Chapter 11 Yiran
Yiran
Yiran kicked at the front door of the weird-looking shophouse. Scattered thoughts flew through his mind. Did he just kill
a Revenant? Did he have magic now? No. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening—but the girl in his arms was proof that something did happen. An image
of her surfaced in his mind: lying in the passenger seat of his car, blood fanned out on cream-colored leather like vicious
angel wings.
The car. There was so much blood on the leather seats. What was he going to tell his grandfather? Maybe he could pay someone
to clean it first or—
He swore loudly. If his arms were not full of bleeding girl, he’d slap himself. Why was he thinking about a freaking car when
the girl was slumped against him, silent and still? Is she dead? asked his good-for-nothing brain. He shushed it and kicked the front door of the shophouse again.
“Open up!”
Light leaked from the window shutters. Yiran heard an eclectic selection of swear words as someone fumbled with the doorknob.
“You better have a good reason for waking me up. I was having the funniest dream about talking pandas.”
The voice was low and scratchy with sleep, and it belonged to someone much younger than Yiran had expected.
Haloed in the light, a shirtless boy slouched against the doorframe. One of his eyes was shut, the other barely opened and
startlingly light-colored. There was a tattoo on his chest above his heart: two butterflies hovering together, as if in a
dance.
Stifling a yawn, the boy raked the dark mess of hair off his face and peered out, finally seeing what or who was in Yiran’s arms. Something fragile sparked like lightning across the boy’s face, and like lightning, it vanished quickly, chased by a thunderous rage.
He lunged wildly. “What did you do to her?”
Moving back, Yiran said through his teeth, “It wasn’t me—it was a Revenant.”
Anguish ripped from the boy’s throat. “Give her to me.”
Yiran hesitated. The boy had a look in his eyes, a desperate kind of helplessness that sought a violent release. Yiran wasn’t
sure if he could trust this beautiful, untamed creature. But the girl had said this boy was the only one who could help.
“No, we shouldn’t move her too much. She lost a lot of blood.” Yiran pushed past the doorway, bumping a shoulder meaningfully
against the boy’s chest.
Inside, he looked for a place to lay the girl down. The shophouse wasn’t what he expected. It didn’t look like a retail space;
it looked like someone’s home. If that someone was partial to sandalwood and lemongrass incense, left stacks of funeral paraphernalia
on their bookshelves, and indulged in half-finished paintings of people with distorted faces caught either in the throes of
ecstasy or extreme fear.
Yiran blinked away from a disturbing painting of a woman crawling out of a crab, her limbs bleeding with what looked like
fresh red paint.
The boy with the pale blue eyes motioned at a chaise. Carefully, Yiran lowered the girl onto it.
Her eyes fluttered open and focused on the boy, who had knelt beside her. “Zizi?”
“Don’t be afraid. I’m here,” said the boy named Zizi. He brushed the girl’s bangs aside, tucking the longer strands behind
her ear.
The girl struggled to breathe. “Not afraid . . . you fool.”
The gurgling sound from her throat turned Yiran’s stomach. He whispered to Zizi, “Is she going to be all right? She’s not
going to . . . you know . . .”
“I can hear you, fool.” The girl closed her eyes and coughed. Blood trickled down her chin. “Not going to die yet. Sorry to . . . d-disappoint.”
Zizi shot Yiran a scathing look. Then he leaned over the girl like he was about to put his arms around her, but all he did
was whisper something in her ear. There was a pause before she nodded.
“Look away,” he said to Yiran.
“What?”
Zizi narrowed his eyes. “I said, look away.”
Too exhausted to argue, Yiran faced the wall, trying his best not to stare at a portrait of a man with dark hair and blue
eyes dressed in something that looked suspiciously like a garbage bag. Maybe it was a portrait of Zizi’s future self. Maybe
it was a commentary on the state of the environment.
Behind him, fabric ripped, and the girl hissed in pain. Gradually, the air crackled like the beginning of a storm and the
room grew hot.
Yiran tugged at his collar. His adrenaline from earlier was gone, and he was drained and lightheaded. He wiped the sweat from
his forehead only to realize he was burning up. There was a new sensation crawling over him, like something was moving in his veins. It was the same feeling he had moments after the girl had cast her spell.
Magic, whispered his fast-beating heart.
His soul shivered.
This was magic. What he’d just witnessed was magic. And now, some form of it was inside him too. It was the thing in his veins, brought to life by the spell the girl had cast.
It was the strangest feeling.
To his grandfather, Yiran was a constant reminder of the shame that someone carrying the Song family name could be born without
the ability to do magic. It hurt. Yiran never showed it, not even to Ash. He played it off like he was relieved he didn’t
have to train at the Academy and was happy to waste his days away doing nothing.
Truth was, he yearned.
But he had always been the other. A sad, pathetic intruder looking into a world where he wasn’t allowed to exist. A boy who fell in love with a mansion and all its locked doors.
Tonight, one door unbolted. All he needed to do was to push it and walk through. But he was afraid he would find himself still
unworthy.
The girl’s scowling face appeared in his mind. What was her name? Rui. It was a pretty name. The owner of the name was pretty in a way that reminded him of a wildflower bloom in the desert. His
chance meeting with her had left him with the impression that she had a sizable chip on her shoulder and believed shouting
was an effective way to communicate. Yiran wanted very much for her to survive her injuries.
Impulsively, he turned around.
Zizi was kneeling with his hands over Rui, blocking her from Yiran’s line of vision. A mysterious glow radiated from the boy,
illuminating him. Lines of black ink, sharp like a knife’s edge, ran over pale skin from his scapula down toward his narrow
waist, ending at the small of his back. Swooping and looping, the dark curves were at once delicate and cruel.
Feathers.
Yiran was reminded of the bloody imprint Rui left on his car seat. He stared, fascinated. There was something so real about
the tattoo that he wouldn’t be surprised if Zizi suddenly sprouted real wings, like a sullied angel cast down to earth.
Zizi shifted, and Yiran glimpsed his face. His eyes. They were not pale blue like before, but eerie black pools of nothing.
A shiver skittered across Yiran’s skin.
Rui made a small sound. The tension in her body released, and her head tipped back onto the armrest. Color returned to her
face, and her breathing sounded less labored.
Whatever Zizi did to save her, it was nothing short of miraculous.
Was he a healer? Yiran had heard of healers.
The term made them sound like people who specialized in herbs and exotic tea, but he knew that some of them were Exorcists too.
Yiran didn’t think an Exorcist would be living in a place like this, which could only mean that Zizi was from the underground magic community.
The glow from Zizi faded, and the temperature in the room dropped back to normal. Slowly, that precious new thing in Yiran’s
veins dissipated and he was left with a hollowness he’d never felt before. He heaved a lungful of air, trying to fill himself
up. He didn’t want to lose that feeling of being complete. Of being enough.
Zizi got up, palms rust red, the bare skin on his torso blood-dappled like an avant-garde painting, looking as if he might
have tumbled into the world exactly this way: fully formed, bloody and bare, eyes naked like a winter’s lake.
“I’ve done all I can,” he said quietly. His eyes were blue again. Deep emotion lingered in them, and Yiran knew immediately
that this boy would go to the ends of the earth for the injured girl. “I thought we agreed you would look away.”
Yiran tilted his head toward Rui and saw why Zizi was making such a fuss. He averted his gaze as Zizi threw a large silk shawl
over her. Scrounging around, Zizi pulled out another slinky piece of fabric from between cushions. He put the pajama top on
and buttoned it up like it was the normal thing to do in a situation like this. Like he left pieces of clothing all over the
house so he could dress and undress at varying intervals.
He tucked a cigarette behind his ear with care and gestured at Yiran as if he was beckoning a puppy. “Come along.”
With some uncertainty and much irritation, Yiran followed. The kitchen was a menagerie of coffee beans stored in an assortment
of mismatched jars and decorated with instruments that looked like they could be used to conjure up a frothy cup of latte
with some light torture on the side.
“Sit.”
Yiran didn’t appreciate the condescension in the other boy’s tone, but he was tired. He got onto the barstool and propped
his elbows onto the counter.
Zizi rinsed his bloody hands under the tap and puttered around. He threw a handful of coffee beans into a mortar and pounded them furiously with a pestle. Yiran wasn’t versed in the intricacies of barista work, but he couldn’t fathom why Zizi wasn’t using the electric grinder instead.
Zizi seemed to sense Yiran’s question. “Helps me think,” he said, giving the beans a particularly hard smash.
“Is she going to be all right?” Yiran said.
Zizi put his pestle down, staying silent for a few seconds.
“She will be,” he finally replied, a catch in his voice. “Her spiritual energy is at the bare minimum, but that’s not quite
it. It’s like she turned into a normie, which doesn’t make sense at all. If a Revenant drank that much from her, she would be dead, she wouldn’t be like this. And