“Why?” My attention jolts automatically to the rear view mirror, where I can see a sliver of Feng Mun’s narrow face, his eyes turgid with caffeine, or more controversial compounds. If he noticed my exclamation, he makes no outward indication of it. I relax.
“Because I can’t.”
Outside, Kuala Lumpur fades into a bleak chiaroscuro, street lamps blending into a wash of amber. Feng Mun’s replacement cab is more well-appointed than his usual. There’s a stereo embroidered with ruby LEDs, a built-in GPS system that is being cheerily ignored, and air-conditioning that actually works, possibly too well.
“What do you mean you can’t?” My teeth chatter. I can’t tell if it is from the effort of remaining calm, or the freezing temperatures. Clearly, I should still be screaming, gibbering in unparalleled mortification. But my lungs won’t summon the requisite noises.
Jian Wang shrugs. “I can’t.”
Modern buildings recede into a stubble of aging shophouses, their walls tangled in black vines. The road grows pockmarked, uneven, which doesn’t stop Feng Mun from driving over every bump and pothole. I trail my fingertips down to my phone where it sleeps on my lap, screen blank. I’d sent a flurry of messages to Minah: apologies, ill-thought-out pleas to reconsider the situation, even a dribbling of platitudes. Anything to provoke a reply. None come.
Kanye West replaces Madonna on the radio, a moody celebration of his own grandeur. I sigh. Over the last two hours, I’ve tried everything. Banishing spells, express ritual sacrifice, loud threats of amputation. A perfect storm of solutions equating in nothing but desultory mockery. I’m stuck with Jian Wang, even if I won’t admit it to him.
“You okay ah?” Feng Mun asks, his voice a little higher than normal. “Got trouble with Minah, is it?”
Good old Feng Mun. He never asks about my imaginary friends. Still, it doesn’t keep Minah’s name from hurting. It takes a minute to frame the lie, unhook the ache embedded in my ribs. “Yeah.”
“Mm.” Neither of us believe my assertion, but Feng Mun doesn’t call me out on it.
We sink into quiet, Jian Wang singing gently to the electronica, his voice childishly sweet, the words completely alien. Slowly, Kuala Lumpur submits to palm trees and open road. Blackness crowds around us. I straighten in my seat. We’re getting closer. The boss and his family, despite their urbane connections, prefer more pastoral haunts. Easier to put together a dinner party without unsympathetic neighbours snooping about the grounds.
The manor soon cuts into view, gaudily imposing, dressed in a rash of gothic steeples and an unnecessary number of buttresses.
“Eh, boss,” Feng Mun stumbles, slurring into the next breath. “Is it okay—”
“It’s fine,” I say, as the taxi rumbles to a pause. I pat his shoulder reassuringly, then slap a wad of bills into his palm. “Go home.”
He hesitates, bless his generous heart. “How you want to get home le?”
I feel fingers in my hair, a sharp upward tug. I follow the motion towards the sky, craning my head out of the taxi, to where Jian Wang is eagerly gesticulating at the stars, a glittering torrent poured over a featureless black night. The kneejerk irritation slips. This is probably the first time Jian Wang has seen the constellations in a hundred years.
But he’s also growing roots in my flesh.
Moving on.
“I’ll be fine,” I promise Feng Mun again, as I bend down to share a smile. He doesn’t reply, at least not verbally, nodding in time with the rap music now blasting through his speakers. Giving the roof of his taxi a resounding pat, I straighten and begin trudging up the route towards the boss’s abode.
THE MANOR, UNBELIEVABLY enough, is even more chichi on the inside. The walls are lined with crushed velvet the deep scarlet of Pinot Noir, the carpeted floor adorned with a dazzling recreation of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Gold-leaf portraits, each housing some regal figure in exorbitant finery, watch the house from every doorway. My footsteps make no sound at all, sinking deep into the wool.
“Nice place,” Jian Wang whistles.
I make a noncommittal noise, attention scrolling from corridor to vacant corridor. A musty, funeral-home stillness pervades the air. It’s like the concrete is holding its breath. While the boss’s immediate family is not very large—extended relatives are stored in the crypts—there is usually more than a smattering of domestic helpers lurking in shouting distance. Not tonight, though. Weird, and very worrying.
“What are we doing here?”
“Quiet, I’m trying to think,” I hiss, swatting at the air. The front door was unlocked, the security system deactivated; clearly, they were expecting me. But if the boss has summoned me to enforce discipline, it deviates massively from his usual modus operandi.
“But this is boring.”
Moments before I tell Jian Wang where he can shove his discontent, a voice cuts into hearing, feminine and nationless in accent. “Sir desires your company in the audience hall. Please proceed to the antechamber for instruction.”
“Thank you, Sara.” Like every other housekeeper in the boss’s employ, she’s gorgeous. Six feet tall, svelte. Hair like champagne, eyes like the Maldivian seas, contours like every teenage fantasy distilled into one moist wish. In sharp contrast, her clothes are austere: over-the-knee grey skirt, sensible clogs, starchy buttoned-up blouse; clean functionality over gross exhibition.
She nods again, smiles, the expression never quite reaching her eyes, which are abstract and fogged. Silent, liquid, she turns and prowls away, back straight as a line, chin slightly raised. The cloth on her sleeves ride up, revealing a litany of old tooth marks and healed incisions.
“She’s pretty,” Jian Wang whispers, sly. “Prettier than Minah, don’t you think?”
“Eh.”
We follow her to a pair of mahogany doors, the wood inlaid with intricate designs, a centuries-old diorama cobbled from the family’s myriad accomplishments, and their most beloved meals. I run my fingertips over carved faces; every inflection of dismay is captured with exquisite detail, right down to the glazed acceptance of a deep-fried ending.
Sara raps thrice on the door, and someone responds in thunderous counterpoint, three precise explosions. The doors oil apart and frangipani blooms through the air.
“Rupert.” The boss. “We’ve been expecting you.”
I wince at the theatrical delivery, percussive, powerful and obnoxiously exaggerated. I knew I should have never introduced him to The Addams Family. Hesitating at the doorway, I steal a glance at Sara, who offers neither encouragment nor foreboding, only passionless attentiveness. No help there.
I step forward. The boss sits at the head of a Victorian banquet table, flanked by his wife and husbands, the former crocodile-sleek, the latter like a cluster of polished ivory carvings. The dining hall rises several storeys into the air before opening into a massive glass ceiling, hexagonal window-panes giving the room the feeling of a vast hive.
“Boss,” I say, coming to a halt on the opposite end of the table. I barely resist the temptation to click my heels together.
He crooks a finger. “Come here.”
And I do. His spouses ignore me, either too preoccupied or too refined to acknowledge a commoner, silverware tinkling against bone and porcelain over that thick, choking quiet. As I slope past, Husband Number Three slurps the marrow from a miso-glazed wrist before dividing radius from ulna, fingers groping for lengths of sweet tendon. I look away.
Despite their dietary predilections, the boss’s family is virtually indistinguishable from any other members of the local gentry, if you overlook the telltale odour of frangipani.
“Rupert.” The boss pushes himself up from his seat, daintily tapping at his mouth with a napkin, voice that made-for-television friendly that every politician dreams of mastering. “Rupert. Rupert. Rupert. How are you?”
“Uncomfortable.”
His eyes gleam, mouth curling into something radiant. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing a guest.”
Jian Wang speaks up, before I can intercept the question. “We only recently became an item.”
The boss laughs—no, chuckles. His amusement is crystalline, flawless, pitched exactly right to convey warm familial delight and a hint of budding affection. When he stops, though, he stops cold. No giddy tapering, no trailing off. Only an intent silence. “What an interesting acquisition.”
I feel Jian Wang go rigid. “There was a bit of a, uh, kerfuffle. He”—I roll the words on my tongue, repulsed by the content, but they’re the closest truth I can wield at this moment—“helped me escape. Unfortunately, we became entangled in a contractual obligation that neither of us desired. And...”
“Spare me.” The boss waves a many-ringed hand, every knuckle in competition for gaudiest ornament of all. “All I need to know is if you enjoy his presence.”
“No.”
“Hey!”
“Excellent.” The boss daubs at his mouth with a monogramed napkin and nudges his plate back with a finger. Almost at once, a blonde-haired woman materializes to collect the detritus of his meal. Like Sara, like everyone else in the boss’s immediate employ, her forearms are a wasteland of hideous scars. “If you get this one thing done for us, we’ll get rid of him and consider all your debts paid. How does that sound?”
“Terrible,” Jian Wang spits, half-choking on indignant rage.
In reply, the boss authors a sigil in the air with a raised pinky, a jagged hieroglyph that glistens lipid-yellow for the sliver of a moment. Jian Wang emits a strangled noise, low and keening. My employer tuts his rebuke, expression bored, index finger ticking from side to side. “Children are to be seen and admired, not tolerated.”
Black eyes dart back to mine, with a hint of a shark’s smile. “Where were we? Yes. Complete this task, and we’ll permanently rid you of Jian Wang. Deal?”
This is too easy. Something is up, he’s planning something, he—I scratch behind my neck, breath held tight in my ribs. “Um.”
“Wrong reply, Rupert.” The friendliness withers; warning flashes a fin. “The correct answer would have been, ‘Yes, boss. Absolutely, boss. Looking forward to fulfilling your desires, boss.’ Or any variation thereof. We’ve been over this. I cough. You jump and then ask how high.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Excellent, excellent!” That calculated boardroom laughter erupts again, catching strange echoes in the corners of the hall. His husbands and wife do not look up. “Right. Your task is simple: we’re having guests this weekend, and Fury needs to be on the menu. Catch one of the Erinyes, prepare her however you please, and serve her for our culinary pleasure.”
I—“What?”
“Kill, defeather, and roast a Fury. Murder, process, and broil a Fury with pickled shiitakes and spicy miso. Execute, unrobe, and make Fury rendang. The possibilities are endless.” The boss twines his fingers, drops his chin atop of them. “All I need, at the end of the day, is a Fury in our gullet.”
“But—”
His voice gentles into lethality. “You missed a day and a half of work. And then lied to us. Taunted our appetites, filled us with hopes that would never be fulfilled. But I didn’t bring that up, did I? Sayang, did I accost our employee about his absences?”
“No, sayang.” His wife flicks a disparaging look in my direction, before returning to her meal.
“Lied to us.” The boss repeats, slowly, each word slathered with cold gravitas. “I’ve never allowed anyone to—”
I find a gap between one breath and the next (ghouls don’t need to respire, but they do require air to talk; honestly, ang moh), and lunge through. “Ao Qin.”
“Pardon?”
Briefly, my pulse thrashing in my throat, I contemplate redacting my confession, but it’s too late. The jangle of tableware ceases, as do the eddies of polite conversation. I raise my gaze to find myself impaled by a coliseum of eyes.
“Ao Qin,” I repeat, hoping the name would function as a deterrent. Realistically speaking, the Dragon King is probably better at dispensing unparalleled levels of raw physical agony, but he’s not the one sitting two feet away, a lazy smile balanced on his lips. “Ao Qin needs me to find the Furies and—”
“Oh, we know all about that. Don’t we?” The boss cups a cheek in his palm; his smile gracious, nonchalant, terrifying. The others nod in perfect unison, not a single wasted motion between them. “Finish the job, and we’d make it all go away.”
“But—” I close my teeth over my tongue, the rest of the sentence rattling like dice in my head: but you’re not a god.
Then, another thought tugs urgently on the sleeve of my subconscious: how the hell did he know?
“Rupert.” The boss’s voice snatches me from my contemplations, leaves me completely off-balance. “What do you say?”
“Thank you, boss,” I declare, head thronging with a hundred worries, each more outlandishly awful than the last. My only consolation is that Jian Wang has gone completely silent, leaving me to interact with my boss without interruption.
“Good.” He discards the amiability the way another man might throw away a spoiled jacket. As one, his family members return their attention to the food. “Now, get out.”
“Yes, boss.”
CHAPTER TEN
WE WATCH IN silence as the paper blackens, flashing blue before it finally disintegrates into ash, signalling successful reception. One day, I’ll convince the administration in Diyu to install a desktop.
“What happens if you accidentally burn something else with a delivery?” Jian Wang asks, animated, eager, his vigour restored now that we’re miles from the boss’s manor. The breeze, rain-sweetened, teases the debris from our cul-de-sac. Rats bicker and squeal. In the distance, I can hear the first ululations of traffic, and the clanking of storefronts being stirred from slumber.
I’m prepared this time for the spasm of fatigue, which arrives dulled by repeated exposure, cushioned by the soft, shapeless soreness percolating through my muscles. When was the last time I slept? Fits of unconsciousness, robbed from Feng Mun’s backseat, can only sustain a man for so long.
“Uh.” Reality judders through my musings. I sift through tactful explanations, a yawn intruding after each word, and settle for an ambiguous: “Mild confusion.”
To my astonishment, and considerable apprehension, Jian Wang presses no further. Instead, he drapes an arm around the circumference of my skull and pitches forward, coiling about my head like an innocent child, and not a murderous revenant with potentially fatal designs.
A silhouette lengthens over the entrance of the alley. I spin around and try to project guilelessness as I stroll forward, arms and legs metronoming with forceful jauntiness.
“Morning.” I nod at the middle-aged woman dragging a trash bag towards the dumpster, her apron crusted with animal fat, hair and face pinched back into a humorless bun. She scowls. When I pass her, she mutters a prayer to protect her against stupidity.
“Jian Wang,” I hiss, the moment we’re no longer in earshot. “Jian Wang.”
He stirs, petulant. “What do you want?”
“Your end of the bargain fulfilled, obviously. Tell me what you know about the Furies.”
The ghost swings himself upright. Over the course of the night, his lower abdomen has completely liquefied into mine, leaving only a disembodied torso protruding from my shoulders. Jian Wang insists that this is simply nature, a consequence of prolonged contact rather than a deliberate act of malevolence. Nevermind, of course, that our contract was illicitly engineered and he tricked me into agreement without first allowing me to come to an informed decision. Oh, no. That’s just splitting hairs.
“I know that their feathers are all the rage in Djinnestan.”
“Keep going.”
Rain foams across the city. It rolls down buildings, trails fingers across windows, glazes each and every road with quicksilver reflections. I breathe deep. The lashing waters feel good on my skin, a reprieve despite the knowledge that every dropl
et is brimming with pollutants. Then the cold seeps through, and with it a jerking acknowledgement:
“Wait. Why?”
Jian Wang barks a taut laugh. “Because the locals believe the feathers can bestow the ability to take revenge on those who have done them wrong.”
“Must be expensive,” I reply, absentmindedly, hunching into a popped collar, a flimsy defense against the monsoon as it tumbles over me, soaking me to the marrow.
“Not really,” the ghost-child replies. “It’s not like they’re in short supply.”
I furrow my brows as I squelch towards the lip of the pavement, my sneakers growing soggier by the minute. Traffic is beginning to pick up, tangling in the junctures between streets. Vehicles trumpet in impatient frustration. Steam ripples from exhausts, hissing.
“I—what?”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” Jian Wang purrs, imbued anew with that malignant impishness, secrets gleaming like bones under the gravel of his voice. “The Furies have an entire supply chain set up in Djinnestan.”
A truck roars past and a puddle geysers. It paints my jeans to my skin, paints it black and freezing. I throttle back a curse, dribbling water and the tang of mud, palming the grime from my cheeks. I need to focus. None of this is going where I expected.
“Wait. A supply chain? They’re franchising?”
“No. Nothing so uncouth. The Furies are... entrepreneurs. They supply feathers. Customers supply them money. Then they supply Chee Cheong Kai with money in exchange for luxuries.”
“Ah.” I chew on the revelation, zigzagging unlawfully through traffic in true Malaysian fashion. Three streets down, Chinatown’s ostentatious signage looms, criminally bright, its pillars already teeming with bargain hunters. Neon raincoats and impulse-bought umbrellas jounce unevenly together in commiseration. “So, wait. Stop. I—I should have known about this? Why didn’t I know about this? I should have seen their immigration papers. I, mean. You know.”
“Because you’re terrible at your job.” Jian Wang snorts. “The Greeks are part of the visa waiver, you know?”
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