by Jadie Jang
“If I’d wanted to ‘get away with’ anything, I would have. I’m not here to steal your little stick. I’m here to see Chucha.” I thumbed the rounds out of the mag as I spoke and tossed them one by one into the corner where the stick had rolled. When the mag was empty, I tossed that as well. “Enough bullshit. Take me to your leader, or whatever. Or just take me to Chucha. I have a message for her.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Friday, October 14, 2011
San Antonios’ HQ, Oakland
I knew it was her because … well, imagine a female version of Tez: a bit rounder about the features with eyes wider-set and a subtly smaller jaw (but still jutting and somehow, more stubborn than Tez’s), a bit shorter, considerably more hourglass-shaped, but still tall, strong, full-lipped, and stunning. She didn’t have his languid grace. She moved more energetically, holding herself square from her hips and shoulders, and her face wore a snarl that was no less menacing for being attractive. Plus, she was fast.
I found that last bit out the hard way.
See, when I said I knew what to say to Chucha, I really meant that I knew not to say anything to her, at least not at first. Predators respect physical power. All predators, no matter how small, have to have a physical reckoning of some kind (be it only butt-sniffing) before settling down to be social. And Chucha, with that name and that job and Tez’s description, wouldn’t stop at sniffing my butt. Tez, a cat, should have known this, but he was also a poet, and college educated, and human-passing, and never truly a part of this world. My plan was to come in hot, take her down quick, then deliver my message. She’d hear me then.
That was the plan anyway.
She stood stage left of an ancient naugahyde recliner, clearly a throne, in which sat the shot-caller. The shot-caller had a generic kind of charisma, and a general sort of handsomeness that may have explained how she placed her loyalty. If you like Brazilian futbol stars (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?), this dude might be a close enough approximation to get you off.
A side table to the left of his throne held a collection of empty beer cans and … some books? I could see “Aztecs” and “Meso-America” and “shaman” in the titles. Hey, this guy was reading up on the same stuff I was! I knew I was being snobbish, but my respect for him increased 1000% once I knew he read—and once I knew he was reading up on his new girlfriend/bodyguard.
Okay, the shot caller was not a lightweight. Was Chucha?
I smiled and deliberately flared my eyes at her. She immediately went into a standing crouch, and snarled like a startled weedwhacker. I grinned as insolently as I could, pulled easily out of my escorts’ hold, and, using the glass-inlaid wooden coffee table as a launch pad—with Monkey screeching my fool head off from the inside—jumped her.
Or, at least, I meant to jump her. She simply stepped aside and, while I was gaping and windmilling past her, drove a roundhouse into my kidneys. (That’s punch, not kick, and I’m glad of it.) I revised my estimate (seriously, ten years of crappy fighters and suddenly I’m up against two good ones in a single week?) just in time for her to jump onto me, and it was on. I was hampered by my decision not to change shape in front of civilians (at least not in an obvious way. After that first punch, I turned into silly putty wherever I saw a fist or foot coming. I’m not a masochist. But still, human-shaped silly putty. I doubt they noticed.)
She didn’t seem to be hampered by anything. I’d never encountered a fighter so purely aggressive. There was no defense in her game. She took every hit, didn’t dodge a single blow, just kept coming through whatever I threw at her, trying to land her own punches. After her initial success, I didn’t let her land too many, but she kept me so busy playing defense, I didn’t land many myself.
The shot-caller had leapt up almost immediately and shoved the coffee table out of the way—I guess he liked it—which made a little room for us to fight in. (I noticed that no one tried to interfere; not that we gave them a chance: we were both too fast.) I took advantage to throw her down and see how she grappled. Turns out, she grappled just fine, and just as aggressively and disregarding of hurt as she boxed. When I pinned an arm, a leg, or a neck, she would squirm so violently that I was forced to either back off or break it, and then she’d turn the same move back on me, with no such compunction. I finally started understanding what Tez had told me about her fighting style. She was just too fast and too aggressive. It was true, I couldn’t win this one without hurting her. And she wasn’t dumb. She’d figured out already that I was trying to avoid hurting her and she was using it against me.
Time to find out if the courtesy was mutual.
I jackhammered her off me with both feet, then lay back in the submissive pose I’d seen taken by defeated werewolves, crying “Uncle! I give!” I guess she hadn’t been a thug for very long because she managed to stop her dive back onto me by snapping out her arms like wings, then falling to her knees gaping at me. She had picked up that I wasn’t a pushover, and she wasn’t expecting me to give in. My chin was tilted away from her so she could see my throat. I whimpered a little for good measure, but she immediately looked suspicious, so I gave in and grinned again.
“What the fuck, Chucha? Who is this?” the lieutenant cried. The shot caller was projecting “confused,” but was cool enough not to let it show on his face. He let the lieutenant do the talking.
“I have no fucking clue,” Chucha said.
I flipped up and everyone started. Chucha jumped up almost the same moment. The lieutenant, idiot that he was, pointed his gun again, the gun that I’d unloaded for him. I grinned with what I thought might be disarmingness, although from the tense response, it probably wasn’t.
“Look,” I said, “I’m just here to talk to Chucha, okay?” She looked skeptical, to say the least.
“Why’d you attack me, then?” She asked, reasonably enough, damn her.
I sucked my teeth. “You were growling at me! I thought you were going to attack!”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” Geez, how old was she? I thought they were over the snottiness at eighteen.
“No,” the lieutenant said, “Juice, she’s lying. She’s after the Huexotl. She killed Bu Bu.”
My whole body clenched at the reminder of what I’d lost. I forced myself to relax again, and sighed theatrically. “Seriously? Guys, if I’m so badass I can kill Bu Bu so easily”—I am, but they didn’t need to know that—“why wouldn’t I just take your little stick and run off with it? And why would I want your stick anyway? I’m sure it’s magic, but I don’t know anything about it.”
The shot-caller—Juice?—sat back down in his lounger. “Talk,” he said to the room.
“We heard fighting and came out back and found her handling Bu Bu. He was dying.”
“Yeah, and tell him where you found the stick, dumbass,” I said.
The lieutenant looked confused.
“That’s right, all the way across the yard from me. And you can tell him about my trying CPR on Bu Bu, too.”
Juice raised his eyebrows at his lieutenant, who nodded confusedly.
“Where’s Bu Bu now?” Juice asked.
“Still out back. Squirrel’s guarding him.”
“Bring him in here,” Juice said, getting up and moving out of the room. We followed him into the dining room, with its long farm table, while the henchmen brought the body in. In the light, unmoving, Bu Bu’s body looked tiny and shrunken, his clawed hands and feet curled up like a dead bird’s. My heart clutched again for a moment.
“How did he die?” Juice asked.
There was a silence. None of us knew.
“Ask her, jefe,” one of the henchthugs said, pointing at me.
“I have no fucking clue,” I said, in Chucha’s voice. She started, then snarled at me, but nobody else noticed.
Juice stepped around the table and felt the key points of Bu Bu’s body: his neck, his head, his spine, his ribs. “There’s no blood,” he said, “and nothing feels broken.” He looked at me. “
So what do you think happened?” He was looking at me intently. Maybe not just a thug, this one. He had real pull.
“I came down from the roof and he was already fighting with that shadow thing.”
“What shadow thing?”
I described it, and the fight, and the fact that it disappeared just before the henchthugs came out, which made them scoff. But Juice looked thoughtful.
“Maybe it’s something about the Huexotl,” he said.
“Or maybe she made it up,” the lieutenant said.
“Seriously? Are we still on this? If I killed Bu Bu then how did I do it?” I waited. The henchthugs had taken my minor transformations in the dark in their stride. Was it because they couldn’t really see what I was doing, or because they were, as Tez put it, superstitious? Bu Bu was lying here right in front of us in all his off-color, clawed glory. But I noticed none of the henchthugs was looking directly at him. What did these humans see when they looked at him? At Chucha?
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, finally. “Maybe he had a heart attack or something?”
“Maybe she took a shot at his throat and it choked him?” one suggested.
“Maybe she’s got those kung-fu moves like in Kill Bill, where you hit a guy the right way and his heart explodes?“ offered another.
Juice closed his eyes briefly in what was apparently a prayer for patience. Chucha just rolled hers.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know who connected you with Bu Bu, but I’m the one who captured him in the first place. You know Ayo?”
Juice and Chucha exchanged a glance. “Yeah,” Juice said. “You caught him?” He sounded slightly admiring.
I nodded.
“Well, we’ve only had him for a few days, but he was worth every dime. Next time you catch something like that, take it directly to me. I’ll pay top dollar for a fighter like that. Cut out the middleman and everybody wins.”
He smiled charmingly and, in that moment, I realized that I’d started to admire Juice, because my admiration just flew right out the window. I didn’t yell at him about using the meat market middleman, or about supernat slavery, though; partly because Chucha didn’t react to his statement (did she think his ideas about supernats didn’t apply to her? How had he gotten her, anyway? Didn’t she go through the meat market?) and partly because I wasn’t here to give lectures on equal rights.
“Look, I really didn’t kill Bu Bu. I’m just here to talk to Chucha.” Juice nodded imperceptibly. He believed. And my mention of Ayo had probably decided it. Typical.
“Is this family, social, or business?” Juice asked me.
“Family,” I said.
“You can use the back room,” he said to her, pointing with the crown of his head. “Take care of this and get her out of here. We still got things to do tonight.”
Chucha led the way, stance tight. As soon as I shut the door behind me she asked, “Is anyone hurt?”
“No, no, everyone’s okay.” She relaxed slightly. “Your brother wants to talk to you.”
“Which one?” I had a momentary stab of envy again. Oh, to have so many brothers you didn’t know which wanted to talk to you!
“Tez.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. How do you know Tez?”
“We went to Cal together.” Well, that was technically true, anyway
“What are you, anyway? I can’t really smell anything weird but … what are you?”
“I don’t know. That’s not the issue.”
“You don’t know?”
“Left on a doorstep. Fostered. Not the issue, okay?”
“No, I mean, like what do you turn into? You turn into stuff, right? I felt your skin getting all weird …”
I sighed. I realized we would have to do me first, so I sat down on the bed. “I can turn into anything, really. Animal or object or person. But I default to monkey pretty easily.”
“Monkey?”
“It’s what’s for dinner.”
“And you can really turn into anything?”
“Pretty much. I mean, some things are harder—“
“And you really don’t know what you are or where you come from?”
“Really truly.”
“Wow … like you could be a princess or something. Like, a really badass princess!” She hitched herself up onto the dresser, and her eyes gleamed when she said “princess” in a way that told me that a part of her was still twelve years old. I knew which part of her.
“Yeah,” I said, “or I could also be the daughter of the devil or something super evil. It’s less romantic than scary if you really think about it.” And I’d really been trying hard not to think about it since Monday night.
She sighed, “But the possibilities are all there. And you are really badass. You were holding back.” She said the last with a little pout, like I’d denied her a treat by not breaking her limbs.
“I don’t think being a nagual is anything to sneeze at. And you’re pretty badass yourself. I couldn’t have taken you without really hurting you.”
She snorted. “Being a nagual is all bullshit ritual and math and dealing with people’s fuckups. It’s all being ‘responsible,’ like my brother. Bo-ring. The only good parts are changing and being strong and fast.”
“Don’t forget the healing factor … and the enhanced senses.”
“Yeah, that too … except when you’re living with a bunch of guys.”
“Tell me about it. If gangs were run by women we’d be ‘just saying no’ to black market perfume.”
She sneered at me, little girl gone and teenage rebel back. “What do you know about gangs? Aren’t you one of Tez’s little college girlfriends?”
Well, now that was interesting. Was it just a figure of speech or did he have a harem? This was not unheard of among people who turned into animals. I filed the question away for later gnawing.
“Oh,” I said breezily, “I used to ride with the Celestials back in the day. Before I went to college. And seriously? More than anything it was the smell that got me moving on. I lived in a women-only dorm at Cal.”
The New York Celestials had been in the news recently for general ruthlessness, and I could tell from her expression she’d heard about it. I let her take that in for a second. Yes, Princess, I was in a badass gang and I left and went to college. And I can still set you back.
“Really?” she asked, looking at her knees as if she didn’t care (but I could see her ghosty dog ears pricked towards me.) “Were you, like, somebody’s girlfriend or something?”
I blew out an exaggerated scorn-breath, skipping over my on/off dalliance with the Celestials’ version of Juice: “Yeah, right: those losers? Nah, I ran security for a while, then I got sick of it.”
She was turned entirely towards me again, not hiding her interest. Dogs were so obvious. “Dude, how old were you? You can’t be much older than me!”
“Actually, I’m closer to your brother’s age. I’m twenty-five; I just look younger. It’s the Asian thing. But I was, like, fifteen when I started with the Celestials, and sixteen when I became head of security for the whole Chicago branch. I bailed pretty quickly after that, though.”
“Why?” she asked. I had been planning to say something smartass about the smell, but she asked so simply and honestly that I couldn’t help being honest back.
“I didn’t like what I was turning into. I hurt some people, and I was starting to really not care. Then they wanted me to kill some people, and I was starting to not care about that, either. It was really time to get out.”
Chucha blew scorn at me. “You couldn’t deal. I get it.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “And you can? How many people have you killed?”
“How many have you?” she countered. She wasn’t taking this seriously.
Should I—?
I felt challenged, for the first time in a while. But I also felt … weird, I know, but I felt responsible for her. And I wasn’t getting through to her.
I deliberat
ely remembered—decompartmentalized—the person who allowed herself to kill. She was part “me” and part “monkey”. I let that girl out of her cage for a moment. She was calm … I was calm, looking around the room for weapons and cooly evaluating Chucha for easy ways to put her down.
“Three,” I said, my voice pleasanter, lower. “One by accident.” I looked at Chucha with that person’s eyes. I let her fill in the blanks. I could almost hear her hackles rising. She swallowed audibly and jumped herself down from the dresser.
“Did you have a message for me or not?” Her sudden aggressiveness told me she was probably spilling fear-smell. It wasn’t really reaching me but it was doubtless making her even more nervous. Hm. Now was not the time to give her Tez’s plea. She was on the defensive, and would take any sign of weakness, even at second hand, as a cue to attack. No, I needed to stay in the dominant position I’d gained.
“Tez wants to meet with you,” I said.
“I have nothing to say to him.” That sounded … equivocating.
I stood up, and grew my body with the upward motion until I was taller than she was. The effect of this, I knew from experience, was chilling. She shrank back, ever so slightly, but still showed her teeth. “Are you saying ‘no’?” I asked, bleeding a little more monster into my eyes.
“I don’t see what the point would be,” she replied, stalling. “We’ve said all there is to say.”
“Maybe not.” I put gravity into the two words, and let them sit. I didn’t move otherwise.
We stood like that—an enforcer and an unknown, slightly larger, monster—staring at each other, for a full minute. She looked panicked and cornered, defiant and rebellious. But she also started to look … what was it? Relieved? As if perhaps here was a way out?
“Fine,” she said finally. “Where and when?”
“Why don’t we three meet at the Sanctuary on Monday, early evening, say, six?” I knew Tez was free. We’d arranged this time in case she’d been amenable.
“Fine,” she said again, as if saying more would reveal something. She got up and put her hand on the doorknob.
“Oh, and I want to talk to your shot-caller again. What’s his name, Juice?”