Chapter 5 What She Really Is

• The address she sends isn't off campus after all, not exactly. It's a door at the back of the library, past the archive stacks nobody uses, down a hallway I didn't know existed until her text told me to find it. *Private research room*, the sign on the door says, nothing more.
• I knock. No answer. I try the handle and it's open, so I let myself in, the way she'd probably expect me to.
• The room is smaller than I imagined, shelves lining every wall, the same leather-bound books from the library that night, dozens of them now instead of a stack of three. Candles burn on the desk instead of a lamp, which strikes me as strange for a professor grading papers, but I've stopped questioning the strange things about her out loud.
• She's not at the desk.
• She's standing near the far shelf, back to me, shoulders rigid in a way I've never seen from her. Even from behind I can tell something's wrong. Her breathing is too loud in the quiet room, ragged, like she's been running.
• "Professor?"
• She doesn't turn around. "You shouldn't be here right now."
• "You texted me the address."
• "That was before." Her voice comes out strained, lower than usual, like it's costing her something to keep it steady. "Junho, leave. Now."
• I don't leave. I take a step closer instead, because everything in me that isn't survival instinct is telling me something's hurting her and I can't just walk away from that.
• "What's wrong? Are you sick?"
• "You need to go." She still hasn't turned around, and her hand grips the edge of the shelf hard enough that I hear the wood creak under her fingers. "Please."
• It's the *please* that stops me. I've never heard her say please to anyone, not once, not in a lecture hall full of two hundred students or an office with red ink bleeding across my papers. Hearing it now, cracked and desperate, does something to my chest that overrides every warning bell going off in my head.
• "I'm not leaving you like this," I say.
• She turns around.
• Her eyes are gold, fully gold this time, no trick of the light, no half second flash I can talk myself out of. Behind her, where there should be nothing but the wall, shadows move that don't belong to anything in the room, shapes flickering like something with more limbs than a person should have, more tails than an animal should carry.
• I should run. My legs don't move.
• "I told you to go," she says, and her voice isn't entirely her voice anymore, layered under something older, something that doesn't belong in a university library. "I can't stop this. I haven't fed in too long and there's no one else here, Junho, there's no one else here but you."
• "Fed?" The word comes out small, stupid, the only thing I can manage.
• She crosses the distance between us before I can finish being afraid of the question. Her hand closes around my jaw, gentle even now, even with gold burning in her eyes and something ancient rolling off her skin like heat off summer pavement.
• "I'm sorry," she whispers, and it sounds like she means it, right before her mouth finds mine.
• The kiss isn't like anything I've felt before. It pulls, actually pulls, something rising up out of my chest and pouring into her like water finding the lowest point in a room. My knees go weak. The candles gutter and flare. Somewhere behind her closed eyes I imagine centuries stacking up, hunger older than the building we're standing in, older than the country, older than anything I have a frame of reference for.
• When she pulls back, gasping, her eyes are still gold, and behind her the shadows have shape now, nine of them, moving like they're attached to something I can't quite bring myself to look at directly.
• "What are you," I manage, the room already tilting sideways.
• "I'm sorry," she says again, reaching for me as my legs finally give out. "I'm so sorry, Junho."
• The last thing I see before the dark takes me is her true face, beautiful and ancient and terrified, nine tails fanned out behind her like something out of a story I never believed was real.
• Then nothing.