Lee Hyori sat in a corner of the tiny windowless room and drew her knees up to her chest, then wrapped her arms around her shins.

She rested her chin on her knees.

She could hear voices – angry, bitter voices.

Hyori concentrated on the sound. She allowed her aura to expand a little as she murmured a small spell she had learned from an Inuit shaman.

The shaman used it to listen to the fish moving under the arctic ice sheets and the bears crunching across the distant ice fields.

The simple spell worked by shutting down all the other senses and concentrating exclusively on hearing.

Hyori watched as the color faded from her surroundings and darkness closed in until she went blind.

She gradually lost her sense of smell and felt the pins-and-needles tingle in her fingertips and toes as her sense of touch dulled, then faded completely.

She knew that if there were anything in , she would no longer be able to taste it.

Only her hearing remained, but it was enhanced and supersensitive.

She heard beetles crawling in the walls behind her, heard the scritch-scratch as a mouse gnawed through wood somewhere above her, knew that a colony of termites was munching their way through distant floorboards.

She also heard two voices, high and thin, as if they were being picked up on a badly turned radio, and coming from a great distance.

Hyori tilted her head, homing in on the sound. She heard wind whistling, the lap of clothing, the high crying of birds.

She could tell that the voices she was hearing were coming from the roof of the building.

They strengthened, warbled and bubbled, and then abruptly clarified.

The belonged to Junhyung and the Davichi, and Hyori could clearly hear the fear in the man’s voice and the rage in the Goddess’s shrill cries.

“She must pay for this! She must!”

“She is an Elder. Untouchable by the likes of you and me,” Junhyung said, trying unsuccessfully to calm the Davichi.

“No one is untouchable. She has interfered where she was not wanted. My creatures had almost overwhelmed the car when her Ghost Wind swept them away.”

“Jihoon, the warrior Fei and the two humans have now disappeared,” Junhyung’s voice echoed, and Hyori frowned, concentrating hard, trying to follow every word.

She was delighted to discover that Rain had sought the assistance of Fei.

She was a formidable ally.

“It’s as if they have vanished off the face of the earth.”

“They have vanished off the face of the earth,” the Davichi snapped.

“He’s taken them into Gyuri’s Shadowrealm.”

Unconsciously, Hyori nodded.

Of course! Where else would Rain have gone? The entrance to Gyuri’s Shadowrealm in Mill Valley was closest to San Francisco, and while the Elder was no friend to them, she was not allied to Junhyung and his Dark Elders either.

“We must follow them.” the Davichi stated flatly.

“Impossible,” Junhyung said reasonably.

“I have neither the skills nor the powers to penetrate Gyuri’s realm.”

There was a pause, and then he added, “Nor do you. She is a First Generation Elder, you are of the Next Generation.”

“But she is not the only Elder on the West Coast.” The Davichi’s voice was a snap of triumph.

“What are you suggesting?” Fear had touched Junhyung’s voice with a hint of his original Korean accent.

“I know where Tiffany sleeps.”

Hyori sat back against the cold stone and allowed her senses to return.

Feeling came first – pins and needles racing through her fingers and toes – then her sense of smell, and finally sight.

Blinking, waiting for the tiny colored spots of light to fade, Hyori tried to make sense of what she had just discovered.

The implications were terrible.

The Davichi was prepared to awaken Tiffany and attack Gyuri’s Shadowrealm to retrieve the pages of the Codex.

Hyori shuddered.

She had never met Tiffany -- she didn’t know anyone who had in the last three centuries and had lived to tell the tale – but she knew her by reputation.

One of the most powerful members of the Elder Race, Tiffany had been worshipped in Korea since the earliest ages of man.

She had the body of a beautiful young woman with the face resembled a cat, and Hyori had absolutely no idea of the magical forces she controlled.

Events were moving surprisingly swiftly.

Something big was happening.

Many years before, when Rain and Hyori had first discovered the secret of immortality, they had realized that their extra-long lives allowed them to view the world from a different perspective.

They no longer planned events days or weeks in advance.

Often they would make plans decades into the future.

Hyori had come to understand that the Elders, whose lives were infinitely longer, could make plans that encompassed centuries.

And that often meant that events moved with an extraordinarily deliberate slowness.

But now the Davichi was abroad. The last time she had walked in the World of Men, she had been spotted in the bitter, mud-filled trenches of the Somme, before that she had prowled the bloodstained battlefields of the American Civil War.

The Crow Goddess was drawn to death. It hung around her like a foul stench.

She was also one of the Elders who believed that humans had been placed on this earth to serve them.

Rain and the twins were safe in Gyuri’s Shadowrealm, but for how long?

Tiffany was a First Generation Elder. Her powers had to be at least equal to Gyuri’s … and if the Cat-like Goddess and the Crow Goddess, combined with Junhyung’s  alchemical magic, attacked Gyuri, would her defences hold?

Hyori didn’t know.

And what of Rain, Fei and the twins ?

Hyori felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, but blinked them away.

Rain would be six hundred and seventy-seven years old on the 28 of September, in three months’ time.

He was well able to take care of himself, though his mastery of practical spells was very limited, and he could be remarkably forgetful at times.

Only the summer before, he had forgotten how to speak English and had reverted to his native Korean. It had taken her nearly a month to coach him back to speaking English.

Before that he had gone through a period when he had signed his checks in Japanese and Korean characters.

Hyori’s lips curled in a smile.

He spoke sixteen languages well and another ten badly. He could read and write in twenty-two of them – though there wasn’t much chance to practice his Linear B, cuneiform and hieroglyphics these days.

She wondered what he was doing right now.

He would be looking for her, of course, but he would also need to protect the twins and the pages that Seungho had torn from the Codex.

She needed to get a message to him, she had to let him know that she was fine and to warn him about the danger they were in.

One of the earliest gifts the young woman known as Lee Hyori had discovered when she was growing up was her ability to talk to the shades of the dead.

It wasn’t until her seventh birthday that she realized that not everyone could see the flickering black-and-white images she encountered daily.

On the eve of her birthday, her beloved grandmother, Miyeon, died.

Hyori watched as the withered body was gently lifted from the bed where she had spent the last ten years of her life and laid in the coffin.

The small girl had followed the funeral procession through the tiny town of Daegu and out into the graveyard that overlooked the sea.

She had watched the little rough-hewn box as it was lowered into the earth, and then she had returned to her home.

And Miyeon was sitting up in the bed, eyes bright with their usual mischief.

The only difference was that Hyori could no longer see her grandmother clearly. There was no color to her – everything was in black-and-white – and her image kept flickering in and out of focus.

In that instant Hyori realized she could see ghosts.

And when Miyeon turned in her direction and smiled, she knew that they could see her.

Sitting in the small windowless cell, Hyori stretched her legs out in front of her and pressed both hands to the cold concrete floor.

Over the years she had developed a series of defences to protect herself from the unwanted intrusions of the dead.

If there was one thing she had learned early on about the dead – particularly the old dead – it was that they were extraordinarily rude, popping up at the most inopportune and in appropriate moments.

The dead particularly liked bathrooms – it was a perfect location for them. Quiet and still, with lots of reflective surfaces.

Hyori recalled a time she’d been brushing her teeth when a ghost of an American president had appeared in the mirror in front of her.

She’d almost swallowed the toothbrush.

Hyori had quickly come to understand that ghosts could not see certain colors – blues and greens and some tints of yellow – and so she deliberately encouraged those colors into her aura, carefully creating a shield that rendered her in visible in the particular Shadowrealm where the shades of the dead gathered.

Opening her eyes wide, Hyori concentrated on her own aura.

Her natural aura was a pale ice white, which acted like a beacon for the dead, drawing them to her.

But over it, like layers of paint, she had created auras of bright blue, emerald green, and primrose yellow.

Now, one by one, Hyori shut off the colours – yellow first, then green, then the final blue defense.

The ghosts came then, drawn to her ice white aura like moths to a flame.

They flickered into existence around her. Men, woman and children, wearing clothes from across the decades.

Hyori moved her green eyes over the glistening images, not entirely sure what she was looking for.

She dismissed woman and girls in the flowing skirts of the eighteenth century and men in the boots and gun belts of the nineteenth and concentrated on those ghosts wearing the clothing of the twentieth century.

She finally picked out an elderly man wearing a modern-looking security guard’s uniform.

Gently easing the other shades aside, she called the figure closer.

Hyori understood that people – particularly in modern, sophisticated societies – were frightened of ghosts.

But she knew that there was no reason to fear them.

A ghost was nothing more than the remnants of a person’s aura that remained attached to a particular place.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” The shade’s voice was strong, with a touch of the East Coast in it. Boston perhaps.

Standing tall and straight, like an old soldier, the ghost looked about sixty, though he could have been older.

“Can you tell me where I am ?” Hyori asked.

“You’re in the basement of the corporate headquarters of Enoch Enterprises, just to the west of Telegraph Hill. We got Coit Tower almost directly overhead,” he added proudly.

“You seem very sure.”

“Should be. I worked here for thirty years. Wasn’t always Enoch Enterprises, of course. But places like this always need security, Never one break-in on my watch,” he informed her.

“That’s an achievement to be proud of, Mr …”

“It surely is.” The ghost paused, his image flickering wildly. “Miller. That was my name. Jefferson Miller. Been a while since anyone asked for it. How can I help you?” he asked.

“Well, you’ve been a great assistance already. At least I know I am still in San Francisco.”

The ghost continued to look at her.

“Did you expect not to be?”

“I think I may have slept earlier, I was afraid I might have been moved out of the city,” she explained.

“Are you being held against your will, ma’am?”

“I am.”

Miller  drifted closer. “Well, that’s just not right.” There was a long pause while his image flickered.

But I’m afraid I can’t help you – I’m a ghost, you see.”

Hyori nodded. “I know that.” She smiled. “I just wasn’t sure if you knew.”

She knew that one of the reason ghosts often remained attached to certain places was because they simply did not know that they were dead.

The old security guard wheezed a laugh.

“I’ve tried to leave … but something keeps pulling me back. Maybe I just spent too much time here when I was alive.”

Hyori nodded again. “I can help you leave, if you would like to. I can do that for you.”

Miller nodded. “I think I would like that very much. My wife, Ethel, she passed on ten years before me. Sometimes I think I hear her voice calling me across the shadowrealms.”

Hyori nodded. “She was trying to call you home. I can help you cut the ties that bing you to this place.”

“Is there anything I can do for you in return ?”

Hyori smiled. “Well, there is one thing … Perhaps you could get a message to my husband.”

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Hello there my lovely (silent) readers xD

Sorry i took such a long time to update. Exams are round the corners T__T /sobs

Will try to update as much as i can ^-^

Comments are much loved xD