Ishaan didn’t say anything to either of them.
He just grabbed his phone off the nightstand and called Jihoon, hands shaking too hard to hit the right numbers on the first try.
“There’s a girl,” Ishaan said the second the call connected, voice cracking.
“She’s here, in the room, Yuna’s channeling her right now, you need to come back, you need to come back now—”
“We’re coming,” Jihoon said, already moving, Ishaan could hear it in his voice.
“Stay together.
Don’t leave the room.”
The line went dead.
Ishaan sat frozen on the edge of the bed, watching Yuna slowly blink her way back into herself.
“Did you hear any of that?” he asked her.
“While it was happening?”
Yuna shook her head slowly, still pale.
“Not from the inside.
It’s like being asleep.
I only know what came out of my mouth after the fact.”
Neither of them said much after that, just sat there watching the door, waiting for headlights.
Twenty minutes later, the whole team burst through the motel door at once, out of breath, talismans already in hand.
“What happened?” Baek asked, scanning the room like the girl might still be somewhere in it.
“She was right there.” Ishaan pointed at the empty spot on the bed.
“Just sitting there.
She said found you, except it wasn’t her voice, it was Yuna’s mouth saying it.
I panicked.
I called.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
“That’s not possible,” Somi said slowly.
“That’s not how any of this works.
Nothing’s supposed to be able to leave the site once we’ve got it contained inside the circles.”
“Unless it’s not tied to the property at all,” Baek said.
The room went very quiet.
“That’s not good,” Junho said, stating the obvious anyway.
“You two are coming with us,” Jihoon said, already turning back toward the door.
“No more splitting up.
Not after this.”
By the time they got back to the site, the sun was still high, and nobody wasted a second of it.
Junho worked faster than Ishaan had ever seen him move, talismans spreading out across the gravel in neat, practiced rows, ink barely dry before he was writing the next one.
“We’re not waiting anymore,” Junho said, not looking up.
“Whatever’s happening, it’s escalating too fast.
We go in tonight.”
Somi and Baek worked the outer ring together, chalk lines connecting each talisman into one long, unbroken circle around the building’s perimeter.
Within hours, everything was ready, laid out with a kind of speed that felt less like preparation and more like a countdown.
The sun started sinking behind the building as they finished, throwing the whole site into long, uneven shadows that didn’t quite match where the light should have been falling.
Nobody said much while they worked.
The usual banter had gone quiet somewhere around the third hour, replaced by the scratch of chalk and the low murmur of Junho double-checking every line twice.
Even the air felt different by the time they were done, heavier, like the building itself had noticed them getting ready.
“Before we go in,” Jihoon said, gathering everyone close, “remember the rules.
Don’t say anyone’s name out loud.
If something calls yours, don’t answer, not even to correct it.”
“Trust your gut over anything else,” Baek added.
“If something feels wrong, it’s wrong.
Don’t second-guess that instinct.”
“Some spirits mimic voices,” Junho said.
“Make sure you can actually see whoever’s talking to you before you trust it’s really them.”
“If it doesn’t feel right, even if it looks exactly right, don’t engage.”
“If you’d rather not talk at all tonight,” Jihoon said, glancing at Ishaan specifically, “that’s fine too.
Nobody expects you to narrate everything.”
Ishaan nodded, throat too tight to answer out loud anyway.
They crossed into the building together, and the second they stepped past the threshold, everyone felt it at once, a pressure settling low in the chest, cold enough to steal the breath right out of him.
Everyone held their talismans a little tighter.
Somi kept one hand wrapped around the metal bucket she’d insisted on carrying herself, refusing to hand it off to anyone else the whole walk in.
Jihoon held a long cleaver knife now, heavier and more ceremonial than the small ritual blade from before.
The driver had brought it out to him earlier that afternoon, wrapped in cloth, without a word about why he happened to have something like that on hand.
Junho drew a small circle around each of them individually, then connected all the circles together with one continuous line, standing at the very center once he’d finished.
Jihoon stayed outside the ring, chanting low under his breath, the words fast and unfamiliar.
Shapes began peeling away from the walls almost immediately, drifting out of corners that had looked solid a second before.
Jihoon glanced toward Ishaan.
“Come on.
Where.”
“Left,” Ishaan said, voice steady despite everything.
“There’s one moving up toward the second floor.
Fast.”
Jihoon had shed his jacket and vest somewhere outside, sleeves rolled up past his elbows now, moving through the space like he’d walked it a hundred times before instead of once.
“Another one, behind the register counter,” Ishaan called out.
“Low to the ground.”
Baek’s eyes tracked something none of the rest of them could see, jaw tight, murmuring something to himself about the flare of intent rolling off each new shape as it emerged.
Then, at the center of the room, the air itself seemed to bend.
The distorted woman stepped forward, thin and wrong, arms too long, edges still shimmering like heat off summer pavement.
“It’s here,” Ishaan said, voice dropping.
Junho’s chanting shifted, and Somi and Baek picked it up almost immediately, three voices weaving together into something that made the air hum.
Ishaan had never seen any of this happen for real before, only heard about it secondhand.
His whole body wanted to run.
He stayed exactly where he was instead.
The woman’s head tilted, slow and deliberate, studying each of them in turn like she was choosing where to start.
Yuna went rigid beside Baek, one hand flying up to her ear like the sound had come in too loud.
“She’s talking,” Yuna said, fast, low.
“She says— new.
They sent someone new this time.”
Nobody answered the woman directly.
Junho’s chanting didn’t waver.
“Thirty years, and this is what they send.” Yuna’s voice shook slightly, repeating the words as they came.
“A little circle of paper.
Cute, she says.
She thinks it’s cute.”
“Ignore her,” Jihoon said, not looking away from the shape in front of him.
“She heard that,” Yuna said quickly.
“She says of course I’m talking.
I’ve had thirty years alone in here to practice.”
Jihoon moved first, closing the distance in two long strides, cleaver already swinging.
She caught his wrist mid-swing.
The cleaver stopped dead in the air, and frost spread across the blade in a thin, crawling web, ice climbing the steel toward Jihoon’s fingers.
“Move!” Ishaan shouted.
Jihoon wrenched his arm back, the frost shattering as he broke free, stumbling half a step before catching his footing.
“She’s not just fast,” Ishaan called out, heart pounding.
“She’s smart.
She’s reading you before you move.”
“She says I built this place.
Every floor, every wall.
Says you think you can walk in and take it from her with a knife and some string.”
“Somi, now!” Baek shouted.
But she wasn’t ready yet, still holding the bucket low, waiting.
The woman lunged again, faster this time, aiming straight for Jihoon’s throat.
He barely got the cleaver up in time, the impact jarring up through both arms.
“Careful, little shaman,” Yuna relayed, voice climbing higher with every word.
“She says your friends can’t even see me.
How would they know if I already had you?”
“Left,” Ishaan shouted.
“She’s going left, low—”
Jihoon pivoted just as she struck, the blade catching her shoulder this time, and she screamed, high and furious, more insulted than hurt.
“She’s talking to you now,” Yuna said, looking straight at Ishaan, something close to fear in her own voice this time.
“She says you brought eyes.
That’s clever, she says.
She didn’t expect clever.”
“Don’t talk to him,” Jihoon said, sharp, stepping into her line of sight.
Without warning, Somi swung the bucket, the dark arc of pig’s blood sailing across the space between them.
It caught the woman full across the chest, and she froze mid-motion, screaming something that wasn’t a word at all anymore.
The shape buckled, folding in on itself, the frost and the shimmer and the too-wide smile all collapsing together into nothing.
Silence dropped over the room so completely it felt like a physical thing.
“That’s it,” Junho said, breathing hard.
“That’s the fight.”
Everyone slowly stood down, shoulders dropping, something like relief spreading through the room.
Somi let the empty bucket drop to the floor with a hollow clang.
Baek actually laughed, short and disbelieving, like he hadn’t expected to still be standing here.
“That was rough,” Junho said, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve.
“But we did it.”
It felt, for a moment, like it was actually over.
Safe, almost.
The kind of quiet that came after getting through something they hadn’t been sure they’d get through.
Ishaan let his shoulders drop too, running back through everything that had just happened, checking it off point by point in his head.
The woman.
The shapes along the walls.
The one behind the register.
He kept counting, kept checking names off a list that existed only in his head, and something about the count didn’t sit right.
Then his stomach dropped all over again.
“Wait,” he said.
“The little girl.
We haven’t found the little girl.”
Everyone went rigid at once.
A sound came from the top of the stairwell, small and unhurried, footsteps padding down one step at a time, the way any ordinary little girl might walk down any ordinary staircase.
A pressure settled over the room with every step she took, heavier and heavier, pressing down on all of them at once.
This time, nobody had to ask where to look.
Every single one of them turned toward the stairs, and every single one of them saw her, all the way down to the last step, standing there watching them with her head tilted at that same wrong angle.
Jihoon’s jaw tightened, both hands going white-knuckled around the cleaver.
“That’s not a normal spirit,” he said quietly.
“None of this has ever felt like this before.”
Nobody moved.
Nobody spoke.
“What is this thing?” Somi finally whispered, and nobody in the room had an answer for her.