Chapter 5: Fearing

This entire chapter is through the POV of Sehun.

            My father had always taught me about fear; that it came hand-in-hand with power, that I needed to harness it, to gain energy from it in order to become a good leader. At first, I hadn’t thought much about it; fear wasn’t something I was particularly wary of, nor something I was used to. I didn’t think fear was too bad of an energy source; there were mass murderers killing thousands of innocent people for pleasure, who was I to judge someone who lived off of others’ fear?

            But now, seeing the look of absolute terror in Haerin’s eyes as reality slowly faded back in, I came to the conclusion that anyone who enjoyed being feared was nothing more than a monster.

            “Haerin?” My world spun, and I stepped forward to maintain my upright stance. I caught the way she stepped backwards, keeping a safe distance between me and her, but chose not to think too much about it – the fear in her eyes was enough reason for her actions.

            What had happened to me?

            All I remembered was seeing the blood on my hands, the brief flash of panic before I realized it was my own blood, not someone else’s, and then it was as if a cloud of intense pain had descended into my skull. My vision clouded over, my throat burned, I couldn’t move, my head felt as if there was a supernova exploding within it, and then, just as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

            And now Haerin was looking at me like I was a demon.

            “What happened?” I asked, pressing the heels of my hands into my temples. That reminds me- I looked at my palms, checking for the blood that I had seen just before everything fogged over with pain.

            There was none. Instead, eight thin, crescent-shaped white scars, four on each hand, gleamed in the light of the hallway, one underneath each finger.

            Pain spiked in my head again and I cursed, falling back against the wall. When it had ebbed away and I was capable of processing reality once more, concern had replaced the fear in Haerin’s eyes as she stepped closer to me, her hand poised in the air between us as if she wanted to touch me but was afraid to do so.

            I didn’t blame her. I was scared of me too.

            “Are you okay?” she asked, settling for twisting a strand of hair around her index finger, pulling it taught before letting it go. “You looked- you looked…”

            “What?” I mumbled, my throat too raw for me to speak any louder than I was currently. “What did I look like?”

            She shook her head, a series of calculations flickering through her eyes before she closed her eyes, swallowed, and opened them again. “Your irises flashed red,” she said quietly, as if it was a secret meant for only the two of us. Perhaps it was. “You looked – you looked like a porcelain doll, completely frozen and devoid of emotion. And your hands – the cuts were healing themselves, Sehun. They were healing twenty times faster than they should.”

            “What?” I demanded, not quite wanting to believe her but not quite able to accuse her of dishonesty either. “How did- what-?” The sight of my new scars sickened me, and I dropped my hands back to my sides. “This has never happened before,” I said, more to myself than to her. “I’m just a normal person, I…”

            She shook her head, a look of disbelief in her eyes. “Either you really think you’re normal, or there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said candidly, her brutal honesty cutting through my haze of confusion.

            I raked a hand through my hair, remembering the curses and blessings and spells that hung in the air in my old town, how acutely I felt and smelled my father’s breath only moments ago. The secrecy of our town’s existence was an unspoken rule when I was growing up; it had been drilled into my head from the day I was born, slowly becoming an instinct as I grew up.

            But that had been before. Before, I couldn’t smell someone’s breath from ten feet away. I couldn’t heal at twenty times the usual rate. I couldn’t feel the strange tingling that was now sweeping through my body, making my toes and fingers twitch.

            I sighed. It was far too late, and Haerin was far too smart, to pass off whatever had just happened as a trick of the light.

            “Come with me,” I said slowly, beginning to walk down the hallway. “I have a lot to tell you.”

--

            Haerin handled the overload of information I gave her rather well. Which was expected, because to be honest she didn’t seem like the type of narrow-minded person to be intimidated by something unusual.

            “So you’re not from the countryside,” she said slowly, beginning to summarize everything I’d told her in the past twenty minutes or so. “You’re from this town that isn’t even on a map. And you’re a… trueblood?”

            I nodded, realizing that the warmth from the mug in my hands had already drained completely. “My father always told me that we were truebloods, that we needed to keep the glory of our kind, but as far as I know, we were just normal people. For some reason, we had to be kept a secret – I don’t know why-”

            “Think about it.” She interrupted me briskly, leaning forward with her forearms placed flat on the wooden table. “You don’t know this entire town exists, and them bam it’s like ‘hey, here we are!’ How do you think people will react?”

            I blinked. It made sense. People were generally afraid of unknowns – and an entire clan of peo