found him mute with anguish amidst the wreckage of his parents’ bodies.

Yunho’s parents stand with their backs to the wall of the lawyer’s office, awkward in their best clothes, the ones they wore to the funeral. Yunho fidgets, his gaze fixed on Siwon. He wants to comfort his friend, but a distance has opened between them and he doesn’t know how to help.

The lawyer fakes an avuncular smile. “It will take a while before the police have finished their investigation. And then the house will need to be cleaned.” His smile slips a little. “New carpets. Wallpaper. Furniture. There was a lot of... The stains are... It’s better for you to continue living with Mr and Mrs Jung for now.”

Siwon grits his teeth, stares at the lawyer. “It’s my home. I want to go back as soon as I can.”

“I think it would be better to find a new house,” the lawyer insists. “A smaller residence, perhaps, one without the associations of—”

“No.” Siwon sounds furious, but his anger is shot through with tears.

The lawyer clears his throat and looks down at the papers on his desk.

Pastor Lee studies Siwon for a long moment, then says, “Let him stay. No one else would want that house anyway. Mr and Mrs Jung can move in to take care of the boy until he’s old enough to look after himself.”

Yunho’s mother speaks up. “I don’t want to live in a house full of ghosts.”

Yunho glances at her, surprised by the vehemence of her tone.

The pastor nods. “My dear lady, I quite understand. I will conduct a service within the property to bring peace to any troubled spirits.”

Yunho’s mother starts to say something else, but his father stops her with a look. He nods a bow at Pastor Lee. “I’m sure that would help. Thank you.”

“No, it won’t,” Yunho’s mother mutters beneath her breath. She draws Yunho towards her, rests her hand on his head. “No, it won’t.”

* * *

It’s another three weeks before they return to the house. Siwon stands for a while on the front steps holding Yunho’s hand, gathering his courage. Yunho nudges against him, and together they take a deep breath and cross the threshold.

They go from room to room. Even with new furniture amongst more familiar pieces, the place feels stripped and empty, redolent with the smell of industrial cleaner rather than beeswax and fresh-cut flowers. Yunho holds tight to Siwon’s hand and stares around each room, seeing arcs and splatters of blood like shadows beneath the fresh paint, seeing flash-glimpses of torn bodies on the floor or draped like rag dolls over chairs and tables and banisters. He sees entrails steaming and hearts still pumping; he sees Jiwon torn into quarters and Uncle Choi’s decapitated head bouncing across the rug, and in the middle of it there’s a dark mirage that resists his every attempt to bring it into focus, something that moves with inhuman speed, something deadly and beautiful.

His imagination is sick and horrible. Yunho doesn’t know what the crime scene looked like. His parents shielded him from it; Siwon has never mentioned it. The media reported the killings in vague terms. At school, rumour had run riot, but nothing that anyone had said even comes close to the things Yunho sees now.

Except he doesn’t see them, because when he blinks, when he flexes his hand and feels his sweaty palm slide against the solid grip of Siwon’s fingers, all Yunho can see is new paint and new carpets and new furniture.

Yunho’s mother goes around opening the windows, even though it’s cold outside and snow still covers the ground. “To get rid of the smell,” she says. Yunho meets her gaze and knows she doesn’t mean the smell of the chemical cleaner. It’s the stink of blood, the stench of death.

Siwon pulls him along on this tour of memory. They go upstairs, open every door, every cupboard and drawer, in every single one of the rooms. Finally they enter Siwon’s bedroom. None of the family tried to take refuge here. It’s untainted, but not untouched. Yunho can see the scuff-marks of adult shoes in the pile of the rug. The police, he supposes. A smear of fingerprint powder remains on top of the television. The books have been put back on the shelves in the wrong order.

The atmosphere shrivels in on itself. Yunho can barely breathe.

“They’ve gone,” Siwon says, and bursts into tears. He turns, reaches out blindly. On the verge of crying himself, Yunho hugs Siwon and listens to the noisy, shuddering sobs escalate into a desperate howl of grief.

Yunho holds on tight, offering wordless support. When he looks over Siwon’s shoulder at the dressing table mirror, he sees faceless shadows crowding in at the doorway behind him.

* * *

Even though Pastor Lee conducts an exorcism, Yunho’s mother says there are ghosts caught in the walls. She comes every day to cook and clean and tend to the boys, but she refuses to live in the house. Yunho’s father says he doesn’t care about ghosts and makes himself at home in the old servant’s quarters. He spends his time pottering in the garden or drinking beer in his sitting room, watching television. When they’re not at school, Yunho and Siwon are left alone for most of the time. It’s an odd life, but everyone settles to it eventually.

Siwon doesn’t cry again after that first day. He doesn’t speak of what happened. All around the house there are photographs of his parents and family, but he doesn’t acknowledge them. A few times, prompted by the school counsellor, Yunho tries to talk about them, but Siwon stares at him with such awful blankness that the conversation fades into silence.

Though there are six guest bedrooms, Yunho has shared Siwon’s room since they moved in. Siwon says it makes him feel safer, and Yunho has tried to be worthy of this by taking hapkido lessons. Not that Siwon needs his protection; he seems to draw most of his strength from Pastor Lee and derives his comfort from the church.

Yunho’s mother insists on giving each day structure, though the only thing that follows any sort of routine is breakfast. “The most important meal of the day,” Yunho’s mother always says as she serves rice and eggs and tofu seasoned with soy sauce and puts packets of cereal on the table. Yunho’s father drinks three cups of coffee and smokes a cigarette at the back door. Siwon eats everything that’s put in front of him, then brings out the pill bottles.

Yunho remembers how, years ago, Uncle Choi had insisted that they both take vitamins every day. “It’s important that you grow up healthy and strong,” he’d said. Siwon had scrunched his face and refused, so Uncle Choi had made a game of it. They’d each had a pill bottle—Siwon’s was blue, Yunho’s was yellow—and Uncle Choi dispensed the vitamins into their hands and gave them a drink of fruit juice. Now it’s Siwon who holds the pill bottles. Yunho doesn’t mind taking the vitamins. Returning to the habit is easy, and besides, it seems to help Siwon. He always looks calmer after they’ve washed the vitamins down with orange juice.

Two weeks after they’ve moved in, Yunho gets sick. He can’t feel his feet and his fingers tingle, then go numb. He starts vomiting and his pulse slows to a crawl. His mother blames the ghosts. A doctor is called; gastroenteritis is diagnosed and hydration and rest are prescribed. His father brings him several volumes of manga, all non-sequential, from four different series. His mother brings him herbal teas, peppermint and nettle and lime blossom. Siwon brings him homework and school gossip and they sit in bed reading manga and talking, and Siwon begins to smile, and they scuffle together and even though Yunho is weak, he manages to knock Siwon onto the floor, and Siwon laughs.

It’s almost like it used to be. It’ll never be the same again, but maybe they can get through this. Maybe there’s hope.

Three days later, Yunho is halfway through his maths homework when he falls asleep. The textbook slides to the floor with a thump. The sound wakes him, but though he opens his eyes, he can’t move. The quilt feels like a stone on top of him, pinning him down. He hears the rush of wings beating. His pulse jumps, races. The room is bathed in sunlight. His mother is humming along to a song on the radio as she moves around downstairs. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Nothing—

Except the dressing table mirror.

The face of the mirror is as liquid and slick as crude oil. The surface is seething, forming itself into torturous shapes. It boils, smoothes out, and reflected in its depths is the image of a man, as handsome as a movie star with black eyes and blood around his mouth and a smile that robs Yunho of his breath. He remembers this man, recognises him for the space of a heartbeat, and then the knowledge dissolves. I know you he wants to cry, but there’s something silencing him, something that tightens its grip around his throat until the sound of frantic wings fills his mind and darkness roars towards him.

Yunho sits up, gasping. He reaches out.

The mirror shatters.

* * *

Time passes.

* * *

They both turn eighteen. Finally Siwon has limited access to his wealth, although the lawyer and Pastor Lee will continue to regulate his spending until he reaches the age of twenty-one. Siwon sits down with Yunho and draws up a proposal for the next few years. He submits it to all four of his guardians for approval and then buys Yunho’s parents a nice little bungalow with a garden, and closes up his family home.

Yunho and Siwon both go to the same university to study Business. It’s not what Yunho would have chosen to do, but Siwon is funding his degree and so he let Siwon decide which course he should take. Besides, it’s not that bad. He’s quick-witted and smart enough to keep his grades steady, and he enjoys some of the lectures. There’s the added advantage that most of the courses are populated by guys, and some of them are cute.

Siwon’s tragic family history coupled with the lure of his great wealth—plus the fact that he’s terrifically good-looking—acts like an aphrodisiac on the female students. They flutter and coo, hoping to be the one to heal him of his awful grief, the sorrow so deep that he won’t ever talk about it. But Siwon politely deflects all romantic interest in him, and while some of the girls retreat to mend their broken hearts, others slide their gaze sideways to his best friend and roommate, and Yunho finds himself the recipient of second-hand interest. Not that it bothers him; Yunho enjoys going out and meeting new people, and his easy-going enthusiasm makes him popular with men and women alike.

Siwon shakes his head over Yunho’s willingness to experiment with both genders, but there’s never any heat in it. “It’s only because I’m jealous,” Siwon tells him, smiling in a way that means he’s being serious. “I’m afraid you’ll leave me.”

Yunho always laughs at this, laughs and says, “You’re my best friend. I’m never going to leave you.”

They’re almost inseparable. During an end-of-year party, Yunho’s girlfriend dumps him, her face a mask of jealousy as she accuses him of being more in love with Siwon than with her.

“Maybe we should try it,” Siwon says at the end of the night when they’re back in their shared room.

They’re both more than a little drunk, but Siwon’s words have a sobering effect. Yunho looks at him. “What?”

Siwon sits on his bed and leans against the wall, his face expressionless. “Since everyone already thinks we’re together, maybe we should try it.”

Startled, Yunho stares at Siwon, sees the weariness he carries across his shoulders and the slight plush of stubble at his jaw and the artful tousle of his hair, the pansy-velvet softness of his eyes. It would be easy, Yunho thinks, so easy. Siwon is undeniably handsome and his body is incredible and they know one another inside out already, know each other’s history and baggage. In many respects it makes perfect sense, but—

“I’m sorry,” Yunho says, cringing inwardly, not wanting to hurt his best friend, “but I just don’t see you in that way. You’re like my brother.”

Siwon thinks about this. Nods once. “Okay.”

“Is it really?” Yunho gets up from his bed and sits beside Siwon, touches his arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I’m not, and I don’t.” Siwon pats his hand, smiling. He looks relieved. “I just thought it would save you some trouble.”

Yunho doesn’t know what to make of that. He laughs, but it’s an awkward sort of sound. “It’s no trouble for me to go on dates.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, though.” Siwon keeps hold of Yunho’s hand. “I wish you’d... well, not save yourself, exactly, but I wish you’d just wait for that special person, like I am. Pastor Lee says—”

“I don’t care what Pastor Lee says,” Yunho interrupts. He pulls free of Siwon’s warm touch. “And I am waiting for ‘that special person’, as you put it. I just...” He pauses, cutting off the next few words—haven’t met him yet—suddenly dizzy as another part of his mind conjures a memory, an image in a mirror, a man who lights the contradiction of fear and desire inside him. He clears his throat and continues, “I just want to have a bit of fun before I settle down.”

Siwon nods. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m tough,” Yunho says.

“Sure you are.” Siwon yawns and points to the yellow and blue pill bottles on one of the bookshelves. “Just remember to keep taking those things. Vitamins are so important. Especially at this time of our lives.”

“Especially when I’m drinking and partying, you mean,” Yunho says with a grin.

Siwon dips his head, half laughing. “Dude, I’m not going to nag you.”

“I know. Maybe you should pray for me instead.” Yunho ruffles Siwon’s hair and bounces off the bed, swallows two of the vitamin pills, then crawls beneath his own duvet to sleep.

During his second year, Yunho makes an effort to involve himself in different activities. He still rooms with Siwon, they still spend most of their time together, but Yunho takes up rock-climbing and gets a part-time job in a bar and expands his social circle outside of his fellow students. He continues dating, finds himself more drawn to men than women, and then, inexplicably, no one wants to go out with him anymore.

He doesn’t understand it. Three dates, sometimes just one date, and then they make excuses and don’t return his calls. No one goes so far as to ignore him when they meet on campus or on the street, but when he asks why they’re not interested, he receives only uncomfortable silences and awkward looks. Not even his friends can offer a satisfactory explanation. They tell him that he’s a great guy, sweet and romantic and funny and everything anyone could want in a boyfriend, but the fact remains that no one actually wants him.

It’s a mystery, a depressing, confidence-stealing mystery, until one day Yunho hears that one of the guys he dated has just been released from hospital. The guy became ill a day or so after they’d slept together—his hands and feet had gone numb, he’d started vomiting, his pulse had slowed. Tests at the hospital were inconclusive.

Yunho remembers having an illness like that when he was younger, but it’d just been a stomach bug. It was years ago; it’s not like he could still be carrying some sort of virus in his system. It’s not like he’s contagious. But then he discovers that this isn’t the first time someone has got sick after being intimate with him. Girls he’d kissed, boys he’d slept with—several of them ended up ill with a range of similar symptoms.

“This is why no one wants to date you,” his friends tell him, looking bewildered and sympathetic and keeping their distance. “You’re a really great guy, but you’re kind of... toxic.”

Hurt and confused, Yunho backs away from his social life. Now he goes out only to work and study in the library. “It’s better like this,” Siwon says. “Without the distraction of dating, you can focus on your studies.”

Yunho nods. He might not have chosen this degree, but he’ll do his best. He works hard for the duration of his final year and graduates at the top of his class.

* * *

They do their military service straight after leaving university. Either by coincidence or intent, Siwon and Yunho are assigned to the same squad. Yunho doesn’t mind. Their base is in the mountains to the east of the country. Life there has a certain monotony, so Siwon’s presence is a comfort. They do artillery practice and play a lot of football; they build a shed half the size of an aircraft hangar before disassembling it again. The other soldiers like Siwon because he’s rich but didn’t use his connections to be transferred to a cushy Level Four position; they like Yunho because he works hard and tries his best to be cheerful even in adverse situations.

Yunho’s mother sends food parcels every few weeks. Siwon orders luxury hampers online. They both share the contents with the squad, except for the vitamins that Siwon still keeps in the yellow and blue pill bottles.

During the summer, they’re sent out into the mountains in groups of six to undertake a training exercise. Yunho is chosen as the leader of his team. They’re given a compass but no map and are instructed to reach a specific rendezvous point by sundown of the third day. They have limited food and water rations in their packs and must fend for themselves in the wilderness. All is well and they’re ahead of schedule, following the path of a river, when one of the men, Private Kam, slips and falls into the water.

Yunho throws off his pack and goes in after his colleague. The river is deep and swift and cold, but with some help from Siwon and the rest of the group, Yunho drags the soldier onto the bank. Private Kam is unconscious; he’s not breathing. Following protocol, Yunho begins CPR. Siwon grabs his arm—“You’re exhausted, let me do that”—but Yunho refuses and orders Siwon to radio for assistance.

Yunho switches between artificial respiration and chest compresses, and after what feels like forever, Private Kam chokes, vomits up a quantity of water, and whoops for air. Yunho sags with relief. The rest of the team cheer and call him a hero.

Private Kam is taken back to camp, dazed but smiling and urging them on to completion of the task. The incident has slowed them down and they reach the rendezvous in second place. When they return to the base, they’re told that Private Kam is dead.

“Unforeseen complications,” their C.O. tells Yunho. “It’s not your fault. You did everything you could. These things happen.”

Yunho says nothing. He hears the sound of beating wings.

* * *

When they finish their military service, they can finally start living their lives. Siwon buys an apartment in the city, an expensive, luxurious place on the twentieth floor of one of the premier downtown condos. He thanks the aging board of directors who took such good care of his father’s business for all these years, dismisses most of them to comfortable retirement and a lifetime’s golf club membership, and takes the helm the way he always intended to do.

He offers Yunho a job in Accounts. An important job with just enough responsibility to stop him from feeling bored, plus a very attractive wage and a car and the adjoining apartment in Siwon’s condo.

Yunho refuses. He wants to try something else for a while. More than that, he wants to live on his own.

Siwon looks puzzled and a little hurt by the response. “It seems like a waste,” he says. “But if you can’t find anything decent, or if you need anything at all, come to me. You know I’ll help. You’re my best friend. I couldn’t have made it this far through life without you.”

Yunho laughs at this. “We’ll always be friends, but it’s time we were apart. Besides, don’t you need to find your special someone? You won’t find her with me hanging around.”

Siwon nods at the reminder, his expression sombre and determined. “Yes. It’s time I started looking for her.”

Yunho isn’t sure what he wants to do for the long-term, but for now he’s content to make the most of his new freedom. He visits his parents in the bungalow that Siwon gave them. He looks up old friends, and through an acquaintance he gets a job waiting tables at a trendy cafe-bar in Apgujeong.

With the money he’s been saving since he was a student, he rents a tiny fourth floor flat with a balcony. Siwon helps him move in and tucks the yellow pill bottle in the cupboard where Yunho keeps his breakfast cereal. “Don’t forget,” Siwon tells him. “I still take my vitamins. Let me know when you’re running low and I’ll bring you some more.”

“I can just buy them myself, it’s no trouble,” Yunho says.

“No trouble at all.” Siwon smiles and slings an arm around him. “At least let me help with something as small as vitamins when you won’t let me help you with a job, a car, a decent place to live...”

“Hey!” Yunho shoves at him playfully, and they laugh and open a couple of beers and squash together on the balcony and admire the cluttered neighbourhood, listening to the sound of a thudding bass-line from an apartment nearby.

Yunho enjoys his job at the cafe. Siwon comes in for half an hour or so every day, sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in the evening. He’s always dressed in exquisite suits and carrying briefcases that cost more than Yunho’s entire wardrobe. At first he only drinks Americanos, but over time Yunho introduces him to apple cinnamon lattes and chocolate chip frappuccinos.

Life is simple. Life is fun. Every week, Siwon asks Yunho to reconsider his decision. Every week, Yunho pushes a blueberry muffin across the counter with Siwon’s coffee order and says no. It becomes a game. Maybe one day he’ll say yes to Siwon’s job offer, the way his parents want him to, but not now. Maybe when he finds someone special and falls in love, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. Not when he doesn’t date. Not while his toxic reputation still sticks. Not until he can believe that he wasn’t responsible for Private Kam’s death.

One Thursday morning, Yunho is dealing with the breakfast rush when one of his colleagues drops a tray. In the aftermath, the whole cafe goes quiet. Jooyeon shrinks with embarrassment and apologises over and over to the customers nearest to her. Yunho hurries over to help, giving her a reassuring smile—it’s not her fault she tripped, it could happen to anyone—and they start gathering together the spoons and crumpled napkins and chipped mugs and broken crockery. Jooyeon murmurs that she’s taking a tray-load of debris out to the kitchen; Yunho nods and continues crawling on the floor in search of scattered ceramic sherds.

He’s collected up most of the pieces of a smashed plate when the door opens and a customer walks in. Yunho tries to scoot out of the way. The customer sidesteps at the same time. They almost collide. Yunho snatches up another sherd, then stares.

The customer is wearing boots. Knee-length boots that lace all the way up. Yunho catches his breath, the sight of the boots nudging loose a scrap of memory. He doesn’t have a kink for boots, but there’s something...

He looks up.

The boots belong to a guy who, even wearing oversized sunglasses, is absolutely gorgeous. He’s tall and slender in dark blue jeans and a grey woollen sweater with a leather jacket over the top and a purple-blue scarf wrapped around his neck. His dark hair is worn too long, the ends of his fringe brushing the top of his sunglasses. And his mouth... his mouth is wide and generous and sexy.

Boots guy smiles, and it’s breathtaking. “You’re already at my feet and we haven’t even been introduced,” he says. “I like that.”

Yunho realises he’s staring. He must look like an idiot. He stands up too fast and the world tilts. “Excuse me,” he says, disoriented. His hands are still full of broken crockery. “Please excuse me.”

“I’ll be right here.” Boots indicates a table in the corner. “Hurry. I’m thirsty.”

Yunho looks around for one of his colleagues. “I’ll get someone—”

“No,” Boots says, unwinding his scarf. “I want you to serve me.”

A blush heats Yunho’s face. He tells himself that Boots didn’t mean anything by it, but still... Yunho bows slightly, says, “I’ll be right back. Please wait a moment,” and escapes to the kitchen.

Jooyeon is peering around the doorway. As Yunho comes in, she cuts a look at Boots and fans her face. “Mm, he’s hot.”

“Really.” Yunho dumps the broken plates and wipes his hands. “Hadn’t noticed.”

She snorts, mutters, “Yeah, right,” and elbows him in the ribs as she goes to attend to another customer.

Yunho straightens his shirt collar, fiddles with his sleeves. He feels unaccountably nervous, and that makes him annoyed. He’s never been one to shy away from a challenge, and taking a cute guy’s coffee order is not exactly a difficult task. All the same, it’s been a long time since he’s felt such a slam of attraction. Actually, maybe it’s the first time.

That doesn’t make him feel any better. Yunho gives himself a mental kick and makes his way over to Boots’ table, notepad and pen ready. He schools his expression into something friendly and polite. “Thank you for your patience. What can I get you?”

Boots smiles. “How about you on a plate.”

It’s such a bad line that Yunho laughs. “Seriously.”

“I was being serious. But if you’re off the menu...” Boots pauses, pushes down his sunglasses just a little to glance at the board behind the counter, then continues, “Black coffee, no sugar, and your number.”

Yunho bites his lip and writes down the order. “Anything to eat, sir?”

Boots slides his sunglasses back into place. “Maybe later.”

“I’ll be right back.” Yunho gives him an amused look and turns away. He knows Boots is watching him, can feel the weight of the—curious? appreciative?—gaze upon him. He passes the order to the barista and goes to check on some people at a nearby table. Boots is still watching him. It’s making him nervous again, but this time it feels different. It’s oddly, inappropriately, arousing.

The coffee is ready. Yunho carries it over to Boots and sets the cup down in front of him. “Please enjoy your drink.”

He’s gone four steps before Boots calls him back.

Yunho turns. “Is there a problem?”

Boots makes a show of looking at the cup, the saucer, and the napkin. “Where’s your number?”

“I’m here to work, not to pick up guys.”

“Why not? Two birds, one stone.” Boots pushes the coffee aside and leans across the table, his smile dazzling. “I promise I don’t bite. Much.”

Yunho struggles not to laugh again. “I’m flattered, but...”

“You have someone already?” Now Boots looks offended, his mouth turning down in an imitation of woe. “I’m better. I guarantee it.”

Now Yunho has to laugh. This guy is too much, but damn, is he hot. “No, I mean, I’m sure you are; it’s just... I don’t date.”

Boots flicks back his hair. “Why not?”

It would sound ridiculous to say it out loud. Yunho shrugs and settles for a simple version of the truth. “I have really bad luck with dating, that’s all.”

“I’d say your luck has just changed.” Boots gives him a slow look that, even from behind the protection of the sunglasses, makes Yunho feel naked.

Yunho exhales a laugh that slides towards the kind of noise he only makes in bed. He can’t take his gaze from Boots’ mouth. At that moment, the barista calls Yunho’s name. The spell is broken; Yunho jerks back and knocks into an empty chair behind him. The sound of the chair legs scraping on the floor brings him to his senses, as does the solid feel of the wood beneath his hands.

The barista gestures to a group of businessmen and women who are seating themselves around one of the larger tables. Yunho nods and glances at Boots. “Excuse me.”

Boots draws his coffee towards him. “Hurry back.”

As it turns out, Yunho doesn’t have time to go back. The business people have a long, complicated order and one of the women changes her mind three times, and just as Yunho has delivered all the food and drink to the table, more customers come in—fashionable young mothers with babies, more businessmen, and a gaggle of university students who shriek and chatter and noisily try to work out if Boots is an idol incognito because of his sunglasses.

Two hours pass, and the lunchtime rush gets underway. Occasionally Yunho glances over to the corner, each time expecting to see the table empty, or new customers seated there, but Boots doesn’t move. He sits perfectly still, every now and then sipping at his coffee, and he waits.

Siwon hurries in at half past one, talking into his phone and looking harassed. He’s speaking Mandarin, slow and halting, his features screwed up with frustration. He waves at Yunho, makes seemingly random gestures and points to the door, and Yunho interprets for the barista: “Cherry chocolate latte to go, sprinkles but no cream, and a slice of lemon cheesecake. I’ll get the cheesecake.”

He wraps the cake and puts it in a box. Siwon pulls out his wallet and tosses it to Yunho, who extracts some money, rings it up, and folds the change back into place before returning the wallet. Siwon smiles, then pulls a face at the person on the other end of the phone. Yunho leans on the counter and looks towards Boots, who is now half hidden behind a newspaper.

Siwon finishes his call just as his latte arrives. “I’m so sorry, I wanted to sit and talk to you properly,” he says, taking a swig of his coffee and scrolling through a bunch of messages on his BlackBerry. “Seriously, Yun, you should quit this job and come work with me. You know my every move without me needing to say it. You’d make the best secretary.”

Yunho laughs. “Your secretary looks cute in short skirts and high heels. I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” Siwon shoves his BlackBerry into his pocket and opens the cake box. He scoops up a finger-full of cheesecake and sucks it clean, an expression of bliss crossing his face. His phone rings, and he looks comically anguished. “I have to go. I’ll call you later, okay?”

Yunho watches him leave, then glances towards the corner table. Boots has put down the newspaper and is gazing at him. For a moment Yunho does nothing, just lets the pull of attraction go through him. He knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t do something about it, but at the same time he’s not sure. There’s a fluttering inside his mind like distant wing-beats.

Boots beckons to him.

Yunho goes over. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

Boots leans across the table. “Give me your hand.”

Yunho holds his hand out. Boots grips his wrist as if he’s taking Yunho’s pulse. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s unexpected, and Yunho makes a soft sound. Boots sits motionless, his lips parted and colour tingeing his cheeks. Then he sighs, relaxes his grasp slightly, and takes a pen from his jacket pocket. He scrawls his name and number across the back of Yunho’s hand, then lets go.

“You could have just used a napkin,” Yunho turns his hand to read Boots’ name, “Changmin.”

“Why write on paper when I can write on your skin?”

Caught between amusement and embarrassment, Yunho doesn’t know how to respond. He tries to stop himself from smiling. “I have to do the dishes later. Your number will wash away.”

Changmin brushes at his fringe. “I used permanent ink.”

“What?” Startled, Yunho licks his finger and rubs at Changmin’s name. One of the characters smudges.

“So I lied.” Changmin leans back in his chair. “You wouldn’t really wash my number off without writing it down first, would you?”

Yunho bites the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing. “You’re kind of cocky. I don’t like cocky guys.”

“Duly noted.” Changmin looks at him. “What time do you finish tomorrow?”

“Eight,” says Yunho. “Why?”

Changmin smiles. “I’m taking you to dinner.”

A laugh splutters free. Yunho covers his mouth but can’t stop his grin. “What did I just say about cocky guys?”

“I heard you. I thought you might like to try and curb that tendency in me.”

Yunho shakes his head. He has to give this guy props for persistence. “Okay. Okay, Changmin, it’s a date.”

“One more thing.” Changmin lowers his sunglasses and pins Yunho with his gaze, black-eyed and sexy. “Don’t tell your friend Siwon about me. He seems like a dick. I don’t want him spoiling our fun.”

* * *

Changmin keeps him waiting for twenty-six minutes.

Yunho doesn’t mind, but he’s a little disappointed. Changmin was so very pushy yesterday, so keen for a date, and now he’s late. Which could mean many things; the most obvious one being that he’s stuck in traffic. Or maybe he wasn’t serious about the date in the first place, although why he’d bother sitting in a coffee shop for half the day in order to secure a date and then not actually turn up is beyond Yunho.

He wanders up and down, looking into shop windows as he waits. There’s a cold wind blowing, teasing his hair, creeping down the collar of his jacket to lick at his neck. Yunho goes closer to the shop windows as if the light from within can warm him. He looks through the glass at a display of watches dipped in platinum, watches with multiple dials or inlaid with diamonds and trailing crystal beads.

“Hey.”

Yunho turns, a polite smile dying on his lips when he sees Changmin leaning against the side of a silver-blue Mercedes roadster. Not the usual kind of Mercedes, either, but some elegant and expensive version of the marque that’s low-slung and sexy and must have cost an absolute fortune to import. It’s the kind of car Siwon says he’d like to buy if he wasn’t so sensible.

The car is taken in at first glance. Yunho’s gaze rocks back to Changmin. Fastens on him. God. It takes every atom of Yunho’s rapidly dwindling willpower to resist the urge to slide down the window behind him and end on the ground on his knees.

Changmin looks good enough to grace the fashion pages of a magazine. He’s wearing leather trousers, shiny and supple along his thighs, and biker boots with buckles, and a midnight-blue shirt that must be made of silk for it to drape like that. His hair is brushed back a little. It makes him look taller, makes his features more intense. He’s almost too much, too beautiful, but then he smiles, and his mouth is soft and sensual.

Yunho feels like a fish caught on a hook. The attraction is like a sharp, visceral tug on his guts, as if he’s being turned inside out. “Hi,” he says, mouth dry, palms wet, body humming with tension.

Changmin doesn’t apologise for being late. He just smiles again and opens the passenger door wide. “Get in,” he says, then crosses behind the roadster and slides into the driver’s seat.

Yunho doesn’t care for the peremptory order. It raises his hackles. It also raises goosebumps. He likes straightforward guys, guys who don’t play games. Everything in him is telling him that Changmin is really bad news. He knows Changmin is so far out of his league that they’re not even on the same planet. Changmin is not just going to break his heart, he’s going to rip it right out of his chest and crush it beneath his boots.

Yunho knows all of this beyond any doubt, yet still he gets into the car.

The door locks as soon as it closes. It makes him jump. Stupid, really; it’s a convertible, if he was in any danger he could just jump right out. The locked door means nothing. Nothing at all.

Yunho realises he’s staring at Changmin. He feels like a rabbit hypnotised by a cobra. Changmin has the darkest eyes he’s ever seen, black and intense and—

He pulls his gaze away, heart pounding. Shit. No one, male or female, has ever had this effect on him before. Obviously his self-imposed chastity of the last few years has made him a complete pushover.

That, plus Changmin is the hottest thing Yunho has ever seen.

“Want to go for a ride?” Changmin asks, eyebrows arching in amusement.

“Uh,” Yunho says. “Sure.”

Changmin turns the ignition and the engine rumbles, growls, then roars as they accelerate away from the kerb. The heavy sound of the V8 is almost enough to drown out the fluttering of wing-beats in Yunho’s mind.

They drive. Changmin doesn’t speak. Yunho doesn’t know what to say. He darts glances at Changmin’s hands on the wheel and tries to imagine those hands on him instead. Oh God, he is so screwed, sitting in a supercar in his chainstore clothes next to a man who looks like a movie star and a model and Yunho’s every wet dream all rolled into one.

Stop freaking out, he tells himself. He came after you first. And it’s not like you don’t know how to behave around rich people. Siwon is probably richer than this guy.

The thought steadies him and Yunho relaxes. He lets the glide and bark of the powerful car lull him right up until the moment they arrive at a restaurant that, according to his colleague Jooyeon, has a waiting list of four months and prices with so many zeroes on the end that they can’t fit them on the menus.

“Okay,” Yunho says, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but there’s no way I can afford to eat here. I doubt I could even afford a cup of coffee.”

Changmin gives him a look of surprise. “I invited you.”

Embarrassment crawls over Yunho. “Even so.” He can’t hold Changmin’s gaze. “You don’t need to impress me.”

“I wasn’t—” Changmin stops. He takes his hand from the wheel, strokes the back of his forefinger down the side of Yunho’s face.

Yunho freezes, desire slamming into him. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but allow the slow, soft caress.

“I want you to enjoy a nice meal.” Changmin leans closer, the words a hot whisper over Yunho’s skin. “I want to enjoy getting to know you. This is as good a place as any. But if you prefer, we can go and have squid burgers at Lotteria.”

The incongruity of that statement breaks the spell, makes Yunho laugh. “Maybe not Lotteria. I do have some standards for a date.”

“And I am too far above those standards,” Changmin says, far too perceptive and incredibly arrogant both at once.

“Yes.” Yunho moves away from Changmin’s touch, covers the movement by fiddling with the seatbelt. “I find you quite intimidating, actually.”

“I have certain... control freak tendencies.” Changmin gives him a wolfish smile. “Maybe you can cure me. Make me learn to relax and let go.”

Yunho knows a double entendre when it’s rubbed in his face, but he ignores it and sits a little straighter and summons some of the steel he’s let kink since he finished his military service. “Okay, let’s start by going somewhere less ridiculous for dinner.”

Changmin puts his hand back on the steering wheel. “You choose. Tell me where you want me to go.”

Yunho flashes him a look of merriment. “Don’t tempt me.”

Changmin laughs. It makes him seem younger, suddenly; young and carefree and likeable, and Yunho wants more of this Changmin. Laughter has always been his biggest weakness in a man, and Changmin’s laughter is so at odds with the appearance he cultivates that Yunho wants to hear it again.

“Drive,” he says, all imperious, and Changmin grins.

They end up at a Chinese restaurant that’s still expensive, but not prohibitively so. It specialises in Sichuan food. Yunho asks for the fuqi feipian but is told, with great regret, that the dish isn’t available that night. “Never mind,” Yunho says, scanning the menu again. “I’ll choose something else.”

“No.” Changmin takes the menu from him and looks up at the waiter, fixing the man with his black-eyed gaze. “You will bring us the fuqi feipian.”

The waiter jerks back on his heels, blinks, and mumbles something indistinct. He hurries away towards the kitchen.

“It’s no bother for me to have something else,” Yunho says, puzzled.

“It’s no bother for you to have what you want.” Changmin smiles and lifts his wineglass. “Gambei.”

They drink, Yunho watching Changmin’s mouth, the way his lips move, the way the red wine glistens, and it reminds him of something, reminds him of—of... He frowns, groping after the memory, and realises Changmin is looking at him with a quizzical expression. Embarrassed, Yunho takes refuge in small talk and asks about Changmin’s work, his interests, his life, a whole rush of idiotic questions.

Changmin folds his hands on the tabletop. “I’m not all that fascinating,” he says with a smile. “I want to know about you.”

Yunho hesitates. He’s never met someone who doesn’t like to talk about themselves. The knowledge makes him shy all of a sudden. That’s new, too. He’s never shy. Usually he can talk about anything to anyone, but with Changmin looking at him across the table, sleepy-eyed and with a half smile just touching his lips, Yunho finds it difficult to think of anything to say.

He finds himself talking about Siwon instead. Siwon’s the interesting one. He’s just the best friend. It’s easier talking about someone else, easier to talk about himself through his relationship with Siwon. He talks even when dishes are brought to their table, talks and pauses long enough to drink more wine, to try some hotpot, and then Changmin asks, “Do you love him?”

Yunho blinks, genuinely shocked. “What? No. Not like that. I mean, not romantically. Oh God, no. It’s just...” He circles his chopsticks in the air. He’d alluded to the slaughter of Siwon’s family but hadn’t dwelt on the details, and he doesn’t intend to go into it now. But he needs to explain why he and Siwon are so tied together. “It’s the memory of tragedy,” Yunho says. “It makes people closer than normal friendship. Closer than brothers. Maybe even closer than lovers. It’s hard to explain.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Changmin says, “I know what you mean,” and there’s a raw, husky quality to his voice, a flicker of pain in his eyes, and then it’s gone.

Arrested by that brief glimpse into Changmin’s past, Yunho puts down the chopsticks and looks at him. Maybe it’s the lighting in here, maybe it’s just the wine going to his head, but he could swear that he knows Changmin.

“Have we met before?” Yunho asks tentatively. “Before yesterday, I mean. There’s something about you—it’s like I remember you from somewhere.”

Changmin tosses his head, smiling as if amused by his own vanity. “I’m pretty memorable. Maybe you saw me around.”

Yunho wants to smile in response, but it won’t come. “No, that’s not it. It’s more like...” The memory teases him. Snow. A park. Cherry tree. He sighs, the recollection sliding away. “I don’t know.”

The waiter returns to their table bearing a plate of fuqi feipian, the scent hot and spiced as it’s set in front of them. Yunho thanks the waiter, who looks at him blankly. Changmin makes a dismissive gesture and the waiter leaves them alone.

Yunho gives a laugh of disbelief as he selects pieces of the sliced offal. “He really said it wasn’t on the menu tonight, yet here it is. How did you do that?”

Changmin shrugs. “I can make people do anything.”

“Because you’re hot and charming and you have money?” Yunho jokes.

“Because I can.”

Amusement freezes in Yunho’s veins. He’s heard those words before, the same words spoken in the same tone by the same man. He forces himself to chew, to swallow. The rush of beating wings fills his head, so loud and frantic it feels like he can’t stay upright. Nausea lurches inside him. He feels cold, but he’s sweating.

Changmin must know there’s something wrong. His head jerks up, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring.

Yunho puts both hands on the table and levers himself to his feet. The room is spinning. The wing-beats in his head are so loud. He wants to silence them, needs some space to breathe, to think. His gaze drops to his glass, to the few centimetres of red wine left in it, and it’s not wine, it’s blood, he’s seeing blood, thick and dark, heart’s blood.

“No,” Yunho whispers, lifting his hand.

The glass shatters. It doesn’t just break across the stem; the bowl disintegrates, explodes outwards in a hailstorm of crystal shards and ruby droplets.

Changmin pushes back his chair, stands up. He looks mildly surprised, but not shocked. “Yunho,” he says, voice low and cautious, “are you all right?”

Yunho turns his hand, expecting to see dozens of glass shards embedded into his palm, but there’s nothing. Not even a scratch. There’s fragments of glass all over the tablecloth, blown all through their food, and there’s splashes of wine making crazy shapes, but he’s untouched.

For only the second time in his life, Yunho thinks he might faint. Snow, I’ll wake up in the park in snow and Siwon will have run off and left me, he thinks, but no, he’s not nine years old anymore, he’s on a date, for Christ’s sake, a date with a really hot guy who probably thinks he’s a lunatic, and oh shit he has to get out of here before he pukes.

“I’m sorry,” Yunho says, the words raspy. “I don’t feel well. I—”

Changmin is at his side in an instant, his hands against Yunho’s shoulders, steadying him. “Let me take you home.”

Yunho fights the urge to run. “No. I’m fine. Please don’t trouble yourself.” He tries to remember where they are, if there’s a bus stop nearby. He pulls away from Changmin, trying to keep himself together. “Thank you for dinner.”

“Fuck dinner.” Changmin reaches for him. “I’m taking you home. You’re not leaving like this, you’re—”

“I’ll be fine.” Yunho lifts his hand again and Changmin takes an involuntary step back, eyes wide. Yunho struggles against a fresh surge of confusion. He made the wineglass shatter. Could he break a human being? He curls his hand into a fist and holds it against his chest, trembling.

“You can’t,” Changmin says as if he can read Yunho’s mind. “You can’t hurt me. Not like that.”

At least that’s what Yunho thinks he says, because the sound of wing-beats banging frantically around his skull drowns out everything else. His head feels like it’s fracturing into pieces. “I’m sorry,” he gasps, “so sorry,” and he staggers out of the restaurant and into the car park, where he falls to his knees and vomits up the entire of their fancy meal. The contents of his stomach are curdled with red wine. Yunho closes his eyes and retches again, remembering blood on the walls, soaked into the rugs, spattered across the ceiling, intestines torn out and hearts excavated from behind cracked ribs.

“Oh God.” Hot tears cut down Yunho’s cold cheeks. He shakes with the force of his sobs. “Oh God, oh God, no.”

* * *

Yunho finds a bus stop a few blocks away from the restaurant. He slumps down on the bench a polite distance away from a woman with a child and closes his eyes, wishing the noise in his head would fade. He presses the heel of his hand against his brow, his mind giving him again and again the moment when the wineglass exploded.

There’s no rational explanation for it.

He remembers long ago when a mirror broke because of him. He hadn’t touched it, hadn’t even been near it, but it smashed into pieces anyway. It was when he was sick, when his family had moved into Siwon’s house after the tragedy. His mother had come running upstairs and Yunho had thought he’d get the worst scolding of his life. Instead she gathered him into her arms and held him tight and berated the ghosts in the walls, shouted at them to leave him alone.

Siwon’s house had been full of ghosts. But tonight—that wasn’t the work of ghosts. He’d done it. He’d made the wineglass shatter, and he doesn’t know how or why.

The jangly up-tempo pop song of his ringtone startles him. Yunho takes out his phone and checks the display. It’s Siwon.

“There you are,” Siwon says when Yunho answers. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you all evening!”

“Nowhere,” Yunho says. He doesn’t want to mention the date. “Sorry. I didn’t hear my phone.”

Siwon fusses at this for a moment then launches into a monologue about going out somewhere tomorrow. Yunho listens but can’t connect himself to the conversation, and his lacklustre replies get weaker and weaker.

“Yunho,” Siwon says after a pause, “Yun, are you all right?”

“No.” The word comes out before Yunho can stop it. “I don’t know.”

“Did something happen?” Siwon’s voice changes. He sounds worried. “Did you meet... someone? Did they hurt you?”

“What kind of question is that?” Yunho exhales, trying to banish the lingering sense of panic. The urge for the comfort of the familiar is overwhelming. He gives in to it. “Can we meet?”

“Right now?” Caution still inhabits Siwon’s tone, but there’s also relief. “Sure. I’m just leaving work. Where are you?”

Yunho doesn’t want to put Siwon to any trouble and ask for a lift. Instead he names the bar he worked at when he was a student. The university isn’t too far away; he can walk there in the time it’ll take Siwon to negotiate the evening traffic.

They arrange to meet in half an hour. Yunho returns his phone to his pocket, gets up, and heads towards the university campus. He sets a good pace, almost jogging, more to keep the circling thoughts at bay than from any urgency.

He takes a shortcut he remembers, noting that the area has become rundown, windows boarded-up and rubbish lying around and angry slashes of graffiti daubed on the walls. Yunho slows a little, conscious of his heartbeat and the fact that he’s wearing nice clothes and he’s on his own. Not that he thinks he’s in any danger, but still, it pays to be cautious.

There’s an alleyway up ahead that runs along the side of a warehouse. A few years ago the path was well-lit, but now the streetlamps have been smashed. Yunho takes his hands out of his pockets and strides into the alley as if he owns it.

He gets halfway down when two men step out of the darkness and face him. Yunho stares at them, startled and slightly offended. This used to be such a safe place and now—

“Give us your wallet,” one of the men says. “And your phone.”

Yunho backs up one step. “No.”

“Don’t be a hero,” the other guy says with a grin. “Just hand it over.”

“Fuck off.” Yunho retreats one more step. The last few months drop away and he summons his army training and the memory of his hapkido lessons. The two guys are a couple of years younger than him; they probably haven’t done their military service yet, they’re just a couple of punks trying to act tough. He can take them, he knows he can; he can do a few moves on them and buy himself enough time to get to safety.

“Guess we’ll have to do this the hard way,” the first guy says.

“Guess so.” The second man makes a gesture, and a flick-knife is in his hand.

Shit. Yunho spins side-on to present less of a target, trying to silence the part of his brain telling him to run. He relies on muscle memory, disengaging from his thoughts and going on instinct as the guy with the knife stabs at him. Yunho moves from the shoulders, sways to one side and grounds himself, blocks the attack with one hand, striking out with the other. Everything seems to happen slowly, as if through a long-distance lens and a clutter of dust, and then his fist connects and his assailant grunts and fetid breath washes over his face, and it’s all real and now.

The other guy yells a challenge and aims a kick. Yunho jerks from the knife guy, unable to follow through with the second part of his attack as he’s forced into defence. He manages to turn and crouch just enough that the kick slams into his thigh rather than his groin. It hurts, an angry red pain that makes him snarl. He wants to lash out, but that would be dangerous. The knife guy is still the biggest threat; he has to focus on disarming him first.

Yunho stamps an aggressive step towards the two of them and they give ground. Good—they’re rattled. He flicks a look between them, waiting for their next move. It comes from the first guy, who barrels towards him with another yell. Yunho bounces on his toes then darts to one side just before the thug reaches him. Instead of pursuing the opening, Yunho turns on the knife guy and attacks. Knife guy is surprised enough to stumble backwards. Yunho shrieks his rage and hooks his bruised leg around knife guy’s knee, yanks hard and tips him onto the ground. At the same time he slams the blade of his hand into knife guy’s inner elbow. Knife guy howls and drops his weapon. Yunho kicks it far away and then jumps free of the thug, running towards where the knife lies on the ground.

“You fuck!” shouts the first guy. The sound of breaking glass makes Yunho freeze, but then he realises it’s not him, it’s the thug splintering the neck of a discarded beer bottle, and then the bottle is hurled at him.

Yunho ducks. The rest of the bottle shatters on the wall behind him. Glass showers over him, catches in his hair, slices tiny stinging cuts down his face and neck. He gropes for the knife, gets a grip on it and rises to his feet. The adrenalin is draining from him now; he feels sick and dispirited.

The second guy lumbers at him again. Yunho holds the knife out in front of him. The first guy comes at him at the same time. It all happens so fast. They rush him, and his knife-hand is slammed hard against the wall. He refuses to let go of the weapon. They crush his hand against the wall again and there’s an explosion of pain. Yunho kicks at them, furious and desperate, struggles and fights with everything he has left, and then out of the shadows there’s Changmin like some kind of avenging angel, his face alight with fury as he lifts both men and tosses them across the alley as if they were nothing but ragdolls.

The thugs hit the wall and collapse onto the ground. Yunho stares at them, not quite able to believe what’s just happened. Changmin stalks over to the fallen men and gives the nearest one a brutal kick. The man doesn’t even groan. Yunho hopes it’s because the guy’s unconscious and not because—

He stops that thought as Changmin turns to him. “Are you okay?”

Yunho nods. His right hand is burning with pain. He lifts it, angles it to the faint light overhead, and sees the blood running down from his skinned knuckles.

Changmin hisses and presses back against the opposite side of the alleyway, his gaze fixed to the bloodied wounds.

“It’s nothing,” Yunho says. “We should call the police. I should...”

Changmin’s eyes are black. He looks away, breathes deeply. He’s trembling. Maybe the sight of blood makes him feel ill. Yunho tries to pull his sleeve down to cover the gash, but the movement hurts and he gasps.

“I think your wrist is fractured.” Changmin keeps his gaze averted. His fingers are clenching and clawing. He must really hate the sight of blood. “You should go to hospital. I’ll stay here and wait for the police.”

Yunho shakes his head. “I should wait, too.”

“No.” Changmin almost snarls. “You should go. I saw what happened. I can tell the police everything. Go and meet Siwon. He can take you to hospital.”

Uncertain, Yunho glances down at the two unmoving bodies. The pain from his wrist is distracting him, preventing him from thinking clearly. It’s like there’s a fog in his mind, thick and deep, and he’s stumbling around in it. He just wants to lie down and rest. “Okay,” he says. “If you’re sure...”

Changmin turns from him. “Go. Go now.”

Cradling his injured wrist to his body, Yunho takes out his phone. It’s awkward, doing everything left-handed, but he manages it, even though each footstep jars his wrist and brings a stab of fresh pain. He hits the speed-dial for Siwon and waits for the call to connect. As he limps from the alleyway, he hears a soft, muted sound behind him. Turning back, he sees Changmin crouched on the ground over one of the thugs.

Siwon picks up. Yunho looks ahead, his attention on the phone call.

It’s only later that he wonders how Changmin knew he was meeting Siwon—and more to the point, how the hell did Changmin know he was in trouble?

* * *

Time in hospital seems to move at a different pace. Yunho leans against a stack of four pillows and stares out of the window, which offers a view of the almost featureless building opposite. There’s a ledge halfway up, and a couple of pigeons come and go. One is white and brown, the other is grey. Yunho supposes he could watch TV, but the birds are more interesting. He had a dream early this morning that ended with the sound of wing-beats, and when he woke up he saw the grey pigeon fluttering against the window as if it were trying to get in.

Siwon brought him here last night, arranged for a private room and told everyone that mattered to send the medical bills to him. Yunho protested that he had insurance through his workplace, but Siwon kept on frowning and it was easier to let him feel like he was in charge for now.

They set his arm—Changmin was right, he does have a fractured wrist—and put it in plaster and ran a whole battery of tests on him because of the open wound on his hand. They picked out a few pieces of glass in his face and daubed him with a stinging, stinking ointment and told him he was fortunate. The skin is healing, the damage minimal—he’s had worse cuts from shaving. It’s just his wrist that hurts. Maybe it would be less painful if he wore the sling they’d given him, but he doesn’t want to look so feeble.

Yunho thinks he should have been discharged hours ago, but it’s already two o’clock in the afternoon and his only visitor has been the woman with the breakfast trolley. He’s bored and hungry and he has too much time to think.

Changmin hasn’t called. Yunho fiddles with his phone, turns it over and over with his uninjured hand. Looks like he really screwed up there. That was the worst date he’s ever been on. He is so incredibly lame—complaining about the expensive restaurant, being fussy about his food, freaking out and smashing a wineglass just by looking at it, throwing up in the car park and then getting into a fight with two would-be muggers in a dark alleyway until his date rescued him. Thank God he hadn’t tried to kiss Changmin; the poor guy would have probably burst into flames or something.

So much for shrugging off his toxic nickname. Yunho sighs. Maybe he should start investigating the monastic life.

The door opens and in comes Siwon. He’s carrying a plastic bag and a takeaway pizza box. “Can you believe it?” he asks in lieu of a proper greeting. “I wanted to come and keep you company today but there was a problem with the Shanghai office, and by the time I’d sorted it out...”

Yunho smiles. “It’s okay.”

“I got your favourite. Hospital food is evil.” Siwon drags the over-the-bed table closer and dumps the box on top. “Plus you’re weak, you’re not going to eat it all, so I can have some, too.” He opens the lid and the scent of melted cheese and the sight of seafood marinara makes Yunho’s stomach lurch, and not in a good way.

Siwon takes a pill bottle from his jacket. “And don’t forget these,” he says, shaking out a couple of vitamins onto a slice of pizza. “Eat. You need to keep your strength up if you’re going to go all Stephen Chow on people.”

“Stephen Chow is much cooler than me.” Yunho picks up the pizza, wincing at the dull wrenching ache in his wrist. He takes a bite of food, popping the vitamins into his mouth at the same time. “Seriously, Kung Fu Panda could have done a better job.”

“You didn’t really say much about it last night.” Siwon reaches into the bag and brings out two green tea drinks. “You were in shock, I guess. Want to talk about it now?”

Yunho nibbles on the pizza. “Nothing much to say. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two guys pulled a knife on me. I was an idiot and fought them.”

Siwon gives him a look. “You’re really brave. And also really stupid. You could have been seriously injured.”

“Yeah.” Yunho starts to say that Changmin helped him, but the words won’t come. He folds the rest of the pizza into his mouth instead and takes another slice. He tries again to mention Changmin’s involvement. “Last night, there was—there was...” He stops. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to form the right phrase.

“There was what?” Siwon asks, looking puzzled.

Yunho shakes his head. “Can you open the drink for me, please? Kind of hard to do it one-handed.”

Siwon gives him a big smile and uncaps the bottle.

They chat about the usual subjects—Siwon’s work, the crazy old man who lives in the apartment downstairs from Yunho, the nice girl that Siwon has just started dating and whether it might turn serious—and they’ve finished eating and have tidied everything away when a doctor comes in with a reassuring smile and a clipboard and an air of distraction.

Siwon gets to his feet. “Can Yunho go home now?”

“In a little while.” The doctor makes ‘sit down’ motions with his hand and Siwon resumes his seat, sending Yunho a bewildered glance. There’s silence for a moment, and then the doctor says, “Well, now,” with the sort of passive joviality that Yunho associates with TV doctors who are about to deliver devastating news.

“Well,” the doctor says again. “This is... unusual.”

“What?” Yunho asks, tucking his injured arm against his chest and crossing his left arm over it in a protective gesture.

“Will he be okay?” Siwon demands, half rising from the chair again.

“The fracture is straightforward enough; it will heal.” The doctor stops smiling and checks something on the clipboard. He turns a page, lets it fall, then stares at Yunho. “It’s the results of your blood work that we need to discuss.”

Yunho catches his breath. Fear blossoms, tightening his chest. “What’s wrong with my blood?”

“Ah,” says the doctor, adjusting his glasses, “I phrased that badly. There’s nothing wrong with your blood. It’s just... well, that is to say—” he glances at the clipboard again, “you have an abnormally high level of toxicity in your system. And by that I mean you’re an estimated forty times over the fatal dose. You should be dead.”

Time seems to freeze. Yunho tries to process this information. Beside him, Siwon makes a sound of disbelief.

“Toxic. I’m toxic,” Yunho murmurs, more to himself than to anyone else. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing does. He pulls himself together, looks up at the doctor. “What kind of toxin?”

“Aconite.” The doctor smiles as if this is some sort of achievement, to be forty times over the fatal limit. As if Yunho had tried to be a medical anomaly. “In extremely small doses, aconite has beneficial properties as an analgesic, anaesthetic, and sedative. But one can have too much of a good thing: anything above twenty millilitres dispensed as a tincture is a fatal dose, and death results in a few hours.”

“Poison,” Yunho says, his throat clogged, his voice hoarse. “You’re telling me I’ve been poisoned.”

The doctor nods. “Comprehensively so, and possibly over a long period of time. I’ve never seen anything like this before. You should be dead, but you don’t display any of the symptoms associated with aconite poisoning.”

Siwon speaks up. “And what are the symptoms?”

“It begins with numbness in the extremities,” the doctor says, “followed by nausea and vomiting, paralysis, and finally, cardiac arrest. In anything but minute doses, it is always fatal. Always. Except in this case.”

“How is this possible?” Yunho sags against the pillows. “How did it get into me?”

The doctor consults his clipboard again. “That’s why we’re asking you to stay here a little longer. We’d like to run a few more tests, just to be certain the results haven’t been compromised somehow. We’ll make it a priority case.”

“But I don’t understand,” Yunho protests. “I don’t want to stay. I just want to know how it got into my blood!”

“It could be any number of factors.” The doctor has his reassuring expression on again. “Aconite doesn’t need to be ingested; it can be absorbed through the skin. Perhaps you have a genetic predisposition to tolerating certain drugs, or you’ve experienced prolonged exposure to minute amounts of the toxin. There’s an old legend about a king who was so afraid of being poisoned that he fed himself small quantities of every kind of poison as a prophylactic. He built up immunity, though in order to stay alive he had to continue taking the poisons every day.”

The idea seems farfetched. “What happened to him?” Yunho asks.

“He was captured by an enemy and his bodyguard stabbed him to death.” The doctor gives a wry smile. “You can’t protect yourself from everything.” He pauses, then adds, “A nurse will be along shortly to take a few more samples. Please do give us your utmost cooperation. I can’t stress enough how unusual this case is. If there’s some way we can identify the element that makes you seemingly immune to aconite, then it could be a great leap forward in toxicology.”

“I don’t want to be a great leap forward!” Yunho grabs at the bed sheets and regrets it when the action jars his wrist. He grits his teeth against the pain. “I just want to go home. You can take your damn samples just in case you made a mistake, but after that, I’m leaving.”

“I understand.” The doctor backs away. “I’ll give you some time to think things through. This is an extraordinary situation. Unique, I’d say.”

Yunho puts his head in his hands. He stays like that until he hears the doctor leave and the door close, and then he looks out of the window at the pigeons on the ledge opposite. “Unique. That’s me.”

Siwon shuffles his chair closer. “Yun...”

“This is unbelievable.” Yunho shakes his head, over and over. He only stops when Siwon pats his leg in mute sympathy. “Who would want to poison me? And why?”

“I don’t know.” Siwon runs a hand through his hair. He looks distracted. “It sounds a bit unlikely to me.”

“The doctor wouldn’t lie.”

“Maybe the lab results were wrong,” Siwon suggests. “You heard the guy—he said they needed to do more tests to be sure. They might have contaminated your blood somehow.”

Yunho makes an exasperated noise. “How can that be possible?”

Siwon shrugs. “How would I know? It can happen, that’s all. Maybe your blood samples were stored next to something radioactive.”

“I’m not radioactive, I’m being poisoned!”

They stare at each other. Siwon’s gaze skitters, then slides away.

The answer comes to Yunho then. He tries to dismiss it, but it won’t budge. “Siwon,” he says, softly, his voice fading. He doesn’t want to think this. Doesn’t want to entertain the possibility. But it must be true. It must.

Siwon keeps his head lowered, studying his expensive shiny shoes. His jaw is tense. There’s guilt in every line of his body.

“Siwon,” Yunho says again, desperate. “Tell me it wasn’t you. Please tell me.”

The silence goes on and on. With each passing moment, Yunho’s fragile hope cracks and crumbles. Still Siwon says nothing.

Yunho doesn’t want to push this, doesn’t want to face the awful truth, but he needs to know. “The vitamin pills,” he says. “They weren’t vitamins. They were poison. Deadly poison.” His composure wobbles. He can barely hold on. The sense of betrayal is so huge he can’t comprehend it. “Just now, you brought me pizza and you fed me poison. You’ve been poisoning me since I was nine years old.”

“Since you were five.” Siwon looks up. His eyes are red-rimmed and his voice sounds tight and harsh, as if every word is an effort. “It was my father’s idea. I merely followed his directions. Remember that time you were sick, when you were so ill your parents thought you might die, when they came to my father for help? That’s when he knew beyond doubt what you were. His grandfather—my great-grandfather—he said years ago that your family would be the one to help us destroy our enemy.”

“Enemy,” Yunho repeats, confusion swirling and an awful, terrible pain crushing his heart. “What enemy? Why did you poison me?”

“I had no choice!” Siwon stands up so fast that his chair tips back and clatters across the floor. “Do you think I got some kind of kick out of feeding you aconite? I hated what I was doing to you, I’ve always hated it! But at the same time I knew it was okay, I knew it wouldn’t harm you. Not if I was careful with the dosage.”

He turns away for a moment, his hands over his mouth. Locking his palms together as if praying, Siwon exhales. He picks up the chair and sits down again. Weary now, he continues, “The only time I made a mistake was after the funerals, when we moved back to the house. I got it wrong then. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was upset. I was too full of grief and rage and I didn’t pay proper attention to my father’s notes and I gave you too much. I made you sick and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for all of it, but you have to know, you have to understand: I had no choice then and I have no choice now.”

Yunho wants to open the window for some fresh air, but he can’t seem to make himself move from the bed. Everything he ever knew has turned out to be a lie, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. “I don’t understand,” he says, a phrase he’s starting to despise. “How can poisoning me help you in any way? I’m your friend, your best friend. Why did you do this to me?”

Siwon shoots him an anguished look but can’t hold his gaze. “It was my great-grandfather’s idea. He said we should find your family, find the son who could be made into a weapon. A weapon to protect my family. A weapon that would break the unholy bond my ancestor forged with that monster.”

Yunho shakes his head. None of this makes any sense. Maybe he’s hallucinating. Maybe the doctors pumped him full of some kind of experimental drugs when they set his wrist and he’s only feeling the effects now. He’s trying so hard to understand, but it’s as if he keeps missing something important every time they go around in a circle. “What enemy? What monster? What the hell are you talking about?”

“A vampire.” Siwon bows his head and rocks forward, his hands in his hair and his voice muffled. “There’s something about you, Yun, something unique and precious and incredibly rare that makes you irresistible to vampires. The thing that makes you immune to poison is also a lure. Vampires will be drawn to you like cats to catnip.”

Yunho stares at him. “Siwon,” he says, slowly and clearly, “there are no such things as vampires.”

Siwon looks up, his face ruined with tears. “What do you think killed my family?”

* * *

Yunho discharges himself from hospital. He doesn’t wait for the nurse to take more blood, doesn’t want to listen to more bullshit talk from the doctor. Most of all, he can’t bear to be in the same room as Siwon. Not in the same room, not even in the same building. He has to leave; he has to get out of here and put space between himself and his so-called best friend, the man who’s been systematically poisoning him for the past sixteen years.

Usually so composed and unflappable, Siwon chases after him down the clean, bright corridors. “Listen to me. Just listen, Yun!” He keeps grabbing at Yunho’s jacket, at the collar, at the sleeves, trying to make him slow down, but the white heat of rage and the utter blankness of despair drive Yunho onwards.

“Yunho, for fuck’s sake, just listen!” Siwon grabs at him again, seizes Yunho’s injured wrist and pulls him around.

Pain slices through Yunho with such force that his knees buckle and he almost falls.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Siwon catches him, hooks one arm around Yunho’s waist to steady him. He holds Yunho close. “I hurt you. I’m sorry, please forgive me. You’re my best friend; I can’t lose you, not after everything that’s happened. Please, Yun, please understand, please listen...”

“Get off me.” Yunho shoves at Siwon’s chest with his good hand. He feels weak and small and it makes him furious. He doesn’t know if it’s the agony in his wrist or the betrayal that hurts the most, and then tears are pouring down his face.

Siwon steps back, hands raised and fluttering. He looks lost, as helpless as the day they moved back into the Choi family’s house after the murders. In some distant corner of his mind, Yunho feels sorry for Siwon, but the pity is overlaid by hurt and anger and far too many other emotions too sharp and complicated for him to untangle.

“Here.” Siwon pulls a packet of tissues from his coat pocket and offers one out.

Yunho takes it, dries his eyes. His wrist throbs with a vivid, angry pulse. He exhales, focuses on his breathing, and wills everything to stop hurting.

Siwon scuffs his feet. “I’ll take you home.”

“No.” Yunho gathers his strength and pushes away from the wall. He resumes walking towards the exit.

“Don’t be stupid.” Siwon follows him. “You can’t just expect me to leave you.”

Yunho shakes his head. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk to you. Not right now.”

“And I’ll respect that, I promise,” Siwon runs past him, blocks his way, walks backwards when Yunho doesn’t stop, “but first you have to listen to me. The poison can’t harm you. Even a hundred times over the fatal limit won’t harm you, not now. When you were younger, maybe, but not now.”

“Excuse me, I wasn’t aware you’d taken a degree in medicine along with business studies,” Yunho snaps.

“My great-grandfather said—and my father believed him—he said...”

“Your great-grandfather is dead!” Yunho shouts. “And your father, your mother, your sister, everyone! I understand you want revenge, but this? Doing this to me? You’re insane. You should be locked up.”

Siwon halts. He looks like Yunho just punched him in the mouth.

Guilt twinges Yunho but he shoves it aside. He sets his jaw and walks past Siwon.

“My great-grandfather said your family were special.” Siwon’s voice carries down the corridor.

Despite himself, Yunho pauses.

“Whatever you think, please believe that I never meant to hurt you.” Footsteps, and then Siwon is at his side, big dark eyes full of unhappiness. “You’re my friend, maybe my only true friend. We’ve been through everything together. You’re closer than a brother. The last twenty years have not been a lie. Our friendship—what I feel for you—it’s real, Yun, can’t you see that?”

Yunho turns his head. “I don’t know any more.”

Siwon takes a breath, starts to reach out, then stops as a couple of nurses leave a room further down the corridor and walk past. “Let me take you home,” Siwon says in a low voice. “We can talk properly there.”

“Talk to me now.” Yunho sends a pointed glance at his watch. “After I leave here I don’t want to see you again. Not for a while. You’ve got two minutes.”

Irritation darkens Siwon’s face. “Why must you be so stubborn!” He rakes his hands through his hair, regains his composure. “Look, the aconite—it won’t cause you any harm. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that. It’s because of your bloodline, it’s—”

“Bloodline.” Yunho stares at him, an awful thought coming to mind. “You didn’t—you haven’t been poisoning my parents, too?”

Siwon looks shocked. “No! God, no, of course not. It would kill them. Only you have the ability to absorb toxins in such a way that renders the poison harmless to you but fatal to anyone else.”

The words fall on Yunho like hammer-blows. He hasn’t had the time or the wits to make the connection before, but now here it is, the pieces sliding into place with awful finality. “This is why the people I slept with at university ended up sick. This is why Private Kam died on the training exercise.”

It hurts to say it out loud, to admit the weight of guilt he’s been carrying around all this time. He looks at Siwon. “I really am toxic. I’m poisonous.”

Siwon swallows. “Yes.”

“You knew. All along, you knew. That’s why you didn’t want me to date. Why you tried to stop me from doing CPR. You knew people would get sick from intimate contact with me.”

“I didn’t expect anyone to die.” Siwon stares at the floor. “That was...”

Yunho shakes his head. “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it.” The pain in his wrist has receded, but he doubts he’ll ever feel whole again in his heart. “Why aconite?”

“It has another name,” Siwon says. “Wolfsbane.”

“What, so now there are werewolves involved in this, too?”

“No.” Siwon steps forward, the glitter of a zealot coming into his expression. “Wolfsbane incapacitates not just werewolves, but also vampires. In strong enough doses, it’s fatal to all supernatural creatures.”

Yunho moves back. “Are you full of wolfsbane?”

Siwon shakes his head, looking weary. “It would kill me, the same way it would kill your parents and anyone else who had exposure to it. I told you, it’s because—”

“I’m special. I’m unique. Yeah, you told me.” Yunho hears the bitterness in his voice, the sarcasm. “I’m so special to you that I’m expendable. You keep saying we’re friends, but for twenty years you’ve been using me—and for what? To keep you safe from a big scary vampire?”

Siwon throws up his hands, frustration slashing through his composure. “Why won’t you listen? The threat is real!”

Yunho laughs, cracked and shrill. “Listen to yourself! You sound like a madman! I understand why you believe this... this fairy story about a vampire killing your family, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that you’ve been feeding poison—deadly poison—to your best friend since we were kids. And for what? The off-chance that it’s all true and that a big scary vampire is going to come after you? And then what’s supposed to happen, huh? The vampire bites me instead because I’m so special and taste like vampire catnip? And what the hell will you do then—run away?”

Siwon faces him, expression so fierce and full of anguish that Yunho steps back. “I get to kill it,” Siwon says, his voice trembling. “The poison in your blood will burn the monster from the inside. Even one drop of your blood will hurt it, but it won’t be able to resist you, and the more it feeds from you, the deeper its agony, and in the end it’ll burn up and become a charred skeleton, and then I’ll hack off its head and its limbs and I’ll throw all the pieces into the sea and finally we’ll be free of it.”

The corridor is silent. Dust motes dance in the late afternoon light.

Yunho exhales a long, shaking breath. “You’ll be free. I’ll be dead. Fuck you, Siwon. I’m not playing this game.”

He shoves past, walking fast, faster, desperate to get into the fresh air.

Siwon doesn’t try to stop him this time.

* * *

Yunho gets home to find a familiar silver-blue Mercedes roadster parked outside his apartment block. Changmin is leaning against the hood, booted feet crossed at the ankle, his long grey woollen coat unbuttoned to display faded jeans and a white t-shirt and a purple scarf looped several times around his neck. He’s attracting almost as much attention as the car. Yunho can see crazy old Mr Park peering down from the third floor, and a couple of kids with skateboards are gawping from the street corner.

Changmin takes off his sunglasses and straightens as Yunho comes towards him. “I wanted to see how you were.”

“As you see.” Yunho lifts his plastered arm. He feels too drained to deal with any further drama. “Thank you for your concern, but I’ve had a hell of a day and I’d just like to go to bed.”

Changmin raises an eyebrow. “Want some company?”

The response is unexpected and so fundamentally wrong in this situation that Yunho laughs. He doesn’t know if he’s annoyed or impressed. “You’re sure of yourself.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Changmin gives him a wicked smile.

“No, there’s not, but...” Yunho shrugs and goes past him towards the main door, “I told you—”

Changmin follows alongside him. “You don’t like cocky guys. I remember.”

Yunho fumbles his keys out of his jacket pocket. It’s a difficult operation, because they’re in his right pocket and he has to reach around with his left hand. Just as he thinks he’s got them, the fob slips out his grasp and his keys drop to the ground. “Crap.”

“Allow me.” Changmin leans down and retrieves them. He studies the lock and sorts through the keys, selects the right one, and opens the door. He tucks the keys into Yunho’s left pocket and smiles. They’re standing way too close.

Yunho’s heart is racing. Heat crawls through him. He tries to ignore it. “Thanks. My wrist...”

“I can take the pain away,” Changmin says softly. His eyes are black, their depths promising only pleasure.

Yunho stares at him. He’s tempted. Oh God, how he’s tempted. He drops his gaze to Changmin’s mouth, so full and luscious. Yunho wonders how he’ll taste. After everything he’s been through in the past twenty-four hours, he deserves some fun. Although maybe ‘fun’ isn’t the right description, not with Changmin. Whatever it is, he knows it’ll be amazing. Yunho isn’t certain how much good he’s going to be with an injured arm, but—

Changmin moves closer, his breath sweet and warm. “I’ll be gentle.”

Yunho exhales a laugh. “Can you read my mind or something?”

“I don’t need to read your mind. You have such an expressive face.”

Not just his face. Yunho edges away, embarrassed that his body is reacting so eagerly in such a public place. His anger at Siwon is fading fast, replaced by the heavy, coursing beat of arousal.

Changmin raises his eyebrows. His smile is full of sin. “Want me to help you unlock your apartment door?”

Yunho smiles back at him. “Yes.”

They go inside. The lift isn’t working—it seems to break down at least once a week—and they take the stairs. Changmin follows close on Yunho’s heels. Yunho is aware that he’s being watched, his sense of excitement increasing along with a certain nervousness. He hasn’t been with anyone since university. He’s never been with someone as gorgeous as Changmin. Not even Siwon is—

Yunho shuts down that thought. He doesn’t want to think about Siwon, doesn’t want to reawaken the deep surge of rage and betrayal and misery. He knows he’s about to use Changmin to blot out the day’s revelations, but he doesn’t think Changmin will mind. It seems wrong to feed his lust for Changmin from his anger at Siwon, but Yunho is beyond caring. He just wants to be held, wants Changmin to fuck away all the pain.

By the time they reach the second floor, Yunho realises he has to tell Changmin about his toxic state. Maybe if they don’t kiss too much and if they use condoms, Changmin won’t end up in hospital like his university lovers. Or maybe, if he tells the truth, Changmin will walk out of the door and leave him alone, and Yunho doesn’t think he could bear that. He can’t lose Siwon and Changmin on the same day. Okay, he’ll settle for a compromise: he won’t say anything this time and he’ll give Changmin a blowjob but do himself by hand somehow, and he’ll take one kiss, just one kiss, because he’s been craving Changmin’s mouth from the moment he first set eyes on him.

Yunho is absolutely certain of his decision by the time they reach his apartment. He gives Changmin the key. Heavy silence weighs around them. The afternoon light has faded from this part of the building and they’re standing in shadows. Changmin looks at him for a long moment, then inserts the key into the lock. He turns it. Pushes at the door.

Yunho’s breathing comes clipped and fast. He wants to drag Changmin into the hallway and have him right there, but he keeps hold of his sanity and steps inside, then bends down to take off his shoes.

Changmin stands outside, his arms braced against either side of the doorframe. His gaze is burning, his face taut with expectation and... hope, Yunho realises; Changmin is looking at him with a kind of desperate hope.

Yunho smiles, beckons. “Come in.”

Changmin crosses the threshold. He stops to take off his coat and scarf and boots. His t-shirt clings nice and tight, and Yunho wriggles out of his own jacket and slings it over the back of a chair. Squirms of anticipation coil and quiver inside him. It’s been so damn long, and he just wants to enjoy this feeling, the knowledge of desiring and being desired.

Aware of his duties as host, he moves into the kitchenette and takes down a couple of glasses. “Do you want a drink?”

“No.” Changmin stalks towards him with a hot, feral smile. “I want you.”

Yunho turns to face him, allowing himself to be trapped against the bench. The air ripples between them, the atmosphere thickening. Changmin pins him, his touch gentle but brooking no resistance. Yunho thinks he might just take off right there, he’s so turned on.

Changmin leans closer, almost-brushes his lips from Yunho’s forehead down to his chin. They’re not touching except for where Changmin is holding him, and the infinitesimal space between them feels molten with desire.

On the bench behind him, a glass tumbles and breaks. Yunho starts in shock, his heart pounding, a lick of fear flashing cold through him. Turning his head, he realises it’s nothing sinister—he must have bumped against the glass just now and knocked it over. It’s a normal accident, nothing more. He tries to laugh it off. “I’m so clumsy.”

“Forget it.” Changmin’s voice is dark and rich. He feathers his lips against Yunho’s throat, not a caress but a tease.

Yunho can’t bear it any longer. He turns back and kisses Changmin.

The power of it takes his breath away. It’s like he’s never been kissed before, as if it’s his every first time wrapped into one. Changmin tastes incredible, heat and the drugging-sweet offer of oblivion. Yunho wants more. He moans into Changmin’s mouth and deepens the embrace, the tether of his good intentions worn straight through and snapped. Changmin lifts his hands to cradle Yunho’s head; and then there’s blood on Yunho’s tongue, blood filling his mouth, and it’s hot and bitter and it’s burning.

Yunho jerks away in horror. Changmin’s skin is bubbling, starting to char. The stink of roasting flesh fills the air. Yunho can see bone, actual bone beneath the blackening flesh, and there’s so much blood, it’s oozing like syrup, a thick wash of deep, deep red all around Changmin’s mouth, all down what’s left of his chin.

Changmin staggers back, staring at him in utter disbelief.

“I’m sorry.” Yunho can barely get the words out. Remorse and anguish claw at him. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Changmin whispers through the bloodied mess of his mouth. He looks devastated, then furious. “No!”

* * *

Yunho clears up the broken glass after Changmin’s abrupt exit. He finds himself cleaning the kitchen bench long after the last shard has been swept away; the repetitive action numbs his mind, stops him from thinking too many wild thoughts.

Eventually he gives up and goes to sit on the couch. He stares at the wall. Thinks about what just happened. Guilt clenches tight and he screws his eyes shut. He should have told Changmin. He was greedy and selfish and his actions are unforgiveable. The doctor never said the aconite in his system could act that fast, but everyone’s different. He should have stayed in hospital. He’s dangerous. Poisonous. Toxic.

His mind skips to his job. A new wave of despair comes over him. He’ll have to tell his boss about his fractured wrist. Not just that; now he knows how toxic he is, he’ll have to quit. He can’t be around that many people; can’t risk contaminating someone just because he touched them.

Then logic kicks in and reminds him that he’s been working there for a while without a single problem, and if anyone had become ill from him handling cups and plates and serving food, they’d have made a complaint by now. Likewise he’s touched plenty of people in a friendly way and he’s kissed his mother’s cheek every time he’s visited his parents, and no one has started melting right in front of him.

He leans forward and puts his elbows on his knees. He stares at the floor, thinking. The symptoms of aconite poisoning didn’t include scorched flesh and gouts of blood. But Siwon had said something about that. He’d mentioned it when he was babbling on about his stupid vampire-killing theory. What was it again?

Yunho rubs at his temples, trying to drag rational thought from the mess of confusion. That was it—something about how his blood would harm the vampire, how just one drop would hurt it, and Siwon’s whole plan was based on the fact that Yunho’s toxicity would make the vampire burn up and turn into a blackened skeleton.

Completely fucking crazy.

Or was it?

Yunho remembers the kiss, remembers the moment when blood filled his mouth, when Changmin’s skin started to burn, the smell of it so vile it makes him feel sick even to recall it now. He remembers the sight of Changmin’s sexy mouth blistering, his flesh curling and peeling in blackened bits. He remembers he could see bone.

That was not a normal reaction. Therefore, the only logical explanation is...

Yunho looks up. “Vampires don’t exist,” he says out loud.

The apartment gives him back silence.

He tries again. “Vampires aren’t real.”

This time, distantly, he hears the fluttering of wings.

“Stupid,” Yunho says, getting up and pacing around the room. “Stupid and crazy and...” He stops, gazing at the photograph of his parents that’s propped up on a bookshelf. There were ghosts in Siwon’s house, ghosts his mother felt and acknowledged, ghosts that he’d seen for himself. If ghosts exist, then why not vampires?

Yunho shakes his head, not willing to believe it. Ghosts are not the same as vampires. He stares at the photo and thinks instead about what Siwon said about his bloodline. Maybe he should call his mother and ask for her advice.

He dismisses the idea straight away. She’s never liked talking about ghosts, not even when he was very young and he’d asked her about them. She’d told him it was just a phase and he wouldn’t be able to see them once he was grown-up. He’d believed her. He’s never mentioned the subject again, so the idea of starting a conversation about vampires and how Siwon believes he’s some kind of vampire catnip is sure to upset her.

Plus there’s the fact that Siwon dotes on her, and she loves Siwon as dearly as if he were her own, and while Yunho doesn’t want to see Siwon for a very long time, he doesn’t want to rob him of the only mother-figure he has.

Sitting back down, he tries to think who else he could talk to about this. There’s no one who’d believe him. “Stupid,” he mutters again. He rubs his eyes with his good hand. He’s tired and confused and the nagging pain in his wrist is getting really unpleasant. Maybe if he lies down for a moment.

Yunho stretches out on the couch and falls asleep.

He dreams about snow and cherry trees, and wakes to the throaty roar of a motorbike engine. He’s only been asleep a few hours. Evening is creeping on, the sky starting to darken, the temperature starting to drop. His head is still jumbled, but at least the pain has receded. Yunho gets up, opens the balcony doors, and goes outside. The air is still warm here, busy with the scent of exhaust fumes and the deep sweetness of roses on Mr Park’s balcony below him. He can hear the steady drone of the traffic and the cheeping of the finches in the cage hanging from the balcony of the next-door apartment.

In that moment he feels free and safe, and then he remembers his dreams. The park in the snow. Christmas Eve. He was sitting on the swings with Siwon, and Siwon was complaining about his sister, and there was a crow, and a cherry tree, and then a man came into the park—no, Changmin came into the park, and he had blood around his mouth and Yunho wanted to help him, and then—and then...

Yunho frowns, trying to drag the dream back, but it resists him, like it’s a thread caught around a thorn, and he pulls and pulls, summons it from wherever it’s hiding, and in a shock like iced water he remembers everything.

I just killed your family. All of them. Merry Christmas, Siwon.

It wasn’t a dream. It was real. This happened; it actually happened.

Why did you do that?

Because I can.

Nausea hits him so fast that Yunho feels dizzy with it. He turns, walks into the door and chokes on a yelp as he bangs his injured wrist. The sudden pain cuts through the muffling panic. He shoves at the balcony door, runs into the apartment and makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.

Are you going to kill me, too?

No. I’m going to wait until you’re older.

He doesn’t want these memories. He’d give anything to forget them again.

Are you going to kill me?

Yunho turns on the tap and splashes cold water over his face one-handed.

I’m going to—

He looks up, stares at his reflection in the mirror.

—wait until you’re older.

Dear God. He can’t deal with this. Not any of it. Siwon was right. Siwon was telling the truth. Vampires exist.

This is so fucked-up.

Yunho usually prides himself on finding the best even in bad situations, but he’s hard-pressed to think of anything good about today.

He’s still alive. He doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

Exhausted, his voided stomach aching as much as his fractured wrist, he pushes away from the sink and goes out of the bathroom.

Changmin is standing on the balcony. The sun is setting behind him, grey clouds streaking through a pink and gold sky. He’s wearing bike leathers and gloves. His face is whole and perfect, and he looks at Yunho with wary curiosity. Incongruously, he’s barefoot.

Yunho doesn’t know if he wants to laugh at the idea of such a polite mass murderer. There’s no point in asking how Changmin managed to get onto his balcony four floors up. Yunho is only surprised that he’s not surprised.

“You’re a vampire,” Yunho says. It sounds just as crazy as every other time he’s said it aloud.

Changmin comes inside. “I’m a vampire. Look, fangs.” He opens his mouth and unsheathes his canines, neat and curved and wickedly pointed. He tosses his head and clicks his tongue and his fangs shrink, become normal teeth.

Yunho refuses to be impressed or intimidated or anything else by this little display. “You killed Siwon’s family.”

“I did.”

“His entire family.”

Changmin smiles without humour. “I’m an impulsive kind of guy.”

“So,” Yunho says, amazed that he’s actually having this conversation and not throwing himself from the balcony or running out of the apartment screaming, “why didn’t you kill Siwon?”

The smile darkens into annoyance. “Because I can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I can’t.” Changmin sighs and wanders across the room, then flops into an armchair and crosses his legs. He makes himself right at home but doesn’t remove his gloves. Brushing at his hair, he says as if by rote, “It’s forbidden for me to kill the last surviving member of that branch of the Choi family.”

Yunho stares. “Forbidden?”

Changmin taps the fingers of one hand on the armrest. “A few centuries ago, a group of people got together and placed a binding spell upon me.” His smile is one of supreme self-mockery. “The thing with binding spells is they’re hard to break... but sometimes there’s a loophole. I like loopholes. I always exploit loopholes. I exploited it when it came to the spell. I killed every one of the people who tried to bind me with it, with one exception.”

“Siwon’s ancestor,” Yunho guesses.

Changmin nods, the bitter smile still in place. “The Choi who cast the spell upon me wasn’t as stupid as his colleagues. He knew I would come after them and their families, so he ensured that the balance of power was kept in check. If I kill the last surviving member of his family, I’ll become a shade. I’ll never be able to feed, never be able to die, never be able to live. I’ll be a perpetual shadow, constantly tormented by hunger and the desire for rest. I don’t want that—so Siwon lives.”

Yunho considers this. “What if he dies of natural causes?”

“Then the binding spell dies with him, and I’ll be free.” Changmin stops tapping his fingers and leans forward, his gaze very bright. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for the last Choi to walk off a cliff or under a bus? About three hundred years. They have an over-abundance of good fortune on their side. Also, they breed like rabbits. Which means I just have to wait for a few generations and then I can hunt them down and slaughter the lot—except one, who has to be male, below the age of twenty, and healthy enough to sire a child.”

Changmin’s expression turns hard-edged. “The original Choi was a Jesuit. Tricky little bastards, those. Always so clever with words. Selfish, too. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to add a few words to the spell to protect his unfortunate colleagues. But he didn’t.”

“And you killed them.”

“Snuffed them out one by one. Completely extinguished their lines forever.” Now Changmin smiles with satisfaction. “Like I said—I have impulse issues.”

Yunho breathes through his fear, detaches himself from it. Maybe if he keeps Changmin talking, he can buy some time to figure out what to do. He should call Siwon, but his phone is in his jacket pocket on the other side of the room.

He tries to remember what he knows of vampire lore from books and TV shows. Obviously he already screwed up the rule about not inviting strange men into his home. “But surely you don’t need to keep killing the Choi family. Why don’t you just leave them alone? If you’re really a vampire, then the world is big enough. You can go somewhere else and start again. You don’t have to stay here and keep taking revenge every few generations. It’s not like Korea is an island. You’re not trapped by the sea—there’s all of Asia and India and Russia and Europe...”

“I’ve done all that. The Grand Tour—very enlightening. Good for wasting a hundred years or so.” Changmin wrinkles his nose and makes a dismissive gesture. “But I always come back home. You see, the Choi family has something that belongs to me, and I want it back.”

“What is it?” Yunho asks.

Changmin hesitates. For a moment, there’s uncertainty in his expression. Then he smiles and waves a hand at the couch. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’d rather stand.” Yunho flicks a look at the front door.

“There’s no use in running. You can’t get away from me.” Changmin pauses. “I’m not saying that to sound sinister, by the way. It’s just a fact. From the moment you came over to me that day in the park, so sweet and concerned and just a little boy—”

“I was nine.”

Changmin leans his head to one side and gives Yunho a very thorough once-over. “You were a little boy. And now you’re all grown-up.” He bites his lower lip, eyes black with sudden desire, then he breathes in and relaxes, smiling again. “As I was saying: From the moment we first encountered one another, your fate was sealed. I was never going to let you go. So don’t think you can get away from me now—not after I’ve waited sixteen years for this glorious reunion.”

“Am I meant to be flattered?” Yunho snaps before he can think better of it.

“Yes.” The smile fades. “You should be very flattered. I am not known for my patience. You do know what you are, don’t you?”

Yunho snorts. “Oh, yes. I’m special. I’m unique. Go on, tell me.”

Changmin is hemming him in before Yunho can even register that he’s moved from the armchair. Changmin puts both hands against the wall just above Yunho’s shoulders, trapping him in place. Yunho freezes, trying not to show any fear.

“You’re a witch,” Changmin says, a look of absolute triumph on his face. “Or, more correctly, a shaman.”

Yunho stares at him in consternation. “But—”

Changmin grins, a joyous sight. “Yes, I know. Shamans are almost always women. But...” and his grin widens, becomes infectious, inviting Yunho to marvel at the wonder that is his own self, “sometimes, just sometimes, a male shaman is born, and he has a unique gift.”

Yunho has the suspicion that the gift is his blood. This is probably not an ideal topic of conversation. He tries to deflect it. “I’m not a shaman. I don’t have special powers. I’ve never even won anything on a scratch-card. And shamans talk to dead people. I don’t do that. I can’t do that.”

Changmin tilts his head. “You’re talking to me.”

“You’re a vampire!”

“And you could, if you wanted. Talk to the dead, I mean.” Changmin looks around as if he can hear—or see—something else in the room. He shrugs, turns back to smile at Yunho. “There’s at least a dozen of them here right now, and they’re very upset with me for intruding like this. But that’s not what I was talking about. Any shaman can call up some dead ancestors for a chat. What you’ve got is so much better.”

Yunho swallows. “Siwon told me I’m vampire catnip.”

“An uncouth way of putting it, but yes.” Now the smile is inviting, seductive. “Essentially,” Changmin says, drawing one gloved finger down Yunho’s cheek, “you were bred as vampire bait. You were born for me.” Gently, he tilts Yunho’s head to one side, exposing the vulnerable curve of his neck.

Lips parting, fangs unsheathing, Changmin moves closer. His breath whispers over Yunho’s skin. Closer still, and Yunho struggles against a surge of desire, wing-beats in his head and the world closing down around him. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows he can’t allow this to happen. With a huge effort he pushes through the pall of arousal and blurts out: “I have wolfsbane in my blood.”

Changmin jerks back. He looks offended, then intrigued, and then he sighs. “So that’s what it was.” He gives Yunho a twisted smile. “Not just in your blood. It was in your kiss, too.”

Yunho puts his good hand to his head, shaking off the echoes of desire. “Siwon and his family have been feeding me aconite for the past twenty years.”

“Why did you tell me?” Changmin’s gaze is sharp with curiosity. “Twenty years of poison inside you would have all but finished me. You saw the damage a single kiss did. An amazing kiss, I’ll admit, but not one I care to repeat knowing what I do now.” He exhales on a laugh. “If I’d actually tasted your blood...”

“I’m catnip,” Yunho says, remembering Siwon’s comment. “You wouldn’t have been able to stop.”

“That amount of wolfsbane would be fatal to a younger vampire,” Changmin says softly. “For me, it would take perhaps a century or more before I could regenerate. During that time I’d be completely helpless to anyone who wanted to kill me.” He tilts his head, gives Yunho a wondering look. “Thank you for warning me.”

Yunho brushes off his gratitude. “Yeah, well, I don’t regenerate at all. I don’t want to die for Siwon, and no matter how hot you are, I don’t fancy the thought of you sucking my blood all night.”

Changmin laughs properly this time. “I can’t even suck anything else all night. Any fluid from your body will be tainted by wolfsbane.”

Yunho gives him a quelling look. “What a shame we won’t ever be lovers.”

“Oh, we will,” Changmin says. “You may be assured of that. I’ve been patient for sixteen years. I can wait a little longer. I know you’ll be worth every second.”

* * *

Siwon keeps his word and makes no attempt at contact. Yunho hopes for a call, then wonders what he’d say. Nothing that would make any sense, that’s for sure. He feels trapped in an unenviable position between his best friend and—and... He’s not sure what Changmin is, apart from a vampire. Before all this, maybe Changmin could have been his boyfriend. Except that sounds ridiculous, given that he’s a vampire and centuries old. Lover, then. They could’ve been lovers.

If things had happened differently, Yunho wonders if and when Changmin would have mentioned the whole vampire thing. At least this way he knows what he’s getting into. Unlike the situation with Siwon, who’d had twenty years to tell him about the aconite and why it was important, yet hadn’t said a word.

Yunho spends most of Sunday veering between wishing he’d never met either of them and trying to accept it. He can’t change who or what he is, and chances are, because of his vampire catnip blood, if it hadn’t been Changmin then some other vampire would have found him eventually. The outcome surely would have been the same. Happy vampire, dead Yunho.

He reminds himself that death is an inevitable part of life. If it’s his fate to feed a vampire then he’d rather it be Changmin. Better the devil you know and all that.

His thoughts are driving him crazy. Yunho calls his boss and explains about the attempted mugging and his fractured wrist. He asks about the company’s medical insurance policy and his boss tells him not to worry, it’ll be sorted out. Yunho feels relieved. He’ll be able to pay Siwon back for the medical bills.

At lunchtime he gets up off the couch and stands in the kitchenette looking at the contents of the fridge and cupboards. Yunho knows he should eat something. He hasn’t eaten since the pizza Siwon bought for him yesterday. It seems like a week ago. He should eat so he can heal faster, but he’s not hungry.

His gaze stops on the yellow pill bottle. It’s stuffed full of aconite tablets. He should throw it away. Dispose of it carefully so no one will become ill and die. He wouldn’t even want a rat to eat one of those pills. Then he remembers what the doctor said about the king who took all the poisons. Maybe he should keep taking the aconite. If he stops, he might get sick. He can’t rely on his oh-so-special shamanic blood to keep him alive.

Maybe he can decrease the dosage and wean himself off the wolfsbane instead. But doing that will eventually mean that Changmin will be able to drink from him.

What a choice. Death by poison or death by vampire.

It’s not a choice he’s going to make today. Yunho takes the pills.

*

Changmin comes through the balcony doors at four o’clock. “Enough wallowing. I’m taking you out.”

Yunho glowers at him. “Are all vampires as cocky as you?”

“Some of them are worse.” Changmin seems less intimidating now the truth is out in the open; less intimidating and more flirtatious. Yunho isn’t sure which he prefers. “Come on,” Changmin says. “Where’s your jacket? Let me help you.”

“How many vampires are there in Seoul, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Changmin snags the jacket from a wall-hook and holds it so Yunho can slide his arms through the sleeves. “We don’t hang out together in a secret club or anything. There can’t be too many, though, because otherwise one of them would have found you by now.”

Yunho wrinkles his nose. “Can you... smell my blood or...”

“Only if I’m standing this close.” Changmin tugs at the sleeves of the jacket so the back lies flat. He slides his hands around Yunho’s waist, rests them on the buckle of Yunho’s belt. His voice is a soft purr in Yunho’s ear. “It’s your pulse that gives you away. It beats a different rhythm. Like a song.” He hesitates for a long moment, still holding Yunho, then he lets go and moves away. He’s almost smiling, his hair flicked forward into his eyes. “It’s hard to explain. Anyway. Come on.”

“Why?”

Changmin looks at him, surprised. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m courting you.”

Yunho stares. “But why?”

The question seems to throw Changmin even more. He blinks, is silent for a moment, then answers, “Because I can.”

*

They go to a tea house in Insadong, a small place with a somnolent atmosphere heady with the fragrant scent of infusions and tisanes. They’re shown to a private room with a low table and plush bench-seats. The view of the street outside is partially obscured by a fretwork screen. After a brief look at the menu, Yunho orders persimmon tea. Changmin selects chrysanthemum. The waitress brings the usual snacks with the teas and leaves the room, drawing the door shut as she goes.

Yunho drinks his first cup too fast. He’s nervous, he realises. He’s afraid to be on this weird date. Not because he might get drained of blood—Yunho knows that won’t happen—but because he doesn’t know how he feels about Changmin. He’s attracted, of course he is, and now there’s this whole vampire catnip issue that’s brought them together, but neither of these things is the basis for any kind of meaningful relationship. And it seems like that’s what Changmin intends—for them to have a relationship. Otherwise why go to the effort of courting him?

Changmin takes a sip of his tea. He’s been quiet since they got here. He doesn’t seem to be in a rush to make small talk, and while the silence isn’t uncomfortable, Yunho feels awkward. He has to have some sort of conversation, even if it’s about the weather or the traffic or the really hideous dress a girl is wearing on the street outside. He opens his mouth to comment on the dress and says instead, “How did you become a vampire?”

Changmin sets down his cup. He sits back and looks at Yunho from beneath his lashes. “It’s a long story.”

Yunho wiggles the fingers of his injured arm. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“No, you’re not.” Changmin crosses his legs. Smoothes his hair. He’s nervous, too, Yunho realises. “I haven’t spoken of it for over a century.”

Despite his curiosity, Yunho isn’t going to pry if Changmin doesn’t want to talk. Years of Siwon keeping silent on the subject of his family and burying his misery deep have made Yunho the perfect listener. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s sat quietly beside Siwon and offered sympathy and understanding. But Siwon never spoke about the murders. Changmin is not like Siwon; by his own admission he’s more impulsive, and Yunho can see that he wants to talk but perhaps doesn’t know how to begin.

Yunho stays quiet. He pours another cup of tea and munches on a handful of pumpkin seeds.

Changmin stares out of the window at the people passing by. Finally he says, “I was made three hundred and seventy years ago during the reign of King Injo. Back then I was a captain in the royal guard. His Majesty was not popular.” He smiles, snorts. “Two wars with the Manchus, two sons sent as hostages to China. Korea had just become a vassal state to the Qing, which was two years away from overthrowing the Ming dynasty.”

Yunho tries a sesame seed snack glued together with honey. “History wasn’t my strongest subject at school. I’ve seen some ancient dramas on TV, though.”

Changmin gazes at him, apparently caught off-guard. “Ancient dramas.”

“Ones set in Joseon. Some are pretty good. I liked—” Yunho physically has to stop himself from completing the sentence. He takes a big gulp of tea. He’s a moron, an absolute moron. He finishes the tea and pours more. His good hand is shaking. “I’m sorry. You were saying.”

A smile curves Changmin’s mouth. He snorts, shakes his head. “Thank you. I have the habit of taking myself too seriously.”

Yunho winces. “I didn’t mean...”

Changmin waves away Yunho’s embarrassment. He picks up his tea and looks into the cup, the fragrant steam curling around him. “I was in love with one of the King’s concubines. Her name was Lady An. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Through her maidservant I learned that she favoured me, and I considered myself the most fortunate of men. With the assistance of her maid, we found ways to be together in secret. All was well until Lady An became pregnant.”

Yunho stills in the act of taking another sesame seed snack. He hadn’t expected that. Intrigued, he tries to imagine Changmin as a father, holding a child.

“She was afraid,” Changmin says. “She begged me to help her flee the palace before her deception was discovered. With all the in-fighting between the pro-Qing faction and those ministers who believed we could regain our freedom if we joined with Ming forces, it was an uncertain time. Everyone was looking to see what the Great Ministers would do; I didn’t think anyone would pay attention to me. So I stole coin from the treasury, took small, portable items of worth and exchanged them in the city for money, and I made plans to get Lady An and our unborn child to freedom.”

Changmin smiles without amusement. “Then I was caught.” He takes a sip of tea; sets the cup down on the table. He interlaces his fingers. “They arrested me. Imprisoned me. Tortured me. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to betray her. I knew what they’d do to her and my baby, so I let them believe I was just greedy. I was stripped of my rank, but told that I would be spared execution if only I named my fellow conspirators. And that’s when I realised something had gone very wrong.”

Yunho touches his fingertips to his teacup. “Conspirators?”

“The Minister of Justice, Lord Jeong himself, came to question me.” Changmin sits back in his seat, shoulders rigid. “I was accused of financing an anti-Qing coup against the King. Never mind that I’d stolen only a small amount—enough for a family to start a new life away from the capital, but not enough to grease the palms of men of influence. I was a thief, therefore I was a liar. When I protested my innocence, Lord Jeong said he had evidence against me, and when I demanded proof of this evidence, he brought in Lady An.”

Yunho sits silent.

Changmin seems lost in his memories, his features darkening as he continues, “She came into that foul prison without her maid to support her. She looked terrified. The whole time she kept her hands protectively over her belly. She wouldn’t look at me. When Lord Jeong prompted her, she said that her maid had been my lover and that I’d bragged to the girl about my part in the coup. She began to cry, sobbed that her maid had been taken out and strangled for her disloyalty.

“I didn’t know what to do. What to believe. She looked so afraid. I knew she’d been forced to lie just so Lord Jeong could pursue his political enemies. We were both puppets, in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was doing what any woman would do in those circumstances—she was protecting our baby. I couldn’t blame her for that. I couldn’t save them, so she was saving herself. I knew that, but it was so unfair, and so I shouted that she was a liar. And then...”

He pauses. Stares out of the window again at the world going by outside. “And then,” Changmin says, softly, “Lord Jeong said that Lady An wouldn’t lie. Not when she was carrying a future Prince in her womb. I wanted to tell him that the baby was mine, but I stayed silent. For once I knew I couldn’t be rash.” He stops, smiles slightly at Yunho. “Perhaps that was the last time I ever curbed my impulsive tendencies.”

Yunho can’t bring himself to smile back. He fiddles with a snack of sweet puffed rice, crumbling it into pieces.

“Lord Jeong ordered the guards to increase the torture. He wanted the names of the conspirators within three days. In all honesty,” Changmin pauses again, looks down at his hands, “if I’d known which names he wanted me to say, I’d have said them, just to make the pain stop. But it didn’t, and they broke me, and the only thing that kept me holding on was the thought of my woman giving birth to my child; the knowledge that my son or daughter would become a member of the royal family because of this deception.”

He lifts his head, eyes bright with emotion. “I should have been pleased with this thought, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be free. I wanted to live. I wanted to raise my child somewhere far away from the court and its politics.” Changmin laughs as if mocking his younger self. “I was very simple back then, prone to the most basic of desires. I loved Lady An; I wanted to provide for my family. There was nothing else in my mind.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Yunho says, moved to defend a young man he knows has been dead for almost four hundred years. “You can’t be angry for being human.”

“Yes, I can.” Changmin drops his gaze. He fishes a bedraggled chrysanthemum flower from his tea and drops it onto the table. “Aside from the guards, the prison was tended by commoners who cleaned the cells and brought food and water. Lord Jeong had decreed that I was to be given water but no food, but one of the commoners, a woman of the Mu people, disobeyed this order. She brought me scraps of food and fed me.”

He looks up again. “They crushed my fingers and broke my arms. This woman kept me alive. Before my imprisonment, I was like anyone else at the palace. I shunned social outcasts. Now I saw the Mu woman as my saviour. The other commoners were afraid of her. I didn’t care. When I asked why she was helping me when my situation was so hopeless, she said, ‘A man like you shouldn’t suffer.’

“I thought she meant that I was too noble to be tortured, but one of the other commoners told me not to listen to her. ‘She plans to use you,’ he said, but I ignored him. I was half dead, in no fit state to be of use to anyone.”

Yunho remembers his drink. He draws the cup towards him, curves his hands around it and lets the warmth of the tea soak through the porcelain.

Changmin takes a sip of his own tea. His voice still conversational, as if they’re discussing the weather, he continues, “It happened on the third night. Lord Jeong was disappointed with my stubbornness; I still had no names for him. I was to be executed with the sunrise. The Mu woman came to me and asked me only one question: ‘Do you want to live?’ And I said yes, because I believed I had so much to live for.

“She left my cell and came back with four cups. The first was a drink to quench my yang, the second a drink to strengthen my yin. Then she drew a circle upon the earthen floor of the cell and conjured fire from sticks of wood. Into the flames she dropped an ancient silver vase-coin. The fire burned hotter, melting the silver. The stench of it was like nothing I’d ever smelled before— worse than the palace middens in the height of summer, worse than my own burning flesh when they tortured me. The stink of it went to my head. And then she gave me another drink—human blood, fresh, still warm.”

Changmin swirls the tea in his cup. “I tried to spit it out. Gagged on it. ‘What is this?’ I asked. ‘Why?’ She didn’t answer. She started to chant in a language I didn’t recognise. Just hearing the shape of the words terrified me. The fire burned hotter. I had blood in my mouth. I felt sick and strange. And then she drew out a knife and passed it through the flames, touched it to the melted silver. I heard the wing-beats of a thousand birds. She took up the fourth cup and doused the fire with water.” Changmin looks up, smiling. “And then she slit my throat.”

The room is absolutely silent for a long moment. Yunho can barely breathe. He feels stifled, his skin prickling with heat. Sweat rolls, ticklish, down his underarms.

Changmin sets down his teacup with a bang that makes Yunho jump.

“I woke in a mass grave with earth in my mouth and the taste of death everywhere.” Changmin grimaces at the memory. “I dug myself out, panicking, thinking I’d been buried alive. It was daylight. The commoners tending the area ran away from me, screaming. Then I remembered. My crushed hands, my broken bones, my throat—all healed. I was whole. I didn’t understand. Had I been dreaming? I was hungry, starving. You wouldn’t think a man would be hungry after waking up amongst the dead, but I was ravenous.”

Yunho feels ill. He pushes the tray of snacks away.

“I wandered around, headed for the palace,” Changmin says. “Soldiers came at me. I killed them. It was easy, as if they were paper dolls. And then the hunger became too much, and there was a sharp, agonising pain in my skull—my fangs unsheathed,” Changmin pauses, snarls just enough to demonstrate the quicksilver change between normal canines and fangs, “and I picked up the nearest body and drained it of blood. I did the same to the next. And the next, and the one after that, until I came to my senses. I had no word for myself, no way to describe what I had become.

“I went looking for the Mu woman who had done this to me. I broke into the prison, slaughtered all the guards. The commoners tried to run, but I was faster. They told me the Mu woman was dead, destroyed by the same spell that gave me this new life. Her body had been thrown into the same mass grave as mine. ‘What am I?’ I asked the commoners, thinking they might know.”

Changmin smiles. “‘A monster,’ they said. ‘You are a monster.’ The man who’d tried to warn me told me that the Mu woman had wanted to create a weapon for her vengeance. The King’s soldiers had destroyed her village and killed her family. She blamed Lord Jeong for everything and wanted him to suffer horrible torments. I was a convenient puppet for her plan. I was just a means to an end.

“But she was dead, and I didn’t know what I was except I was faster, stronger, and so much angrier than before. If I was wounded, I could heal in a matter of moments. I felt invincible. And I realised that now I could rescue Lady An and we could be together again. We could leave the capital and make a new life with our child.”

Changmin falls silent, staring into his tea. Yunho doesn’t want to disturb him for more of the story when he’s related so much suffering already, but at the same time Yunho needs to know how it ended—for already he knows it must have ended badly.

“Changmin,” he says softly, “did you find her?”

“Yes. Oh yes, I found her.” Changmin gives a harsh laugh and looks up. “She tried to kill me.” He runs a hand through his hair, disordering it. For the first time in his narrative, he looks agonised. “I didn’t want to frighten her, so I crept past the guards and the eunuchs in the side-palace without spilling any blood or breaking any necks. I hurried to her chambers, but when she saw me, she almost fainted. Of course she thought I was dead. I caught her before she could fall. ‘I came back for you,’ I told her. ‘I love you. Let’s run away. Let’s go far from here and be happy!’”

Changmin closes his eyes. “She wrenched herself free and looked at me with such scorn. ‘You poor stupid boy,’ she said, her beautiful voice full of mockery. ‘I don’t love you. I never loved you. A dear friend asked a particular favour of me—he wanted to ensure his own position at court by engineering the downfall of his rivals. For his plans to succeed, he needed a traitor. He asked me to find one, and I knew you were so besotted that you’d do anything I wanted.’

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I protested. What about the baby? She put a hand to her stomach and told me the child wasn’t mine. She laughed at me. Boasted that I was not her only lover. She said that she’d had another three men from my squadron alone; in addition she had another, far more well-connected lover, a man who was in the position to give her jewels and perfumed robes and everything I couldn’t offer. I was the only man malleable and foolish enough to fall in love with her. I was the only one who’d died for her.”

Changmin looks up, his smile brief. “She screamed then, screamed and ran at me with a knife, stabbed me over and over. ‘You should be dead!’ she shrieked. ‘Why aren’t you dead?’ And in that moment I wanted to die. I wished the Mu woman’s spell would undo itself so I could become a lifeless corpse. I had never known such anguish. I fled when maidservants and eunuchs came running in answer to her screams. I ran and hid in the city and nursed my broken heart and my humiliation until the one thing that consumed me was the desire for revenge.”

Yunho puts his good hand over his mouth, wishing he could say something to take away the pain he can see in front of him. Changmin looks raw and vulnerable, still wounded by this ancient betrayal. “What did you do?” Yunho asks in a whisper. “Did you kill her?”

Changmin’s smile is cold. “No. For once I wasn’t impulsive. I waited. I terrorised her. Every night, no matter where she was or who she was with, I went to the palace and stood over her bed. Every night, she woke and saw me. She screamed, night after night, for four years. No one else ever saw me. Only her. I drove her insane until, finally, she hanged herself.”

Horror trickles down Yunho’s spine. “What about the baby?”

“It lived.” Changmin’s features shutter, blanking out all expression. “A girl. Princess Sukhwi.” He’s silent for a moment, then says quietly, “She wasn’t mine, but I loved her anyway. She was beautiful, like her mother. She died of water-fever when she was seventeen. Her death...” His voice breaks. “I was not the same afterwards.”

Yunho reaches out across the table and takes Changmin’s hands. Their tea has gone cold.

* * *

“We sound like a joke,” Yunho says. “A vampire and a shaman walk into a bar.”

It’s after dinner and they’re sitting in Changmin’s car, parked along the Han River like any other courting couple, looking at the lights across the bridge and watching the water flow past.

Changmin smiles. “What’s the punch line?”

“I don’t know. I’m not good at telling jokes. I always laugh too much.” Yunho snuggles down into his jacket. The evening isn’t cold, but there’s a breeze from the water. “I always thought this was a romantic thing to do, but I never found the time to do it before.” He glances at Changmin. “I guess now I get to ask that cliché question: Do you come here often?”

“The river? Yes.” Changmin gazes through the windscreen. “Some things don’t change. Peripherally they do—the buildings, the industry, the pollution—but the river is still here. It’s still flowing. That’s a comfort.” He turns to look at Yunho. “Why did you never bring anyone here?”

Yunho shrugs, embarrassed. “I don’t know. I hadn’t met the right person.”

Changmin snorts. Resumes staring at the river. “Then why did you insist on coming down here now?”

Yunho says nothing.

Realisation arrives a few seconds later. Changmin turns back to him, startled and angry, his eyes black with emotion. “Are you mocking me?”

“No.” Yunho reaches out, then stops. “You’re the only person I would want to bring here.”

Changmin stares at him, prickly and tense. “Why? Because my tragic past moved you to so much pity?”

The events and revelations of the past few days roll together, gathering pace and crushing everything in their path, and Yunho snaps. “God forbid anyone should care. You can manage the pity part all by yourself.” He grabs at the door handle with his injured arm and snarls at the backwash of pain. Frustrated, he turns so he can use his left hand, but before he can get the door open, the locks snap shut.

“Don’t go,” Changmin says.

Keeping his fingers curled around the handle, Yunho says, “Unlock it.”

“If I do, you’ll leave.”

Yunho looks back over his shoulder. “Try me.”

Changmin’s expression gives away nothing.

“Trust me,” Yunho says, softly.

Changmin unlocks the doors.

Yunho lets go of the handle, turns and shifts across the seat towards him. Close, closer. Changmin lifts his gloved hands and touches Yunho’s face, strokes with his fingertips, slides his leather-clad thumb over Yunho’s lips. Yunho dips his head slightly, catches at the seam on the glove with his teeth and tugs at it playfully. Changmin pushes a little, and Yunho sucks the thumb into his mouth. The scent and taste of fresh leather fill his senses; the texture of it on his tongue excites him. He can feel the warmth of Changmin’s thumb beneath the covering; he can feel the fluttering of Changmin’s fingers against his cheek.

Changmin makes a sound. Withdraws his thumb. He places his gloved hand over Yunho’s mouth and kisses him.

It’s the strangest kiss Yunho has ever received; the strangest kiss he’s ever given. He closes his eyes, mouths at the leather-clad palm as Changmin kisses the back of his own hand. They press closer together, Changmin cradling the side of Yunho’s head, holding him into the embrace. It’s weird. It’s hot. Yunho runs his good hand over Changmin’s thighs. Maybe they can do this without touching bare skin or having any contact with bodily fluids. There must be a way.

They push even closer. Changmin makes a hungry noise low in his throat. His hair tickles across Yunho’s face. Yunho adjusts the angle of his stifled kiss. A few strands of Changmin’s hair fall across his lips, catch in his mouth. Within seconds the hair is singeing, disintegrating, leaving the taste of bitter ash on his tongue.

They break apart, breathing hard. Changmin yanks out the strands of burning hair, a queasy look on his face, then he ruffles his gloved hand through his fringe.

Yunho leans back against the seat and exhales, trying to calm the insistent throb of arousal running through him.

After an endless moment of silence, Changmin says, “I would remember if I’d compelled you just now.”

He sounds bewildered, as if surprised that Yunho wanted to kiss him. He seems so taken aback that Yunho laughs. “Is it so hard to imagine that someone might actually like you?”

“I slaughtered your best friend’s family.”

“And he fed me poison every day of my life since I was a child.” Yunho turns his head and smiles a little. “You’re both as bad as each other.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Changmin says.

“But in mathematics, two negatives make a positive.”

Changmin gives him another puzzled look. “You’re trying to like me.”

“And you’re trying to court me.” Yunho stares out at the river. “I thought I’d meet you halfway.”

“I could kill you.”

“Ditto.”

They sit in silence. The breeze picks up, ghosts over them.

Yunho shivers. “It’s my life,” he says quietly. “My decision. I realised that if I do what Siwon wants and keep on taking the poison for the rest of my days, I run the risk of harming even more people. I would have to resign myself to being alone. I don’t like being alone. I like people, I like hanging out and talking; I like making love, I like kissing. I can’t be close to anyone while I’m toxic. But if I stop taking the aconite, you’ll kill me. And I’m okay with that, because I know it’s nothing personal—it’s just the vampire catnip thing. Then I wondered how long you’d wait, given that you’ve waited sixteen years already. And I thought if I took the wolfsbane a bit longer, maybe I can’t ever have a normal life, but at least I wouldn’t be lonely, because I’d have you.”

Changmin exhales a soft laugh. “I thought I was devious.”

Yunho looks at him. “I’m selfish. You can say it.”

“No. You’re not.” Changmin’s voice is rich with emotion, his eyes black with intensity. “You’re the least selfish person I’ve encountered.”

Yunho drops his gaze. “I don’t want to die yet. I want something real. Something just for me.”

There’s another silence, and then suddenly Changmin yanks at the door and gets out of the car. He walks away, his body rigid. His boots crunch across the gravel, thud on the concrete of the footpath. He stands by the side of the river, head bowed, hair stirred by the breeze.

Yunho wonders if he’s made the wrong choice. Even if he has, he won’t regret his decision. He doesn’t believe in regrets.

Long moments later, Changmin comes back. He strides to Yunho’s side of the car and curls his gloved hands over the top of the door, gripping tight. He stares down at Yunho with fury and wonder. “Why?” he asks. “Why are you so good?”

Yunho doesn’t know how to respond. He shrugs, grasps at the first thing that comes to mind. “Because I’m a shaman? Aren’t shamans supposed to be mediators?”

Changmin laughs, the sound disbelieving and wild. “If it wouldn’t burn my cock off, I’d take you right here and now on the hood of the car.”

Lust punches into Yunho. He claws the fingernails of his good hand into his palm. “I’d like that. You fucking me on the car in public, I mean. Not the other thing. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Changmin stares. “You have no idea how much I want to kiss you.”

Yunho lets out a frustrated sigh. “Yeah, well. We can’t do that. Wolfsbane, the greatest cockblock known to man or vampire.”

A short laugh breaks from Changmin. He lets go of the car door and swings away, goes a few paces before he turns, walks around the front of the Mercedes, and climbs back inside. He puts both hands on the wheel but makes no attempt to start the engine.

Yunho tips back his head and gazes up at the night sky, the stars muffled by light pollution. “I want to know everything about you.”

Changmin slants him a watchful look. “I’ll tell you everything. Just ask.”

“Siwon’s ancestor,” Yunho says. “The Jesuit. Tell me about him. How did he come to put the binding spell on you?”

The keys rattle in the ignition as Changmin leans forward. “You must be cold,” he says, flicking a switch so the soft-top slides out and folds up and over them. They’re silent while it happens, and when they’re cocooned within the car, it seems even quieter, even darker than before.

Changmin doesn’t look at him. “After Princess Sukhwi died, I was... different. I went mad with grief. I killed anyone and everyone who stood in my path. Everyone, regardless of age, gender, or innocence. It was indiscriminate butchery. It helped fill the void, but the more I killed, the more I wanted to kill. Bloodlust, I suppose you’d call it. Some sort of never-ending berserker rage, only it was not anger that drove me, but pain.”

Yunho listens, trying to imagine the amount of anguish suffered by Changmin and his victims, his heart aching for all the souls taken and destroyed so easily.

“Around this time,” Changmin continues, “I discovered there was a name for what I had become. I found that I was not the only such monster to have been made. There were others, though none had been created by magic like me. Some were the vengeful dead; some were raised by mischance because a cat had crossed their corpse. Others were created by the bite and blood of an older vampire. From them I learned that there were rules to ensure the balance of nature. For instance, I could not enter an enclosed private dwelling without invitation, but the palace was open to me because so many people passed through it. I was created from all five elements, but the ones that rule me are Earth and Fire. My weaknesses are Wood and Water; my balance is Metal. I took as much information from others of my kind, and then I killed them all.”

“Why?” Yunho asks softly.

Changmin raises an eyebrow. “Why does a madman do anything? I did it because I could. I was stronger than them, faster than them. I was born from a shaman’s magic. I thought myself better than them.”

Yunho shakes his head but offers no comment.

“You would judge me?” Changmin stares at him through the darkness. “I wouldn’t blame you. Be disgusted with me. Be appalled by my actions. I was worse than an animal.”

“Any animal, if wounded, will lash out at those around it,” Yunho says.

“Don’t try to excuse my behaviour.” Changmin taps the fingers of one hand against the steering wheel. “Don’t forget that if I could, I would tear out your throat and drain you of every last drop of blood your body holds until you were nothing but a desiccated husk—and there would be no excuse for that beyond greed.”

Yunho puts his good hand to his neck. He can feel his pulse thrumming.

Changmin laughs without humour. “But to return to the past... My savagery was so widespread across the capital that the King went into hiding. He summoned his ministers, who summoned the religious leaders, who devised a way of binding me. They brought together a shaman, a Buddhist, a Taoist, and a Christian. After conversing with the spirits, the shaman said that Lord Jeong’s son had in his possession a silver pendant that had been discovered on the floor of my cell when the Mu woman and I were found dead.”

“Silver,” Yunho interrupts. “There was an old silver coin used in the spell that turned you.”

“Yes. And now you see why Metal is my balance.” Changmin slides his fingers over the steering wheel and grips tight, the soft leather of his glove creaking. “The silver coin was cast into the pendant. The pendant contains my soul. Or at least, it contains one of them.”

Yunho blinks. “You have more than one soul?”

Changmin nods. “We all have two souls, the hun and the po. Unholy creatures—vampires—we are driven by po, the yin or corporeal soul. It makes us dark; it demands that we feed on base emotions. The silver pendant contains my hun, my yang, ethereal soul. Splitting the two souls made me a monster. Anyone in possession of my hun soul and with the ability to call upon the spirits would have power over me. They could bind me. That’s what they did, Siwon’s ancestor and his colleagues. They bound me with my own soul.”

The wind rises, dashing a few leaves against the side of the car. Yunho fixes his gaze on the river, stares at the lights reflected in the black water. He thinks about two souls in one body. Doubtless Siwon and Pastor Lee would reject such a notion, but he can believe it. The ghosts he saw as a child must be formed from either hun or po. Yes, he believes it. He turns to face Changmin. “What did they do to you?”

“The procedure was simple.” Changmin grimaces. “They lured me into a forest and hemmed me in with a circle of fire. Half buried in the earth at my feet was a wooden bowl of water containing the silver pendant. They cast the spell, a four-way binding to limit my power and contain my rage. I am still swift, I am still strong, but I possess only a fifth of the speed and strength I once had. Instead of acting without thought, I must now think before I act. The spell at once made me less dangerous and more deadly.”

Changmin smiles. “With a four-way spell, the possibilities for ambiguity are so much greater. Only the Jesuit saw the loopholes in the incantations of his colleagues. Only he made the necessary adjustments to his invocation to the saints—a prayer built on top of the binding spell. It’s this additional prayer-spell that stops me from extinguishing that line of the Choi family and prevents me from being free.”

Yunho considers this. “So your hun soul is inside the silver pendant, and they placed the binding spell on the pendant.”

“Yes. The four who cast the spell were supposed to take turns in guarding the pendant, but I killed three of them. Thanks to his treachery, the Jesuit escaped, taking with him my hun. The Choi family has it still, and until I get it back, I will keep killing them every few generations. In return, they loathe and despise me and would see me destroyed.”

“Siwon mentioned something about that.” Yunho looks down at his injured arm. “That’s where I’m supposed to come in. You drink my blood, I poison you, you burn up, Siwon cuts off your head and dismembers you.”

“A crude yet effective method.” Changmin snorts. “Destroying my physical body is all very well, but my hun would remain and so, technically, I could haunt them. My po, without a human form, would wander around in search of my hun. There must be balance in all things. To end me, they must destroy both souls simultaneously—and so most of the time, I stay far away from that family until I feel like herding them together for slaughter.”

Yunho rubs a hand through his hair. “Knowing Siwon’s family, I’m surprised no one tried to capture you in the past three hundred years.”

Changmin is silent for a long time. “They need something else,” he says at last. “The Chois have no supernatural gifts. They don’t have the ability to destroy me completely even if they had both me and my hun in one place. They need...” He hesitates. Flicks a look at Yunho. Continues softly, “They need someone who can call upon the spirits.”

Understanding hits Yunho with sudden, devastating force. “A shaman.”

“Not just any shaman.” Changmin looks at him with a terrible smile. “A male shaman in full possession of his powers. They need you.”

*

The drive back to Yunho’s apartment is filled with quiet, simmering tension. Yunho doesn’t know what to say to break the silence, and it seems as if Changmin is angry, somehow. Perhaps he’s regretting everything he’s said. Perhaps he feels too open, too vulnerable.

Changmin walks him up to the fourth floor and opens the apartment door.

Yunho crosses the threshold and stands in the hallway, looking at him. “Why did you tell me about the pendant—about me being the one who could destroy you?”

Changmin flicks his hair from his eyes. “Because you told me about the wolfsbane. It seemed only fair to offer you something in return.”

“That’s not it,” Yunho says without thinking.

“Isn’t it?” Changmin tilts his head, gaze darkening. “Then tell me why I did it.”

Yunho takes a step back. “You can come in.”

“I don’t need your permission.” Changmin stays outside in the hallway. The light is indifferent, a flickering fluorescent strip that buzzes and stutters occasionally into silence. It makes Changmin look pale and tired, his eyes shadowed. He leans against the doorframe the way he did yesterday, when he was waiting for Yunho to invite him in. The hope has gone from his expression. Now he’s just weary.

Yunho thinks he’d give almost anything to be able to hold him. To stop himself from reaching out, he tucks his thumbs into the back pockets of his jeans. “What would you do if you regained your hun?”

“What would I do.” Changmin shifts his weight and leans to one side, resting his head against the doorframe. “I would decide whether I wanted to continue existing as a vampire or if I should live out the rest of my natural lifespan as a human.”

It’s not the answer Yunho was expecting. “Do you want to be human again?”

Changmin gives him a glittering look. “I want the choice to decide.”

Yunho nods. He can understand that desire. Maybe he can understand it more than most. His own situation is nowhere near as complicated—he can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to choose between being immortal or mortal—but he supposes it’s not really about that. It’s the fact that, right now and for the past three hundred-odd years, Changmin has had no choice.

“Your hun,” he says, voice quiet. “The silver pendant. What does it look like?”

“I don’t know.” Changmin looks exhausted and dispirited. “I searched the house the day I killed Siwon’s family, the same way I always search the house every time I massacre the Chois, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t know what it looks like now. It might not even be a pendant any more—the sensible thing would have been to melt it down as soon as the binding spell was cast, and form the silver into something else. For all I know, my soul inhabits a set of sugar spoons.”

“Siwon’s family has never had sugar spoons,” Yunho says. “It’s your soul, can’t you feel it?”

Changmin makes an annoyed sound. “Do you think it calls out to me? ‘Changmin, I’m over here’? No. I’ll know it when I touch it, but until then...”

Yunho takes his hands out of his pockets and squares his shoulders. “Maybe I would know. If I’m such a shit-hot shaman—”

This brings a ghost of a smile to Changmin’s lips. “You are.”

“If I am, then maybe I can find it for you.”

Silence burns between them. The light in the corridor flickers, on-off-on. Changmin lifts his head. “Why would you do that?”

Yunho swallows; glances away for a moment. “Because I don’t want you to kill any more of Siwon’s family.”

“I can’t kill him,” Changmin reminds him gently, “and you have my word that I won’t harm his future wife and their darling children, or his adorable grandchildren. By the time I’m ready to commit mass murder again, you won’t be here. So why do you care about Siwon’s descendants?

“Because,” Yunho says. “Because it’s wrong to keep on taking revenge just because you can.”

Changmin looks at him. “It’s a means to an end. They can stop their own suffering by giving me back my hun.”

“It’s not just that.” Yunho meets his gaze. “I worry about your suffering, too.”

* * *

Exactly a week since Yunho’s first disastrous date with Changmin and the swift unravelling of everything he’s known, Siwon finally calls.

“Is this a bad time?” Siwon asks when Yunho answers the phone.

Yunho hesitates; flicks a look at Changmin seated opposite him. They’ve just finished lunch and are lingering over coffee, the rest of the afternoon waiting for them to decide what to do with it. Siwon’s call is long overdue, but Yunho wishes he hadn’t picked this exact moment. He doesn’t want this conversation in front of Changmin, who’s watching him with a wary yet smug expression.

It makes Yunho feel like a bone fought over by two dogs, and the image is enough to make him want to hang up and do this later, but instead he says, “It’s okay.”

“Good.” Now it’s Siwon’s turn to hesitate. “Yunho,” he says. Pauses. There’s the sound of paper shuffling in the background. “Yun,” he begins again, “I’m going to America. I’m moving to Los Angeles. I want you to come with me.”

“What?” Yunho’s grip on the phone tightens. Of all the things Siwon could have said, this is the most unexpected. Surprise rolls around Yunho’s head; anger is swift to follow. “When? When were you going to tell me about this?”

“I’m leaving on Tuesday.” Siwon takes a quick breath. “I know it doesn’t give you much time—”

“Not much time?” Yunho hears his voice climb in tone and volume. Changmin is frowning, eyes gone narrow and black. He doesn’t want to deal with Changmin on top of this right now, so he shuffles around in his chair and fixes his gaze outside the restaurant window.

“It’s not like you’ve got much to leave behind,” Siwon says, sounding defensive. “You’re signed off work because of your wrist so if you resigned, they could find someone to replace you. It’s not like your apartment is that great and I can come round and help you pack, or if you want, I can get professionals in who’ll do it for you, and—”

“No. Stop.” Yunho waves his injured hand as if he can cut the flow of Siwon’s words. The food he ate at lunch sits uneasily in his stomach. He feels hot and confused. “Why? Siwon, why?”

Siwon is silent for a moment, then says, “I’ve always wanted you to work with me. This is a really good opportunity. Opening a North American office will take a lot of effort, and you’re the hardest-working person I know. You’re perfect for this job. And I’m sorry I didn’t give you more of an advance warning, but you said you didn’t want to see me for a while after... after what happened, and I wanted to respect that. But now I’m telling you—I’m asking you—please come with me.”

Yunho twists at his hair. He closes his eyes. “No, Siwon. Tell me why.”

The silence is longer this time, and then Siwon says, “Because you’re my best friend and I need you.”

Opposite him, Changmin leans forward, his hands flat on the table and his eyes blazing.

Yunho tries to ignore him. “Is it because of what I found out last week?”

“No!” Siwon sounds upset. “It’s not about that. Not all about it, anyway. Yun, don’t you see? This is the chance for us to make a new start. To get away from everything that’s been holding us back. My family’s past, the—the vampire thing, all the rest of it... We can go to America and forget about it.”

The passion in Siwon’s voice is sincere. It’s as if he really believes this. As if he can sweep it all away without fully dealing with the consequences of his actions. Yunho doesn’t know if he envies him or pities him, but he’s furious that Siwon seems to think that nothing’s changed, that Yunho will go along with his plans just because.

“I can’t forget,” Yunho says, keeping his tone level. “If you want to forget, that’s fine, but don’t ever think for one moment that I will.”

“Yun...” Siwon draws in a breath. “Where are you? I’ll come right away and we can talk. Let me explain.”

Yunho shakes his head, even though Siwon can’t see him. “There’s nothing to explain. I understand why you poisoned me, Siwon, I understand.”

“You hate me.” Siwon’s voice catches.

“I don’t.” Suddenly this is a much harder conversation than he’d anticipated. Yunho slumps over the table, pushing his coffee cup aside. “I couldn’t ever hate you.”

“Then please come with me,” Siwon begs. “Let me make things right.”

“You can’t.” The world has turned dull; Yunho doesn’t want to be disappointed, he doesn’t want this to hurt so much, but his heart aches. “I understand why you did it. But that doesn’t take away the fact that I’m responsible for causing people to get sick. I’m responsible for a man’s death.”

Across the table, Changmin gives him a curious, sharp glance.

Siwon tries to protest, but Yunho hasn’t finished. “I know you’ll tell me that none of those things are my fault because I didn’t know I was toxic. Is ignorance really an excuse? You kept me ignorant all that time. Is your life worth more than Private Kam’s?”

Siwon is silent.

“You should have told me. Right from the start, you should have told me. You were my friend, my best friend, and you kept this from me.”

“Would you have done it?” Siwon sounds husky with emotion. “Would you have taken the pills for me if I’d told you the truth?”

“Yes.” Yunho’s face is wet with tears. He splays the fingers of his free hand, hides behind them and turns his face, leans into his phone. “Yes, because I loved you. You were closer than a brother. I would have done anything for you. Anything to keep you safe. But you should have told me. You should have given me the choice. I can forgive you everything but that.”

Silence. Then Siwon says, very softly, “I’m sorry.”

Yunho sniffs and scrubs at his cheeks, drying his tears. “I’m not coming with you. I’m staying here.” He clears his throat, regaining his scattered control, trying to detach himself. “If you would do one thing before you go... Visit my parents and say goodbye. They’ll be sorry to see you leave. You know my mother adores you.”

“I’ll visit.” Siwon sounds small. “Yun, if you would do one thing for me, too...”

“What?”

Siwon pauses for a heartbeat. “Keep taking the vitamin pills.”

Yunho swallows the burst of hysteria that threatens. “The poison, Siwon. You mean you want me to keep taking the poison.”

“It’s important.” Now Siwon sounds anxious. “The monster can’t follow me across saltwater, but if you won’t come with me, then you’re vulnerable and I—we can’t protect each other.”

Yunho laughs, but it feels like his heart is shattering. “That’s what you’re saying now? That we’re mutually protecting one another?”

“Please.” Siwon’s begging. “I’ll arrange for more of the pills to be delivered. Please, Yun. It’s the only way you’ll stay safe.”

It’s on the tip of Yunho’s tongue to tell him to fuck off straight to hell, but he can’t bring himself to say it. “Goodbye, Siwon. Be happy and successful and never contact me again.”

“Yunho,” Siwon shouts down the phone. “Yunho, don’t—”

Yunho cuts the call, turns the phone over, and takes out the battery. He stares at the two pieces for a moment, then says, “I need a new phone.”

Changmin reaches across the table. Lifts the empty shell of the phone. Crushes it into bits. “You do now.”

Laughter bubbles up, hot and rancid. Yunho giggles, then puts a hand over his mouth before he can start crying again. He’s shaking. He shifts his gaze and looks out of the window until he feels calmer.

“I take it you heard the whole thing,” he says after a while.

“Yes.” Changmin brushes the pile of plastic and metal into the middle of the table and looks at him. “You are far too good for this world.”

Yunho ignores that. He doesn’t feel good. He feels like shit. “So it’s true what he said about saltwater?”

Changmin nods. “One of the limitations of the binding spell.” He fiddles with the broken pieces of the phone, not looking up. “You could have gone with him.”

“What for? At least I can trust you.”

That gives Changmin pause. He tilts his head, lips parting. “You trust me?”

Yunho picks up his mostly cold coffee. “You’re honest. I know you want to drain my catnip blood. I know that’ll kill me. You haven’t lied to me. So yes, I trust you.”

Changmin reaches across the table and lays his hand over Yunho’s bandaged wrist. “Stop taking the wolfsbane.”

The coffee tastes awful, the scent of it too strong now. Yunho grimaces and puts down the cup. “I’ll get sick. The doctor said—”

“You’re a shaman. Stop taking it.” Changmin gazes at him, absolutely serious. “What you said the other night by the river—I will wait. However long it takes, I’ll wait. I won’t leave. If you want to take the aconite for another twenty years, I’ll still be here. But know that it won’t kill you to stop taking the pills, and if you stop taking them, it’ll still be a few years before the poison leaves your system. It’ll be years before I can—” He stops himself, face pale and tense.

Yunho drops his gaze and stares into the cup at the dried ring of milk foam and the dregs of the coffee. “You and Siwon both talk about me being a shaman, but I don’t see any evidence of it.”

“The aconite,” Changmin says. “You’re not dead.”

“Apart from that.”

Changmin smiles, starts to relax. “The glass. In the restaurant on our date last week. You smashed it just by looking at it.”

Yunho pushes the cup away. “I thought I could see blood in it.”

“You could see blood,” Changmin tells him. “Just as you could see me in the mirror all those years ago. And the ghosts in the walls in Siwon’s house, and the memory-impressions of the killings.”

Yunho laughs without humour. “Those are kind of crappy powers, really. Proper shamans do rituals for good harvests and things like that. They deliver spirit-messages to the living. They heal people. I’ve only made people sick and one guy even died because of me.”

“Because of the wolfsbane,” Changmin says softly but with emphasis.

“Same difference.” Yunho glares at him. “If I’m a shaman then why couldn’t I heal those people? If poison and cure both exist inside me, shouldn’t they cancel each other out somehow?”

“Maybe if you were in full possession of your powers. But you’re not.”

Yunho sits back. Shakes his head.

They’re silent for a while, watching the bustle of the restaurant, then Changmin says, “Do you ever hear things—wing-beats?”

“Yes.” Yunho thinks about it, remembering all the times he’s heard that sound, how sometimes it drowned out everything else, and he realises he hasn’t heard it in a while. A week, to be precise. “Not so much these past few days, but... yes.”

“That’s the sound of the spirits.” Changmin gives him a half smile. “They hate me. They’re afraid of what I’ll do to you. A vampire and a shaman, that’s—” He stops himself again.

“What?” Yunho frowns at him. “What were you going to say?”

Changmin deflects the question. “You could be immensely powerful. You could summon and control the dead. That’s a terrifying prospect. But first your power needs to be triggered.”

Yunho wrinkles his nose. “How?”

“I don’t know, truly. It’s different for each shaman. Your power manifested through sickness when you were a child. Shamans in every culture endure near-death experiences, sometimes more than once. It gives them the knowledge of the spirit world. They have to experience sickness in order to be able to heal.” Changmin pauses, then continues, “It’s inside you, waiting for you to tap into it. But it’s sealed up as a way of protecting you and everyone around you. When you’re ready to deal with the power and its consequences, it’ll unlock. Something will trigger it, and...”

“And?”

Changmin looks at him. “Not even I would stand in your way.”

* * *

The next morning, Yunho takes only one of the aconite pills. He goes through the day expecting to feel different, but he doesn’t. Stupid, really; it’s just one pill less. He takes only one pill the next day, too, and the day after that, and on Tuesday, the day Siwon is leaving for America, Yunho seals the yellow pill bottle in layers of packing tape and throws it into the bin.

He feels fine. He’d expected some sort of withdrawal symptoms, but it looks like Changmin was right. His super-special shamanic blood is probably starting to cleanse the decades of accumulated poison out of his system at that very moment.

Yunho decides that, since he feels fine, he’ll go and talk to his boss about returning to work. It’ll be another six weeks before the fracture heals completely, and so he won’t be able to carry heavy trays around, but there’ll be other duties to which he can attend.

“You don’t like my company?” Changmin asks, teasing, when Yunho says he’s going back to work.

“Of course I do,” Yunho says, quite seriously. “Siwon used to come and see me in the coffee shop every day. You can do the same, if you want.”

Changmin gives him a hot-eyed look. “I am not Siwon.”

Four days after Yunho starts back at work, Jooyeon nudges up to him at the end of the midmorning rush and says, “Are you all right? You look kind of washed-out. Is your wrist hurting?”

Yunho lifts his bandaged arm, turns it slightly. It hasn’t been painful for the past few days or so. “It seems okay.” He smiles at her. “I’ll be fine.”

She doesn’t seem convinced, giving him an uncertain look as she goes off to take an order. Yunho keeps the smile on his face and studies his hand. He twitches his fingers, watches them move slightly. The skin is a dull colour, almost grey under the lights. Though he can move his fingers, he can’t actually feel them. That’s weird.

A customer comes up to pay. Yunho taps at the keys on the till—it took a while to get used to doing it left-handed, but he’s pretty good at it now—and then he stares at the register in bewilderment. From force of habit he’d reckoned the total of the customer’s bill in his head, but the till display is showing him a different figure. “I’m sorry,” he says to the customer, “this isn’t the correct amount. Let me do that again.”

He voids the sale and starts afresh. His fingers keep slipping on the keypad. He has no sensation in the fingertips of his left hand.

Trying to keep his anxiety at bay, he voids the sale a second time and does a manual override, not wanting to keep the customer waiting any longer. His hand feels like it’s a lump of lead. He has to use every scrap of concentration to take the money, push it into the till drawers, and select the change.

Jooyeon comes back, her expression worried. “You look terrible.”

“I’m—” He wants to say he’s fine, but cold, clawing nausea grips at him and almost doubles him over.

Jooyeon pushes him towards the kitchen, clucking with concern. “Sit down. Take ten minutes, we’re not busy.”

Yunho stumbles into the kitchen and leans against the wall, taking deep breaths to quell the sickness roiling in his stomach. His throat is dry. He’s sweating. He can smell it, the sweat and panic, and it makes him want to vomit. He groans, turns his head to press his cheek against the tiled wall.

A few more deep breaths. He starts to feel better. The world snaps back into focus. He can hear the murmur of conversation from the shop, the click and hiss of the espresso and steamed milk machines, the scent of coffee and syrups and cakes and—

Nausea hits him so fast he can barely keep upright. His stomach lurches and he runs for the nearest sink, bends down into it and throws up. He gropes for the tap, turns it on. He can see the water running, but he can’t feel it. His vision is blackening around the edges, pointillist dots encroaching upon him. There are wing-beats in his head, fast and rapid, gathering, flurrying.

Yunho tries to keep calm, but inside he’s terrified. Numbness in the extremities. Nausea. Vomiting. He knows what this is. Aconite poisoning. He shouldn’t have gone cold turkey. He should’ve listened to the doctor. He should’ve listened to Siwon.

As if from far away, he hears Jooyeon come in, her voice playful: “Yunho, your hot customer is here—Yunho? Yunho!”

He tries to drag himself upright, wants to warn her to stay away from him. She mustn’t touch him, mustn’t try to help. He doesn’t want to poison her.

Jooyeon comes towards him, eyes wide with fright, but before she can reach him, she’s pushed aside.

Yunho keels over.

Changmin catches him. “I’ve got you,” he says, holding him close.

Yunho wants to shove him away. His shirt is soaked through with sweat, but Changmin is still holding him. He’s still holding him even though Yunho can smell the oily, sickening stench of singed flesh. He’s hurting Changmin and he can’t bear it. “Let me go,” he whispers, throat closing on the words.

Changmin only holds him tighter. “Never.”

* * *

Yunho wakes in a king-sized bed in a room that isn’t his. It’s three times bigger than his entire apartment, including the balcony, and it’s decorated in soft, muted colours and furnished to exquisite taste. For all that, it seems impersonal, more like a hotel room than someone’s intimate living space, and he’s not surprised when the door opens and Changmin comes in.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I should be dead.” Yunho tries to smile, to make light of his answer.

Changmin sinks down into an armchair close by the bed. There’s a marble-topped card table next to it; upon it is an open book laid spine upwards and tumbler of brandy. The cushion is squashed flat. It’s clear that Changmin has been watching over him for some time.

“You were very sick.” Changmin’s voice is rough. He looks tired.

Yunho stretches a little. His entire body aches with the memory of pain. It feels as if someone stuck him with red-hot needles and then flayed him. His wrist is still in plaster. He can feel again—his fingertips slide along the cool, smooth Egyptian cotton sheet—and his head is clear.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Four days.”

Yunho starts. “Four days?” He tries to push himself up onto his elbows, but just that small effort robs him of strength and brings a debilitating wave of nausea. Frustrated, he eases back onto the pillows and waits for the sickness to recede. He closes his eyes, focuses on his breathing. The sheets carry Changmin’s scent. Yunho turns his head, nuzzles deeper against the pillow, then he remembers, jerking a look at Changmin. “Your arm, your hand—you touched me and I was... I burned you.”

“All healed.” Changmin rolls back his shirtsleeve as proof, revealing flawless bare skin. He smiles. “Hurt like a bitch at the time, though.”

“What about Jooyeon?”

“I compelled her. All she remembers is that you got sick and I took you home. I talked to your boss, too, and persuaded him that you should take another couple of weeks of sick leave. He was happy to oblige.” Changmin reaches behind him and plumps the cushion, then sits back in the armchair and crosses his legs.

“A couple of weeks?” Yunho rubs his good hand through his hair. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble. Honestly, I feel better.”

Changmin snorts. “I think I preferred it when you were unconscious. You were less stubborn.” He runs a fingertip around the rim of the tumbler. “You used up all your strength fighting off the aconite poisoning. You need to rest and recuperate.”

Yunho rolls his eyes. “Then I should be in hospital. Or maybe I should start taking the pills again.”

“No.” Changmin picks up the brandy, agitates it. “This will pass.”

“What if it doesn’t?” Yunho snaps. He hates being sick. He hates this stupid, helpless feeling. He doesn’t want to be trapped here. Irrational anger boils up, overflows. Yunho shoots a glare at the tumbler in Changmin’s hand, and the glass shatters.

The brandy spills, spattering over Changmin’s cream-coloured trousers. He sits motionless, still holding what’s left of the tumbler, glittering fragments of glass around him and the rich scent of brandy in the air as the liquid soaks into the cloth.

Yunho stares. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’re just trying to survive.” Changmin stands up and brushes at the broken glass.

“Trying to survive so you can kill me,” Yunho amends.

Changmin stares at him. “Is that really what you think?”

In truth, Yunho doesn’t know what to think. There’s a faint pounding at his temples, like the onset of a headache, and he feels a little dizzy. Reaction to breaking the tumbler, he supposes. At least there’s no more wing-beats fluttering around his skull. He looks away as Changmin clears up the broken glass, then surreptitiously looks back again when Changmin unbuckles his belt and takes off his trousers.

Changmin smiles. “I’m quite happy for you to watch me get undressed.”

Yunho snorts in response, but wriggles back in the pillows and enjoys the view. Changmin tosses his trousers into the washing basket and opens the wardrobe, leaning forward to sort through his clothes. Yunho admires the long, lean line of Changmin’s legs, the high, round curve of his ass, and wishes he’d managed to spill brandy and broken glass on Changmin’s shirt, too.

Lazy arousal spins through him. Yunho pulls his gaze elsewhere. He looks around the room again, noting the difference between this and his own cluttered space. It’s a measure of how distracted he is that he remarks without any thought whatsoever, “You don’t have any pictures in here.”

The wardrobe door closes with a bang. “Funny, that.”

Yunho winces inwardly, but presses on: “You must have had friends. People you cared about. People you wanted to remember.”

Changmin pulls on a pair of jeans washed pale over the thighs. They’re tight enough to cling like a lover’s caress. He feeds his belt through the loops and buckles it in place, then turns to look at his reflection in the mirror and makes minor adjustments to the fall of his shirt.

The silence doesn’t deter Yunho. It just makes him even more curious. “Have you ever turned someone—made them into a vampire?”

Changmin leans closer to the mirror, his expression unreadable. “Three hundred and seventy years is a long time to be alone.”

“Then you did. You made a vampire.” Yunho sits up. “Where are they?”

“I made four,” Changmin says. “They’re all dead.”

“Dead?”

“I killed them.” Changmin turns from the mirror, keeping his back to Yunho. “They were... broken.”

Yunho shakes his head. “In what way?”

Changmin is silent for a while. Yunho stares at him, at the tension in his back, across his shoulders, the unguarded emotion evident in the way he bows his head. Finally Changmin exhales. He turns to face Yunho. His eyes are black. “Remember I told you there were different types of vampire—some made by magic, some through accident, some for vengeance...”

Yunho nods.

“For those who are created through the bite and blood of an older vampire—” Changmin stops, his gaze sliding away again, becoming distant with memory. “It turns out that only certain bloodlines can adapt to the change. The people I chose were from the wrong families. They did not transform well. I had to end their agony.”

The idea of it is horrifying. Changmin has suffered so much; not only did he lose a beloved child, but his attempts at making a companion had also ended in grief. Yunho hugs his knees. “Which are the right bloodlines?”

Changmin looks back at him, gaze steady. “The shamanic families.”

There’s a moment of silence as Yunho absorbs this, and then he says, “You mean—”

“You would be magnificent,” Changmin says softly, his eyes kindling with some new emotion.

Another silence. Yunho is conscious of the beat of his heart, the flutter of his pulse. “Is that what you’ll do to me once the aconite is out of my system?” He doesn’t know if the prospect thrills him or terrifies him. He doesn’t know what answer he wants to receive. “Changmin, are you going to turn me?”

“I don’t know.” A look of terrible uncertainty crosses Changmin’s face. “It depends how well I can resist the lure of your blood. It’s physically painful for me to keep my distance now, while you’re still full of poison. As the aconite leaves your body, you’ll become more and more of a temptation. I might not be able to wait. I might run the risk of being weakened for the next one hundred years. I might just kill you.”

* * *

It takes a week before Yunho swaps the bed for the sofa. He falls asleep a lot, usually in the middle of a daytime drama or wildlife documentary, and often wakes to find a blanket over him and the television turned off, and Changmin curled up in the chair opposite, watching him.

“Sleep is the best healer,” Changmin says with quiet authority whenever Yunho apologises for being so boring.

The aconite poisoning has slowed Yunho more than he expected. He remembers it took a while for him to recover from the first round of sickness when he was a child, but now the physical restrictions chafe at him and make him short-tempered. It’s as if he’s reverted to being nine years old, and he feels whiny and sorry for himself. This in itself is a novel but unpleasant experience. He’s so used to sharing his company with others that he’s not sure what to do with himself now he has so much time alone.

Changmin goes out a lot at first.

“It’s nothing personal,” he says, his unblinking black gaze fixed on Yunho’s throat, or the inside of his elbow, or his wrist. Sometimes Changmin’s fangs slide out, sharp and glistening, and when that happens he moans quietly and clenches his hands into fists, takes shuddering breaths to calm himself.

And yet at other times, it seems easy for Changmin to be near him, and on those days Changmin’s eyes are their usual soft, deep brown and he seems relaxed, happy to sit close on the sofa as they watch a film together.

It takes Yunho a while to work out why this might be.

One afternoon Yunho is sitting on the couch, toying with the frayed hems of his jeans and half watching a kids’ TV show. A pile of manga is stacked on the coffee table—gifts from Changmin, and all of the volumes sequential. He’s in that state of mind that’s neither here nor there, bored and yet without knowledge of what he should be doing instead, and his mood is vacillating.

“Here.” Changmin hands him a mug of tea, lime blossom and ginseng, and sits beside him. After a moment, he reaches out, caresses Yunho’s ankle. A heartbeat later, he draws Yunho’s foot into his lap and lets it rest there. Changmin smiles, delighted with his own daring. His skin is flushed; his eyes gleam. Heat radiates from his body.

Yunho wriggles his foot, stroking his toes over the heavy cotton of Changmin’s trousers, then pressing against the hard muscle of his thigh. The bizarrely costumed presenters on the TV show break into song while shuffling around in a strange dance. Yunho drinks his tea, the scent sweet and familiar, and then realisation hits him. He puts down the mug so fast that tea slops over the side.

Changmin sits forward, immediately concerned. “Are you all right?”

Yunho withdraws his foot from Changmin’s lap and squashes into the corner of the sofa, unease thumping inside him. “I just realised. Oh God, I’m so stupid.”

“What?” Changmin looks confused. “What is it?”

“When you can bear to be close to me like this. I just realised how you can do it and not want to rip my throat out.” Yunho sees Changmin’s eyes flicker and knows he’s guessed right. “Oh, shit. You are, aren’t you. You’re going out and feeding on people to stop yourself from wanting to snack on me.”

Changmin’s lips part, but he doesn’t deny it. He looks at Yunho from beneath the sweep of his fringe. “This is what I am. This is what I need to do.”

Yunho jabs at the remote control and switches off the television. “Fuck.”

“I can wait for you, but I have to eat,” Changmin says, and he sounds so reasonable, as if he’s talking about a normal meal and not human blood. “Please believe me when I tell you that I never take more than I need. Not now. I don’t hurt them. I always compel them afterwards. They’ll never remember.”

That stirs a memory loose. Yunho frowns, gestures with his bandaged arm. “Those guys who attacked me. Did you—”

“I wasn’t gentle with them.” Changmin growls, his expression darkening. “I told you: I’m impulsive. Besides, they hurt you.”

Yunho snorts, more disturbed by this revelation than he thought he’d be. “Like you care about me.”

“I do.” Changmin flicks back his hair and meets Yunho’s gaze.

They stare at one another until Yunho glances away and mutters, “Only because I’m your catnip.”

Changmin laughs. “If you had a prize stallion, would you let it wander the streets or would you keep it safe?”

Yunho slants him an annoyed look. “I’m not a horse.”

“I’d like to ride you.” Changmin leans closer, his smile wicked and inviting.

Lust slides through Yunho, making him shiver even as it heats his blood. It’s dangerous, this wanting, so he snaps, “In your dreams.”

“Not just mine.”

They look at each other again, Changmin’s eyes turning black and slumberous. A series of hot, dirty images flood Yunho’s mind. He exclaims, aroused and shocked, his pulse racing faster. “Don’t do that.”

Changmin sits back, looking innocent. “What?”

“That... whatever it is. Thrall. Compulsion.” Yunho shakes his head, trying to dislodge the images. “You made me forget you when I was nine. Now you’re putting sexy thoughts into my head. Don’t do it.”

“Very well.” Changmin sounds smug. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”

Yunho glowers at him. “A vampire’s promise.”

That seems to wound Changmin. He looks offended, lifts his chin. “You know I keep my word. You’re too important to me.”

“As a food source,” Yunho snaps. He half turns away from Changmin and tries to settle back onto the sofa, reaching for the remote control again.

“I know you don’t believe me, but it is more than that.”

Yunho isn’t in the mood. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

Before Yunho can turn the TV back on, Changmin reaches out and puts a hand over his injured wrist. “I could have killed you when you were nine years old. You were all alone. No one would have saved you. I could have taken you and drained you right there and then.”

Yunho meets his gaze. He remembers that day, the snow, the terror, the stench of blood on the fur of Changmin’s coat, the confusion when he woke up alone and Siwon had gone. He swallows. “I had four years’ worth of aconite in me. Good job you didn’t do it.”

Changmin makes a dismissive sound. “Four years’ worth of aconite would have been painful, but it wouldn’t have had any long-lasting effects. I had just dined very well—so well, in fact, that I was drunk on it.”

The reference to the slaughter makes Yunho feel sick. “So that was why you spared me. Because you were glutted on the blood of Siwon’s family.”

Changmin laughs, the sound utterly without amusement. “I could have stolen you away and kept you locked up until I was hungry.”

“Why didn’t you?”

A strange expression crosses Changmin’s face. “I don’t know.” He looks uncertain. “I wanted to wait. I wanted you to be older. I wanted it to be... mutual.”

Yunho stares at him, emotion rising like a spring tide. He knows Changmin is speaking the truth; he can see it in the look of bewildered wonder in Changmin’s eyes, and he can’t do this, he can’t deal with any of it any more.

Yunho gets off the sofa and walks out of the apartment. He punches the button for the lift, then when Changmin starts to follow him, he pushes through the doors to the stairwell and clatters down the steps, ignoring Changmin’s pleas to come back.

He has no fixed thought in his mind. He just wants to get away, wants some space. At the bottom of the staircase he shoves at the emergency exit and steps out onto the street. He hasn’t been outside in days, and it feels strange, fresh air, sunlight, the bite of the cold through his jacket and t-shirt. His shoes feel heavy on his feet, the leather chafing his bare skin. He has no idea where he’s going. He just walks and walks, trying to unleash some of the feelings trapped inside him.

He’s gone half a mile before he realises he’s in love with Changmin.

The realisation brings him to his knees. Yunho puts a hand over his mouth. Wonders how he could have been so blind, so insensible to his own emotions for all this time. He’s in love, and he doesn’t know if this is the greatest moment of his life or the absolute worst.

The pavement is cold and hard beneath his knees. Slowly he becomes aware of passers-by staring at him. In a minute someone will probably come over and ask him if he’s all right, and he won’t know what to say.

A silver-blue Mercedes roadster draws up beside him. The door opens. Changmin is leaning across, looking at him with that same gentle, bewildered wonder. “Yunho,” he says. “Please.”

There’s no compulsion necessary. Not now; not ever again. Yunho gets to his feet and climbs into the car.

* * *

The weeks roll by.

Yunho’s wrist heals; he recovers from the aconite poisoning. By the time he’s ready to return to work, he’s given notice on his tiny fourth floor apartment and has moved in with Changmin. They sleep in separate rooms, but share everything else. It’s simultaneously frustrating and satisfying, this relationship, but neither of them can stop it now, and neither of them, Yunho is sure, would want it to end.

Changmin devises a way for Yunho to test his state of toxicity. Each morning, Changmin opens a vein, drips blood into a shallow dish, and leaves it by the side of the bathroom sink. Yunho slicks his finger with saliva and dips it into the blood.

“Wolfsbane litmus test,” Changmin says the first time they try it.

The blood flash-fries as soon as Yunho’s fingertip touches it. Heat, a puff of stinking, acrid smoke, and the dish cracks right down the middle.

Yunho stares at his finger. It has smudges of carbon on it.

“Yes, well.” Changmin picks up the broken pieces of the dish and throws them into the bin. “We’ll do this every day from now on.”

It becomes part of their daily routine, the thing that Yunho does right after he’s brushed his teeth. He gets used to the bursts of flame and the curdling blackness as the blood shrivels away from his touch. Over time, he supposes the reaction will become less extreme as the aconite leaves his system. Just because it’s no longer poisoning him, it doesn’t mean he can’t still poison anyone else. It’s good to have the daily reminder of how toxic he is, how careful he has to be around everyone, not just Changmin.

He goes back to work at the coffee shop. His boss greets him with delight. Jooyeon says she missed him and complains about the lazy temp that had filled in while he was off sick. A whole new range of flavoured drinks has been introduced, and Yunho wonders if Siwon would have enjoyed the toffee nut latte with its mountain of whipped cream and the sprinkles of candy hearts. Probably Siwon is drinking syrupy-sweet coffee concoctions morning, noon, and night in LA. Yunho misses him, but the pain of Siwon’s betrayal has faded, and Changmin fills Yunho’s life instead.

Jooyeon approves when Yunho tells her he’s dating Changmin. She squeals and does a little skipping motion and says, “It was the boots, wasn’t it? That first day he came in here, he wore those really sexy boots and you couldn’t take your eyes off him, and he stayed here all day just to talk to you. Those boots were sexy, tell him that from me.”

Yunho ducks his head, embarrassed. “He’s sexy all over.”

“Ooh, you’re so cute!” Jooyeon waves her hands in delight. “Cutest couple ever!”

Telling Jooyeon was easy. Now comes the hard part.

He tells his parents over the phone that he’s seeing someone and it’s serious. He goes round to their house and tells them in person that he’s seeing another man. His father fetches a beer and goes outside without saying a word. His mother hugs him and tells him it’s all right. Yunho feels shaky and over-emotional and, after a few minutes, he goes out into the garden.

His father is standing in the vegetable patch, the beer in his hand as he scuffs over the ground by a row of cabbages. They stand there for a while, not speaking, and then his father clears his throat and says, “Do you love him, this man you’re seeing?”

“Yes.”

His father nods. Takes a draught of beer. “Your mother. She knows things. She sometimes sees things. Dead people. Ghosts. She says they talk to her.”

“Yes,” Yunho says again.

“Some people said she was odd. They said I shouldn’t get involved with someone like that.” Another swig. “She told me all about it before we got married. I didn’t like it, but I loved her. I still love her.” He drains the bottle and turns it upside down, shaking out the last few drops over the cabbages. Finally he looks at Yunho. “Give me some time, son, but know that in here,” he taps his chest, “it changes nothing. I still love you.”

Yunho bows his head, humbled. “Thank you, Father.”

*

Less than a week after Yunho’s visit to his parents, his mother calls and says she wants to meet Changmin. Yunho wonders how best to manage this. He doesn’t know how strong the shamanic blood is in her, but since he inherited it from his mother’s side of the family and if she can see and talk to ghosts, he’s fairly certain she’ll know there’s something different about Changmin.

Preparations for the meeting get a little out of hand. Perhaps picking up on Yunho’s jumpiness, Changmin reserves a table at an extravagantly expensive restaurant, working on the theory that if Mrs Jung is intimidated by her surroundings, she might not mention the whole vampire issue. Yunho squabbles with him and they don’t talk for half a day until Changmin presses him up against the door and snatches a kiss, swift and passionate, which leaves his mouth a weltering mess of blood and turns Yunho to jelly.

Eventually they settle on the coffee shop for their get-together, and Jooyeon is primed to intervene with a selection of baked goods and coffee refills if things look like they’re heading for disaster.

Changmin is already waiting when they arrive. He’s bought a small but elegant bouquet of flowers for Yunho’s mother and he’s dressed in a gun-metal grey suit with a more casual shirt worn beneath it. As Yunho holds the door open for his mother, Changmin gets to his feet and smiles.

Yunho’s mother murmurs something about how tall Changmin is. She goes a few steps closer, then stops abruptly and turns. “Yunho.” She grasps his arm, tries to steer him away from the table. Her face is set with tension. “Your friend...”

“Boyfriend,” Yunho says patiently. “I thought you were okay with this.”

“It’s not his gender that concerns me.” She looks up at him, and there’s fear in her eyes, genuine, startled fear. “He’s—he’s a...”

“Nice young man,” Yunho supplies. “And he’s a vampire.”

She sags against him, her grip loosening. “You know.”

“I know.”

She gathers herself, darts a look in Changmin’s direction. “I never thought this would happen. Never thought it would be necessary to tell you, but what’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh and my family—mine, Yunho, not your father’s—we...”

“You’re a shamanic bloodline. I know that, too,” he assures her, tucking her hand through his arm and giving her a little smile. “Changmin told me.”

His mother looks stunned. “He did?”

“Yes.” Yunho has no intention of going into details. This meeting is fraught enough already.

“It only affects daughters,” she says, refusing to budge a step closer to Changmin just yet. “Shamanic ability passes through the female line. It doesn’t affect sons. Not usually. Except...” and she looks deeply troubled, “there are some old stories about sons inheriting the powers of past generations.”

Yunho increases his smile. This is so not the time and place for this conversation. It’s like she’s poking a stick at a huge can of worms and he’s not ready to deal with that. Even more so, he doesn’t want to worry her. “They’re just stories, Mama.”

“Like vampires are just stories?” She clings tight to his arm and gazes up at him, searching his face. “Yunho, my bloodline hasn’t produced a male shaman in over five hundred years. What if—”

“Mama,” Yunho interrupts, still smiling, “Changmin is waiting. He’ll think you don’t like him.”

Recalled to her purpose, his mother gives a start and looks flustered. “Oh dear. I don’t mean to be rude. Especially when he bought me such pretty flowers.”

“Yes, let’s sit down,” Yunho says, ushering her towards the table and giving Changmin an apologetic look. “Mama, may I introduce—”

“You needn’t be so formal.” She sits in the chair that Changmin has pulled out for her and places her handbag at her feet. Flicking a glance between them, she continues, “Vampires and shamans shouldn’t mix. One takes life; the other preserves it. Together...”

“Together they should balance,” Yunho says, taking the seat next to her.

She picks up the bouquet and looks at Changmin over the flowers. “Yes. They should. But a male shaman’s blood is supposed to be irresistible to vampires.” She turns to Yunho. “I’m afraid he’ll kill you.”

Yunho holds her gaze. “I trust him.”

She half gasps, half laughs. “Yunnie, you can’t trust a vampire!”

Yunho starts to protest, but falls silent when Changmin leans forward. “You’re right, Mrs Jung. I might kill your son.”

She goes still, staring at him.

“I can’t promise not to harm him,” Changmin says, “but know this: I have waited for him since he was nine years old. My kind is not known for their patience, but I waited for him, and I wait for him still.”

She looks between them, surprise dawning. “You haven’t...”

Changmin gives her a slow smile. “No.”

Yunho feels a hot blush climb to his face. “No, Mama, we haven’t.”

She settles back in her seat and picks up the menu, peruses it for a moment, then directs a cautious look at Changmin. “Perhaps I misjudged you.”

“No.” He smiles, fangs flashing. “You didn’t.”

* * *

They can’t touch, so they devise ways of pleasuring each other without touching. The first time is when they’re both a little drunk after a night out with Jooyeon and her friends. When they get home, Yunho buries his face in Changmin’s leather jacket and clings tight. “Want you,” he slurs, giving voice to the desire that’s ruled him for weeks, months—no, years. “Want you so bad.”

Changmin nuzzles at Yunho’s hair. “How bad?”

Yunho rubs up against him, humps Changmin’s leg. “Don’ wanna go to bed and jerk off just thinking about you again.”

“Then do it in front of me.”

Startled, Yunho lifts his head. Changmin’s eyes are black with lust, his voice thick with need when he says, “Let me watch you.”

Yunho pulls away and retreats a safe distance, yanks open his jeans and takes out his cock. He’s brought himself off in front of lovers before, but they were beside him or on top of him or under him, and this is different. This is a display, a performance, and the thought of doing it for Changmin excites him more than he thought was possible.

“You do it, too,” he says. “Tell me what you want to do to me. Tell me what you’d be doing right now if we could touch.”

Changmin groans. He presses back against the wall, eyes shining, fists clenched, fangs unsheathed. He’s trembling with the force of his desire, all that wanting and needing tightly restrained but with the leash stretched almost to breaking point.

Yunho strokes his cock with long, deliberate tugs. He wants to make it last, wants Changmin to see everything. “I love you,” he says, quickening his pace. His legs quiver. He slumps against the back of the sofa and finds his balance, works his cock harder, gazing at Changmin the whole time. “I want you. Please let me see you.”

Changmin snarls, tears at his own clothing, and jerks off in time to Yunho’s rhythm. “I want to fuck you,” Changmin gasps, “fuck you so hard you can’t move, you won’t want to move, you’ll just want me inside you forever. I want to keep you on the edge for hours until every word you utter is a plea for me to let you come. I want you to beg, beg me for more, beg me to take you higher. You’ll scream for me to take everything, and when I do, when I tap that vein, when I taste you—oh, it’ll be incredible, the most incredible rush you’ve ever had—”

“Changmin,” Yunho whispers. “Oh fuck, I want it. Please.”

“Not yet.” Changmin’s eyes are huge, his breathing ragged. “Not yet, not yet.”

They reach orgasm within seconds of each other, the dirty talk giving way to desperate, staccato endearments, and the silence afterwards is deep and rich with longing.

*

Time goes on. They continue to perform for one another, bringing home random hook-ups and letting the other watch. Yunho refuses to kiss these conquests, tries to keep most of his clothes on, and always uses a condom. The sex is fun, but it’s the knowledge that Changmin is watching that always gets him off.

One night, Changmin lures home a pretty boyband singer. The idol seems delighted when he realises he’s stumbled into some kind of open relationship. “Ooh,” he coos to Changmin, his gaze sliding hot and lascivious over Yunho, “is he going to join us?”

Changmin smiles. “Why not.”

They end up in bed together for the first time, Changmin fucking the idol, the idol fucking Yunho. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to having sex, and they’re doing it through the conduit of another man. The thought drives the knowledge of pleasure from Yunho’s mind; his body responds eagerly enough but it’s breaking his heart that he can’t have Changmin the way he most wants him.

Changmin is always a little rough with his one-night stands. He goes further this time; he unsheathes his fangs and sinks them into the idol’s neck, watching Yunho’s reaction throughout. Yunho has never seen Changmin feed before, and it’s horrifying, compelling, and so fucking sexy that he wants it; he wants Changmin to do it to him while they’re joined. It’s the most erotic thing he’s ever seen, this draining of life, the way the idol’s body stiffens with shock and how the death impulse makes him turn his head towards Changmin, forcing the fangs deeper into his throat; but the thing that triggers Yunho’s orgasm is the way Changmin looks at him, eyes black with desire and endless yearning.

Afterwards, Changmin leaves the boyband singer passed out on a park bench with an interesting collection of bites, cuts, and bruises to match the puncture wounds in his neck. The ensuing scandal of an unnamed idol indulging in alcohol, drugs, and kinky sex is the lead in the news for the next couple of weeks.

“We mustn’t do that again,” Yunho says when the story still hasn’t died down by the third week.

“Why not? It was fun.” Changmin quirks an eyebrow at him. “Next time I’ll pick someone who isn’t famous.”

“No. I don’t think we should do it at all.” Yunho crosses his arms, uncomfortable, not willing to admit his jealousy. “Not when you compel them.”

Changmin stares at him, face alight with wounded surprise. “I only compel them to forget afterwards. I don’t force them to come here. They come to our bed because they want to. What the hell do you think I am?”

Yunho shakes his head, tired and frustrated. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did.” Changmin is angry now, his colour heightened and his eyes glittering. He shoves a hand through his hair, takes a deep breath. “Everyone I brought home has come here of their own free will. I would never take that choice from anyone. Not now. I would never—”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Guilt stabs at Yunho. His stupid, petty jealousy tastes like ash on his tongue. “I hate it, okay? I want to be the only one. I want to be the one you feed from. I want to give you my blood, my everything. But I can’t. I can’t.”

Changmin growls and stalks forward. Anger still radiates from him, but there’s something edging it, something that’s banked up like storm clouds. Yunho gives way before it, allows Changmin to hem him in against the wall. The atmosphere changes, heavy with need, charged with desperation.

Yunho responds to it, his breathing clipped and pulled. He turns his head, offers the vulnerable sweep of his neck. Never has he been so aware of his pulse, of his heart beating strong and steady. Changmin comes closer, making a soft keening noise as his fangs unsheathe, as he lets them rest against Yunho’s throat, the razor-sharp points denting the skin but not breaking it.

They stand there for endless moments, Changmin’s breath hot against Yunho’s neck, the undertow of arousal dragging at them both. Yunho knows that if he moves even slightly, Changmin’s fangs will pierce his skin. He’s still toxic, the wolfsbane still strong in his system. They’ll both die. Maybe it’ll be worth it, just to know, just to experience it, to be joined with Changmin just this once.

Changmin groans helplessly, the sound echoing through them. Yunho half closes his eyes. Changmin lifts his head and grasps for Yunho’s cock through the constriction of his jeans. He rubs, swift and violent, the denim rough and making everything clumsy, making it dirty and desperate. He lowers his head again, his fangs touching Yunho’s throat once more, and Yunho tries not to move, tries to keep still and silent as Changmin jerks him off, pleasure and pain twisting and knotting, both of them frantic and yearning—

Before Yunho can reach orgasm, Changmin pulls away, drags himself free and spins and slams his fist against the wall, cracking the plaster.

“I want you,” he says, voice shuddery and sharp with anguish. “I want you so much you’ll never understand it.”

Yunho stares at him, aching. “I want you, too.”

“It’s different.” Changmin uncurls his fist. “Everything’s different now.”

Yunho shakes his head. He doesn’t understand. “Why?”

Changmin turns. He looks broken. “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you.”

* * *

It takes four years until his system is clear of the wolfsbane.

The chemical reaction between Changmin’s blood and Yunho’s saliva has been getting less and less, but the test has become so much of a habit that, on the day there’s finally no reaction at all, Yunho isn’t sure what’s just happened.

He stares at the blood in the dish. Repeats the test. Changmin’s blood doesn’t boil. It doesn’t burst into flame. It doesn’t even retreat from Yunho’s saliva-slick finger. Unable to believe it, Yunho picks up the dish and dribbles the blood onto his tongue. He holds it in his mouth, swishes it around, and waits for it to burn.

It doesn’t. Nothing happens. Nothing at all.

He swallows the blood. No ill effects. Heart pounding, light-headed with the reality of the situation, Yunho takes the empty dish out of the bathroom. He finds Changmin in the living room, glancing at the newspaper and fixing his tie.

Yunho can’t speak. He stands there, the dish clutched in one hand, until Changmin turns and smiles like this is any normal, ordinary day, and then the smile fades and he says, “What is it? What...”

There are no words for what Yunho wants to say. He remains silent, scarcely able to breathe, the sound of wing-beats suddenly swarming through his head, loud and deafening, but they’re not as loud as his pulse, his frantic, drumming pulse.

He holds out the dish. Turns it so Changmin can see the smear of blood left in it, still wet, still red.

Changmin stares at the dish. Lifts his gaze. Stares at Yunho.

Time spins out between them. Twenty years expands, contracts. Eternity yawns wide and then slams shut, leaving only a hairline crack to mark its passing. Everything slows. Everything grows silent.

Everything stops.

And then Changmin says, “Kiss me.”

Yunho drops the dish. It smashes on the floor. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now, nothing but Changmin. Yunho is across the room in a heartbeat, offering himself up, not even a flicker of hesitation as he crushes his mouth to Changmin’s. He’s waited a lifetime for this. Need shudders through him, all those years of greedy, grasping hunger obliterated by the force of Changmin’s lips over his, Changmin’s tongue in his mouth, Changmin’s hands all over his body. The relief of being able to kiss, to touch, is so great that Yunho thinks his heart will explode.

Desire blanks out everything but sensation. There’s nothing but silence in his head, wild, roaring silence, a tripwire tension that tightens with every caress, every breath, every kiss. They tear at each other’s clothes, stumble towards the bedroom, but they can’t make it that far. They sink to their knees on the floor, breaths short and sharp and lust with its hooks caught fast in their flesh.

Yunho gives himself over to Changmin, drops every defence, opens himself up and spreads himself out in every way possible, inviting Changmin to take whatever he wants. He thinks he’ll come with that first thrust when Changmin claims him, but he doesn’t, he can’t, and Yunho cries out in pleasured agony, wanting more. He surges up to meet Changmin, bites at his lips. They fight as they fuck and fuck as they fight, and Changmin’s lips are bleeding, Yunho licking at them and gasping, aware now of a single high-pitched note ringing through his head.

“Yes,” pants Changmin, burying himself deep inside Yunho, “yes,” and he tears open his wrist, “taste me, drink from me—” He pushes his arm across Yunho’s mouth, presses down so hard that Yunho bites him, bites and then drags at the wound, draws in great mouthfuls of blood, and the taste of it is sweet and powerful and it slams through him, awakening every one of his senses, rousing things that have been long dormant.

Changmin yanks his arm away, kisses Yunho again. They roll and tumble across the floor, Yunho on top then pinned down; Changmin catching at his wrists, holding him in one place so he can drive into him over and over. Excited laughter bubbles up, spills out. Yunho is exhausted and giddy, craving release, craving the feeling of Changmin’s fangs in his neck as he comes. But Changmin doesn’t do it. His face is against Yunho’s throat, his teeth strafing marks into the flesh, but there’s no fangs, no deadly bite.

“I love you,” Changmin gasps. “I love you. Forgive me.”

“Anything,” Yunho promises. His orgasm hits, brilliant and brutal and perfect.

The windows explode outwards. Everything made of glass in the room shatters. Wing-beats fill the air, circling, climbing, streaming towards an incredible brightness that glows and burns with the ferocity of a star before it shrinks to a single line and snaps, coming to rest curled up inside him, warm and safe.

They’re sprawled on the floor, gasping, sweat running, blood pumping. The world seems so much sharper and clearer than before. An ecstatic sense of joy fills Yunho. He feels invincible, aware of everything around him, aware of his entire being and all the spirits that now reside within him, waiting to be called forth.

He holds onto Changmin and they lie there amongst the sparkling fragments of glass, still locked together, hot and wet and happy.

Yunho looks up. “What now?”

Changmin smiles. His fangs unsheathe. “Now, my love, I’m going to kill you.”

* * *

Siwon pushes open the door of his family home and waits for the memories to rush out and overwhelm him. He peers into the semi-darkness, listens to the hush descend. A breeze rattles through the trees and he turns, glances at the strakes of afternoon sunlight glinting on the bodywork of his hire car. He’s glad he kept the gardener on a monthly retainer; otherwise he’s sure the place would be overgrown by now.

It’s been a long time. Not just the four years he’s been away in LA, but before that. He hasn’t set foot in this house since the day he closed it up, the day he and Yunho went to university. Eleven years. It seems like forever.

Siwon picks up the travel case at his feet and lifts it over the threshold. Still he hesitates to enter his own house, afraid of what he might find, what he might feel, but when the breeze whispers around him again, he snorts at his own foolishness and steps inside. He closes the door behind him with a slam and stands there.

Silence gathers. He takes a deep breath. Faintly he can smell the last, lingering scents of home, of familiarity—the furniture polish Mrs Jung always used, the warm smell of old wood. If he concentrates hard enough, maybe he’ll catch the sweet fragrance of fresh-cut flowers and the drowsy-sharp scent of his father’s cigars...

But no. He’ll never smell those things again. Siwon shakes his head and wheels his case to the foot of the stairs. He glances up at the shadows on the landing, imagines the empty rooms filled with light and laughter. Imagines himself as a child, chasing his sister round and round. Remembers his mother’s hugs and his father’s stern countenance that could sometimes, quite unexpectedly, turn good-humoured. He remembers coming back here after the tragedy and wandering hand in hand with Yunho, checking each room, each cupboard, to make sure it was safe.

Pushing away the rest of the memories, Siwon clears his throat and goes over to the light switches. He flicks them on and off, testing the electricity. He’s never had the place disconnected, but he just wants to be sure. He’ll need to plug in his phone to charge it; his fiancée will be expecting him to call her a little later.

The thought of her makes him smile. He always knew he’d meet someone special. It just took him longer than he’d anticipated, and he hadn’t thought he’d have to go halfway around the world to find her. She’s everything he ever wanted, beautiful and kind and clever, and he was ecstatic when she agreed to become his wife. They plan to marry in America and have a blessing here in Seoul before they go on their honeymoon.

Pastor Lee is retired now, but he still does ministry work. He’s said he’d be delighted to conduct the blessing ceremony. Siwon has come home to arrange everything, to look up his old schoolmates and university friends so he can invite them to the blessing, and to see if he can track down Yunho.

He wants Yunho to be the best man at his wedding. It’s a big ask, but there’s no one else Siwon would rather have beside him on such an important day. He left things in a mess between them when he took off to America, but Yunho had made it clear that he didn’t want any contact, and Siwon had respected that. It didn’t stop him from missing Yunho almost every day for the past four years. It was only when he’d met his fiancée that Siwon had started to feel whole again.

He hopes Yunho will want to see him again now. Siwon has learned so much about himself in these four years. He’s come to understand a lot of things that had confused him before, and he wants to sit and talk to Yunho the way they used to do when they were younger, when they were the very best of friends.

Siwon opens the door to the living room and goes inside. Sunlight gropes through the blinds, pushing at the drapes. He flings back the curtains and sneezes at the sudden tumble of dust. The room seems smaller than he remembers, and all the surfaces have a velvet-soft layer of dust on them, like drifted ash. He moves around, dragging a finger through the dust, reclaiming the house.

Jetlag knocks at his skull. He yawns, sits for a moment on the sofa. The dust sheet puffs out beneath him, the white cloth fluttering. He relaxes, yawns again, and wonders how long it’ll take him to find Yunho. The last number he had was disconnected long ago; someone else lives in his old apartment. He no longer works at that coffee shop in Apgujeong. When Siwon had called at the bungalow he’d bought for Yunho’s parents, a neighbour told him that Mr and Mrs Jung were on holiday in Tongyeong.

Siwon rubs at his tired eyes. Maybe he’ll get a private investigator on it. He’s waited too long to be denied a happy reunion, and he has so much he wants to tell Yunho, so much he wants to share.

He gets up and straightens the dust sheet, then continues his slow circuit around the room. He trails his fingers over the dulled gleam of a pair of silver candlesticks, then stops in front of the collection of family photographs. He raises a hand to his throat in an almost unconscious gesture and lifts from beneath his shirt the silver crucifix he always wears around his neck. He gazes at the picture of his parents and remembers when his father gave him the crucifix when he was five years old, when the chain was too long for him and his father had shown him how to knot the links to make it shorter. Siwon recalls that he hadn’t liked the gift, telling his father that Jiwon should wear it instead.

“She’s a girl,” his father had said. “This is for my heir. Only you can wear this, son.”

Siwon remembers the solemnity in his father’s voice, the serious expression on his face. Now he closes his hand around the crucifix, feels the tiny figure of Christ warm from the heat of his body and from the soul residing within it.

“Never take this off until you have a son of your own,” his father had told him. “When he is old enough, give him this crucifix as I have given it to you. It is a treasure beyond price and is the sole reason for our family’s continued survival.”

Siwon had stared at him. “What do you mean?”

His father had smiled a terrible smile. “The body of Our Lord contains the soul of a deadly vampire, a creature that has slain countless hundreds of our bloodline. For nearly four centuries we have been at war with this foul monster, but now... Your great-grandfather and I believe we have a solution. One that will let the Choi family live in peace and which will destroy forever the vampire Shim Changmin.”

Siwon fiddles with the crucifix, draws it back and forth along its silver chain. He looks away from the photograph and sighs. So much for his great-grandfather’s plans, his father’s cunning, and all of Siwon’s years of deceit. It had all come to nothing in the end, and the only thing that had been accomplished was the loss of Yunho’s friendship—and that was the real tragedy.

Life in LA has taught Siwon many things, but now he’s on the brink of marriage, he needed to come home. He needs to put things right. He should have done it before, but he was afraid and he let a childish invention, a stupid story about a vampire, become an excuse. He’s been seeing a therapist, one his fiancée recommended, and the sessions have proved enlightening. The therapist has helped him come to terms with what happened here all those years ago on that fateful Christmas Eve.

Siwon looks back at the pictures, focuses on a photograph of his parents with him and Jiwon. A happy family torn apart by a random act of madness.

He touches the crucifix again, grips it tight. The therapist advised him to come home and lay the ghosts to rest once and for all. He’d told Siwon to return to the scene of the murders and accept what had happened. He’d suggested that Siwon should come here and take off the crucifix, the one thing that’s kept him linked to the brutal memories for so long, causing him so much pain—he should take it off and forgive his younger self for not being in the house when the madman broke in and killed everyone. He should shatter the bond with the past and look forward to a bright new future with his beautiful fiancée.

Reaching out with his free hand, Siwon traces over the smiling faces in the picture. He wishes his parents were here to advise him. He wishes his sister was here to tease him. He wishes he still had Yunho in his life. In lieu of his real family, Yunho had been everything to him. If only—if only...

Siwon exhales another sigh. He stands there, the atmosphere thick with regret and anxiety and sadness. He tightens his grip on the crucifix, feels the silver chain bite into the back of his neck.

The doorbell rings.

Startled, he drops the crucifix. Tucks it back into place down the front of his shirt. No one knows he’s here. Heart pounding, Siwon leaves the room, crosses the hall, and opens the door.

Yunho is standing outside, his smile as bright as winter sunshine. “Hello, Siwon,” he says. “Can I come in?”