Bloodbath

by Stephanie Ahn

  I ask if Aden was drinking or doing drugs. The kids share a this-is-still-an-adult glance, then staunchly deny it. I rattle the six-pack; they admit that maybe, perhaps, possibly, they may have encouraged Aden to eat a pot brownie. Or two. Maybe. I barely suppress a sigh as I hand the drinks over.

  As I turn to leave, I hear the kids opening the paper bag behind me. “Hey,” says one of them, “isn’t this just Diet Coke?”

  I start jogging. By the time Sports Jacket shouts, “Give me back my money, bitch!” I’m already around the corner.

  I keep a steady pace for a minute or two, just enough to escape yodeling distance of the teenage nerd squad. Then I keep walking, toward Aden’s school. No particular intent, just thinking. If Aden was high, then he might have wandered off. But then he should’ve come back home at least by the next day. A dedicated student with loving parents doesn’t just decide to run off and not come back, at least not without coming home to grab some belongings. Right? I mean, that’s sort of what I did… but I was a restless delinquent following a captivating stranger halfway across the world to study magic. It’s not the same thing.

  Right?

  I’m rounding a baseball field surrounded by a chain link fence when I notice a shift in the shadows on the ground. Someone’s following me. The sun is high in the sky and beating down mercilessly, so there’s no shade for them to hide in—thank you, global warming. As I get to the corner of the block I turn abruptly to the left, catching a glimpse of the guy before he frantically darts behind a car.

  A trench coat? Really?

  Oh, wait. Pot, kettle, black. Whoops. But at least I’m not wearing a fedora… unlike this fucker.

  I move at the same pace as before, but keep my ears open. Now that I’m listening for them, my stalker’s footsteps are obscenely obvious. I hear them as a skittering of gravel while I walk, then a distinct lack of footsteps when I stop. Not to mention disturbingly heavy, raspy breathing. Alright, time for a goose chase.

  I pick up my pace, turn a corner around the fence—then stop, staring into the distance. In my peripheral vision, I see my stalker rubberneck around for the object of my attention. Then I take off running.

  There’s a pause as he stands frozen in surprise. Then the pounding of footsteps starts up behind me.

  I feel a steady burn starting in my throat and lungs, my black coat flaring out behind me and making me look nice and conspicuous in the daylight. It gets hot and sweaty quickly—but that’s alright, I don’t intend to go far. I catch the reflection of the guy chasing me in a car window; he’s at least as winded as I am, plus a little more. I veer into a nearby alley, a narrow one without any windows peeking into it, then tuck myself neatly behind the corner.

  He comes puffing around the bend. I stick my arm straight out, right at the level of his throat—he smacks into the crook of my elbow, and for one gorgeous snapshot moment, his eyes bug out and the fedora tumbles from his head. His legs keep up the momentum, sending his feet skidding forward while his chin is still hooked firmly over my arm. He goes horizontal as neatly as a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel, then hits the pavement, hard.

  As he makes rebooting noises on the ground, I scoop up the fallen fedora and dust it off. It’s a genuine fedora, not a trilby, brown with a black band and a subtly curved brim. Nice. I twirl it around a finger and drop it, lopsided, onto my own head.

  “Alright, bud,” I say, standing casually over him. “Now that we’re all loose and warmed up, it seems like a good time to talk. What do you think?” I give him my best rakish smile.

  He just stares at me, panting and wide-eyed. He’s pretty pasty, clean-shaven with a dull blade to leave the underside of his chin greenish-gray. The fine lines on his forehead and around his mouth mark him as either a thirty-year-old who looks forty, or a forty-year-old who looks thirty. The brown of his thinning hair contrasts sharply with his pale scalp, except at a patch of shockingly gray hair on the side of his head about the size of a golf ball.

  His near-nonexistent top lip is trembling. I tilt my head at him.

  “Nice hat,” I say, tapping the brim. “Very Humphrey Bogart.” Wait. Ratty old trench coat, fedora, inclination toward trailing strangers… shit. “You’re the PI, aren’t you? The one Tricia Powers tried to hire before me?” He starts in recognition. Good, that probably means he’s lucid. I poke him in the side with my toe. “Hey, give me an answer here. Why the Hell are you tailing me?”

  He grabs my ankle—of course. I have a second to feel like an idiot before crashing to the pavement, right onto the hand-shaped bruises on my ass. Holy shit, ow. As my head spins from the pain, he scrambles to get up—I kick blindly, landing the hit square on his hip. He goes down again, yelling, and I roll on top of him with all the grace of a newborn colt.

  I pinpoint the pain still clouding my head and draw it out into my hand, forming a conjured blade: a translucent, ruby-red shard of my magic given physical form, able to slice through nearly any organic material. I hold it like a guitar pick between my thumb and index finger, grab him by the lapels, and let the razor-sharp edge hover a millimeter from his throat.

  “I’m going to ask one more time, politely,” I say, gritting my teeth. I don’t intend to sound malicious, it’s just that the throbbing pain in my bruises hasn’t faded yet. But it’s still satisfying to watch the guy’s muddy gray eyes widen. “This isn’t your case. Tricia offered it to you but you turned it down, very explicitly from what I’ve heard. So why did you come back here? And why. Are. You. Tailing. Me?”

  “Luh,” he says, staring cross-eyed at the shard. “Luh-lead. Found a lead. On another case.”

  “Really? That sounds interesting. You mind telling me more?”

  “Another m-missing persons case. Similar. Made a connection.”

  “A-plus for summarizing under pressure. That’s a handy résumé skill, you know.” I ease back, and he visibly relaxes. “So you came back here to find out more about Aden, see if the connection panned out. Couldn’t go crawling back to Tricia after how bluntly you refused to help her—which, by the way, was pretty shitty of you—but you saw me snooping around and figured I might know something you didn’t. Correct?”

  He nods frantically.

  “Well, see here, when you turned down Tricia’s case, she hired me. Which means Aden is my jurisdiction. My responsibility. Just like whoever you’re looking for now is yours. So I have a right to be offended when you just show up and start fucking around, trying to piggyback off my work without even letting me know there’s a connected case nearby. You know what I mean? It’s rude.”

  He nods again. I’m talking out of my ass here; I don’t know how private eyes interact, or if they have anything akin to a system of honor or etiquette. But hey, I’m creative. I can bullshit.

  “So, here’s my idea. We work together. We find out if these two cases are connected, and if they are, we find out how. We both find our missing people, we both get paid, we go our separate ways, and I never have to deal with your creepy ass stalking me through dark alleys again. Think you can wrap your head around that?”

  He nods. At this point, it’s a wonder his skull hasn’t popped off like a bobblehead’s. “Y-yes. We work together. Good idea, definitely.”

  I smile fondly. “Good man. Knew you’d come around.” I pat his shoulder with my free hand and get to my feet. His eyes flash to the ruby shard in my hand.

  “It’s i-illegal to threaten people with lethal weapons, you know,” he says, snatching his fedora off the ground and scrambling upright. There’s something behind the words; I think it’s supposed to be bravado? “I could call the cops. One pat-down and you’ll be behind bars.”

  I widen my eyes in mock confusion. “Lethal weapon? What lethal weapon?” I hold up my palm, where he can plainly see the scarlet shard. Then I let it dissolve away, the construct becoming energy as abstract and invisible as the pain it originated from. He stares.

  Of course, I do have a number of less-than-legal stabby thi
ngs in my coat pockets. Razor blades and a penknife, to be exact. But he doesn’t need to know that.

  “If we’re going to be collaborating,” I say cheerfully, sticking my hand out, “I’m going to need your name. I’ll go first: Harrietta Lee. Consultant and definite non-possessor of sharp objects unlawful to be carried publicly in the state of New York. But you can call me Harry. You?”

  He stares at the outstretched hand. Then he cautiously, cautiously shakes it. “R-Richard Moore. You can call me Dick.”

  Dick Moore. Moore, Dick. Oh my gods.

  “…Right. Dick. We’ll talk while we walk.”

  ***

  When I was a kid, my parents told me not to blow my nose too hard or I’d blow out a chunk of my brain. I believed them. But then common sense, the Internet, and five years of blood magic training taught me better. Babies aren’t conceived when a husband and wife hold hands in bed and pray very, very hard to the Almighty Lord. Drinking too much water doesn’t wash out the white in your bones. And blowing your nose too hard will not blow out your gray matter.

  At the moment, Jenny Shilo seems intent on reeducating me.

  “It’s b-been over a week,” she sobs, clutching her wad of soaked tissues against her blotchy, cherry-pink nose. She pauses to blow her nose again, the sound like a warhorn in a blizzard. “The police keep t-telling me—they keep s-saying they’ve d-done everything they can. But he has to be out there somewhere, he’s just lost or s-something—oh god, David—”

  Dick immediately rushes forward, and she sticks to him like a magnet against a refrigerator. I shift uncomfortably and avert my gaze to look at the rest of the apartment.

  It’s a studio, not very big, but somehow giving the illusion of airiness. All the furniture is made of smooth plastic or glass panes, as clean and orderly as the glossy pictures in an IKEA catalog. The dominating color is white, dotted with solid blacks and bright pastels that keep the place looking just shy of sterile. A lot of the furniture looks foldable, easily compressed and pushed out of the way to keep the place looking cute. Two people could live here, but only if they were very, very neat.

  Jenny looks like she could be neat. She’s a white blonde of average height with a subtle spray tan and toned limbs, dressed in a low-cut, patterned shirt and black leggings. Her hair is tied up in an artistically messy bun, and she’s without makeup. As she composes herself and pulls away from Dick, I catch him glancing down her cleavage, then hastily staring up at the ceiling. Asshole. I step forward with a scowl, then immediately switch to a neutral expression when Jenny looks up at me.

  “I’m sorry to be bothering you about this,” I say hastily. “It can’t be easy, talking about it.”

  She shakes her head, sniffling. “Oh no, it’s alright. Thank you for helping, it means the world to have one more person looking out for my fiancé.” She looks up at Dick and smiles blearily. He smiles back, maybe showing a little too much teeth. My left eye twitches.

  “Ms. Shilo, if you could just fill me in on the details of what happened—”

  Her eyes water like Noah’s flood, and Jenny Shilo is bawling once again. Dick rushes forward, again. As he holds Jenny against him, he shoots me an accusing glare.

  I raise my hands in surrender. “I’ll… give you a moment. If it’s alright with you, I’ll just look around the apartment for, um, clues.”

  Jenny lets out a gurgly sob that sounds vaguely like an “okay,” and I flee to the opposite side of the room.

  …Which isn’t that far away. I end up in the teeny tiny kitchenette, still with a totally unobstructed view of Jenny and Dick sitting side-by-side on the bed nearby. The middle-aged private eye has his hat in his lap and a comforting hand on Jenny’s shoulder, and she’s leaning heavily against him. The light from the window makes Dick’s gray patch look soft as duck feathers. I avert my eyes and turn around to occupy myself with a row of cabinets against the wall.

  Dick’s already told me the bare bones of this case. Jenny’s fiancé, David, disappeared without a trace about eight days ago while coming home from his place of work, some kind of nouveau fusion restaurant nearby. Poof. Gone. Just like that. Just like Aden. They’re not easily connected by demographics, considering that Aden is a Black high schooler mostly looked after by his mother while David is a white twenty-something professional chef living with his fiancée. But they’re both healthy young men who live within five blocks of each other and were spirited away at night when they were alone, outside and without help. Maybe there’s something to that.

  As I idle, something catches my eye: on the counter by the sink is an arrangement of Tupperware containers full of various, sweet-smelling spices, stacked on top of each other the way children stack buckets to make sand castles. The counter around the containers is sprinkled with tiny white daisies. At the center of that arrangement is a framed picture, capturing an older woman with a broad chin, mousy brown curls, and skin creased by fine lines as she laughs jovially at the camera.

  I squint. “Julia Child?”

  A sniff comes from right next to me—I nearly jump out of my skin before I realize it’s just Jenny, standing next to me with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes still raw.

  “She’s his hero,” Jenny says. “Always has been. She inspired him to start cooking—he’s really, really good at it. Before him, I’d never had a boyfriend who insisted on cooking for me all the time instead of the other way around. He’s so sweet, he’s always doing things for me and never asking for anything back—” For a moment she teeters on the verge of another breakdown. But she regains her balance, exhaling raggedly. “This kitchen, it’s his happy place.”

  “Sounds like he really found his calling,” I say, giving her a cautious smile.

  She nods vigorously. “I know this sounds fake, but David’s food—if you eat it, it makes you—it just makes you better. Like, it makes you feel better emotionally, but honest to god I haven’t been sick once since we started living together. I’ve asked him what his secret is, and he always gives me some stupid answer like ‘unicorn barf’ or ‘Cinnamon Toast Crunch’ or ‘how much I love you—’” She clears her throat with a wet sound. “Sorry, I’m just going to… I think I need to clean up. Richard knows all the details, you can ask him.” I nod in understanding. She attempts a wobbly smile, then hurries away.

  I look back at the Tupperware castle, and at Julia Child’s smiling face. Then I open all the cabinets, one by one, and step back to get a good look at all the contents. Jars and jars and jars of all kinds of herbs and spices, meticulously labeled with white stickers inscribed in thick Sharpie. Some of the labels have tiny, almost unnoticeable symbols on them: a little star here, a triangle there, a looping spiral, a cluster of dots. I open the refrigerator—its contents are arranged in such deliberate, orderly groupings that for a second I think I’m staring at a children’s poster of the food pyramid.

  Kitchen witch. He must have been one. Not powerful enough to be recognized by the community, but he must have known what he was doing—at the very least he knew he was doing something, he just didn’t realize it was magic at the time. Every ritual has power, and preparing food is absolutely a ritual, one that imbues the finished product with specific intent. He even had a goddess; granted, it’s Julia Child. But hey, modern religion works in weird ways.

  I frown. I can’t tell if this changes the game or not. I need to look into it further.

  Dick meanders over. He doesn’t seem to have noticed my fascination with the kitchen and refrigerator contents, as he’s too busy watching the direction Jenny’s gone. “She’s, uh, really upset,” he says.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” I answer.

  He reaches up to yank open the freezer housed in the refrigerator’s top compartment, blasting both of us with cold air. Inside resides a tray of richly brown cupcakes, each topped with creamy, pastel frosting that automatically triggers my salivary glands.

  “David made these?” I ask.

  “Over two weeks ago. And those,
and those, and those.” He nudges the tray aside to show the rest of the freezer, which is jam-packed with all kinds of sweet and savory goodies. They look a bit… shapeless. “Most of them have gone bad by now. But she won’t throw them out.”

  “That’s… sad.”

  “The cupcakes are amazing though.” Dick stares longingly into the depths of the freezer. “She gave me one the first time I came around.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Cupcakes and cleavage, the ultimate siren call. Tell me, if Tricia were as young and accommodating as Jenny, would you have taken her case too? Or would the race thing have still held you back?”

  He swivels toward me, blood draining from his face. “What? No! That’s not why I—I—” He fumbles and I let him, glaring pointedly. “Look, I’m not a racist! A-and I’m not a pervert! It’s just that the Powers kid is—well, I thought he was just a kid who’d run away to mess with his family, you know? Every kid does that sometime but they always come back—but this guy, he’s an adult, he’s got everything going for him, you don’t live in a place like this with a girlfriend like that and just up and leave, not without leaving a note—”

  A note. Why does that feel important? Whatever it is, I lose track of the thought as Dick rambles on.

  “—a-and it’s not like I never acknowledged I was wrong! I came back to the Powers’ neighborhood, I found you, we’re working together now, so it doesn’t really matter—”

  I wave him off. “Buddy, I’m not your priest or your therapist. I don’t need a confession, just an explanation so we can move the Hell on to finding these people.”