by Sarah Fine
Since the request came from him, it was tempting to push back, but Hualing looked so pathetic that I couldn’t say no. Zhi directed me to a room down the hall, and I wrapped my arms around Hualing’s shoulders and tugged her up. She was mumbling to herself, her face a shifting kaleidoscope of emotion. But she didn’t resist as I escorted her to the large bathroom. I gently directed her to sit on the toilet. I dampened a paper towel in the sink and wiped her pale, clammy face. Her eyes were rolling in her head. She grabbed my arms a couple of times, shaking me and shouting, but most of the time she seemed oblivious to my presence.
She’d lost her mind. She’s broken, Asa had said. It was the touch of my hand that had transferred the magic into this woman’s body. Could I have done it more slowly? Could I have controlled it better? And . . . could this have happened to me?
I took Hualing back to the office to find Zhi and Asa staring at each other across her desk. He looked pissed, and Zhi looked grimly satisfied. She smiled at me as I helped the still-shaking Hualing to the couch. “What’s going to happen to her?” I asked.
“I’ll make sure she is taken care of,” said Zhi.
Asa grunted. “Let’s get out of here, Mattie.” He pushed me to the door.
“But—”
“Now.” He bundled me into the stairwell without a backward glance.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Did she look okay?” He jogged up the stairs, so quickly that I was panting by the time we reached the top. He grabbed my arm before I went through the door leading to Mrs. Wong’s lair. “When we get onto the street, you do everything I say, all right? Do not question me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What part of ‘do not question me’ was difficult to understand?” he grumbled under his breath. “Listen, I’ll explain later, okay? It’s not safe here.”
“Okay. But later—”
“I promise.” He yanked open the door and stepped through. It took him only a few seconds to reload all his pockets with the random crap he carried with him as Mrs. Wong watched him warily from behind her counter.
We retraced our steps and were on the street in no time. Night had slipped over the city while we were inside, but the streetlights kept the sidewalks bright. Colorful lanterns were strung in zigzags over the road, and the air was cool. A whiff of pork and onions and garlic reached me, and suddenly I was starving. But something told me now was not the time to ask Asa about dinner. He was radiating tension as he led me toward the gates, now lit with red neon.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered. “I can feel you.” His eyes darted from corner to corner, up and down. “So where the fuck are you?”
He stopped abruptly and turned, grabbing my shoulders and moving me with him. No sooner had we whirled around, though, than Asa stopped again. “Shit,” he whispered.
Three men were watching us from about twenty feet away, all Asian, all elegantly dressed in black pants and sleek shirts that clung to their slender bodies. The one in the middle merely stared at us blankly. He had some sort of black leather harness on, one that folded over his shoulders and buckled over his chest. His eyes were shadowed with dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept in a year. His cheeks were even hollower than Asa’s. He kind of looked like a zombie.
The guy on the left, who had a wide forehead and bold black eyebrows, folded his arms over his chest and smiled smugly. “Asa Ward. I’d heard you were in town.”
“Just visiting.” Asa stepped closer to me and jabbed me with his elbow. “My friend here had a craving for Chinese food.”
“It’s true! I love dumplings,” I said.
“Right,” said the eyebrow guy, his gaze never leaving Asa. “You know magic doesn’t leave the territory without Zhong Lei’s okay, right?”
“Sure. I know the rules.” Asa was smiling in the same friendly way he had when he was trying to keep me calm earlier. Before, I was too tipsy to notice that his cheerfulness didn’t reach his eyes, but now it was obvious. He looked over his shoulder. “Is all this really necessary? Zhong Lei’s never had a problem with me. I’m small-time.”
I glanced behind us to see that two more guys were hovering maybe six feet back, close enough to make my skin crawl. “Totally small-time,” I added. “He hangs out in Sheboygan, for goodness’—”
“Shut the fuck up, Mattie,” Asa said from between clenched teeth.
“Your small-time days are behind you, and you know it. So what do we have, Tao?” Eyebrows asked, nudging the guy in the harness.
The zombie pointed at Asa’s pants. “In there,” he said in a dead voice.
Asa took a step back as the trio sauntered toward us, but froze as the footfalls of the men behind us made their presence clear. “Come on, now. It’s pack in, pack out. I brought my own juice and I’m leaving with it.”
Tao shook his head, his expression wooden. “No. Not this. I would have felt it coming in. He’s stealing.”
“Hand it over,” said Eyebrows.
Asa gave me a sidelong glance as he put his hands up in surrender. “Guess you got me dead to rights.” He met Tao’s eyes. “Happy?” he whispered.
Tao stared at him, and for a moment his dark eyes glinted with intense emotion. Then he jerkily reached into his pocket, and his eyes fell shut in apparent relief. Exactly like Ben and his agate.
One of the guys behind us, thickly muscled and tall, laid a hand on Asa’s shoulder, but Asa wrenched himself out of the guy’s grip. “Get the fuck off me, you Strikon piece of shit,” he snapped, sweat breaking out at his temples, glistening under the streetlights. “I’ll give it to you, okay?”
The three guys in front of us stepped back, though Tao had to be guided by Eyebrows because he seemed lost in a daydream. Asa reached into his front pocket.
Tao’s eyes flew wide. “It’s—”
A hissing sound cut him off as Asa shoved me to the side. “Run!” he shouted.
Screaming filled my ears as I stumbled into a storefront. Then I sprinted toward the gates, fully aware I was running for my life.
CHAPTER NINE
I ran beneath the red gates and turned right, hoping to make it to the transit station we’d exited when we arrived. Heavy footsteps echoed behind me, but I could still hear shrieking spiraling into the air. I barreled into an intersection right as an arm hooked around my waist and wrenched me back onto the curb.
“Not that way,” Asa barked, setting me on my feet and taking off down a side road.
Asa. I’d been so sure those were his screams I’d heard, and I was weirdly relieved to see that he was okay.
He looked back to see me still standing there. “I thought you said you could run in those shoes,” he roared. “Get those little legs moving!”
I chased after Asa, who loped along Wentworth Avenue, glancing over his shoulder every few strides. I was gasping for breath—I was built more for short bursts of speed than for long dashes—and I could hear the footsteps of a pursuer coming nearer. Asa made it to a section of the sidewalk where leafy trees narrowed the path between the street and a black metal fence circling a parking lot. He paused to let me catch up, unbuttoning one of his thigh pockets. I squinted at him in the darkness, expecting to see him holding a weapon.
But it was the floss.
As we stood beneath the leaves, where the glow of the streetlights couldn’t reach, he detached the side of the dispenser that was connected to the floss and lassoed it around a tree branch, then tossed the other half of the floss dispenser over the edge of the fence, leaving a thin string hanging across the sidewalk. “Duck under it,” he said, breathing hard as he reached for my hand.
I looked up the sidewalk to see Eyebrows racing toward us. “Seriously? That won’t stop—”
Asa yanked my hand and dragged me up the block. A moment later, I heard another scream. Eyebrows was on his knees, clawing at his throat. Asa didn’t let me slow down to gape, though. He kept running, weaving down alleys, across parking lots, and through intersections. Fi
nally, he pulled me onto a waiting bus, then shoved me into a seat and stood over me, panting and staring out the window as we lurched forward.
My whole body was shaking with adrenaline, and cold sweat trickled down my back. And I didn’t have time to catch my breath, because we hadn’t gone two stops before Asa tugged me up the aisle and back onto the sidewalk.
He made to tow me across the street, but I locked my knees and tore my fingers from his grasp. He rounded on me, his angular face glistening with sweat. “Now what?”
“No more,” I said, my voice tremulous. “What the hell was that?”
His lip curled. “That was me, saving our asses.” He lifted the Silly String from his pocket and looked down at the bottle. “Contents under pressure. And saturated with Strikon magic.”
“So you basically squirted liquid pain on those guys?”
He nodded.
“And the floss?”
“Same.” He smiled and pointed to himself. “See? Jokester. Now let’s get going.”
“No! I’ve had it with this.” Everything that had happened in the last few hours crashed down on me in that instant. “Everything we’ve done, we’ve done for you! I’m your decoy, your magical suitcase, your silent—”
“You haven’t exactly been silent.”
“Shut up! I was going to say ‘partner,’ but that’s not what I am at all. You’re using me, and putting my life in danger, and setting me up to do terrible things to people I don’t even know. All I want is to find Ben, and we haven’t even taken one step toward doing that!” I swallowed back a sob. “I’m done, Asa. I’m done. I thought you were going to help me, but you’re so absorbed in your own business that you can’t.” I gestured toward his pants. “And you’ve done it again, haven’t you? You’ve stolen something—”
“Nope. Zhi gave it to me.” He was barely looking at me; he was too busy scanning the streets.
“Whatever! Let me guess—you want to put whatever piece of magic she gave you inside of me so you can smuggle it wherever you’re going next.”
He regarded me, and then raised his eyebrows. “Yep. That pretty much sums it up.”
“Yeah? Well, fuck off!”
He whistled. “She swore!”
I charged forward and planted my hands on his chest, shoving him as hard as I could. He took a step back, an amused smile on his face, and rage exploded inside me. I cocked my arm and threw a punch. He caught my fist about a foot from his face. “Oh, Mattie. You know violence isn’t the answer.”
I kicked him in the shin, and he cursed and dropped my fist. I turned on my heel and stalked down the street away from him, my cheeks blazing and tears burning my eyes.
“At the risk of getting kicked again, I have to ask,” he said as he fell into step next to me. “Where are you going?”
Where was I going? I didn’t have my wallet or my phone. Asa had told me to leave them at Daria’s. And he’d probably done it on purpose.
We were close to downtown, it seemed, and the streets were lined with restaurants and stores. But it was a Sunday night, so the sidewalks weren’t terribly crowded.
“Mattie, I’ll explain if you’ll let me.” I could tell he was toying with me, and it made my fists clench again.
“I don’t want your explanations. I want to go home,” I said in a choked voice. “I hate this. I hate you. And I hate what I just did.”
Asa’s long fingers wrapped around my arm, and he pulled me to a halt. “Having to run again, you mean?”
“No.” I sighed. “To Hualing. You said she was broken. And I—”
“You didn’t do that,” he said, frowning.
The memory of Hualing’s tear-stained, agonized face flashed in my mind. “I helped.”
He shook his head. “There are risks, and Hualing accepted them. And Zhi never should have brought her in. She only did it because she was desperate.”
I found the strength to look into his eyes. “And when Zhi said she would ‘take care’ of Hualing?”
“Well, I wouldn’t think too deeply about that if I were you.”
“And if that were me? You’d just leave me on a street corner or something, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for your honesty. Like I said—I want to go home. None of this is getting me any closer to Ben.”
“Wrong,” he said softly. “While you were in the bathroom with Hualing, I was negotiating with Zhi. She’d wanted me to tuck that piece of magic into you and smuggle it out, but since her conduit was broken . . .” He shrugged. “She wanted it badly. So I demanded a bonus on top of my commission to accept the job.”
“How nice for you,” I hissed.
“Nice of me, more like. I asked if she had any information about Ben.”
I gasped. “And?”
“C’mon, let’s talk about it over dinner. You hungry?”
“Asa!”
He nodded toward a bar a few doors away. When I scowled at him, he leaned forward. “I think you’re hangry, Mattie,” he said solemnly. “And I think you should let Randall Waxruby treat you to dinner.”
“You are the most infuriating man I have ever met.”
He laid his hand over his heart. “I’m wounded. I just risked my ass, and I did it for you.”
“For Ben, you mean.”
He chuckled as his hand fell away from his chest, a dark, humorless laugh. “Right.” He pointed at the bar. “Can we argue semantics while we eat?”
“Fine.” Because he was correct—I had reached the homicidal zone on my hunger meter, as Ben used to tell me, and I recognized I was not at my most rational. “Lead the way. But I’m not drinking.”
“Good. You’ll be a cheap date, then,” he said as he strolled toward the bar.
“It’s not a date.”
“Again with the semantics.”
He got us a table instead of sitting at the bar, where a crowd was watching the Cubs game, and flagged down a waitress immediately. She came over with a little basket of popcorn. I ordered a hamburger and fries, and Asa ordered a plain salad, no dressing, no croutons, extra peppers and tomatoes, and a side of sunflower seeds. I asked for a Coke and he ordered water.
“Are you a vegetarian or something?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he said, pushing the popcorn toward me. “Eat while I talk. I’m tired of having my life threatened tonight.”
He did look kind of weary. Though the bar was air-conditioned, Asa was still sweating. After the waitress brought his water, he dipped his napkin in it and ran it over his face and hair, ignoring the strange look she gave him. “We have to go to Denver,” he said as he flopped the napkin onto the table.
“Is that where Ben is?”
He shook his head. “That’s where we have to take the magic that’s in this.” He reached down and unbuttoned a pocket along his calf and pulled out something wrapped in one of the latex gloves. I leaned over to see a coaster, round with a wooden rim and a cork center.
“What’s in it?”
“Healing.” Asa tucked it back into his pocket as he scanned the bar, the exits, the hallway behind us. “Hefty dose. Long lasting. Zhi put everything she had into this, storing it up over time. She’d been waiting for a chance to get it out. It’s for her mom.”
“What does that have to do with Ben?”
“It puts us in the territory of the people who probably took him.”
“But you said he wasn’t in Denver.”
“The West is a big place.” He paused when the waitress brought our food, then jabbed a finger at my fries. “I’m not saying anything else until you eat at least half of those.”
I obeyed, giving him a chance to eat his own food. He ate with desperation, finishing half his salad before I’d had a chance to take a bite out of my burger. He didn’t leave so much as a sunflower seed behind. Once his plate was spotless, he pulled out his leftover trail mix. When he’d finished it, he sat back and closed his eyes, wiping his face o
nce more with the napkin. “I don’t want to go to Denver unless you’re carrying that magic,” he said. “It’s not safe otherwise.”
“Safe for who?” I asked, my mouth full of burger.
His lip curled. “Touché.”
“I still want to know how this helps us find Ben. And I want specifics.”
“Zhi said the rumor on the street is that one of the West Coast boss’s agents was sighted in Chicago last week. And in Milwaukee. Zhong Lei is furious about it. One of the reasons he’s been so touchy lately.”
“Because he thinks his turf is being invaded?”
“Yep, but no one could figure out what the agent was here to do. Nothing was stolen. No one was killed. No messages were delivered. No threats were made. But one man disappeared without a trace, and that man happened to be heavily in debt.” His gaze streaked along the bar, and he leaned forward on his elbows. “To Zhong Lei’s operation, as it turns out.”
I set my burger down, my stomach suddenly threatening to rebel. “Ben was in debt to the Chinatown mob boss?”
“Who do you think controls the magic trade in this part of the country?”
“I just thought . . .” I shook my head and blew a stray lock of hair away from my face. “I don’t even know why he owed all that money.”
“Come on, Mattie. You’re not dumb. He was a fucking addict, and probably worse than that.”
“We don’t know anything for sure,” I said quietly, even as I thought about the agate and the anchor pendant. He’d used them to influence me. Who else had he done that to?
“Whatever helps you keep him up on that high horse,” Asa muttered. He flinched when the full bar cheered as the Cubs scored a run, rubbing his temples before looking up at me. “But believing he was just an innocent victim isn’t going to help you find him.”
“So if Ben owed all this money to the Chinatown boss, how do we know Zhong Lei and his people don’t have him?”
“Why take him when they could lean on him and squeeze him for every cent he’s got?” Asa drained his water glass. “Plus, Zhi told me that Lei’s sent a few spies west to try to figure this out. It kind of suggests he doesn’t know what the hell happened.”