The Girl Who Deserves to Die
As Kang Dae-han cut across the ER with the air around him gone lethal, every gaze in the place latched on and held.
He might as well have been alone. All he could see was Ong So-yul, backed into a corner because of that anchovy of a man. He caught her, set her behind his back, and stared the fellow down as if he meant to drive him straight through the floor.
A doctor's duty would not let him ignore some bastard pulling filthy tricks in a sacred emergency room — and alongside that duty, a feeling he could not name had taken hold of him. Rage, climbing so fast it felt one wrong touch away from detonating.
"D-Dr. Kang. Dr. Kang Dae-han."
"You know my name, so you know exactly what kind of man I am. You sure that wrist of yours is going to be all right?"
The Anchovy was a breath from crumpling under Kang Dae-han's aura when Ong So-yul — tucked away at his back — shot out and looked up at him.
"Dr. Kang! I'm fine. Really. I don't want any of this gutter water splashing onto you. Please step back."
She said it with the whole room's eyes on her, plainly terrified of what would happen if the newly arrived fellow laid into a resident from another department.
"Dr. Ong."
"This is my affair. I know you've just finished a difficult surgery. I'm sorry for making more trouble when you must already be exhausted."
Watching her bow her head to Kang Dae-han and draw a hard line between them felt deeply strange.
"Please just pretend you never saw it. All right?"
Her eyes begged for a yes. Dae-han nodded, easy and unresisting.
"Dr. Ong! Bed three is calling!"
"Yes, I'm coming! I'll go see to the patient, then."
So-yul gave him one more quick bow, gathered her supplies, and headed for the patient. As if nothing at all had happened, she turned a bright, sunny smile their way and wrapped a splint and an elastic bandage around a sprained leg.
"Well, then I'll just be—"
The Anchovy, still lingering, tried to ooze away. Dae-han was never going to allow that.
"Where do you think you're going."
"I— why me..."
"Follow me."
He marched the man out of the ER, where So-yul could not see.
A jerk of the chin — through that door — and the Anchovy bumbled into the emergency exit, stammering the whole way.
"Stand up straight."
"Yes, sir! Attention!"
Anyone who had passed through the ranks of Dae-han's boys carried at least one memory fit for a dog's life, and those memories had usually been made in the army. The moment the Anchovy stood before Kang Dae-han, something like PTSD slammed into him and military discipline locked through his body. Discharge had been years ago. The posture of obedience, his flesh still remembered.
Dae-han looked down at him with eyes that could have ground him to powder. He didn't need words. That killing pressure alone made the man whimper and drop his head.
"I'm sorry."
"For what."
"For all of it! I'm just sorry!"
"Listen carefully. In OS, Ong So-yul is mine. My resident. Do one more thing she doesn't want, and the next time I catch you, you'll be walking into Orthopedic Surgery as a patient. Understood?"
"Yes, sir! I've committed a crime worth dying for! I won't bother So-yul ever again!"
A few compressed sentences had shown him exactly what would happen if he stepped out of line, and the Anchovy submitted as if he might burst into tears on the spot. One look at those violently shaking eyes, and it was clear the lesson had landed.
"Conduct yourself."
"Yes, sir!"
Dae-han smacked the nape of the Anchovy's neck — thwack, thwack — the way you cuffed a raw recruit, then stepped out through the emergency exit ahead of him.
And then he was back in the ER.
His gaze moved fast, hunting for Ong So-yul, and found her standing with a young police officer. The officer had brought in a minor traffic-accident patient himself, and the two of them seemed only to be talking — but the air between them was nothing like the rest of the room.
"Oh my, Officer Ha Tae-joon and Dr. Ong look wonderful together. Both of them have those tofu faces people talk about these days — soft as fresh tofu."
"I know. The lines of them are the same kind of gentle. Like they were drawn by the same soft hand."
"Adorable. Didn't someone say they were childhood friends?"
"Yes. Though who knows — they might already be dating. Dr. Ong looks unusually at ease with him. She doesn't usually allow touching like that, does she?"
"Oh, you're so right. She'll be laughing one second and cut off any contact with a single stroke the next. But with Officer Ha, the chemistry is different."
Listening from behind the nurses, Kang Dae-han fixed his eyes on So-yul again.
Her hand on the arm of the uniformed officer called Ha Tae-joon, the ease of their talk — it was entirely too natural. The woman who, only moments ago, had told him flatly that this was her business and he should stand down was nowhere to be found.
Bzzzt.
He pulled out the vibrating phone. A message from So Joo-won.
Dae-han clenched the phone hard enough to crack it, shoved it into his coat, and turned his back.
Meanwhile So-yul, exhaustion plain on her face, had hold of Ha Tae-joon's wrist. She shaped the words with her mouth so the patient wouldn't hear.
"When are you leaving?"
"I've got a statement to write. I'll go once he sobers up a little. Sorry."
The ER was already a mountain of work, and Ha Tae-joon — walking in a patient who had been hit while jaywalking drunk — had just piled more on top of it.
Seeing patients was a doctor's fate. That didn't mean she enjoyed standing here clutching the forearm of a perfectly sturdy police officer. She and Ha Tae-joon were as close as family, but the ER had too many eyes, and she couldn't help feeling every one of them.
"Must be the ER. There are way too many ghosts today. So-yul, hold on tighter. This is hard."
"Aigoo. All right, all right."
In truth, the reason for the contact was a little out of the ordinary. This man could see ghosts. When it came over him she would take his arm, and he always said it steadied his heart — that it helped more than she knew.
So-yul looked at Ha Tae-joon in his police uniform and remembered the child who, all through their teens, had been called Damun Doryeong far more often than by his own name. The tangled bond between them reached back more than ten years.
So-yul was eight. Her paternal grandmother, Yoon Bok-rye, was a poor shaman. People said her spiritual gift had been strong in her youth, but age had drained the power out of her. She swung wild and missed like any charlatan, and in the end the customers thinned away.
Then a spirit-son came to her. That child was Ha Tae-joon. He was a boy his parents had abandoned, living in a children's home, and there he had fallen into spirit sickness — forever seeing what wasn't there, forever causing accidents — until he earned the director's hatred. Once her grandmother learned of it, she brought Ha Tae-joon out and had him live with So-yul's family.
So-yul was glad to have a friend her own age. Jammed together in a single tiny room, life had its miseries, but Ha Tae-joon was kind enough, and good enough, to make up for them. He helped with the work at her mother's Ongsimi shop — the little place that sold chewy potato dumplings in rich broth — and when her drunk father tore the inside of the house to wreckage, he quietly swept up the broken bottles.
Then one day her grandmother put Ha Tae-joon out front and opened a shaman's shrine beside the Ongsimi shop. It was a sensation. Word that the boy was spiritually potent spread in an instant, and the customers never stopped coming. Her grandmother meant to use her spirit-son to pay off every last debt, and she seemed well on her way to doing it.
But to So-yul's eyes, none of it was for the child's sake. He was not allowed to go to school. Going out to play like other boys his age was beyond even dreaming. Claiming his spiritual power would fade, the old woman permitted him only half a bowl of rice a day and a single cup of water.
Even So-yul, the same age, could hardly bear to watch. The spirit-son Ha Tae-joon was thinner than she was, weaker, smaller. Terrified of being thrown away, he did nothing but receive clients exactly as Yoon Bok-rye ordered, and So-yul's pity for him was past enduring.
The year she turned ten, she finally did the thing. She went to the police and reported her own grandmother for child abuse. Knowing a child's word might not be believed, she installed cameras in the shrine and in the house, and exposed the old woman with the footage.
Her grandmother's wickedness grew famous enough to make the daily papers, and the shrine shut its doors.
The day before she was to be handed over for trial, Yoon Bok-rye seized her granddaughter by the hair and, through bloodshot eyes burning scarlet, poured a curse down on her. As if the god who had abandoned her had come back — with a gaze that saw straight through a person—
"Iiiyaaaaa! I see it — I see it! Because of you, you girl swarming with men, two people who should never have died are going to die! Even from heaven I'll watch with my eyes wide open. You evil-spirit bitch! You'll wither away lonely your whole life, and that's how you'll die. Count on it!"
She cursed So-yul.