Promise

24: Reunion

"Really?" Chaeryong's weak voice spoke up, her deep red eyes glistening as she looked towards the taller. "You know...what this is like then?"

"Maybe not what you're specifically going through." Mingi answered, trailing off as he was focusing his main attention on the keys again. "But yes, I know the weird feelings and initial hardships of being turned. The burning thirst, newfound instincts, trying to understand the newness of a life you once knew."

Suddenly he turned his attention behind him when he heard a loud thumb. It startled him initially, but he quickly relaxed when he realized it was just Yunho...who had dropped one of the corpses down the ladder.

"Sorry." Yunho hastily apologized, stepping down the last bit of the ladder. He leaned down, hoisting up the corpse as if it were nothing, and emotionlessly walked towards the back room.

As soon as he was close enough and Mingi backed away, Yunho dropped the body before the girls. They were all taken aback by the sight, most of them trying to push themselves further into the wall to get away from the corpse. But then the smell of blood filled the room.

Yunho crouched down, lifting one of the dead mans arms to Yeji's face, then the other arm to Ryujin's face since that was just what was convenient right then. When the girls didn't do what was intented, Yunho let out a sigh.

"Drink." Yunho stated, trying to keep to the calmer side of tones, but he was still stern.

"That's hunters blood you idi—"

"Correct, and that's what there is for you to drink." Yunho quickly cut off, now allowing his own eyes to glow red as he looked at Ryujin. He knew very well that the color of his eyes was always intimidating, because while he was great on blood intake and his eyes were bright, the actual color of his eyes is a deeper, blood-like red. He always used it to his advantage, especially against those that didn't know him and would get scared by the color. "Clearly they haven't made you desperate enough to drink anything that's given to you. So if you don't want it—"

"No! No, I'll drink it." Ryujin was fast to put on her look of defeat, eyes pleading with Yunho to not take the blood source away. "I'm...I'm sorry, it's just...."

"I don't need explanations." Yunho told himself to calm down, eyes returning to normal as he moved the arms closer to the girls faces. Almost silently their fangs sunk into the skin, and they began to drink. "I understand more often than not you want to avoid drinking hunters blood, but this one time it's okay to have."

Yunho let them drink for a few more seconds, then forcibly removed the arms from the their mouths. He didn't care about the blood that spewed from the open cuts along the skin of the corpse, just that he needed to make sure the other three got their own share as well.

Truth is, Yunho actually risked his own health for these girls. He drank from this corpse, just a couple drops of blood, before he came back down here with it. He ensured that the hunter didn't inject themselves with a poison like most hunters do before engaging in a fight with a vampire. A poison that does nothing to the hunter, even in their bloodstream, but could leave a vampire in critical condition if ingested, more often than not leading to death. Even those few little drops could've left Yunho bedridden for a couple weeks, but in his eyes, this had to be worth it. Those few drops was also enough for him to tell if the blood was clean or not, and obviously it was clean.

As the others drank the hunters corpse dry, Mingi discovered that Yunho did still have the key to the handcuffs, a duplicate that he claimed was made for emergencies, and for whatever reason, it worked on the bindings holding these girls down. A bit of a lazy move made by hunters in the vampires opinion.