Prologue
I'm running through the woods, the sound of footsteps sounding quickly behind me. I never dare to look, the fear that they, whoever they are, will catch up should I be foolish enough to even take a peak over my shoulder. My lungs burn as I try to pull in air but as always, my asthma kicks in. My breathing becomes labored, my vision blurry. Will the chase never end? I think to myself, lost in the hopeless escape. I have no idea what I am running from, or why I think that my 'salvation' lay in the land of Korea. Seoul to be exact. A laugh escapes my dry lips.
I think to myself that I have finally gone off the deep end, and my sister, Mina, the wretch, would very possibly, and quite hilariously, agree with the assessment, though she would say that she had always known I was off my rocker. I have to say; if I am, so is she.
A tree branch cracks behind me, and I just barely stop myself from turning around to face the sound, which would require me to stop running.
I hear it again, they sound closer. My heart pounds. They're gaining on me, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. I was told that when I was younger, I was an expert runner, faster than most; that the only one that could keep pace with me was Mina.
But that was then, when Mina was only fourteen, while I had been fifteen. Now, I am older, twenty-three, my birthday had just passed. My Music Business professors said I showed great promise in the field... but I am deviating, my mind, as always, wondering off the most important subject at hand.
Right now, that subject was my life.
My foot gets hooked on some tree roots as I bolt past a cedar tree. I stumble, barely catching myself before I fell. My hand hits the ground and I push off, using the momentum to propel myself forward again. I can't afford to lose ground. The footsteps are getting louder, faster.
I have to stop myself from looking back again. The breathing, I can hear it now. No, not breathing; it was growling. I could hear the growling, not twenty feet behind me as I ran, feeling that if I was caught, I'd never see my sister again.
I listened harder. Only two feet. A frown, I can feel it forming on my face as sweat trickled down my forehead. I wonder how I knew that the thing behind me was running on two feet.
I don't get the chance to find out.
My foot catches the sharp side of a rock, and I go down hard. The thing at my back gains on me, closer.
I close my eyes and pray.
Lynn stopped writing in her journal, the frown she had felt in her dream still in play on her pale features.
The same dream for eighteen years, as far back as my memory allows me to go. She sighed. The dream had baffled her when she was a child of five who had no understanding of the danger she felt in the dream state, but as she grew older, it began to frighten her.
The terror of being chased was so real. Too real. She had never told Mina, but she saw the look in her younger sister's face when she was awoken by her older sisters screams in the middle of the night. Anxious worry. The only words to explain the look in the blue eyes tinged with golden brown, as her sea green eyes were. Tawny, their grandmother had said. Like a lions. Later on, they had been diagnosed with Bithil Syndrome.
The Doctors, she heard them speaking to her grandmother when she was fifteen, said that it was particularly rare for Lynn, who had green eyes, because the gene was more recessive in those with blue or brown eyes.
"Astonishingly excellent hearing and sight, though both girls are sensitive to light, they have excellent night vision, shockingly fast reflexes, and yellowish eyes. Don't be alarmed about the misshapen vertebra near their lower back, which is another indication of their state." The doctor spoke calmly, though, through the crack in the door, Lynn saw the excitement in his eyes. "I have to say, I am rather astonished that not one, but two of my patients have been diagnosed with such a rare genetic mutation."
At the word mutation Lynn turned and ran, panicked. She was a freak, and so was her sister.
As the years passed, she began to wonder about her and her sister's condition, so she did research. Knowing about the genetic mutation helped her to cope with it, and gradually, she thought about it less and less, until she simply went on with her life, and in time, she forgot about it.
Both girls had excelled in their Taekwondo and Mui Thai classes, earning black belts in virtually no time at all. Their masters for the classes asked them to help with the new classes, but, with both girls in college, they had to turn down the positions, which weighed heavily on Lynn's conscience.
At the age of twenty-two, she had her Music Business Masters degree, had quite literally worked her way up from the bottom of the agency she worked for, proving herself to the big-wig boss as she had promised.
Mina, a very promising choreographer, was at the top of her game, and the same big-wig boss that said the two sisters wouldn't make it a day in his agency, now wanted her as the head of the Choreography department.
Lynn was the head of the Audio and Visual department, but she led the Tech Support as well.
What they didn't bring into the office was the chaos that was their life. Their entire family was at a constant war with itself, the Sisters, the two girl's aunts, fighting over something well over twenty years old, the Brothers, even Lynn and Mina had to admit, were good for absolutely nothing but keeping their wives pregnant and being on welfare.
The two girls had made up their minds at an early age to never walk down that path, and both had got their first jobs at the same time, sixteen and seventeen, Lynn was the oldest, but only by four years.
They had one grandparent, their grandmother, the woman who raised them.
Lynn, her opinion of her mother was not one that she would like to repeat.
Mina, she thought that their mother was good for nothing. She was never a constant part of their lives, only showing up to collect the check for them, then they never seen her much, maybe two, three times a month, if they were unlucky enough to be home when she came to their grandmothers and demanded more money.
Recently though, Lynn had noticed that Grandmother Violet had started to look... weaker, sickly. It frightened her more than her dreams.
What she found the most terrifying? The words her grandmother always said when they managed to find a quiet moment together, "When you find them, you have to protect them, I have done all I can to prepare you and Mina, the rest is up to you, Ly." She never could figure out what those cryptic words meant.
She never got the chance to ask.
At the age of seventeen and eighteen, the two girls lost their grandmother to cancer.
At the age of nineteen and twenty, they were now hailed as sorceresses of music, more than just mere experts in their professions.
