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"Eunchae, do you want to sit down maybe?" Chaewon suggested.
"Do you want some water?" Sakura moved to stand up, but every muscle in Eunchae's body tensed up, and Sakura froze, not wanting to frighten her further.
"I’m good, thank you," Eunchae said, voice small. "I'm fine over here."
Chaewon shot a helpless glance back at the other girls. "Aegi, you don't have to be scared of us. I promise we can explain everything."
"Explain?" Eunchae's voice was becoming decidedly shriller. "Explain? You just stabbed a girl to death!"
"I know it seems that way, but really-"
"Seems?" Eunchae gestured at the ground between them, where, sure enough, the body of a pale-skinned girl was crumpled facedown, a pool of blood collecting under her torso.
Yunjin winced, lowering her still-raised bloody knife.
"I mean," Sakura seemed to scramble for an answer. "She was a sasaeng anyway." It was a weak excuse even if it hadn't been a lie.
"Sasaengs are still people, unnie!"
"Debatable," Yunjin muttered, and was harshly elbowed by Chaewon.
"Hey!" she yelped, shooting Chaewon a glare, then faced Eunchae, seemingly already tired of diplomacy. "You want an explanation, Eunchae? She's not even human. She's a wraith, and we're monster hunters. That's why we killed her."
"Yunjin," Sakura said sharply.
"She already thinks we're crazy!" Yunjin handed her knife to Kazuha and held out her own bloodied hand to Eunchae. "Come around this side and look for yourself. It's not a real girl."
Eunchae was definitely not going to do that. She felt a kind of hysteria building up in her, looking between her members, the body, and the door. But then, even if she left the dorm, where would she go? She couldn't drive. It was the middle of the night. Her phone was in another room. Could she run to her neighbors? Did she even know anyone else who lived in this building?
"We should move it," Kazuha murmured, snapping Eunchae out of her panic. "It'll be awful to get out of the floorboards."
"If we'd killed it properly it would've disintegrated," Chaewon said.
"Not like it matters. She caught us anyway." Yunjin dropped her hand and lowered herself to a crouch. "Eunchae. Come here." This time it wasn't a plea, and Eunchae obeyed on instinct. She wanted to believe Yunjin, she really did. She also didn't want to risk setting her off and getting stabbed. She crept forward, as Yunjin pulled the girl's arm out from under her and flipped her body over, brushing the hair from her face. Eunchae's breath stopped in her chest.
Where Eunchae had expected the face of a girl her own age, there was instead something that could only be described as corpse-like. The skin was grayed and wrinkled, its mouth stretched too wide open, revealing rotting teeth. Where her eyes should've been, were empty sockets, underscored with black tears.
White noise filled Eunchae's head.
The next thing she knew she was bent over their kitchen sink, heaving and gagging around last night's dinner. She tried to calm herself down, but it was so hard when the image was burned in the back of her eyelids, the body in their living room filling up all her senses, making her stomach turn.
Someone's hands steadied her as she vomited, drawing circles on her back and pulling her hair away from her face.
"You're okay." Kazuha's voice, soothing. "You're alright. Just try to breathe."
Eventually, Eunchae's stomach stopped rebelling, and she was able to stand up straight again. Kazuha handed her a tissue and a cup of water to wash her mouth out with, and Eunchae took it with shaking hands and tried to reorganize herself while Kazuha washed out the sink. Eunchae realized as she regained her bearings that the other girls were not in the kitchen with them.
"Where's everyone else?" she asked, voice hoarse.
"Cleaning up the remains," Kazuha said. She took the empty glass from Eunchae and rinsed it as well. Normally, Eunchae liked it when the older members handled things for her, but she felt so off-kilter already, so out of the loop, that Kazuha's attention only made her feel even more helpless than she already was.
"What is that thing?" she asked finally.
"A wraith. There's more of them here than at our old dorm. Kkura-unnie is trying to figure out why."
"Do…do you guys do this all the time?" Eunchae still felt lost. "How have I never noticed?"
Kazuha finished cleaning and washing her hands and leaned her hip against the counter. Eunchae noticed that Kazuha looked as exhausted as she herself felt. "Not all the time. It's a once-in-a-while thing. That wraith was a sasaeng. Chaewon suspected she'd try something, but we didn't expect her to break into our dorm. We didn't really have a choice in how we dealt with it."
"Are all sasaengs wraiths?"
"No. Most are just people.” She paused. “A shocking amount are liches, though.”
"Oh. Cool." Eunchae felt faint. She walked over to the kitchen table and sat down heavily in a chair, burying her head in folded hands.
Kazuha crossed the room to sit next to her and pulled Eunchae one-armed into a hug.
"Manchae, don't cry. I know it's a lot. I had nightmares for a week after my first kill."
Eunchae hadn't even realized she was crying until Kazuha mentioned it. She lifted her head to wipe the tears away from her eyes and tamped down her quiet sobs. She was sure she looked absolutely pitiful, but she had the right, didn't she? Her group members were monster hunters. Her group members had been monster hunters for..for how long?
"How long have you been doing this?"
"I've only known it for a few months, but the others have been at it since debut. Chaewon and Kkura taught Yunjin. Apparently, it was a whole thing in IZ*ONE."
"IZ*ONE was a cult?"
"I mean, no? Other idols do it too. It’s more common than you'd think. Personally, I find the whole thing a bit...much. And above our pay grade." Kazuha grimaced. "You're not supposed to be involved until you're twenty, but Yunjin slipped up and left her bloody bat where I could see it."
"They're not very good at this secret thing," Eunchae said weakly.
Kazuha sighed. "No, they're really not. But they're good at monster hunting. They help a lot of people. And they would never let anything happen to you or me. They didn't want you to have to worry about something like this until you absolutely had to."
Eunchae thought back to everyone's expressions in the living room. Everyone had been tense, but although Eunchae had at first interpreted it as anger, or even aggression, she now saw it more as fear for Eunchae's safety, or possibly fear of her response. They didn't want Eunchae to think badly of them.
A bit of shame curled in Eunchae's gut. How could she doubt her members so easily? She should know by now that they'd never hurt her.
"Don't feel guilty," Kazuha said, reading Eunchae's mind. "I think you had a perfectly normal reaction to the situation. I mean, monster hunters?" Kazuha rolled her eyes. "I didn't even see a body, so Kkura spent an hour convincing me not to call the police."
"You would call the police on them?" Eunchae asked.
"You're asking if I would call the police on serial killers?" Kazuha was incredulous. "I would turn in my own mother if I thought she was bashing people's heads in with a baseball bat."
"Well thank god we're not killing real people then."
Eunchae turned to see Yunjin leaning against the wall in the hallway, still in her bloody clothes. Her smile was strained. The air smelled strongly of bleach.
"Thank you for staying with her, Kazuha," Yunjin said.
Kazuha shrugged. "I wasn't going to help you with the body either way."
Yunjin huffed, then fixed her gaze on Eunchae, eyes wary. "How are you feeling, baby?"
Eunchae looked at Kazuha, who gave her an encouraging nod. She swallowed, the bitterness of bile still pungent on the back of her tongue, and faced Yunjin again. "I feel alright now. I'm sorry I freaked out earlier. I promise I'm not scared of you all."
Yunjin let out a deep breath. "Thank god," she said, painfully relieved. "And don't apologize for freaking out. We're sorry that you had to see that. Literally just wipe tonight from your memory and don't worry about it anymore."
Eunchae had no idea how on earth she was supposed to do that, but if this really was just a thing that idols did, maybe it was just part of protocol. She was only sixteen, which Eunchae personally felt was way too young to be going around merking zombies left and right even if there hadn't been an official rule about it.
"Where are Chaewon and Sakura-unnie?"
"Making some calls," Yunjin said vaguely. "Do you want to talk to them?"
"Don't I have to?"
"Well, yes, but I was trying to give you a sense of agency," Yunjin admitted. "We can wait until tomorrow, though."
As if Eunchae was going to get any sleep after this.
"No, it's fine. We can do it now." Eunchae didn't consider herself a very good actress at all, but she was doing a pretty good of convincing herself, at least, that this was all normal and fine, and that she had nothing to worry about. And maybe if she could convince herself, it might be enough to appease the others. She couldn't have them thinking they'd traumatized her for life. Sure, they had, but Eunchae thought that under ideal circumstances they wouldn't have done it on purpose.
Yunjin either believed her or was taking advantage of her willingness to cooperate, because she didn't attempt to verify a second time. She just held out a hand, and this time Eunchae actually stepped forward and took it. Yunjin's hands were cold, as if she'd just been outside, but they were clean, no sign of blood or dirt on them at all.
"Let's go wait in the other dorm. The solvents we use to get ichor out of carpet make me want to hurl."
Eunchae just clutched onto Yunjin's hand tighter and nodded. She reached a hand back for Kazuha, giving her best pout to urge the other girl forward, but she needn't have expended the effort, because Kazuha was already walking towards them. She laced her fingers tightly with Eunchae's.
"Change your shirt first, unnie. You're a walking biohazard," Kazuha requested. "I'll walk Eunchae over."
Yunjin waved away the concern. "Our dorm has seen worse than a bloody t-shirt. It’s fine.”
Kazuha sighed, long-suffering, but followed dutifully as Yunjin led their little chain out of the hallway. The two older girls didn't spare a single glance at the spot in the living room where the wraith's remains lay, but when Eunchae looked from the corner of her eye, breath held against the competing smell of blood and chemicals, she saw the floor a pristine white-as if there'd never been a body there at all.