KRISTAL
“Jae-Hyun!” I rush to my fallen mentor’s side after he collapses.
No, he’s more than a mentor. A father. He’s been like a father to me. But now he lies on the ground, his breathing heavy and labored in the same rattling way I remembered from the Christmas Eve before my mother passed.
I don’t want him to die. Not right now. Not this way. A sob rises in my chest as I try to figure out what’s wrong.
I was orphaned when I was ten, but I curse my easy life now. There’s no need for medicine in the workshop. Spells have been cast so that elves never get sick or suffer so much as a sneeze from allergies. I have no idea what to do with an old cancer-ridden human.
Luckily, Norio drops down on the other side of Jae-Hyun and puts two fingers to the side of his wrinkled neck. “He has a pulse, but it’s weak.”
I nod. I sense that he doesn’t have much time left now that the conditions of my contract with Santa have been met.
I try shaking him. “Jae-Hyun? Jae-Hyun? Your loved ones are here. Please wake up!”
But he doesn’t wake up. In fact, the rattling only gets worse with every breath.
Norio frowns, his expression confused. But titan of industry must be his baseline setting. The confusion clears off his face, and he goes into command mode. “Hayato, call 911.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Norio and I both look up from Jae-Hyun’s fallen body to see Hayato, standing exactly where he was when Jae-Hyun fell. He looks totally unbothered. Like Jae-Hyun’s merely taking a little nap.
Rage shoots through my body. “We have to do something. He’s totally passed out!”
“He’s not passed out—at least not in the sense that you fear,” Hayato answers, his voice verging on bored. He then shifts his gaze to a point above our heads and says, “It would seem a ghost cannot hold on to its human form when it is highly emotional.”
Norio and I stare at him for a long, bewildered moment. Then we both ask, “What?”