by Jadie Jang
My eyes burned and burned as I looked at it. Strange: now that she was holding the thing out, it was the length I’d remembered: roughly three and a half feet. But a moment ago it had been entirely enclosed in a backpack that was no more than two feet long, and I hadn’t seen any pointy bulges. The stick had definitely not been sticking out. Magical indeed.
I reached out in a daze to touch it, but she snatched it back from me.
“Mine!” she snarled, then looked startled at herself. I was startled too, and I moved my hand back. She calmed. “Look. Don’t touch,” she said, demonstrating by looking lovingly at the stick.
“You pull guard duty?” I asked, as casually as I could.
“Hunh? Oh. Um. Yeah. Juice got Bu Bu mostly to guard this”—she raised the stick briefly—“but when he bit it I had to take over. It’s supposed to be temporary, but I think I’ll hang on to it. Don’t want another lightweight like Bu Bu losing it again.” She looked up. “Juice says to say thanks, by the way. If you hadn’t shown up, that … thing—whatever it was—would’ve gotten away with the Huexotl.”
She said the name like a prayer.
I frowned. Bu Bu wasn’t a lightweight; not by a long shot. Evidently she hadn’t sparred with him, because he could’ve taken her, no question. Even worse: they seemed to agree with Ayo and me that the stick—the way … the Huexotl—was what the shadow creature was after.
“Chucha, did you get my message?”
“About what?” She looked more perky now. So: no.
“Bu Bu wasn’t a lightweight, and you know I’m not either, but that shadow thing really set me back, and it killed him. You need to be careful, because you’ll be directly in its way now.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said.
“No, not ‘whatever,’ Chucha! Be careful with the shadow thing and don’t try to take it on yourself!”
“Just because you couldn’t take it, doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Oh, how soon they forget. But I could see I wasn’t getting through to her. Maybe Juice would be more rational about it. I made a mental note to get his phone number from her before she left. And now it was time to “collect intel,” as Ayo would put it.
“So, where did Juice get that thing?”
“Dunno. Before my time.” She was cradling it in her left arm now, and began stroking it with her right. Weird.
“Do you know who he got it from?” I was having to rein myself in hard from assuming that Juice must’ve gotten it from Wayland. There was a whole world of possibilities out there. Just because him getting it from Wayland would’ve been neat and clean didn’t mean it was the truth.
“Nope,” she said simply. Sigh.
I thought for a moment; she’d been with the San Antonios only a few weeks, but they couldn’t have acquired Bu Bu any earlier than this past Tuesday, so … “Who was guarding it before Bu Bu?”
“Oh, they had this werewolf kid doing security for a stretch. Almost out of control and no experience, but all they could find. Then Juice got the Huexotl and things started going better and that’s when he found me. So I started doing security and Justin—that’s the werewolf—was just responsible for guarding the Huexotl, but he got killed, so then Juice found Bu Bu—”
“Wait, he got killed?” My thoughts were whirling. “When did this happen?”
“Sometime really early … um … Tuesday morning, I think? Yeah, Tuesday.”
“You saw this?”
“No, I was out. I never saw that shadow thing. Nobody did, in fact. Nobody except you.” She sat up a little straighter and looked … sober … for the first time. “You know, they’re taking your word for it. I know you’re telling the truth, but you better not give them a reason to doubt you.”
No doubt she meant she could hear my heartbeat, the way all other predator shifters could. Walking lie detectors, the lot of ‘em. I found my own lie detecting ability more elegant—and more reliable. It was easy enough for me to turn into a—literally—heartless creature and lie that way.
“So then Bu Bu took over watching It.” Jesus, she could even capitalize Its pronouns. “But he didn’t even last as long as that kid.” She stroked the stick. She was really starting to wig me out.
“Where’s his body?”
She acted as if she didn’t hear me for a moment, then looked up. “Oh. Uh … He’s tucked off.” She looked chagrined for a moment.
“Where?”
She rubbed her face against the stick for a moment, eyes closed. “I’m not allowed to say.” She sounded chastened, and looked as if she were now drawing comfort from the stick. A ha! A loose thread. I decided to pull.
“Chucha,” I said. She didn’t open her eyes, but I could see her invisible ears prick up and turn towards me. “Chucha, did you-all inform his pack? You know the wolves tend to be pretty touchy about their remains. His people will want to handle his body.”
This was true. They were extremely control-freaky about their physical leavings (hair, nails, etc.) and insisted on cremating and scattering themselves, lest witches get ahold of their parts and gain control of a whole pack through one of its members. (Probably also to keep the government from getting proof of their existence, but nobody talked about that.)
However, if a barely controlled young wolf was allowed to work security for a gang, he was without a doubt packless, and that made him a pariah with whom they wouldn’t concern themselves (except to kill him first chance they got and burn his remains. You know, as you do. Did I mention that I don’t like werewolves?) But if Chucha didn’t already know that, I didn’t mind guilting her a little. I’m Machiavellian that way.
“No,” she whispered, pressing her forehead into the stick. “Juice said nobody could know where he’s at.”
“Well,” I said quietly. “Bummer for Justin.”
She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. “He was an asshole anyway. Couldn’t keep his paws to himself. Always cattin’ off.”
I decided to let that stand. Once they started to justify their own bad behavior, there was no more guilting them. If I let her get away with it, though, the guilt would grow on its own. I should know.
“Well, if you change your mind, you can tell Ayo where to find him. She could possibly help you guys by telling you how he died. That might help you figure out who got him.”
She didn’t say anything. I felt a strange satisfaction. She was feeling it. Good.
“So … what’s it for, anyway?” I asked gesturing at the stick.
“It’s magic!” she said brightly. She nuzzled it with her nose, like a baby. Creepy. “It gives you power.” Okay, now she really sounded high. “Can’t you hear it? It … sings.”
I listened dutifully, and of course, heard nothing. “Chucha, let me touch it for a moment. I won’t take it from you. I just wanna hear the singing.”
She jerked her head up and glared at me.
“Honestly, it’s really rude of you to go on about how wonderful it is and ask me why I can’t feel or hear it, and then not let me feel or hear it.”
She looked chagrined again. “Okay … but just one finger.”
I leaned over the bar and ostentatiously placed my right index finger against the stick. She didn’t make it any easier, still cradling it in her arm and holding it in a death grip with her other hand. The moment my finger connected, I felt it, but it was very faint. The closest I could come to describing it would be if you were sitting on an inner tube in a river’s eddy, and you pushed out into the center of the river. It felt—very faintly—like the main current of the river seizing you and moving you along. I felt more awake. More able. Yes, I’d definitely call that “power,” no matter how faint it was.
I removed my finger, thoroughly creeped out. Once I detached from it, the current felt a bit … wrong … somehow. Or maybe just alien. It didn’t feel like me. And I didn’t know why, but the thing was affecting her much more strongly than me. Maybe it was prolonged exposure. Or maybe something about what she was respond
ed more strongly to the stick. I wished I could test her power, see if it had actually made some sort of change.
“So, it just … gives you power? That’s all it does? Are you sure?”
“Well,” she said dreamily, “I ain’t seen the instructions, so I don’t know, but I can feel the power …”
I chuckled at her “instructions” line, but she didn’t smile back. She was serious?
“Wait, Chucha, what do you mean by ‘instructions’? Are there … actual instructions?”
She nodded, eyes closed again, clearly listening to the humming.
“Chucha … where did he get the instructions from?”
Her eyes opened again at the intensity in my voice. She looked puzzled. “He got ‘em from Ayo, of course.”
WTF?
At that moment I’d’ve been willing to bet my tail that Ayo’d had no idea what she was selling.
“Chucha, what do these instructions look like? A book? A scroll?”
“Oh! No, just a piece of paper. You know, like torn out of a spiral notebook. College ruled. Written with pen, I think.” More WTF??? did the macarena across the landscape of my mind.
“And what do they say?”
“Juice won’t show them to anyone. Doesn’t matter. I know what to do with it.”
“How do you know what to do with it, Chucha?” I asked, trying to keep my creeped-out-ness out of my voice.
“It tells me. It tells me what I should do with it.”
Holy Oktoberfest, that wasn’t scary at all.
“Chucha, why don’t you put it away for now? Tez will be here any minute.” I didn’t say that he might want to take it away from her—I didn’t want to put ideas in her head—but she must have thought the same thing, because she put it obediently away. Instantly, she seemed soberer, although she still smiled that beatific smile, and still exuded a good mood.
We were silent for a while.
“So seriously, why do you hate your brother so much?” I asked.
“I don’t hate him. I just can’t live with him anymore. He’s so uptight.”
“Yeah, I guess he is a little. Can’t really blame him. Responsible for three kids at the age of twenty-one.”
“Yeah, and he totally holds that over our heads! Not that he ever says anything about it. He just gets this uptight look on his face whenever you don’t do what he says and you know he’s thinking about how he should be out partying and not taking care of us.” The sudden bitterness startled me—almost as much as the admiration clearly mixed in with it. She and Tez were two of a kind, all right: their moods shifted just as fast, and were just as complex.
“He’s never struck me as the partying type.”
“Well … he used to be kinda rebellious and more laid back … when I was really little.”
After a brief silence, I asked what I really wanted to know, “Why is your sibling called ‘Pronk’?”
She laughed. “Ze saw a nature show on tv about springboks. You know, the African gazelle-type things that jump in the air? The jumping is called ‘pronking.’ Ze loooved them and ended up becoming obsessed with them. So when ze started changing form, ze turned into a springbok.”
“Whoa, ze’s a springbok? I thought ze was a deer!”
“Yeah, ze was always gonna be a deer. Actually, springboks aren’t deer, they’re bovidae, not cervidae. But close enough. I mean, magic doesn’t really give a shit about taxonomy. Anyway, the type of animal is determined by when you’re born. But to be able to change you have to kinda go on this vision-questy thing and find your tonal—like your spirit animal. And that gets very specific, you know. Like I can’t turn into just any kind of dog. I’m a Doberman.”
“Of course you are. Why not a pit bull?”
“Because they’re ugly! Dobies are beautiful!”
Since she seemed so expansive, I asked her more about her siblings and she told me some stories. Like Manny, who was born to turn into a donkey, became a huge—“like, Budweiser Clydesdale size”—black-spotted white mule: something he’d seen in a fair in the Central Valley sometime. I didn’t focus on Tez, but managed to get more dope on him than if I had. He turned into a black panther, actually, which she explained to me at some length was just a jaguar with very dark coloring, i.e. the spots were still there, you just couldn’t see them.
“How about you?” she asked, finally. “You have any siblings? I mean, like foster siblings.”
“No. I guess I was too much of a handful. My foster parents decided not to take on any others.”
“And they never adopted you?”
“They did, of course. But I got into the habit of calling them my foster parents and it just stuck.”
“How long were you with them?”
“From eight onwards. They adopted me officially when I was thirteen. It was kind of difficult, since my birth parents’ rights never got terminated. Nobody ever found them.”
“Wait, if you were in the system since you were a baby, how come you didn’t get adopted right away?”
“Huh. Imagine you look in your cute little foster baby’s crib and find a baby rhesus monkey.”
“Whoa, really?”
“It kept happening. I’d just sort of turn into a monkey every once in a while, and the foster parents would return me to the system without telling anyone why. I’m pretty sure they all thought no one would believe them. Thank god, because if anyone had reported it, I’d probably still be living in some government ‘hospital’, getting experimented on.” I shuddered at the thought, as I always did. Chucha shivered as well.
“I think I went through ten families by the time I turned 3, at which point I figured out how to control it … to a certain extent. But after that, the mommies always asked me what I was being so secretive about—you know, you can trust me, and we love you, and we only want the best for you. So—three times, mind you—I eventually gave in and showed them. Finally, when I was eight, I realized I couldn’t show anybody. Ever. And that’s when I found a family that stuck.”
“Are they … good ones?”
“They were. My foster mom’s dead. And my dad … They did their best. It wasn’t their fault that I was totally fucked up by the time I got to them. They straightened me out a lot.”
“I’m sorry—about your mom, I mean. How did she die, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Breast cancer.”
“Really? My mom, too. God that really sucks. And your dad is still around?”
“Yeah.” Yeah, I didn’t want to talk about my dad. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did your dad die?”
Her face got that tough look back on, the one I’d last seen at the gang HQ when she was still trying to intimidate me. “Oh, he was killed.”
“Really? How?”
“Mission Mob.”
“He was involved with gangs? As a nagual, you mean?” That shocked the look off her face for a moment.
“No! My dad would never—No. He was the nagual for the neighborhood, like Tez. No, the Mission Mob, they said this dude owed them some guap, and the dude came to my dad for help. So my dad tried to negotiate with them and they broke into our house and stole a bunch of our stuff. So when my dad went to ask for it back, they shot him.” She looked blank.
“You remember this?”
“No! No, I was only one at the time. My Padrino—kinda like an uncle but not really…” I nodded. “He told me about it.” She grinned suddenly. “But my mom was a total badass and got them to back off. Amo said she looked just like Wonder Woman back then. He’n’t have to lift a finger to help. She did it all herself.” Her eyes filled with stars.
“So … your mom fought gangbangers, your dad was killed by them, and now you are one.” I shook my head in demonstrative wonder. I just barely held myself back from wondering aloud what her parents would think of that if they knew. I suspected Tez had already hit that button and didn’t want to break it.
I was rewarded by a brief, stricken look, followed by her hard face agai
n.
“Anyway, I don’t think Tez is coming and I gotta bounce,” she said briskly.
I checked the clock. It was ten to seven. “Is this unusual?”
“Nah. It’s part of what sucks about being a nagual. Probably some neighborhood emergency.”
“Okay, I’ll call Tez and make a new appointment. Give me your number.”
She hesitated. “I’m in the middle of switching phones”—a lie, but whatever—“so give me yours and I’ll call you.”
I did, and even managed to get Juice’s number from her (or so I thought; I tried it later and there was no answer and no voice mail, so I have no idea whose number it actually was.) She was all business, right up until she left two minutes later. Was it just me, or was she disappointed that Tez didn’t show up? This might all work out better than I had thought.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Monday, October 17, 2011
Sanc-Ahh Café, Oakland
Ayo arrived at seven on the dot, and seated herself on Chucha’s recently vacated seat at the counter. I filled her in on Wayland’s office, and she promised to ask about who might have any of Wayland’s outstanding personal papers. I tried to persuade her to give me her contact with the werecats so I wouldn’t have to keep going through her or wait for them to call me, but she said, “They’re too old-fashioned,” and left it at that. I assumed she meant you had to know them for years to have any of their trust, and, although I wasn’t sure she was right, I had to trust her on this one.
“How’s the Tez situation?” she asked,
“He didn’t show up. Chucha said he’d probably had a neighborhood emergency. She didn’t seem fazed.”
Ayo nodded. “Did you ask her about that Huexotl?”
“Oh, not only that!” I told her about the instructions and she was thunderstruck.
“What do you think about that?” I prompted, after a long, speechless moment.