At my words, the room trembled. Just like when the paradox had rattled through the room, wood creaked and books jumped off the shelves, the curtains shivering at my words.
Hong Gildong opened his mouth, but I couldn’t hear his response because the ocean was roaring in my ears, a chorus of screams. Myvision glinted and sparkled, my gaze focusing on Hong Gildong’s pale throat—exposed, soft, vulnerable.
I vaulted over the desk and struck my claws across Hong Gildong’s face.
I have claws, I thought, barely processing the discovery as we both crashed into the carpet and the gun flew out of his hand. I hardly felt the impact, like my body was no longer made of flesh and bones but of searing light.
I lunged for his throat with claws that I could now see were sharp and silvery as starlight. Hong Gildong seized my wrist before I could strike him again, yanking me to the side.
I crashed against his desk, sending water from his scrying pool sloshing over me. Hong Gildong stormed toward me, but I was faster. I tackled him around the legs, and we both fell against a bookcase. He barely moved out of the way of my next strike, and my claws ripped across the shoulder of his shirt instead of his face, raking blood to the surface.
I had never felt like anything but a human girl until that moment. But suddenly, despite the cage of human bones, I felt as endless as a river reaching for the sea, my every movement fluid as water, my teeth shards of sea glass, my vision burning with brine. Hong Gildong’s blood splashed across my face, and the taste of it only made the gold in the room glow brighter. My claws tore open the side of his jacket, and something bright blue rolled across the carpet.
His yeouiju.
I climbed off Hong Gildong and seized the ball of light. By the time he got to his feet, I had his yeouiju clenched in my fist.
“Careful with that!” he said, holding his hands up in surrender.
I pinched it between my claws and he winced, letting out a wounded sound. “What happens if I pop it like a grape?” I said. My words came out strangely with my fangs scraping across my bottomlip, but Hong Gildong clearly understood me well enough, because his frown deepened.
“Don’t,” he said, lowering his head in a half bow. “Please,” he added through clenched teeth.
Every part of me wanted to end him once and for all, but there was one last thing I needed from him.
“Bring my sister back,” I said.
I expected him to throw himself at the scrying pool to comply, or tell me he needed more of his time magic to do it, or anything except what he actually did, which was stare at me blankly.
“Bring her back?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“The timeline is a toy to you,” I said, pinching his yeouiju harder, pulling a strangled sound from him. “You can do anything you want with it, sobring her back!”
“I can’t!” Hong Gildong said. “Neutralization is permanent. Once your source of time magic is destroyed, you can’t come back.”
I shook my head quickly. This was just another one of his lies. “There must be enough of her left,” I said. “She’s been communicating with me—”
“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 likethe 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.
