You nervously looked around your living room again. Your protective charm was set up, you'd cleared off your coffee table and fixed up the mess on your couch. Not everybody would have somewhere to sit, but they should all fit, even with the addition of Jungwoo and Mark. You assumed that Sungchan had told him what happened, what Mark had done, since he was coming down from his shrine for the first time in a long while.
Jaehyun emerged from the kitchen to place a hand on the small of your back and press a kiss to your forehead, "When are they coming?"
"Seven. But Johnny said him and Renjun would come fifteen minutes early to set up the food," you reminded him. "I think his constant state of being is cooking."
"Seems like it."
Just a few minutes later, a knock at your door roused Taeyong from his catnap in the corner of the sofa, and you went over to let Johnny and Renjun in. Sicheng was next, as punctual as ever, then Jeno, then Sungchan and Jungwoo, then Yuta.
"That's everybody?" Sicheng double-checked, probably doing a mental roll call.
"No, I told Mark to come as well," you announced, receiving the immediate backlash that you were anticipating.
Jeno and Renjun were the most vocal about their disapproval, while the others joined in at a somewhat lower volume. Jungwoo and Sungchan were the only quiet ones, your mentor clinging to his brother's arm.
"Hey!" You yelled out to silence them. "I know how we all feel about him. But he's the one who started this whole mess, he can give us some more information about it. So please, don't kill him."
"I agree with Lady Onmyoji," Jungwoo spoke up, voice quiet but still commanding the room.
That seemed to calm everybody down a bit more, allowing you to hear the knock at your front door. You moved to open it, letting Mark enter. He was met with several glares and general distrust and disapproval. You didn't really have warm fuzzies for him either, if you were to be honest with yourself.
"Thanks for coming," you murmured to him as you brought him further into the room.
The Onmyoji nervously stood between you and Taeyong, who hissed when he'd accidentally bumped his arm.
"Tell us what the fuck you did, Mark," you ordered, crossing your arms over your chest.
He took a deep breath before speaking, keeping his word speed down unlike a few nights ago, "I was controlling them, and inherently made them more powerful by doing so. When I saw that you guys had actually gotten hurt, I severed my connection with them. But I did it too fast and didn't take the power back."
"So now they're supercharged Wraiths with nobody controlling them?" Renjun spat out.
"Yeah..."
"So what's the plan?" Jaehyun asked.
"The... what?" You couldn't conceal your surprise at his words.
"The plan, to stop the Wraiths."
"What do you mean? Jae, you're..."
"A human? I'm not an Ayakashi or an Onmyoji? Yeah, I'm not. But I'm still helping you, Y/N."
You nodded, taking his hand in yours, "Okay."
Yuta interrupted your heartfelt moment, "Adorable. Jaehyun's right, what are we supposed to do about them?"
You rolled your bottom lip between your teeth, "I mean, do we have to do anything about them? I know it's not ideal for them to be more powerful than usual, but if they're just, you know... chilling, do we actually have to do anything about them?"
"They do not think past their own basic needs typically," Jungwoo countered. "One of those basic needs, however, is the need to destroy."
"Oh, I see."
"We could just continue our patrols, banish Wraiths when needed," Johnny suggested.
"Isn't there anything preventative we could do?" You asked, not wanting to just have to wait around for the Wraiths to do anything like that again.
The Ayakashi around you all shook their heads or shrugged before Mark piped up again.
"I don't know of anything off the top of my head, but I do know somewhere we could look."
"Where?" Sicheng's blue eyes were glaring daggers into the boy as he questioned him.
"My dad's library. He's got mountains of books on Onmyoji, Ayakashi, Wraiths, anything and everything supernatural."
"That sounds like a good idea. You and I could look after class tomorrow," you suggested.
"There's a lot of content, we'll need more than just two pairs of eyes."
"I'll go with Y/N," Taeyong declared, still regarding Mark with suspicion.
Jaehyun offered, "I'll help. I'm a good skimmer."
"Ten will be willing to help out too, I'm sure!" Mark added, clearly wanting to prove his usefulness to you all.
"That's five, do you think we'll need more?" You asked him.
"The more people we have, the faster we'll get through it," Jaehyun answered instead.
"I have tomorrow off, I'll help," Sicheng said.
"I as well," Jungwoo added, Sungchan nodding to show his commitment as well.
"Great," you breathed out. "Mark, can you send flying notes and/or texts for the time and your address tomorrow?"
"Of course," he nodded hurriedly.
☆
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the library in Mark's mother's house, you had a book opened across your lap. It was already your fifth one that you were desperately skimming through. Jaehyun, Taeyong, Mark, Ten, Sicheng, Jungwoo, and Sungchan were spread around the rather large room as well, each of you with stacks of books beside you. You'd already been at this for almost two hours, and the words were beginning to swim in front of your eyes.
A knock at the doorway alerted you to Mrs. Lee having entered the room. She had a tray of food, and carefully stepped over Sungchan and his spread of books to reach the table that had been covered in Jaehyun's readings. He moved a few books aside to allow her to set the snacks down, then she left as carefully as she came before returning with a pitcher of lemonade.
"Figured you might want to take a short break," she explained kindly. You were unsure of how much and what exactly Mark told her, but she seemed to have no problem with the eight of you taking over a portion of her house for hours on end.
A chorus of 'thank you Mrs. Lee's rang out, Mark standing to peck his mother's cheek, mumbling his own thanks to her. She departed as you were distributing out the food and drink.
As you gulped down the miniature sandwich in your mouth, you strode around the room, stretching your legs out, "Alright, anybody found anything useful?"
Everyone shook their heads.
"Me neither," you groaned. "Let's review what we know already, see if we can narrow our focus."
"Wraiths are evil spirits," Jaehyun began with the obvious.
Sicheng continued, "They come from concentrations of evil energy or corrupted souls."
"Mark established a power multiplier with them," Ten drawled. Despite being Mark's True Ayakashi, he didn't seem thrilled about his choice.
"And broke it too soon, leaving them with all of the power I gave them," Mark mumbled sheepishly.
You shook your head, "Let's forget about that for a second. Go back to generalities of Wraiths. The nature of Wraiths. When nobody's controlling them, what do they do?"
"They are drawn in by concentrations of great power," Jungwoo spoke up. "Such as you, Lady Onmyoji."
"They've left me alone since that night, I haven't sensed a single Wraith anywhere near my apartment or school."
Sicheng surmised, "Then there's something nearby that's more powerful than you that they're being drawn to."
You all looked at each other, waiting to see if someone else had any idea about what it could be. Jungwoo and Sungchan exchanged a glance before your mentor spoke up once more.
"The shrine," he said. "After I left they must have gone there."
"Why would they go there?" You asked, head tilted with confusion.
"Underneath the shrine there is a great evil. It is the only thing that I can think of that they would congregate around aside from you."
"If it was such a great evil, why'd you leave it alone?" Ten called out accusatorily.
Jungwoo's features suddenly contorted into those of anger, the expression so unfamiliar to you that it gave you chills. His voice was harsh and stern as he snapped, "Because your Onmyoji conversed with evil and now requires us to rid the city of the problem he has created!"
The room was silent in the moments after his outburst. None of you had heard Jungwoo even get annoyed, much less actually angry and snap at someone like that. Mark was looking down at his lap where his hands were, trembling. You didn't think there was anything for you to say. Jungwoo was right, nobody could argue against that.
"I'm sorry..." Mark whispered, sounding all too loud.
Sicheng finally broke the tense quiet that had followed, "A few of us should go to the shrine, confirm but not engage while the others remain here and keep looking."
"I'll go," you replied immediately. Honestly, you were starting to feel suffocated in there, and going to the shrine felt like something entirely more useful for you to do. "Jae, you should stay and keep reading, you're the fastest of any of us."
He nodded in response to your suggestion.
"I'll come too," Ten offered, mouth pulling into a grin. "I've never been."
Sungchan stood up and turned into his true form, hand resting over the hilts of his sheathed broadswords. Looks like he was coming too.
"Four should be enough," Sicheng announced.
Both Jaehyun and Taeyong stood up to see you off, your boyfriend pecking your forehead and mumbling a 'stay safe' to you, and the Nekomata rubbing his head against your neck, wordlessly expressing his worry.
☆
As soon as you were at the base of the mountain, you could feel the evil energy seeping down from it. So far it was seeming like Jungwoo was right.
Ten inhaled sharply from beside you, then cursed under his breath, "Fuck. Stupid kid."
"Did you seriously not know that Mark was doing this?" You asked Ten, eyebrow raised in doubt. "You're his True Ayakashi and his roommate."
"I knew he was doing something that he didn't want to tell me about, but my research has been keeping out of the apartment a lot recently. I was just hoping he had started seeing someone and wanted to keep it a secret for some reason."
"Well, you were sort of right."
There was a booming laughter from your other side, and you turned to look at Sungchan with wide eyes, jaw dropping when you realized that he was the one laughing. It was a hearty laugh, one that you could feel reverberate in your own chest. As he sobered back up, his face returned its same neutral, serious expression.
"Did you just..." you trailed off in disbelief, then elation overtook you. "You just laughed. I made you laugh! I told you I was going to. I just didn't think that would've been what finally did you in."
"I never said I didn't laugh," he retorted frankly.
"Doesn't matter, I feel vindicated."
You four were only at the first fork in the trails when you grabbed Sicheng's arm and halted.
"What is it?" The Mizuchi dragon asked you with concern.
"There's a lot of Wraiths," you murmured, remembering what you had to do the last time you had to deal with them.
"We're just here to observe, Y/N, remember?" Sicheng reassured you. "We're not fighting them or anything."
"I know."
"Okay then, come on."
You all had just started moving again when Ten suddenly hissed, and you looked over to see blood dripping down his arm. Immediately, he was in his battle form, bright glowing webs suspended between his fingers morphing together he spun around, throwing them out like a whip. He must have struck something, as purple sparks suddenly erupted in the air, much like Sungchan's blades had before.
"The Wraiths are invisible again," you groaned. "We can't fight them, we don't have Johnny."
There were more surrounding you, and you grabbed Sicheng's arm again, "Come on, we have to go back!"
The four of you fled the mountain, only slowing down once you hit sidewalk again for the Ayakashi to turn back into their normal human forms. But you didn't stop to catch your breath until you were back in Mrs. Lee's house.
The sound of the front door being practically knocked off its hinges must have alerted the others to your return, as they were all standing either within the library or by the entrance to it. You skidded to a stop by Jaehyun, letting Taeyong nuzzle into your one side as your boyfriend checked over your other side.
"What happened?" Jaehyun asked as he looked you over for injuries roughly again.
Jungwoo peered at the four of you, "Are you alright?"
Ten lifted up his arm, where the blood had already soaked through his shirt, "Just me."
"We couldn't even get near the shrine," you breathed out deeply as Mark ran out from the room and returned with a first aid kit. "The Wraiths were invisible again and they were everywhere. The first fork was the furthest we could get."
Mark brought Ten into his kitchen to rinse his wound out in the sink, and your group followed to keep up the conversation.
"We need to call everyone over," Sicheng announced.
"To keep going through the library?" You asked with skepticism. It all seemed rather pointless, there was a nearly infinite plethora of tomes of knowledge in there, and nothing had been remotely useful yet.
"It's the best option we have right now," the Mizuchi dragon declared. "It's too dangerous for us to go back to the shrine, even if we were to have Johnny. Last time they wounded his third eye and he only did more damage by continuing to use it while it was injured last time."
"We could protect him better now that we know what they would do."
Sungchan shot you down this time, "We can't risk attracting the great evil to us, not yet."
"I thought it was locked away beneath the shrine or whatever."
"It's—"
Sicheng cut him off authoritatively, "I'll call the others, we should really be discussing this with everyone."