Present Day, Barcelona

I dreamed about my dad on my first night in Barcelona. 

Traveling with the Wild Hunt meant never looking too far ahead. I’d adapted to their rhythms, so I hadn’t considered the fact that we were journeying to the last country my father visited until we checked into our apartment and I noticed a strange little crew of creatures preparing our accommodations. I recognized them from my father’s drawings but didn’t remember their name until Pehtra said it.

“Be careful of the Minairons,” she told me as we paused midway up the five flights of stairs. “If they ask you for a task, you’d better give them one. They’re known to turn their industriousness to violence if you don’t.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her since she’d spoken the warning with a certain gleam in her eyes I’d learned to associate with mischief, but when I reread my father’s entry on them later, I learned she was telling the truth. Minairons would fall ill and die if they ran out of work to do, so they might try to kill a master who failed to keep them busy as an act of self-preservation. If their master was dead then they were free to find a new one, preferably one that was better at giving orders. I decided to keep my distance and avoid eye contact. I had no desire to become anyone’s master.

Exhausted from a whirlwind tour of the Basque region that required multiple high-altitude loadouts in the middle of the night, the crowds chanting for more even as we packed our equipment away, I wanted nothing more than sleep after we arrived. Pehtra and some of the others were eager to wander the city and find some fun, but I turned down their invitations to join them, using my humanity as an excuse for my lack of stamina.

Settling into my bed, I watched the curtains flutter in the breeze and found that the promise of rest was eluding me now that I was actually in a position to sleep. Barcelona was hot and balmy this time of year and there was no central air, so the only way to relieve the heat was to let air flow through the apartment. In lieu of windows, the rooms at the front of the unit had shuttered doors and false balconies overlooking a narrow, twisting alley. Laughter and music wafted up from the bar on the street level, and my mind attempted to fill in the blanks of the scene as I closed my eyes, picturing happy patrons sharing tapas and drinking tinto de verano or sangria while they toasted another day in a beautiful city. I pictured most of the patrons as tourists, I realized, imagining the locals would be sitting on the fringes drinking vermouth and making bitter jokes about the strangers who had temporarily taken over their city.

At some point the vision turned into a dream and the bar became a coffee shop. A familiar figure sat in one corner sketching in a journal. I didn’t realize I was in the dream as well until I found myself walking toward him and taking a seat at his table. Still caught in the web of thoughts between sleeping and waking, I was aware of being in a dream and yet unable to control my own actions.

“What are you drawing?” I heard myself ask.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” my father said without meeting my eyes. The sound of his pen scratching at the paper seemed impossibly loud.

I leaned forward to see what he was working on, but the drawing seemed blurry and undefined, the glare of the sun through the window blinding me the closer I moved. Giving up with a sigh, I focused on him again, tracing with my eyes the slant of his eyes, the web of wrinkles spread across his forehead, the way he chewed his lower lip as he focused on his work. “I miss you.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words out loud until his lips twitched upward in a smile.

“I’ve been missing you for a very long time,” he said, turning the scrutiny back on me.

I was ready to argue, but my dream self swallowed my frustration, took a breath and chose a different path. “Why?”

He continued to draw, but his pen had slowed, sketching broad, careful strokes. “Ever since your mom died, we’ve been different people, haven’t we? The versions of us without her. We lost ourselves in our work until we forgot why we were even working in the first place.”

“I never forgot.”

He sighed, putting his pen down and looking up at me through smudged glasses, but his gaze was as serene as I’d ever seen it. “Yes you did, son. You told yourself you were working so hard for us, and you might have started out that way, but after a while you were working for yourself as much as for anyone. You worked so you didn’t have to think about why you were working.”

“If I’d stopped, we would have ended up on the street!”

He nodded, lips pursed. “Maybe. Or maybe we could have come up with a solution together. You were trying to keep our family together, but after a while, we didn’t feel much like a family at all.”

I wanted to respond, but the me in the dream remained stubbornly silent, and the longer I sat with my thoughts the more I realized dad had a point. 

“I don’t want to argue with you,” he said finally, managing a smile, one I hadn’t seen him make for a long time. “I have something interesting to show you.” He nodded toward the far side of the cafe. “Have you ever seen someone like him before? An avatar of Munshin, god of the door.”

I turned to look and felt my body go tense in an instant. The man was familiar to me. I knew the broad strokes of his shoulders, the proud line of his spine. I could recognize him by the fit of his bespoke suit and the crisp waves of his coiffed hair, even from behind. “I know him,” I whispered, but my father had switched into professor mode and was completely consumed by his excitement at a discovery.

“I’ve never met one in person,” dad continued. “They’re rare enough on the mainland these days, but they can travel between locations just by walking through doors. Can you believe that?”

I wanted to keep looking at Yun Seo, but my dream self turned back to look at dad. “Why did you never point them out to me before? You must have noticed Unseen all over, but you never said anything.”

He shrugged. “You’d stopped seeing them as a child, and you wouldn’t have believed me if I tried to show you. I should know. Stubbornness is a trait you inherited from me after all.”

“It’s not the only one.”

He reached out to cover my hand on the table with his own, his eyes bright as he leaned closer. “But you can see them now! You understand that the world I was studying was real all along!” There was an urgency in his gaze, a need to be validated that I felt hungry to fulfill.

“I do,” I agreed. “Did mom know about them, too?”

Dad laughed a little and shook his head, his smile turning sad. “No. I never told her.”

Suddenly I realized how alone he must have felt all along, able to see something he didn’t feel like he could share with anyone, not even his closest family. He’d thought for a while that I might be different, that he could share this part of himself that no one else had ever seen, but then I’d lost the ability and left him more alone than before. I didn’t know how he had survived it as long as he had, living in a world only he could see. Getting that grant from the Gihoe Society must have felt like being given a lifeline. No wonder he didn’t question it.

“Look,” dad said, turning his attention back to Yun Seo with infectious glee. “He’s about to use his powers.”

I stood up as I turned to look, watching as Yun Seo raised a hand to touch the doorframe and feeling panic rise in my chest. He was so close and I was about to miss my opportunity to speak with him. I took off running, but the room seemed to expand around me, the steps multiplying between me and him until it seemed impossible for me to ever reach him.

“Ri Sang Kyu!” I heard my father calling, desperation in his voice. “Wait! Don’t leave me alone!”

I glanced over my shoulder to tell him I’d be back, but it was already too late. I’d reached for Yun Seo and grabbed hold of his jacket, wrinkling it in my fist in my desperation to hold on. 

He still managed to slip through my fingers, going somewhere I couldn’t follow, and I was trapped in the nothingness between places, falling through the crack in reality he’d opened. It was cold enough that my fingertips and toes immediately began to tingle painfully, the icy temperature stealing away every bit of my warmth. As time passed and I continued to float in the nothingness with no hope of escape, I realized I was going to die in this place cold and alone, lost where no one else could reach.

I woke up with a start, my body damp with sweat and my heart thudding hard in my chest. Staring at the dim glow of dawn filtering through the shutters and gauzy curtain, I tried to catch my breath and shake the dream’s icy fingers from my mind, unsettled in a way I hadn’t felt in months. Determined to shake the feeling off as quickly as possible, I crawled out of bed and pulled on some socks and sneakers. With Pehtra’s help, I’d learned how interconnected my body and mind were. I knew that a run was likely to shift that balance back into alignment, so I jogged down the stairs to the ground floor, ignoring the Minairons working to clean the steps and hoping they were occupied enough to not need additional tasks. 

The morning was crisp but warm in the way of summer days that lost their chill quickly with the rising of the sun. I took off down the twisting alley at a gentle pace and encountered no other people until I reached La Rambla, the thoroughfare cutting through the city designed for pedestrians. I encountered few people even there, mostly locals since tourists rarely rose this early on vacation. Losing myself in the rhythm of exercise, I focused on the way the atmosphere changed as the sun rose, gossamer thin beads of light outlining the buildings in the east while the fragile eggshell blue of the sky slowly deepened in contrast.

I slowed once I reached the sea, walking up to the edge of the docks and catching my breath as I looked out over the waves. I wondered if my father had bothered to visit the coast on his trip. There were a lot of folklore creatures connected to water, so it was possible he had made the journey for that reason, but I wondered if he’d actually taken the time to look at it. I didn’t know how anyone could look at the vastness of the ocean and not feel their own problems shrink in comparison. 

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

I turned to see a willowy woman leaning against the railing nearby. Long flaxen hair fell to her waist in a silken cascade and stirred restlessly in the breeze. I nodded in agreement and she smiled, a slow blossoming of amusement across her face, and there was something ageless about the way the expression fit on her pale features that convinced me what she was. Whether my father had found a water spirit or not, I’d certainly found one.

Thinking back to my father’s notes, I made an attempt to name her. “You’re an Aloja, aren’t you?”

Her laugh was musical and bright, like the playful notes of dolphins speaking to each other across the waves. “Your father named me at first glance as well.”

I had trouble drawing enough breath to speak, stunned that she saw enough of him in me to recognize the resemblance with such confidence. “How did you…” I began, my voice rough enough that I had to clear my throat to continue.

“He showed me a photo,” she said with another laugh. “Of you and your brother.”

The thought of my father sharing family photos with all the Unseen he met was unsettling, but I supposed he didn’t have many friends otherwise. And perhaps he hadn’t shown them to every unseen, but this was the second time I’d heard a story like this.

Her skin seemed to shimmer in the light as she moved closer, her pale gold shift almost transparent as the sun lit it from behind. “I remembered you in particular. You’re quite handsome.”

I scoffed. “My brother’s the good-looking one.”

Lips pursing, she shook her head. “If you like a baby face.” Lifting delicate fingers to my jaw, she added, “I prefer a man.”

If nothing else my travels with the Hunt had taught me to recognize magic, especially the sexual kind. I took a step away from her and turned so that my shoulder was between us, setting my jaw with determination to resist the pull of her enchantment. The central detail I recalled about Alojas was that they often trapped humans with their irresistible charm, not out of intention, but simply because they were fascinated by humanity and didn’t know the limits of their own power.

“Sorry,” she said with a wince. “Habit. Your father lectured me at length about this kind of behavior.”

That made me laugh in spite of the circumstances. The thought of my father lecturing an otherworldly creature on how to properly interact with humans was both ridiculous and utterly believable. 

“Did he come here with you?” she asked. “I would like to see him again and show him how much better I’ve become at resisting the urge to enslave humanity.”

My laugh at her bluntness broke off in the middle as my throat choked with emotion. “My father is dead,” I said just as bluntly.

Blue eyes wide, she leaned closer. “Oh! Oh no. I’m so sorry.”

I nodded, swallowing the emotion and trying to convince the warring sensations of anger and deep sadness to fit back into the boxes I’d created for them in my mind.

“Then you’re here to honor his memory?”

The question was so gentle and unassuming that I resisted the urge to snap back at her that I hadn’t come here for him. “Not exactly.”

She hummed under her breath and turned to gaze out at the water. “But his memory is here whether you wanted to encounter it or not.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Squinting at the sun as it began to rise above the buildings on the eastern side of the docks, she frowned. “I can’t stay here much longer. The sun is so intense this time of year. But I’m glad to have met you.” She lifted a hand to touch me and hesitated before making contact. “Your father was a good man. He taught me how to live with humans in a way that wouldn’t get me into trouble, and for that I will be eternally grateful. He’s helped so many of my kind in small but important ways. If you decide to do something to honor his memory here, I would like to offer my own respects. You can find me here in the evenings and at first light.”

I turned to watch as she slipped off the docks and into the water, moving so fluidly that it seemed as if she were part water herself. When she was gone, her words lodged in my chest like an itch I couldn’t quite reach. 

Honor his memory here. I had no idea how to do that or if it was even what I wanted, but the idea lingered with me as I continued my run.