Cover

Praise for
the Fate’s Thread series

AMAZON EDITORS’ BEST BOOK OF JUNE 2024—SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

“The tastiest treat for fantasy lovers. Following the perfect drama between two sneaky immortals, The God and the Gumiho glows with its supernatural antics and sumptuous world.”

—Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights

“Korean folklore, murder mystery, and a quirky love/hate story combine in this highly entertaining novel. The God and the Gumiho is one of a kind!”

—Juliet Marillier, author of the Sevenwaters and Blackthorn & Grim series

“Enchanting fantasy…With an intoxicating mix of action, mystery, and deliciously angsty romance, this reads like the most bingeable K-drama. Readers will be riveted.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This spellbinding dive into the supernatural realms of South Korea seamlessly blends Korean mythology with contemporary urban fantasy…. [Sophie] Kim’s adult debut marks her as a talent to watch. With its blend of romance, mystery, and supernatural intrigue, The God and the Gumiho is sure to enchant readers.”

—Booklist

“An action-filled contemporary fantasy based in Korean mythology, featuring morally gray characters and a little heat.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

By Sophie Kim

Fate’s Thread

The God and the Gumiho

The God and the Gwisin

Talons

Last of the Talons

Wrath of the Talon

Reign of the Talon

Dedication

For my mother.

Mom, I look up to you more

than astrologers look up at the stars.

Epigraph

The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus. They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.

—Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives

Author’s Note

Ahoy there!

I’m thrilled to see you’ve returned for another adventure. The perennially grumpy (and caffeine-deprived) Detective Seokga, as well as other characters both startlingly familiar and wonderfully new, eagerly await your boarding upon the SRC Flatliner. Monsters, magic, and mayhem await, along with a hearty dash of whodunit and, of course, romance.

So very much of it.

Yet before you step foot onto this esteemed cruise ship and are carried through the churning currents of the underworld’s river, please do humor me as I don my captain’s cap and commence my own twist on a safety briefing. After all, these waters can be tricky—even dangerous—if not properly navigated.

The God and the Gwisin is in no way intended to be a guide to traditional Korean mythology. As in all my books, I have taken significant creative liberties. It is a belief of mine that retellings keep stories alive and spark interest in the original lore. It is also a belief of mine that in order to retell, an author must understand the original cultural context of the stories they work with. Please rest assured that I have carefully researched the traditional tales of my heritage and the centuries of history that inspired them.

With that said and done, welcome to your vacation upon the SRC Flatliner! I dearly hope that you enjoy your stay.

All aboard!

(And remember to mind the rails.)

Chapter One

Kisa

Seoul, 2018

The glittering behemoth that is Seoul’s Shamanic Hospital towers above the city’s streets, lording over its nightlife with a certain smugness only a building of great esteem can possess. Within this pillar of cold steel, steadfast concrete, and sparkling glass lies a world of bustling paramedics, striding doctors, a symphony of mechanical beeps and white-tiled floors that somehow remain pristine even as creatures and mortals alike are wheeled through the winding halls on gurneys.

Up and up the hospital stretches, pulling itself toward the night, where dark gray clouds smudge the rich navy sky and where a young woman sits underneath the stars and kicks a foot in a calculated motion over the edge.

She has carefully tied her hair back in a low bun, but wisps of dark, mocha-colored curls escape their band and brush against her cheek, accompanied by a cold kiss of wind. The young woman wonders, feeling rather detached from it all (a side effect, no doubt, of pulling twenty-four-hour shifts in the Magical Maternity Unit), if another gust would be enough to knock her over. Enough to send her fluttering down like an autumn leaf from a tree, crumpling on the ground below.

She sighs, leaning her cheek against the knee of her propped-up leg and staring down at the crawl of traffic below.

Yoo Kisa is utterly exhausted with her life. Exhausted from the long shifts with her hands fumbling for the slippery skin of a newborn, the eternal sleeplessness and concerning dependency (addiction, really) on fruity energy drinks and flat whites. Exhausted from being a shaman.

Perhaps, she thinks wearily, she should have specialized in something other than magical medicine. Her former New Sinsi University (Magical Division, of course) classmates seem to be doing well, from what she can decipher through the smiling posts on social media. Yuna, her old roommate, is the city’s top glamourist—and paid in the hundreds of thousands. Jinny, Yuna’s sister, has fulfilled her lifelong dream of being a god’s assistant, running errands for none other than Yongwang the sea god himself and even residing in Okhwang. Kisa’s rival Kim Dae, with whom she was always competing for top marks in the specialty, now works in Hallakkungi’s flower garden and is part of the flower god’s prestigious botanical research team, which is famous for their contributions to pharmacology. None were foolish enough to go directly into magical medicine. It’s at least ten times more difficult, more dangerous, than mortal medicine—the dissimilar internal anatomies of dokkaebi versus imoogi, versus gumiho versus demigods, is only one example of the many, many differences.

Oh, taking this job so soon was a grievous error on her part, a flaunting of her own brilliance. Yoo Kisa, top of her NSUMD class. Yoo Kisa, a prestigious doctor, diving into the hospital mere minutes after graduation. Practically unheard of for a twenty-two-year-old shaman to skip the additional four years of medical training, but Kisa was just that good. One of her professors had fondly referred to her as the “nucleus” of NSUMD’s graduating class of 2017. A powerhouse.

And it’s true.

NSUMD is renowned for taking “prestigious” and “cutthroat” to another level entirely. In any mortal university, sabotage would have been frowned upon. In the Magical Division, it had been encouraged. Kisa is unable to count the number of times her laboratory experiments had been tampered with…or the number of times she’d returned the favor in full. There was no punishment for physical altercations, either. Shamans were in constant competition with one another, egged on by their patron deities. The gods may not be able to fight amongst themselves, or do anything to disrupt Okhwang’s inner harmony, but their shamans? Through their shamans, the gods can be as nasty as they please.

Yet despite it all, Kisa did more than succeed. She excelled.

She could read a massive tome on history within four days and write a dissertation on the subject within three weeks. Her hand flew up in every class, and she received nothing less than top marks every semester. Channeling the power of her patron goddess, Samsin Halmoni, is something Kisa is remarkably adept at. A good mother heals, after all—chicken noodle soup, bandages, kisses on the head—and for Kisa, who had longed to be an obstetrician since her own mother died in childbirth, connecting with the goddess of childbirth comes smoothly, and so does channeling Samsin Halmoni’s magic into her work.

The flesh of a mother can knit itself back together underneath Kisa’s touch. A baby born on the brink of death can be revived, can transform into a wailing infant, flushed and healthy.

Kisa is also one of the leading experts on fetal congenital heart disease, able to detect what the machines sometimes cannot, able to perform the necessary surgeries with skilled hands that never falter, never fail. Yet there’s a catch: She cannot heal mortals. Kisa can heal only creatures, those who believe in the power of the Korean gods.

And that restriction hurts. She aches from it—and for something…more. She knows not what—just that there’s a startlingly new feeling of emptiness within her today, a dark, gaping void waiting to be filled.

Perhaps it’s from skipping her usual order of a flat white this morning in favor of a few more treasured minutes of sleep. The lack of caffeine has certainly done her no good.

Kisa inhales a deep breath of night air but is unable to clear the taste of antiseptics and the surgery room from her lungs. Her head still throbs from the emergency C-section she’d had to give a petite haetae woman. Haetae are notoriously hard to deliver, the guardian creature’s wary streak beginning in the womb. Sometimes the babes are too cautious to even want to come out into the world of danger. Kisa swallows hard.

How long has it been since she left the hospital? Days? Weeks? Ever since the hospital cut their staff numbers, she’s been working herself until she falls from the brink of exhaustion and has no choice but to pull herself back up. Kisa’s vision blurs with tears. It’s not that she doesn’t love what she does, or that she no longer feels the surge of triumph when she delivers a happy and healthy child. It’s that she’s so tired.

Nobody knows she’s up here.

It would be so easy to slip away…to finally rest…

Kisa chews on her bottom lip. A flicker of red intrudes in her vision and she grimaces, pointedly not looking at the red thread that tied itself around her left pinky finger hours earlier, wrapping itself around the little finger in an intricate floral pattern almost reminiscent of a mugunghwa.

It’s no surprise, really, that she’s seeing things. It’s the stress of it all, affecting her nervous system, increasing her vulnerability to hallucinations. Because there’s no chance the thread, the one trailing down the building, winding into the streets below, is real.

She’s seeing things. Feeling things.

Oh, yes. Kisa can somehow feel the smooth cord wrapped around her skin just as she would any real thread. Yet unlike real threads, this one won’t come off. It appeared this afternoon, right when Kisa was creating the C-section’s first abdominal incision. She nearly startled, but regained control of herself, conscious of the repercussions of any jerky movement on her patient.

“Go away,” Kisa whispers now in English to the hint of red she can still see. Obviously, it doesn’t reply. It doesn’t reply when Kisa pleads to it in British-accented Korean, either.

Yet the hairs on the back of her neck still prick up. A slow trickle of anticipation crawls down her spine, and her limbs suddenly feel heavy with dread. Something has been decided, she senses. Something has been etched into stone, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. It’s life-changing, life-altering…

Life-ending. A knife to cleave twenty-two years in half.

Her spine stiffens. As it begins, Kisa sucks in a shallow breath, tasting something bittersweet at the back of her throat. It reminds her of her stepmother’s fixation with anti-aging creams. She stares down at the city below, heart thumping. It all happens so fast. Kisa doesn’t even have time to open her mouth, to scream a plea to her goddess.

For in an instant, her body is sliding off the roof and she is, for a perfect, brilliant moment, weightless and hovering over Seoul. But then gravity grabs her by the ankle and tugs her down, yanking her past rows and rows of gleaming glass windows all stacked upon one another, laughing as it hauls her toward the ground in a perfect swan dive.

Kisa closes her eyes.

It’s over soon enough.

Chapter Two

Seokga

New Sinsi, 2025

The only part of Seokga’s sessions with the venerated Dr. Jang Heejin he truly dislikes is when, halfway through the session, the grandmotherly shaman-turned-deity-psychologist inevitably asks him how his inability to find Hani makes him feel.

When she first asked him that, approximately two days after the Red Thread of Fate appeared, Seokga had fixed her with his cold green glare, leaned in close to the aging therapist, and demanded (in a voice sour enough to curdle milk): “How do you think that makes me feel, you stodgy old crow?”

Dr. Jang hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of writing something down in her ever-present leather-bound notebook. Instead, she snorted. It had taken Seokga aback enough that he’d finally (and begrudgingly) begun to trust the doctor Hwanin had assigned to him back in 1992 when he reclaimed his godhood in full (to make sure he didn’t “snap” again, as his brother so aptly put it).

Since letting Dr. Jang into his mind, Seokga has discovered he has a plethora of daddy issues, an avoidant-dismissive attachment style (for everyone besides Hani, of course—it seems that she was the exception to everything), and a boatload of trauma from watching the love of his life die in front of him with his hand around the hilt of the dagger that killed her. Fun. And since beginning to treat Seokga some thirty-three years ago, the good doctor has gone significantly grayer. Although Seokga would very much like to take the credit for that, shamans do age. At a slightly slower pace than mortals, yes (a sign-on bonus from their patron deity), but they do wither, acquire depressing wrinkles, and ultimately die. He’s loath to admit it, but other than the storm-cloud gray hair, Jang looks rather sprightly for a seventy-something-year-old.

“Seokga?” Dr. Jang prompts expectantly. Now, seven years after the red thread first appeared, Seokga just rubs his eyes in exhaustion. He’s tired, bone-tired, and even the large iced coffee currently perched on the table between himself and Dr. Jang isn’t helping. “I just got back from Antarctica,” he replies hoarsely. His voice is always raspy, but the bitter winds hadn’t helped. At all.

“Antarctica,” Dr. Jang repeats. Her warm brown eyes, lined with wrinkles, show no emotion save for a calm neutrality that Seokga has grown to appreciate. She tilts her head, and the autumn sunlight from the circular window behind her illuminates her permed gray hair. “You thought Hani would be there?”

Seokga grits his teeth, glaring at the long Red Thread of Fate attached to his pinky. Nobody can see it but him. It’s tangled, twisted, and has so far led the trickster on a wild goose chase all around the world. For a blessed handful of hours after it had appeared, the red thread seemed to have been bringing him to Hani—a clear, straight line with neat turns. Imbued with a lightness and filled with a pure, sparkling cheerfulness that he hadn’t felt since before Hani’s life sputtered out in front of him in that cursed warehouse, Seokga had called Dr. Jang almost immediately, bursting at the seams with the need to tell somebody that everything in his world—everything—was going to be right again. Seoul, he’d panted out loud to the kindly doctor as he leaned heavily on his cane. It was leading him to Seoul. But a few hours after night fell, it was like the damned thing had stopped working. It ran him in circles until it tangled itself, brought him to one place only to twist back and head toward another, and was an overall useless piece of string.

In hindsight, his joy is humiliating. As is his happy-go-lucky phone call to Jang. How dare she have witnessed him cheerful? He’s been working hard to compensate for it ever since by being exceptionally miserable. And it’s easy to do.

If Hani is anywhere on this world, he should be able to find her.

Why can’t he find her?

“It kept yanking down,” Seokga now explains to Dr. Jang, who nods in sympathy. “Antarctica is…down. But there was nothing there except for penguins and fish and ice.” His lip curls. He’d hated the foul, squawking things, but Hani would have loved the penguins. She would have thought they were adorable, and probably would have named each and every one something ridiculous. A familiar ache lodges itself in his chest, and Seokga takes a hasty slug of Creature Café coffee.

He wonders if Hani’s reincarnation—wherever she, or he, is—would name the penguins, too. It’s fine if they wouldn’t, he tells himself. It’s fine if they’re different from who they were in their past life, his Hani, his love. It’s fine. It’s fine. Seokga can’t, and won’t, expect Kim Hani to be as she once was at the other end of the thread.

But you want her to be there, a cold little voice whispers back to him. Waiting for you. The woman from the nineties. The mischievous gumiho. You don’t want anyone else.

Seokga swallows hard and stares at Jang’s desk as he shoves those bitter doubts away. He won’t let himself think about it. Not until he finds Hani. Not until he finds her. All he wants to do is find her—

Dr. Jang leans forward across the polished wooden surface, face serious. “Seokga,” she says, and he’s half-terrified she’ll try to reach for his hand or otherwise comfort him. He has developed a serious aversion to comfort. The one time that Hwanin tried to hug him after a frustrating trip to Australia that yielded nothing, Seokga had nearly jumped out of his skin.

“What are you doing?” he’d hissed at Hwanin.

His brother had made a noise of disbelief. “I was going to hug you—”

“Do it slower next time, then,” Seokga replied, hastily backing away. “I thought you were going to murder me.”

“That’s my line, brother, not yours,” Hwanin replied, lips quirking.

Seokga doesn’t want pity. He just wants Hani.

But Dr. Jang doesn’t reach for him. Instead, she regards him somberly. “You’re burning yourself out. You’re exhausted, and I am seriously concerned about what will happen to you if you keep working yourself like this.”

He stares fixedly at the pictures and accolades on the wall. Her son and daughter-in-law, grinning with their seven-year-old child in a park, the picture of a perfect, happy family. A BS in psychology from New Sinsi University, and a BA in shamanism. A PhD from New Sinsi University, Magical Division in deity psychology. Newspaper clippings of her practice, a cozy office conveniently next to a Creature Café, with headlines applauding her work supporting the pantheon. She’s done a remarkable job reforming him into a god who doesn’t overly obsess about staging coups. Seokga wishes she’d been around when his father, Mireuk, had what Dr. Jang has called in past sessions a “psychotic break” and created all the evils of the worlds.

She might have been helpful.

“I know you miss Hani, Seokga,” Dr. Jang continues, “but some time off is minuscule compared to the amount of time you have to search for her. And…” She hesitates, shifting in her seat. “Well, Hani can find you, too, dear. The thread does go both ways, after all.”

Seokga rips his gaze away from the clippings. “She might not know what it is,” he says, not letting himself entertain the other explanation as to why they haven’t found each other yet. Not considering that she might be running from him. “Statistically, it’s more likely she’s human than a creature. If she’s human, she may not know the stories about the thread.” He swallows hard. Hani, whoever she is now, must feel the same pull—the same longing—as he does. The red thread has turned them into magnets aching to connect. Yet he still hasn’t found anyone with the wine-brown eyes of his Hani, eyes that Hwanin promised would remain the same in this life.

Thirty-three years.

Thirty-three years of grief and longing. Thirty-three years since 1992, that golden year when a woman with a sly smile and a laugh like the tinkling of bells flounced into his life and sent him falling, head over heels. Thirty-three years since they tackled each other in the bamboo forest, since they shared a tentative kiss on a fairy’s mountain, since Hani brought snacks to a stakeout, since she ran her fingers through his hair as he threatened to burn the whole world down, since he held her in his arms…

Thirty-three years since the Scarlet Fox died.

Seokga pushes down a hot stab of bitter emotion, anger, and betrayal. He drowns it in another sip of cold, cold coffee.

Dr. Jang sighs. “I’m going to be blunt, Seokga. You’re falling apart at the seams. If you don’t stop now, you’ll be nothing but a husk. Forgive me, but have you looked in a mirror recently?”

He knows what she’s referring to. The dark circles under his eyes. The bloodshot corners. Finding Hani has consumed his every waking moment. He doesn’t even use conditioner anymore.

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