Chapter Twenty-One #3
“You’ve been communicating with yourself,” Hong Gildong said. “You might have noticed her absence—it’s difficult to completely eliminate someone—but she has never once interacted with you since she was erased. She can’t.”
I took a faltering step back. “I don’t believe you,” I said, even though I could smell his fear with my dragon senses, even though I knew he wouldn’t lie to me now, with my fist around his yeouiju.
When Hong Gildong didn’t answer, I shook my head again, hugging myself because my arms had broken out in goose bumps and I couldn’t stop shaking.
My claws and fangs were gone and everything ached, my head throbbing and my skin sticky with blood.
There must have been another paradox coming, because I felt like the room was collapsing in on itself, the sound of my breathing deafeningly loud.
“She helped me,” I said, tears burning down my face. “She saved me.”
Hong Gildong shook his head. “You did that yourself.”
“I didn’t,” I said, though the protest sounded so small and childish.
I wasn’t supposed to save myself. That’s what sisters were for—to do what I wasn’t strong enough to do.
To make sure I was never alone. Hong Gildong was wrong, because even now I could feel Hana here, gently taking my hand, uncurling my tightly clenched fist, running her fingers over my bloodstained palm and silver-tinged nails where my claws had once been.
My claws.
I turned my hand over, staring at my throbbing nails that still looked slightly metallic, like the shifting shades of a dragon’s scales.
I wasn’t supposed to have claws. It was rare for any modern descendant, since we were so far removed from our dragon ancestors. It was even rarer for someone with one human parent like me. Claws were a mark of a powerful descendant, like Hyebin, Hong Gildong, and Seulgi …
And, apparently, me.
The descendant who couldn’t even pass calculus on her own, who was so weak that the other descendants decided to sacrifice her to the timeline for the greater good. Too stupid, too clumsy, too human to be anyone of importance.
But all along, Hana had known—I had known—that that wasn’t the full story.
My fingernails lengthened into sharp points, glinting in the light.
I had always thought of myself as more human than dragon, but now I felt as if I was seeing my own hands for the first time in my life. Of course I’d always looked out of place in every photograph—I’d been wearing the skin of a lost, lonely human, not a descendant. Hong Gildong had feared me.
Slowly, I leveled my gaze with Hong Gildong.
Without the power of his yeouiju, he no longer seemed like a tsunami of darkness, an all-powerful dragon too strong and wise to challenge. He was just a lanky young man in an expensive suit who thought the world was his inheritance.
“Mina,” he said—the same smug voice that had once ordered my sister’s death.
I lunged forward and closed my claws around his throat.
With his yeouiju clenched tightly in one hand, I crushed him into the carpet, holding him down with my knees on his chest. He struggled against me, but he felt like a butterfly beating its wings against a glass window.
I wrenched his jaws open with a clawed hand and brought the yeouiju to his teeth. He thrashed in my grip but didn’t dare bite down with the yeouiju so perilously close. I raised the heel of my palm to jam it into his mouth, but before I struck down, a gentle hand squeezed my shoulder.
At first I thought it must have been my parents, but when I turned around, they were still a few feet back, helping Yejun. No one was stopping me. Everyone knew Hong Gildong deserved it, and yet …
There it was, that same gentle touch on my shoulder that I’d felt so many times before.
Hong Gildong said Hana couldn’t interact with me anymore, but maybe there were things that he—as a cold-blooded dragon—couldn’t understand.
The warmth on my shoulder that bloomed like sunlight on a spring day, the invisible hand that tucked hair behind my ear and gently pulled my wrist back …
maybe it wasn’t a rogue Hana in another timeline reaching out to stop me.
Maybe it was the lingering traces of love, the memories that Hong Gildong could never erase.
Whatever it was, I trusted it. That was what sisters were for—loving you through the darkest times.
I pulled my hand back, releasing Hong Gildong.
He stayed perfectly still, as if afraid I would change my mind.
I put his yeouiju in my pocket, then picked up the discarded gun and sank my claws into it, snapping it in half.
I didn’t know what to do with Hong Gildong, but I knew I would never let him hurt anyone again.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway. I braced myself in front of Yejun, claws bared as the footsteps drew closer and closer. Then the office doors swung open and the doorway filled with gold.
At first, it looked like all of Hong Gildong’s hoard had burst out from behind the bookshelves and filled the room with glittering piles of sunlight.
But as my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that a gold dragon had curled around the perimeter of the office, its massive head resting on Hong Gildong’s desk.
It blinked its gilded eyes at me, and I found myself staring at my own petrified reflection within them.
Logically, I’d always known that I was descended from dragons, but I never imagined I’d actually see one. I felt impossibly small, yet something about the dragon felt natural and safe, as if I instinctively knew that despite our different bodies, we were the same.
Hyebin appeared in the doorway, Seulgi close behind her.
“Sunbaenim,” I said. “What are you—”
“This one overheard what was going on and called for me,” Hyebin said, nodding toward Seulgi. “I figured this was a matter for someone above Hong Gildong. Now bow, you idiot. This is the Dragon King.”
I jerked my head back to the dragon, then threw myself to the carpet in a bow. “I’m sorry, uh, Dragon-nim,” I said, not missing Hyebin’s groan of disappointment at what I was sure was the wrong title.
The dragon let out a huff of warm air over me.
“It’s all right, Mina,” said a voice in Japanese.
I turned to a woman in a kimono standing beside the dragon, one hand resting gently on its head.
I was so shocked at the dragon that I hadn’t noticed her at first, but now it was impossible to look away from her beauty.
Her turquoise eyes appraised me coolly, her pale blue kimono fluttering as if rustled by an ocean breeze.
Her skin had a pearlescent sheen, like the inside of a seashell.
“It’s Otohime,” my mom whispered in awe.
I all but slammed my face back into the carpet in another bow. This was my ancestor, the daughter of the dragon god who bestowed time magic on Japan … and she was standing six feet in front of me.
Otohime laughed. “Relax, Mina,” she said. “You’ve done well.”
I peeled my face from the carpet, wincing at the sting. “I have?”
Otohime nodded. “Hyebin called your sajangnim’s supervisor,” she said, gesturing to the dragon. “We happened to be out for lunch together, so I came along as well.”
The dragon huffed, its eyes glinting across the five of us.
“He says that he wants to thank you and Kim Yejun personally for uncovering Hong Gildong’s corruption,” Otohime said.
“And he assures you that accepting bribes to alter the timeline is not in alignment with the principles of dragon culture, in Korea or Japan.” She glanced warily at Hong Gildong’s ruined desk, the golden office supplies spilled across the floor.
“It is unfortunate that some with higher concentrations of dragon blood are too drawn to riches. Of course, we also agree that Hong Gildong cannot erase our children as he pleases. That decision should have been brought to us first.”
Yejun coughed wetly and I turned back to him, kneeling by his side.
“Otohime-san,” I said quickly. “Please, can you help Yejun?”
Otohime turned to Yejun, her vivid eyes taking him in unhurriedly. “He is not one of my descendants,” she said. “It’s not my place—”
“Urashima Tarō wasn’t your descendant either, but you took him in!” I said. “You cared for him and gave him time magic! How is this any different?”
Otohime stilled at my words, her gaze drifting back to Yejun.
The whole reason that Japan had access to time magic at all was because Otohime had loved a human and gifted him a box of time to protect him. That man—Urashima Tarō—had opened the box and unleashed her magic on the world.
“Please,” I said, dropping my head and bowing. “None of this was his fault. He was injured protecting your descendants.”
Otohime turned to the gold dragon, exchanging a long glance. After a moment, the dragon nodded.
Otohime knelt in front of Yejun. His tired eyes fluttered open as she pressed a hand to his cheek, then closed again as she pulled back.
“I cannot save him,” she said.
I gripped Yejun tighter. “But you’re—”
“My domain is time, not healing,” she said. “He cannot be saved.”
I felt my fangs descending once more, claws digging into Yejun’s shirt. I hadn’t planned on fighting a god today, but for Yejun, I would try.
“However, perhaps there is something else we can do,” Otohime said.
I straightened up, quickly retracting my claws.
“We can reset the last hour, so that this tragedy never occurs in the first place,” she said. “It’s probably for the best, as I see there has been a lot of … meddling with the timeline.”
Reset the last hour? I thought, my stomach sinking. I should have expected this—all my unauthorized time traveling probably poked a few too many holes in the timeline, and I was lucky I wasn’t actually getting punished for it.
But I didn’t want to forget the way my parents stood up for me, the way Yejun was willing to die for me, the way I learned that Mina Yang wasn’t a failed descendant and disappointment after all.
I looked down at Yejun, who was breathing shallowly, his face sickly gray.