Chapter 12: Revelation

Sehun

            “What do you mean, she’ll kill me?” I demanded. I knew, in that moment, I should’ve been feeling a plethora of emotions – ranging from fear to anger to disbelief. But I felt nothing – I felt numb, perhaps. It seemed impossible that Haerin would ever be dangerous.

            The near-god practically lighting up the room turned to me, and I noticed Haerin keeping her eyes trained on him, something unreadable in her eyes. Something flared up in me – was that jealousy?

            I frowned to myself. Why would I be jealous?

            “It’s hard to explain,” he said slowly. “At this point, I don’t think you’re ready yet. You haven’t told him, have you?” This last sentence was directed at Jaebum, who – uncharacteristically – seemed to shrink in the stranger’s presence.

            He shook his head, and tilted his head in my direction. “Sehun, this is Kris. He’s, well…”

            “I’m an Oracle,” Kris said bluntly, crossing his arms as if daring me to defy him. “The Oracle, actually. I kind of predicted your future – that is, if our assumptions are correct, and… ah, yes, sorry. I forgot you’re vastly uninformed. Well, you’ll find out soon enough.” He smiled unnervingly and turned to leave, before pausing mid-step and turning back. “Hold out your hand.”

            Hesitantly, I lifted my hand, palm up, expecting him to give something to me. But instead, I heard a soft click, saw a glint of metal and felt something slicing across my skin, and suddenly there was a gash along the width of my palm, glistening crimson in the light. Blood dripped down my hand and pooled between my fingers.

There wasn’t supposed to be that much blood, was there?

In the corner of my eye, someone lunged at Kris, but someone else – judging by his height, I guessed it was Yugyeom – held them back, locking his arms around their midsection and dragging them away. I barely processed that, though – I was more absorbed with what was happening to the wound on my hand.

            Because, right before my eyes, the skin was stitching itself together, the flesh merging and fusing, until all that was left was a faint trace of blood. I stared at my hand in horror – the feeling had been alien and very, very wrong, ice-cold and slippery, like my skin had turned to slime. Jaebum cursed under his breath, there was a flash of dark cloth, and just like that, Kris the Oracle was gone, leaving us in a pregnant, dripping silence.

After a while, it was Youngjae who spoke up, with the tone of someone forcing a joke into an uncomfortable situation. “So… ever heard of Wolverine?”

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Haerin

            “This means he is the One.”

            “That can’t be it – Kris said two hundred years, not fifty-”

            “This is the only plausible explanation.”

            “But how could he have been blessed? His father died-”

            “-when he was a young child, remember? So he must’ve…”

            “…must’ve done it when he couldn’t remember, -”

            “We have to tell him, Jaebum. We have to tell them what this means.”

            Jinyoung and Jaebum – the two, I realized, who lead the group – turned to Sehun and I, sitting on our respective chairs side-by-side against the wall. Everyone else had already left – Mark and Bambam to hunt down Jiwon, Youngjae and Yugyeom to take Jackson to a hospital where no one would question their lack of government information.

            “Sehun, you remember the Blood War, yes?” Jaebum’s voice broke into my thoughts, bringing me back to reality. Beside me, Sehun nodded grimly, his mouth pressed into a straight, firm line. “What did they tell you?”

            “It was a war between the truebloods and the halfbloods,” Sehun said, “because the halfbloods were pillaging and burning peaceful trueblood towns. The only way to get them to stop was war