When at last the song of the Yeoiju becomes a gentle hum again, I fall to one knee and swipe my arm across my forehead. I’m surprised Ethan didn’t rush up to catch me before I fell. After a heaving breath, I push up to a stand. There is no time to rest.
“Ethan,” Jihun shouts in alarm, and I whip around to face them.
“I got you.” Taeyoung wraps an arm around Ethan’s shoulders before his knees buckle.
Oh gods.
“Thank you,” Ethan murmurs, leaning heavily against the King of Underworld.
I run to him and take one of his hands in mine. He’s shaking. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” He smiles wanly. “For saving us all?”
“I should have stemmed my power sooner.” I can’t return his smile as guilt rams into me. “I made you hold the shield up for too long.”
“I’m fine.” His eyes search my face. “How are you? Did that deplete you?”
“No.” I shake my head. “It was actually a ... relief.”
“You guys?” Hailey croaks. “Something’s wrong.”
I look over my shoulder, and blood drains from my face.
Fuck.
I slowly pivot on my feet and confront what I hope isn’t our doom.
The leviathan tentacles are gone, but the bodies of the shinbiin strewn across the field twitch and jerk as they rise up from the ground. Then fist-sized black holes appear in the air by each reanimated corpse.
With the unnerving sound of bones snapping, the shadowy portals suck in the bodies like powerful vacuums.
“What in the worlds ...” Minju whispers. If she doesn’t know what’s going on, then we are definitely in trouble.
Darkness spreads across the Kingdom of Sky once more. Not as slashing black arms, but as torn, twisted bodies with misshapen limbs hanging off at wrong angles. I recognize the white of their pupilless eyes and the red slash of their screaming mouths.
The Amheuk is consuming the dead and regurgitating them as nightmare monsters.
Chapter Fifty-One
Sunny
Ethan cuts down the horrific creatures coming at me, his axes flashing. I stand paralyzed, trapped in a waking nightmare, and the Shin’gwangdo shakes in my hands. The trauma of Heaven Lake still haunts me—these monsters still haunt me.
Cheyun slashes at the dark beasts, her eyes growing wider and wider with disbelief. Every time she cuts them down, they stitch themselves back together. She wasn’t with us at Heaven Lake. There is only one vulnerable point in their twisted bodies.
I open my mouth to warn her, but no sound comes out. Then my panicked gaze shoots to Minju when she cries out. The nightmares are slicing her arm ragged.
Get it together, Sunny.
“Do not touch her,” Jaeseok roars.
Leaping into the air, he spears a dark monster in its red mouth—its Achilles’ heel—and it blinks out of existence. Thedokkaebifights the rest of the monsters around Minju with deadly precision, his handsome, playful face distorted into a furious mask.
But the historian is no shrinking flower. With her lips pressed into a determined line, she heals her ruined arm with silvery light from her other hand. Then she draws a vicious-looking dagger—I recognize it as the one she stabbed me with once upon a time—and hacks at the unending stream of monsters coming at them.
I snap out of my paralysis with a furious growl.
I head toward Minju and Jaeseok—I don’t know if I’m running or flying, but my surroundings become blurred from my speed—and I slash the dark creatures in their red, screeching mouths. But as soon as one blinks out of existence, two more take its place.
