Excerpt
The God and the Gwisin
Chapter OneKisaSeoul, 2018The glittering behemoth that is Seoul’s Shamanic Hospital towers above the city’s streets, lording over its nightlife with a certain smugness only a building of great esteem can possess. Within this pillar of cold steel, steadfast concrete, and sparkling glass lies a world of bustling paramedics, striding doctors, a symphony of mechanical beeps and white-tiled floors that somehow remain pristine even as creatures and mortals alike are wheeled through the winding halls on gurneys.
Up and up the hospital stretches, pulling itself toward the night, where dark gray clouds smudge the rich navy sky and where a young woman sits underneath the stars and kicks a foot in a calculated motion over the edge.
She has carefully tied her hair back in a low bun, but wisps of dark, mocha-colored curls escape their band and brush against her cheek, accompanied by a cold kiss of wind. The young woman wonders, feeling rather detached from it all (a side effect, no doubt, of pulling twenty-four-hour shifts in the Magical Maternity Unit), if another gust would be enough to knock her over. Enough to send her fluttering down like an autumn leaf from a tree, crumpling on the ground below.
She sighs, leaning her cheek against the knee of her propped-up leg and staring down at the crawl of traffic below.
Yoo Kisa is utterly exhausted with her life. Exhausted from the long shifts with her hands fumbling for the slippery skin of a newborn, the eternal sleeplessness and concerning dependency (addiction, really) on fruity energy drinks and flat whites. Exhausted from being a shaman.
Perhaps, she thinks wearily, she should have specialized in something other than magical medicine. Her former New Sinsi University (Magical Division, of course) classmates seem to be doing well, from what she can decipher through the smiling posts on social media. Yuna, her old roommate, is the city’s top glamourist—and paid in the hundreds of thousands. Jinny, Yuna’s sister, has fulfilled her lifelong dream of being a god’s assistant, running errands for none other than Yongwang the sea god himself and even residing in Okhwang. Kisa’s rival Kim Dae, with whom she was always competing for top marks in the specialty, now works in Hallakkungi’s flower garden and is part of the flower god’s prestigious botanical research team, which is famous for their contributions to pharmacology. None were foolish enough to go directly into magical medicine. It’s at least ten times more difficult, more dangerous, than mortal medicine—the dissimilar internal anatomies of dokkaebi versus imoogi, versus gumiho versus demigods, is only one example of the many, many differences.
Oh, taking this job so soon was a grievous error on her part, a flaunting of her own brilliance. Yoo Kisa, top of her NSUMD class. Yoo Kisa, a prestigious doctor, diving into the hospital mere minutes after graduation. Practically unheard of for a twenty-two-year-old shaman to skip the additional four years of medical training, but Kisa was just that good. One of her professors had fondly referred to her as the “nucleus” of NSUMD’s graduating class of 2017. A powerhouse.
And it’s true.
NSUMD is renowned for taking “prestigious” and “cutthroat” to another level entirely. In any mortal university, sabotage would have been frowned upon. In the Magical Division, it had been encouraged. Kisa is unable to count the number of times her laboratory experiments had been tampered with . . . or the number of times she’d returned the favor in full. There was no punishment for physical altercations, either. Shamans were in constant competition with one another, egged on by their patron deities. The gods may not be able to fight amongst themselves, or do anything to disrupt Okhwang’s inner harmony, but their shamans? Through their shamans, the gods can be as nasty as they please.
Yet despite it all, Kisa did more than succeed. She excelled.
She could read a massive tome on history within four days and write a dissertation on the subject within three weeks. Her hand flew up in every class, and she received nothing less than top marks every semester. Channeling the power of her patron goddess, Samsin Halmoni, is something Kisa is remarkably adept at. A good mother heals, after all—chicken noodle soup, bandages, kisses on the head—and for Kisa, who had longed to be an obstetrician since her own mother died in childbirth, connecting with the goddess of childbirth comes smoothly, and so does channeling Samsin Halmoni’s magic into her work.
The flesh of a mother can knit itself back together underneath Kisa’s touch. A baby born on the brink of death can be revived, can transform into a wailing infant, flushed and healthy.
Kisa is also one of the leading experts on fetal congenital heart disease, able to detect what the machines sometimes cannot, able to perform the necessary surgeries with skilled hands that never falter, never fail. Yet there’s a catch: She cannot heal mortals. Kisa can heal only creatures, those who believe in the power of the Korean gods.
And that restriction hurts. She aches from it—and for something . . . more. She knows not what—just that there’s a startlingly new feeling of emptiness within her today, a dark, gaping void waiting to be filled.
Perhaps it’s from skipping her usual order of a flat white this morning in favor of a few more treasured minutes of sleep. The lack of caffeine has certainly done her no good.
Kisa inhales a deep breath of night air but is unable to clear the taste of antiseptics and the surgery room from her lungs. Her head still throbs from the emergency C-section she’d had to give a petite haetae woman. Haetae are notoriously hard to deliver, the guardian creature’s wary streak beginning in the womb. Sometimes the babes are too cautious to even want to come out into the world of danger. Kisa swallows hard.
How long has it been since she left the hospital? Days? Weeks? Ever since the hospital cut their staff numbers, she’s been working herself until she falls from the brink of exhaustion and has no choice but to pull herself back up. Kisa’s vision blurs with tears. It’s not that she doesn’t love what she does, or that she no longer feels the surge of triumph when she delivers a happy and healthy child. It’s that she’s so tired.
Nobody knows she’s up here.
It would be so easy to slip away . . . to finally rest . . .
Kisa chews on her bottom lip. A flicker of red intrudes in her vision and she grimaces, pointedly not looking at the red thread that tied itself around her left pinky finger hours earlier, wrapping itself around the little finger in an intricate floral pattern almost reminiscent of a mugunghwa.
It’s no surprise, really, that she’s seeing things. It’s the stress of it all, affecting her nervous system, increasing her vulnerability to hallucinations. Because there’s no chance the thread, the one trailing down the building, winding into the streets below, is real.
She’s seeing things. Feeling things.
Oh, yes. Kisa can somehow feel the smooth cord wrapped around her skin just as she would any real thread. Yet unlike real threads, this one won’t come off. It appeared this afternoon, right when Kisa was creating the C-section’s first abdominal incision. She nearly startled, but regained control of herself, conscious of the repercussions of any jerky movement on her patient.
“Go away,” Kisa whispers now in English to the hint of red she can still see. Obviously, it doesn’t reply. It doesn’t reply when Kisa pleads to it in British-accented Korean, either.
Yet the hairs on the back of her neck still prick up. A slow trickle of anticipation crawls down her spine, and her limbs suddenly feel heavy with dread. Something has been decided, she senses. Something has been etched into stone, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. It’s life-changing, life-altering . . .
Life-ending. A knife to cleave twenty-two years in half.
Her spine stiffens. As it begins, Kisa sucks in a shallow breath, tasting something bittersweet at the back of her throat. It reminds her of her stepmother’s fixation with anti-aging creams. She stares down at the city below, heart thumping. It all happens so fast. Kisa doesn’t even have time to open her mouth, to scream a plea to her goddess.
For in an instant, her body is sliding off the roof and she is, for a perfect, brilliant moment, weightless and hovering over Seoul. But then gravity grabs her by the ankle and tugs her down, yanking her past rows and rows of gleaming glass windows all stacked upon one another, laughing as it hauls her toward the ground in a perfect swan dive.
Kisa closes her eyes.
It’s over soon enough.
