“You know, I don’t feel the cold anymore,” Yuki shared. He was staring at the moon, and his skin seemed to glow in its light. Dressed in white billowing clothes, he resembled an ethereal prince from a long-forgottentale. Not a knight in shining armor, but the one who was locked up in a tower, waiting to be freed from a curse.
“Good for you. I’m freezing my butt off.” Yiran pulled his hood over his head and blew into his fingers.
“Isn’t this nice though?” Yuki said with an impish grin. “Us sitting on this crummy couch, chatting as if we aren’t about to be mortal enemies in the near future?”
In spite of himself, Yiran smiled.
“You know, I lost all my friends when I changed.”
“Can’t be friends with someone who wants to eat you.”
“Iwas the one who stayed away,” Yuki told him. “I hid myself from my family and friends because the hunger was too much and I didn’t know what to do at first... I think they thought I ran away from home or something.”
“How did you become like this?” Yiran asked, noting the sadness in Yuki’s eyes. It was strange to see such a human emotion in a Revenant.
Yuki stretched his arms out and sighed. “About a year ago, I was on my way home from a movie. There was no moon that night and no curfew either. Everything seemed fine. I remember taking my usual shortcut home from the subway, down one of those side alleys. I felt something sweep over me, like a thousand needles poking my skin. Next thing I knew, I woke up in a different neighborhood. Alone and cold and hungry. There was blood all over me, but it wasn’t mine.”
The Blight got to him, Yiran thought. It was bad luck, nothing more. It could happen to anyone. “What happened after that?”
“I met some... friends. They helped me acclimatize.” Yuki looked coyly at Yiran. “I can control myself better now. It’s the reason why you’re sitting next to me and still breathing.”
“Is it difficult? To be here beside me?”
“Yes.” Yuki raised his hand suddenly, fingers grazing the scar on Yiran’s cheek.
Yiran flinched, and his hood fell off. The Hybrid’s touch was cold,but it had sent a bolt of heat through him.
“The mage made me angry. I never meant to hurt you.”
“As I recall, you made it plain you wanted to kill me,” Yiran reminded him.
“Did I?” Yuki laughed. Then a genuine look of regret appeared. “I’m sorry it left a scar.”
“Takes more than a scar to diminish my good looks.”
Yuki laughed again. There was no reason for his laugh to sound so melodious to Yiran’s ears.
“The glasses suit you.” Yuki made a square with his thumbs and index fingers of both hands, and pulled back, framing Yiran’s face as if he were taking a picture of him. “The perfect college boyfriend vibes.”
“Flattery doesn’t work on me,” Yiran quipped. But he felt his pulse speeding up. “You said you could control yourself, your hunger... how?”
“The Blight turns spirits into ghoulish things—the original Revenants—but the strain that infects humans causes people to react differently to it.” Yuki paused to stare at him, as if deciding whether to go on.
Sensing this could be valuable information to the Guild, Yiran said, “What happens to the infected humans?”
“Always digging for information, aren’t you?”
“Maybe that’s what you’re here for too,” Yiran countered. He didn’t want it to be true.
Yuki held his gaze. “It would be stupid for either of us to trust the other.”
“Never said I trusted you.”
“You shouldn’t.” Yuki glanced away. “Anyway, as I was saying, some infected humans die immediately because their bodies can’t handle the change. Others starve to death because they refuse to feed.” He side-eyed Yiran’s grunt of disgust. “Don’t judge—feeding is a natural instinct. Sometimes, the infected person changes entirely, becoming totally unrecognizable, something more grotesque like the original Revenants.”
Yiran remembered the first Revenant he had encountered at the NightMarket, how it’d started off looking more human before morphing into a monster, how it’d hardened and turned to ash when he killed it, just like Aloysius’s corpse. That first Revenant must’ve been a Hybrid. A human whose body reacted badly to the infection.
“And then,” Yuki continued, “there are those like me.”
