by Jadie Jang
“Why?” she asked, suspicious.
“I want Bu Bu back.”
She just stared at me. “Why?”
I considered what to say to her. “He’s part of an investigation Ayo and I are pursuing. I’ve been looking for him all week, actually. It’s just a coincidence that he ended up here.”
“What kind of investigation?” she asked, all excitable little girl again. She was almost salivating.
I gave her my patented “inscrutable” look, which worked a lot better than it should in Obama’s America. “Did he talk at all about where he was working before he came to you?”
She grimaced in disgust. “No, not at all. He was an arrogant pig and bragged constantly and wouldn’t take orders.”
“Maybe he told one of the guys?”
“No, he was even worse to them, and he freaked them out anyway. I was the only one he’d talk to. He was one of those, you know.” Yeah, I knew. Supernats who despised anyone without superpowers. We all had those tendencies and I had to struggle harder than most to keep mine in check. “I was the only one who worked closely with him, so he would’ve hardly had the time to talk to anyone else. I kept him out back most of the time. He didn’t sleep much, so he was at least useful that way.”
“What did he brag about?”
“MMA fights, exclusively. It was interesting, for five minutes.”
Another dead end. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face.
“Well, Ayo will want to study him to see what exactly killed him.”
“Okay,” she said, easily. She opened a drawer in her bureau and pulled out a bamboo tube, similar to the one Ayo had given me to catch Bu Bu in. I guessed the meat market middleman had had one to keep Bu Bu in when he went to them. Can’t say those fuckers don’t know what they’re doing.
Chucha went out the door, gesturing for me to follow. “It’ll save us the trouble of disposing of the body.”
I followed her, but really didn’t like how easy it was for her to talk about body disposal. For a moment, this gig felt personal: I had to get this girl out of here.
CHAPTER NINE
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Maya’s Apartment, San Francisco
I slammed my front door behind me, and The Damned Book fell off the shelf. I whipped around and glared at it.
My apartment, an illegal sublet where I’d been living for three years, was a studio composed out of what had once been the dining room and part of the kitchen of a second-story, two-bedroom, Mission district flat. The dining room, which was the main room of my studio, had the remains of a Victorian plate rail lining one short wall: a four-inch-deep shelf set at about head height for the purpose of displaying china, which most San Francisco hipsters now used for books or artwork. Of course, I did too, using my heaviest book—one that could stand up on its own—as a bookend. It only stayed put if I didn’t slam my front door when coming in.
And of course, my thickest tome was a secondhand, jacketless, clothbound, unabridged translation of Journey to the West, cursed be its name and bindings. I’d dug this one up in a used bookstore to use in my classic Chinese literature class right at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, and thought I’d scored. What I hadn’t quite figured out was that you needed to buy the right edition of a book for class, so you had the same translation and page numbers and so on. When I couldn’t figure out my first reading assignment, I took the book with me to my prof’s office hours.
The prof, who was handsome in what I thought was a fatherly way, and very Chinese looking—exactly what I wanted—had looked stony faced at my sophomoric enthusiasm and confusion. Then he’d told me that—well I don’t know if I remember what he actually told me. What I heard was that I wasn’t really Chinese and didn’t really belong in his class, and was too stupid to understand the reading material anyway. Thinking back, there’s no doubt in my mind that whatever he said exactly wasn’t about me at all, but about whatever had put him in such a vicious mood.
But at the time, it had devastated me. I’d come out to Berkeley hoping to connect with an Asian community in some way—to find my roots—but I felt like such a fraud that I went through all of freshman year nearly failing my Chinese language classes, and not daring to sign up for a Chinese studies class—or to talk to an Asian-looking person. But I’d won enough courage by sophomore year to sign up for the prof’s class … a courage that was the thinnest crust of ice, shattered at a touch. If I hadn’t met Baby that same day, I probably would have dropped out and gone back to Chicago. As it was, I did drop that class, and my plans to major in Chinese studies. In fact, I never afterwards looked anything Chinese up in books, and avoided asking Chinese people anything (which, of course, put a crimp in my identity search, but I’d get panicky and short of breath anytime I tried any of these things so …) I still thought of that episode as a sort of earthquake in my life; a cataclysm. A disaster.
The book still stood for everything that was holding me back: the humiliation, the hurt, the impostor syndrome, the failure, the fear that everyone could see what an outsider I was—all being made real by that horrible prof. I told myself that someday I would surmount that book, someday I’d read that fucker end to end and own it; and once I did, the whole world of Chinese culture would welcome me in and I’d know everything. But I hadn’t yet, not in six years. Hadn’t even cracked it, nor any of the other books on Asian folklore Ayo pointed me at and I pretended I’d read. So whenever I came home in a mood, it would jump off the shelf and display its fraying, blank, blue cover at my feet, an accusation from the universe, an eternal, sneering question: what have you done to know yourself? What have you done, to improve yourself?
I kicked it against the wall, swearing for the thousandth time to throw it away.
It was of a piece with my mood.
Of course Bu Bu would die just when I’d found him again. Of course he didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t tell anyone about his previous (possible) encounter with a soul-sucking shadow creature, or with something like me. Of course the person I was depending on for clues about me was a total asshole. A total dead asshole.
I went and kicked Journey to the West one more time for good measure.
Then I speed-dialed Ayo, who generally stayed up late, and preferred information to sleep.
“Mmm?” she asked, in her “you interrupted me,” not her “you woke me,” voice.
“Bu Bu’s dead,” I said shortly, knowing I’d get her divided attention better that way.
“… who?” she asked, fully alert, but not sure if she was needed to comfort me or not.
“The bajang.”
“Oh. … Oh! What? How did that happen?”
I gave her a quick rundown.
“Jesu Christi! Don’t go anywhere! I’m on my way!”
I started to protest—it was nearly 3 am, after all—but she had already hung up.
At least this time of night there’d be no traffic. Given her propensity to drive recklessly, she could potentially be here in 20 minutes.
It actually took only ten before she was knocking at my door. I hadn’t even heard her climbing the creaky stairs, which meant, I was absolutely sure, that she’d used some sort of magic to get over here so fast. But she blew in like a whirlwind, giving me no time to ask questions—Ayo tended to be the one asking questions—tossing her bag and implements everywhere, grabbing Bu Bu’s bamboo tube from where it sat on my table, and tossing his body out of it onto the floor. Ew, that was my yoga mat. Yeah, I was gonna be needing a new one of those.
As I tamped down her blizzard of questions, she didn’t even glance at me once; she was too fascinated with Bu Bu.
“What … what is it?” I asked after a long pause. I knew what she saw, though. “His soul is gone, isn’t it?”
Ayo blew out a windy sigh. “Essence. Yes. It is. How long?”
“No more than two hours.”
“Yeah, this is similar to Wayland. The remains should still be surrounded by inert e
ssence for days yet. But there’s very little left.”
“Very little?”
“There’s a bit left. Much less than there should be for a shapeshifter. It seems you interrupted this … shadow creature, you said? Looks like you stopped it before it got all of the essence.” She stood up from her crouch. “Well, I’ll take the body home with me and examine it. Maybe I can figure out what kind of creature did this.”
“Your research hasn’t turned up anything?”
“Nothing specific so far.” She eyed me. “How about you? I know you’ve been investigating …” She let it dangle.
“Well, it’s not nothing, but I don’t know what to make of it.”
“What is it?”
I ran down the facts I had so far: Bu Bu seeing a shadow creature at some point, possibly Saturday night; the Tong people having seen Dalisay more recently than Saturday night; the contradiction of them not having kidnapped her, but having her all the same; and the coincidence of Wayland feeling as if he’d picked up a tail the same night, and at the same location, that Dalisay had last been seen. I also wondered aloud if Dalisay hadn’t maybe been the shadow’s first victim, even if only by accident.
“But I don’t know what club Bu Bu, Dalisay, and Wayland all belong to besides the Hung For Tong fan club. And Wayland’s connect with them is pretty minuscule. So is Dalisay’s, actually. If one of them were to be killed by accident, I’d have thought it would be Wayland. But he was pretty clearly stalked and deliberately killed.”
“It’s true, that connection may be a bit tenuous,” Ayo said, thoughtfully. “I do, I think, see one more connection among those three, though.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“Well, we usually think of aswang as vampiric beings, but they are also, legitimately, shapeshifters.”
That struck me rather hard, and we both stopped to consider it. I remembered the shadow turning to look at me, and shivered.
“I have to say, it’s all rather discomfiting. … Maya, you should keep an eye out for any reason something would be attacking shapeshifters.”
“Well, there was that stick …”
“What stick?” Ayo asked sharply.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Bu Bu here was guarding a sort of magical walking stick for the San Antonios. When I first got there, they accused me of trying to steal it. But I wasn’t really focused on it and I guess they got that pretty quickly, so they put it away and I forgot about it. It made my eyes burn like the Embarcadero on the Fourth of July, though, so maybe it had a glamour on it or something. Maybe it wasn’t really a walking stick.”
“What did it look like?” she asked, still sharp.
“It was about a meter or so long, made entirely of what looked like tropical wood with ivory, red, and brown striations, probably oil-polished but not stained or varnished, with a knob carved into the top depicting a stylized animal head: maybe canine or feline.” This was Ayo’s training: she sent me after rare objects all the time and I’d learned to be very specific in my descriptions. “They also had a name for it. It sounded like ‘way-shot’ or ‘way-shuttle’ or something.”
“Could it have been ‘Huexotl’?” She pronounced the word pretty much exactly the way Beto had.
“That sounds like it, yeah.”
“Did you recognize the style?”
I shrugged. “Could’ve been Polynesian, Meso-American, Iron-Age whatever … you know I’m bad with visual culture.”
“That’s … very interesting,” Ayo said. “Very interesting.” She tapped her chin in thought, then looked up decidedly. “You’re in touch now with that Chucha nagual girl, yes?”
“Yeeees …”
“See if you can find out from her where the San Antonios got this ‘Huexotl’ from and how long they’ve had it. Maybe our weretiger friend was involved with it before. Maybe it came through the Tong. Maybe that’s what this shadow creature was after.” She nodded, as if she’d solved that problem. And I had to admit, it made sense, especially for three in the morning. Her abstraction took advantage of my exhaustion and she’d nearly wandered out the door before I thought to ask:
“Can you connect me with the werecats again, tomorrow?”
“What for?”
“Well, I was thinking earlier we should look through his books. Maybe he and the Tongs are BFFs and we just can’t see it. And maybe even Wayland was involved with getting the stick—”
“Say no more, I’ll call them in the morning.”
CHAPTER TEN
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Sanc-Ahh Café, Oakland
Saturday daytime was too quiet, with our usual clientele off having brunch elsewhere—yes, all day long. I was still disturbed by the fight with the shadow last night. Add that to my intense frustration at losing Bu Bu, and my inability to just haul off and tear Wayland’s office apart (for one thing, I didn’t know where it was; I was waiting for Ayo to get back to me, but she was out after stories,) and I was in a fine state of agitation when the door jingled open.
Sending a momentary flare to my eyes and a slight fizz of electricity to my nerves, Todd walked in. I stared at him for a moment; it was the first time I’d ever seen him without Han and Romeo, his bandmates and co-arts-editors. Then I realized I’d forgotten about our appointment, and I so was not in the mood to deal with anyone.
Todd must’ve picked up on that, because he hesitated a few yards from the counter.
“Hi Todd,” I said, making an effort.
His eyes widened and he pantomimed looking over his shoulder and then pointing to himself. I rolled my eyes. Not that much of an effort.
He saw this and put on an exaggerated concerned look. He dropped his messenger bag, somehow managing to grab his ukulele case from inside it, then whipping the uke out of its case all in one smooth gesture. Without taking his eyes off of me, or putting his uke strap on, he launched into a complicated introductory set of arpeggios. As annoying as I found male clowning (you know, the kind that insists that you pay attention and laugh,) I couldn’t help but be impressed with this. He was really freakin’ good.
He paused dramatically, waggled his eyebrows at me, and then dove into a bright, plucky melody that sounded familiar, but didn’t reveal itself until he reached the chorus: “It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To.”
I grinned, in spite of myself. Message received. He seemed to think that constituted a detente, because he finally approached the bar, still playing the song—only now it was relaxing into a reggae beat—and kicking his bag with the case on top of it ahead of him. If you were only watching for the goofy content, you might just miss how incredibly graceful one would have to be to pull all that off. I didn’t miss it, but I wasn’t entirely having it. Yet.
“What kin I do you fer?” Monkey drawled, trying to take control of the situation back.
He slung his hips over the bar stool. “Wayll thar, missy,” he drawled back, locking eyes with me, and holstering his uke, “I guess I’ll take one-a them thar ‘Blood Rains.’” I raised my eyebrows. A Blood Rain was a house specialty drink, a strong blood detoxifying cleanse that was aimed at a certain type of supernat. We didn’t list it on the human menu, because it sometimes caused humans to faint, although it certainly made them feel cleansed afterwards. Todd knowing about it could mean a number of things. I reconsidered my initial eye-flare when he walked in. Maybe …
“Blood Rain, huh?” I asked. I pulled the dried mixture out from the shelves behind me, without looking. “You’ve been in here before, I take it.” I yanked several bottles of red juice out of one of the half-fridges, and spun them, one by one, as I set them on the counter. I’d been a fan of the movie “Cocktail” as a little kid, and spiced up my shifts with a little flair bartending, learned at the fancy hostess bar below the Celestials’ HQ in Chicago. My own contribution to Sanc-Ahh’s infrastructure was putting the juices in liquor bottles with chrome pour spouts. Ayo had paid for the addition, since I’d broken up more than one ugly mood in
the sanctuary with a distracting performance.
“Haven’t been in a while,” Todd said. “Probably about five or six years. Since I moved into the city. But when it first opened I was in Oakland. I practically lived here.”
He watched in obviously impressed silence as I spun the bottles over my forearms again before knocking whacks of each into the cocktail shaker. I finished with a bump to a long stall (that’s a flip over the shoulder, bump off the elbow, landing on the back of my hand and just sitting there for what seemed like forever) and then a simple pour after that, a cheeky move that always got a laugh.
He laughed. Now that looked good on him. He had a strangely long, but triangular face, with slanting eyes, a long, straight nose, and a small mouth that stretched into a very wide grin. In repose, his face could be considered classically handsome, but I’d almost never seen his face in repose. Mostly, I’d seen him talking with, or for, Cerberus, and making goofy faces, grinning, mugging, generally being a funny dudebro. But this smile was a genuine one, I realized. Was it just me, or was he handsomer than usual? And was that why I was suddenly so busy trying to impress him?
I set his drink out. “On me,” I said, waving his wallet off. “Are you from the Bay Area? … I can’t believe I’ve never asked you that before. But you must be from here, to be such a social justice warrior.”
He laughed that genuine, good-looking laugh again. “No, not really. More central coast. Watsonville, actually.”
“Oh, wow, a real Californian.” He bowed. “I don’t know anything about the central coast.”
“It’s a place, like any other. Maybe more relaxed, in some ways. More uptight in others. And I was a pretty ordinary kid. But then my family got interned—” he paused as if he had been about to say something else, “… and when I found out about that whole history I was pretty shocked. So I started studying up on it and it got me more involved in Asian American stuff.”
“Who was that? Your grandparents?”
He looked at me for a second. “Yeah, my grandparents.” My eyes suddenly flared. Wait, what?