by Devin Hanson
Satisfied, at least for the moment, I grabbed a messenger bag to carry it all in and took my purchases to the checkout. The price of it all depressed me. I was barely buying anything and it still emptied my bank account half way.
I had barely a hundred and fifty dollars to my name and no immediate prospect of getting more. Without my laptop, and the data and contacts stored on it, the next couple weeks were going to be pretty lean. At least I had Ethan’s charity to lean on, otherwise I would be hitting the homeless shelters for food before the week was out.
Still, I needed wheels. Sometimes I wished I had set myself up in New York where having your own transportation wasn’t a must. Living in Los Angeles was expensive enough without having to pay for a taxi or an Uber every time I wanted to go more than a few blocks. Things weren’t so desperate that I had to take public transportation yet. I’d eat welfare cheese and rice for three meals a day before I stooped that low.
Purchase completed, I headed to the restroom and stripped the labels off my new clothes before changing into them. I stuffed my old clothes into my bag and got my phone out to schedule another Uber ride, this time to Chinatown. It was only seven miles away, but with lunch hour coming up traffic was going to be heavy. To my surprise, my phone pinged almost immediately with an available Uber driver.
I grabbed my bag and headed out of the mall toward the parking structure. The driver was waiting for me in the loading zone, and it wasn’t until I had opened the door and slid into the back seat that I recognized the driver.
“Oh, no. You again?”
Only the surprise on the driver’s face when he turned around kept me from diving out of the car. It was the same kid from before, the guy with the aspiring actress for a sister.
“Ack,” he said. “Um. Honest, I’m not stalking you or anything.”
I eyed him while I made up my mind whether to bail and find another ride. He looked sincere, if a bit nervous, and I knew enough about how the internet worked to guess anyone who had the skill to hack Uber’s servers probably wouldn’t be driving for extra cash.
“So, Chinatown. Olvera street, huh?”
“Do I look like a tourist? No. Don’t answer that. Alpine and Spring is blocks away from there.”
He nodded and turned back forward. We were on the freeway and crawling through lunch-hour traffic before he spoke again. “So, uh, busy day so far?”
I made a noncommittal noise and glanced up to see him adjusting his review mirror so he could look back at me. There was a hungry look in his eyes that he was trying hard to smooth out to a pleasant smile.
Jesus. What a creep. I looked out the window and ignored the question.
“My name is Eric,” he tried again. “I’ve never had the same passenger twice in the same day. What a coincidence, right?”
“Real strange,” I muttered.
I guess my reticence was finally registering with him, because he adjusted his mirror again and left me alone after that. Traffic cleared enough to pick up a little speed, and soon we left the freeway behind. The tension in the car was palpable, and Eric slowed down as we were getting closer to the destination.
“You don’t frequent nice areas of LA, do you?” he asked.
I tilted my head to the side and watched a condemned warehouse slide by, its windows boarded up with low-grade plywood. He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t feel like giving him the satisfaction of answering him.
He pulled into the minimart parking on Alpine and killed the engine. “Look, I’m not supposed to do this, but I would feel better if—”
I got out of the car and slammed the door, cutting him off mid-sentence.
Undeterred, he rolled his window down and leaned out of it, holding out a business card. “Please, just take it. Give me a call if you need a lift. I won’t even charge you for it!”
I hesitated, then social conditioning took over and I took the card from him. “No offense,” I said, “but you’re creeping me out a little.”
Eric flushed a little and ducked his head. “Yeah. Sorry about that. You remind me of my sister, and it just makes me feel better if I know you aren’t stuck out here.”
I looked around pointedly. “This is just Chinatown, man. It’s perfectly safe. Try not to be so racist.”
Someone honked behind Eric and he pulled his head back inside. “I’ll be working until late,” he promised.
I stepped back and watched him drive off. The old Chinese lady who had honked at him rolled by and glared at me before pulling into a parking spot. I looked down at Eric’s card. Apparently, he was a freelance web designer. I flicked the card into the gutter and scanned the street, making sure he was actually gone.
Only then did I turn around and head up Spring. The buildings here were the overstated concrete art-deco style, the fading paint patched over haphazardly to cover up graffiti. The shops along one side of the street had long since been consolidated into a single massive import warehouse, with the second-floor windows all covered up with sun-bleached posters.
I crossed the street and picked my way up the sidewalk, careful not to step in any of the unidentifiable stains. Hopefully I’d get some answers to the questions that were rattling around inside my head.
Chapter Four
A word about Chinatown. Forty years ago, new construction had all but halted and the neighborhood was locked in a sort of pre-modern bubble. Ground-floor shops were crowded in shoulder-to-shoulder, with apartments above them. It suited the Chinese way of life, I guess, and was convenient for family-owned businesses. The shops did business with the locals almost exclusively, and had little to no interest in catering to the norms of the rest of LA.
Half the time, the shops were unlabeled, relying on word of mouth to bring in their customers. Even now, in the middle of the day on a Monday, most of the shop fronts had steel shutters closed down over the front. It looked shady as hell, a sure promise that the business carried out within wouldn’t bear close scrutiny.
I found the place I was looking for. The Sanctuary was a double-wide shop-front next to a Vietnamese pho restaurant with a B rating proudly suction cupped to the glass door. Both of the Sanctuary’s bays were closed up by steel shutters and decorated with illegible graffiti.
The sidewalk had a few people walking down it, but none seemed to have any interest in me. I rapped on the shutter and made sure I was standing in front of the peep hole. The pedestrians passing by me stepped by hurriedly, almost breaking into a jog.
There was a clunk from inside, and the shutter ratcheted upward noisily. I stepped back and concentrated on looking harmless.
“Alexandra,” a frowning bald Chinese man greeted me. He had the same generous figure as the Buddha but moved with surprising lightness of foot. “I thought we asked you not to come around here anymore.”
“Good to see you too, Hu. I wouldn’t have come, but it’s something of an emergency.”
Hu stared woodenly at me for a moment before shifting his weight to the side and offering me entry. I smiled at him and eased past. The foyer was close and dark after the glare of the street, and only grew darker as Hu heaved his weight against the shutter chain. Conversation was impossible until Hu threw the locking bar into place.
“Thanks for opening,” I offered.
Hu grunted and pushed past me through a bead curtain. I followed into the next room where Lei had her fortune telling room. Further beyond, I knew the Sanctuary offered a no-questions-asked halfway house that catered to everyone and everything that knew to come knock. It was a bit of a mystery to me how Hu paid rent and kept the power on, but in a building like this, maybe he just was stealing power from the pho place next door.
He turned to me, pointed at one of the chairs, and disappeared deeper into the bowels of the building. I stayed standing and wandered around the fortune telling room, checking out the knickknacks. The other person who ran the Sanctuary, Lei, had collected quite a few interesting pieces over the years. I paused in front of a couple shrunken heads hanging fro
m a bronze nail. They were a new addition and seemed to be real.
“From Indonesia,” Lei said from behind me.
I startled and turned around with a sheepish grin on my face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. How are you, Lei?”
Lei was an ancient Chinese woman as petite as Hu was large. I’m pretty sure her real name wasn’t Lei, but she refused to tell me what her birth name was. She barely came up to my shoulder and seemed ephemeral; thin arms and translucent skin somehow conveying the impression she was seconds away from fading out of existence altogether. Lei’s relation to Hu was a mystery to me, but I was pretty certain they weren’t blood relatives.
“You are not prying, Alexandra, merely curious. Forgive Hu, he has a long memory. What brings you to our sanctuary?”
“I need help,” I admitted. “My apartment was trashed.”
“Our beds are open to anyone in need, child, you know that,” Lei said gently. “Even you.”
“By a marid,” I finished.
Lei’s mouth tightened. “You are sure of this?”
“No, how could I be? But I don’t know anything else that could have done it.” I described the thoroughness of the vandalism, with not a single item in the entire apartment left untouched.
“It sounds personal,” was Lei’s first comment. “What did you do to anger a marid?”
“Nothing!” I threw my hands up in frustration and turned away to pace around the room. “Honestly, I’ve been doing small-time stuff for the last two months. I can’t think of anything that would have angered a marid. I was hoping that you or Hu would have heard something.”
“Well. I can’t speak for Hu, but I have heard nothing.” Lei pursed her lips and tilted her head sideways. Her eyes glittered up at me, birdlike.
“What?”
“Something is changed about you, Alexandra. I know you don’t believe in it, but would you let me read your fortune?”
Out of respect for Lei I stopped my eyes from rolling. “Fine. But no crystal balls. Even you admit those are bull.”
Lei clapped her hands. “Excellent. Crystal balls are for scrying. Useless for a fortune.” She took my arm and led me toward the chairs that I had avoided earlier. She took a seat opposite me and collected a carved ebony box from the shelf. “Tarot?”
I nodded glumly. Tarot was influenced as much by the reader as it was by the subject, but it was better than dice or throwing bones.
Lei seemed happier than I’d ever seen her. The few other times she’d tried reading my fortune I had flat-out refused. As far as I was concerned, fortune telling was a carnival gag, used to trick people out of their money.
“Is this going to help me find the marid who trashed my place?”
“You said no crystal ball, dear. I can’t scry with cards.”
Lei went through a complex shuffling routine, spinning cards through her spindly hands with surprising dexterity. Satisfied, she held the deck out to me. “Cut, please.”
I rapped the top of the deck, the universal signal that I was satisfied with the dealer’s shuffle, but she shook her head.
“You must cut. It won’t work if your life energies aren’t involved, Alexandra.”
This time I did roll my eyes, and just to be an asshole, I took the card from the bottom of the deck and put it on top.
My humor must have been lost on Lei, because her face never changed from the beatific half-smile. Without breaking eye contact with me, she spread the cards out on the surface of the table in a clean arc.
“There are twenty-one cards in the major arcana,” Lei informed me, her voice rolling in a sort of sing-song. “You must pick three cards. The first one represents you, Alexandra, so pick it with the utmost care.”
I reached out a hand, and she clucked her tongue in disappointment.
“With care, Alexandra. You must believe, or we might as well be doing this on my iPad.”
I sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound. I stared at the cards, trying to shake off the feeling that I was wasting my time. Which card should I pick? The backs were all hand-painted with a subtle, gray-on-black vine pattern. There were blemishes and variations from card to card. What kind of deck was this? Even I knew how easy it was to cheat at cards when the deck wasn’t uniform.
One of the cards was slightly out of alignment with the rest and it caught my eye. Was this some sort of card-shark trick? A subtle force? I shook my head. That was unkind to Lei. I reached my hand out and touched a card about a third of the way around the arc, one that had a little blemish in the corner that looked like a smiley face.
Lei fished it out of the stack and flipped it over in front of me. “The Moon!” she announced. “Good, now pick two more.”
I did, with less effort than I had for the first one. If the Moon represented me, did that mean I was going to go all hormone-bitchy? I hate fortune telling.
“The Devil,” Lei read as she flipped my selections over, “and Judgement.” She stared at the cards for a minute, tracing parts of the imagery on them with a fingertip as she muttered to herself in Chinese. “This isn’t right,” she finally declared.
“What isn’t right?”
“You picked the wrong cards.” Lei scooped the cards up and reshuffled.
I wasn’t sure how someone could pick the wrong cards in tarot. Any combination could be twisted around to have any meaning the reader wanted. Still, Lei seemed intent on shuffling the cards thoroughly. There wasn’t any harm in humoring her.
Again, Lei spread the cards around, taking care to make the arc as uniform as possible. To my eye, it looked exactly the same as it had the first time she had displayed them to me. I wanted to play a gag on Lei, so searched the corners for the smiley face that I had seen on the Moon card. As hard as I looked, though, it wasn’t there, or at least, wasn’t visible. Figuring I had put up enough of a show to satisfy Lei, I picked a card at random.
With a bit of flourish, Lei flipped the card and her shoulders slumped. The Moon stared up at me, the painted half-face mocking me with her half-smile. Without having to be asked, I dragged out two more cards from the arc. Judgement first, followed by the Devil.
I cocked an eyebrow and looked up at Lei. Even from a purely math standpoint, the likelihood of drawing the same three cards again was pretty unlikely. Somewhere in the “one in a million” category.
“So…” I drawled, enjoying the look of consternation on her face. “What’s it mean?”
“I… yes.” She took a deep breath and nodded to herself. “It is not as bad as I thought at first. The second and third cards you chose represent your past and your future. In the second drawing, the cards were reversed.”
“Yeah, okay. But what does it all mean?”
“I’m getting there.” Lei glared at me, and I held up my hands in capitulation. She sniffed. “Here, the Moon. The dog and the wolf, two natures, matched by the Devil and Judgement. The Devil needs little explanation, I think. You are familiar with demons, yes?”
“Unfortunately,” I confirmed. “What about Judgement, though?”
“Human.” She traced her finger along the angels leaning down from the heavens. “Only humans get to partake in the rapture, child.”
“I’m not possessed, if that’s what you’re getting at.” I leaned back and folded my arms.
“I didn’t say you were,” Lei huffed. “This is your nature. The Moon, she is half-hidden, as you have a hidden past.”
“I’m pretty certain my dad wasn’t a demon,” I objected. “I may not remember him much, but I think that would have stood out.”
“And your mother?”
“Died in childbirth. Not a particularly demonic trait, if you ask me.”
“Hmm. Perhaps. Either way, it is immaterial. It is the past, and that cannot change. The future, though, is what is important.”
“Both cards represent the future too? So, I’m a demon and a human in the future?”
“I did not say you were a demon, child. Though even you have to admit th
ere were troubled times in your past.”
“The courts sealed my juvenile record,” I protested guiltily.
Lei smiled. “I don’t need records to see that in you. But no, the future cards represent things to come, not things that are.” Her smile faded and she looked at me, suddenly serious. “You will be responsible for great things in the future, but the nature of those things is undecided. You have the power to do great evil, Alexandra, or great good.”
I sighed. All this buildup and I get the Spider-Man speech. “I still don’t know how that helps me find the marid that trashed my apartment.”
She packed the cards away into their box. “It does not. But because you indulged me, I will ask around. If I learn anything, I will let you know.”
“Thanks, Lei. You’re the best.”
Her eyes twinkled at me. “You have a safe place to stay?”
“Yeah. I’m staying with a friend of mine.”
“A man?”
“He has a girlfriend, Lei. Jeez.”
“A woman your age should be married,” Lei said primly. “With tits like yours, you must have men swarming you.”
“You’re just showing your age, Lei. Believe it or not, people have sex outside of marriage all the time.”
Lei swatted me on the arm. “I know that, child. I’m not that old. Have you eaten?”
“I don’t want to impose…”
She clucked her tongue. “Nonsense. Hu!” she screamed. In a normal tone of voice again, she asked me, “So, tell me. What do you know of the marid?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “They’re one of the families of djinn. Big, strong, fast, and not very imaginative, but thorough.”
Lei flicked her fingers, dismissing the generalization. “Some could be described that way, yes. They are quite large, you have that much right.” She waggled her eyebrows, making it suggestive and I snorted.