by Jaym Gates
Fuck. “I haven’t done anything,” I mumbled, nudging my market basket higher on my shoulder, so it was between Lorraine and me.
“I never said you did,” he said smoothly. “But I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about weishei.”
“What’s that?”
He frowned. “You should know. It’s in Chinese.”
“It’s not even a real word,” I blurted out. Weishei, the way he turned it like a stone in his mouth. “Some gwailo bastardized the shit out of it, or else made it up.”
He considered me silently. “Maybe,” he said at last. “It’s possible. What does gwailo mean?”
It meant a lot of things. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, my nails biting into my clenched palms. “Anyway, this doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Oh, I think it does,” said Lorraine. “I heard that Old Man Lo at the 10 Jade restaurant has a niece who has strange abilities. I heard she can track Chinaman magic, all the way back to its source. In objects, in ingredients. And if there’s someone in Chinatown brewing up this weishei poison —”
“I can’t do that,” I said, “and I thought you people didn’t believe in magic.”
“I do when it’s convenient,” he said, and the corners of his mouth curled up. It wasn’t a nice expression. “And weishei has made me it very convenient to believe in magic. Now, Lo Fanlin. I’m going to make this very easy for you.”
“I already told you —”
“You can choose to help me and come back to the station with me.” Detective Lorraine drummed his fingers on the table of bittermelon. Ling aiyi had disappeared into the shadow beneath the awning and was watching from a safe distance. “Or I can send you and your uncle home. Back to China, by boat, the way you came to this country.”
I stared at him. “You can’t do that,” I said. “I was born here. I have proof.”
He shrugged. “And who do you think the immigration officers at Angel Island will believe? A girl who can barely speak English, or an officer of the law?”
Lorraine was right. Paper didn’t mean anything. Not the real papers we had, the ones that proved I’d been born here or that Suksuk had spent weeks on Angel Island before they’d finally processed his immigration. All of that would be worth shit if it was a police officer’s word against ours.
I couldn’t let this happen. Not to Suksuk, who had poured everything into his Chinatown restaurant, then lost my aiyi an ocean away and couldn’t return home for her funeral. Not to Mim, either, who was already facing troubles of his own.
“Fine,” I said. The words tasted like ash on my tongue. “I’ll go with you, but I need to deliver these groceries to my uncle before they spoil.”
Lorraine smiled grimly. “You’ll come now. He can wait.”
#
The police station was cold. I wrapped my jacket closer around me, staring at the tile so I wouldn’t have to look at any of the hostile people around me.
But I could feel them. Curses clung to the walls and floor, on every surface available, glinting at the edge of my vision. I’d kicked away the ones around my feet, and they piled like heaps of straw around my chair.
Fucking Chinaman, taking our jobs, looking at our women, go home, go home, go home. Patterns I had seen so often that I could spot them from across the marketplace, the brightest threads in a web of curses. I was used to plucking them free when they stuck to me, but here, that sticky feeling of not belonging remained.
Mim had always made me feel like I belonged. He was kind to me the first time we met, and that was enough for Suksuk. It was harder than it sounds, being kind to the girl who couldn’t make eye contact, couldn’t grow hair except in sparse patches, couldn’t keep weight on at all. Looks like a fucking goblin, a customer told Suksuk once while I cleared a table nearby. No wonder you couldn’t pack her off to a brothel.
Suksuk threw him out and stayed late that night, cleaning the kitchen with me, never quite saying anything. I didn’t say anything either. The words lingered over us like an old bruise, too true to wave away.
But Mim was full of good ideas, with his careful hands and careful eyes. He helped me clip away what little hair I had and got me a cap to cover up what was left. I was already wearing Suksuk’s castoffs, plain grey trousers and a heavy shirt with clasps up the front, and for the first time, I had felt almost comfortable in my skin. Like I didn’t have to pretend anymore at a feminine beauty I knew I didn’t have. There weren’t many women in Chinatown, especially with the ports barred against immigration, and I’d watched enough hungry stares turned to revulsion that I was glad to give up that particular pressure.
Detective Lorraine had disappeared into one of the rooms at the back of the station when we’d arrived, and now he returned to fetch me. I had to hurry to keep up with his long strides, but I didn’t mind getting away from the people still waiting to be seen, hurt and mistrust boiling in their mouths.
“I want you to meet someone,” said Lorraine as we stopped in front of his office. There was a woman already there, sitting in one of the chairs, her face half-turned to us. Her hair was cropped fashionably short, soft curls brushing her jawbone, and the raised hem of her dress exposed her calves and a pair of round-toed, high-heeled shoes. His hand on her shoulder felt overly familiar for them to be strangers. “This is Ms. Katherine Delacroix, heiress to Weston Railroad.”
The Delacroixes were big players in the railroad business; I’d heard both Suksuk and the brothers at the White Dragon talk about them in hushed voices. So many of our people came to work the railroads, waiting on Angel Island for their immigration to be processed, hoping to make enough money to feed their families back home. Instead, they ended up gouged by loan sharks, delayed indefinitely on Angel Island, then deported; or, if they made into the country, worked in awful conditions until they broke or died. The glittering Transatlantic Railroad was paved with the blood and bodies of Chinamen like us. But the Delacroixes didn’t care about that. They lived and dined on Nob Hill, where the rest of the rich folk hid behind tall, fancy gates. What was the heiress doing here, just shy of Powell Street?
Detective Lorraine circled around the desk, gentling his voice. “Ms. Delacroix, this is the girl I told you about. Why don’t you show her what the weishei did to you?”
The woman brushed her hair behind her ear and looked at me, a half smile on her lips. The other half of her face was lipless, covered in overlapping scales of hardened, discolored flesh, her mouth bulging and stretched grotesquely wide. My hand flew to my own mouth, and I backed up into the wall.
“It’s all right,” said Katherine Delacroix. Her voice was a husky rasp, sultriness undercut by the sibilant hiss in her words. “At least you didn’t scream the way I did when I saw my face for the first time.”
Lorraine placed a bottle of amber-colored liquid on his desk. A grey-brown snake with a flared snout floated inside, its body coiled as if ready to strike, its dead eyes wide open. “This is weishei,” he said. “Ms. Delacroix held a party last night, and she says that one of her guests brought this bottle with him.”
“He bought it from a bootlegger somewhere in Chinatown, but he couldn’t tell me anything more,” said Delacroix. When she blinked, a transparent film flickered over her infected eye. “He didn’t survive the night.”
“If one of the Chinatown gangs is feeding a supply of weishei into San Francisco, we need to find the source and shut it down,” Lorraine growled. “I won’t let foreign magic poison my city.”
The city was plenty poisoned already, but not by foreign magic. “You want me to look at this?” I said, and Lorraine gave a sharp nod.
Suksuk had told me about snake wine, back in Guangdong, but he’d said it was medicinal. This was the first time I’d seen any in person. Before anyone could stop me, I dipped a finger into the liquid and stuck it in my mouth. It burned on my tongue, and bright light flared in my vision as the spells in the room came alive.
There was the detective, a few strands of dark,
resentful blue. Across the desk, delicate latticework spread over Delacroix’s face, the same color as the spellwork inside the bottle. And in the weishei itself, a mass of bright, white threads, glimmering with phantom heat, knitted into a convoluted pattern.
This was intentional. Someone had spent time layering the curse, giving it body and complexity. This poison was engineered to kill.
“Someone did this on purpose,” I said aloud. “And it’s not a Chinese spell.”
Lorraine looked up sharply. “How certain are you?”
“I’m sure,” I said. I knew the pattern of gwailo spells. They didn’t work with the words that feel like home to me, only in the language taught in school, the harsh and aggressive tones I’d learned to slip on like a glove. “It’s got parts that feel almost right, but they’re painted on, like someone was trying to mimic Chinese magic.” Or what they thought Chinese magic might look like.
“This doesn’t help me,” said Lorraine. “You’re giving me nothing, Fanlin.”
Frustration rushed through me. “I can only give you what I have,” I nearly snapped before I thought better of it. I wanted to disappear, to undo the night at the White Dragon, to never have met this man.
Delacroix leaned forward, touching my arm gently. I glanced up, startled at the physical contact. “You said parts felt almost right. What did you mean?”
She looked like she believed me. “I mean,” I said slowly, fidgeting under her hand, “some of it felt familiar. There were unfamiliar bits too, but some smelled like the air by the docks before it was about to rain, and others warm and smoky like the neighborhood on New Year’s.” I flushed. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Like the docks, huh?” Lorraine rose, grasping my wrist. “Why don’t we go for a stroll.”
I had no choice but to stumble after him, the pattern of weishei curses still on my tongue.
#
He led us back to the market, each step filling me with dread. Detective Lorraine held the snake wine under his arm in a paper bag, but the two of us stood out like crows in a flock of seagulls. To make things worse, the weishei had done something to me; every spell shone in my eyes like threads made out of the sun, and the overall effect made the marketplace blinding.
“Is this gwailo still giving you trouble?”
I jerked my head up to see Big Boss Yang blocking our path, his arms crossed. Several of the cousins, including Qin and Wen, were with him. There was dust on their clothing, and their knuckles were bandaged like they’d come from a brawl.
I didn’t like the way Lorraine was staring at Boss Yang, eyes flat and colorless, so I stepped between them. “No, sir, everything’s all right,” I said in English for Lorraine’s benefit. “Thank you for checking on me.”
Boss Yang didn’t look convinced, but he tilted his chin up slightly in acknowledgement. Bright white cursework flashed across his neck and I flinched, but he turned away, nodding to his boys, and it disappeared from my sight.
Lorraine tugged me past them, hurrying around a corner. Something felt off about him; he seemed too pleased, like most of the frustration from earlier had evaporated. “Where are we going now?” I asked, but before I could finish, Lorraine kissed me, his hand hard on the back of my head, his stubble raking my face sharp enough to bleed. He smelled like smoke and hunger. It didn’t feel good; he kissed like a man making a threat.
My hands tightened into fists, but I kept them at my side, hidden.
“I think I got what I needed for today,” Lorraine murmured into my mouth. It made my skin prickle with alarm. “Come to the station again tomorrow. I want you to take another look at the weishei.”
“You’re letting me go?” I said.
“Until tomorrow. I trust you won’t leave me hanging.” He smiled gently, his grip on my face bruisingly tight. “And if you do, I know where to find you. Don’t forget it.”
#
I’d barely gotten home when Suksuk was on me, frantic. “Fanfan! Are you all right? You didn’t get hurt too, did you?”
It took me a second to register what he was saying. “Who’s hurt?” I demanded, panic rising in me.
“You need to come upstairs,” said Suksuk, pulling me after him. Even in the narrow corridor above the restaurant, he wouldn’t let go of my hand. He was trembling so hard he kept stumbling.
Mim looked like shit. Suksuk had propped him up on my bed and bandaged him, but his body looked limp and ragdoll-boneless. His whole face was swollen, bruises as big as plums rising on his skin, and his breath came out of him in horrible, rattling whimpers.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“The boys from Yang’s group brought him back here. He was on his way home when he was jumped by the workers who protest by the docks. The boys managed to rescue him, but …” I hadn’t seen Suksuk look this frail since he’d lost my aiyi. “His arms are both broken. The workers tried to kick in his ribs.”
Their malice lingered in awful, sticky curses all over Mim’s body. I wanted to tear them off of him in handfuls. “I’ll stay with him, Suksuk,” I said. I was trembling too, I realized. I was so afraid of losing him. But I couldn’t. Not Mim, not ever.
I didn’t even wait for the door to close behind me before I started ripping the gwailo curses off of Mim. They came off in sheets, pulling apart like taffy strings. Curses of hatred, of envy, of fear, all tangled up in each other. He started to breathe easier as I cleared them away, but I wasn’t done.
I spat out the bit of weishei spellwork I’d kept in my mouth since the afternoon and stretched it out across the floor until its pieces strained against each other. Time to get to work.
#
I waited until Mim’s crying faded into fitful sleep, and then I went back to the White Dragon alone. The sky had cleared a few hours prior, and the cold moonlight made my skin prickle as I retraced the steps Lorraine and I had taken in the daytime.
Wen and another of the cousins were smoking by the front door, but before I came close enough to be visible, my eye caught some movement around the back. Staying close to the shadows, I skirted the entrance and snuck closer. As I peered into the alley at the back of the pool hall, I heard the front doors close, sealing the sound of Wen’s laughter inside.
Two people were in the alley, close together, talking in low voices. One I recognized immediately as Big Boss Yang, whose tall, sharp figure I could pick out anywhere. The other took me a moment to place as the slick-looking gwailo from before, the one I’d seen with Boss Yang at the White Dragon. But this time, he was dressed in dark blue, just like the officers I’d seen at the police station. A half dozen crates were stacked up against the wall closest to me, and they glimmered in my vision with the same complex cursework I’d seen in the weishei bottles.
“I don’t like it, Rusty,” Boss Yang was saying.
“You don’t have to like it,” said the police officer. He reached out, and I thought he was going to put Boss Yang in handcuffs. Instead, he pulled him forward and their mouths met. I stifled a gasp.
Boss Yang was seeing a policeman? If the cousins found out …
The police officer had two fingers hooked under the band of curses woven around Boss Yang’s neck. When they parted, bright white curses, elaborate as lattice, spilled like ribbon from Boss Yang’s open mouth, and his eyes were glazed. “You don’t have to like it,” the policeman whispered. “You just have to do it.”
Something hit me hard in the ear, and I cried out as I fell, skidding across the cobblestones. Lorraine hit me again and again, until all I could feel were his fists and his knees tight on either side of my ribs.
“I’d hoped you’d take us straight to Yang earlier today,” panted the detective, wrapping his hands around my neck. “But finding your body here will be even better. A murder’s a good enough excuse to raid Yang’s warehouses and expose his weishei smuggling operation.”
Blood dripped down my throat, and my head was a dull roar. My nails scrabbled at his hands. “It’s not true,” I croa
ked.
He smiled his awful ghost smile and squeezed harder.
The slick-looking gwailo came over, standing by my head. Power gleamed over him like spilled oil, and I recognized the knots and weave of the weishei cursemaking in it like a signature. “Who’s this?”
“Don’t worry,” said Lorraine. “I’ll get rid of her.”
“Wait,” I managed. I let the modified version of the weishei curse unspool from under my tongue, gathering in my mouth like burning string. I hoped the slick-looking gweilo wouldn’t notice. “Please.”
I spat the curse straight into Detective Lorraine’s eye. He howled and reeled back, letting go of me to clutch at his face. But it was too late; the curse was already taking root, sprouting new shoots that pierced through his hands and burrowed into other parts of his body. Lorraine’s police companion shouted and tried to escape, but the curse stabbed into him like fangs, and he collapsed, moaning.
All I’d done was mold what they’d woven into something smaller, more personal.
Their bodies shriveled, and their wails died down into soft, pale hissing. Soon, the police officers were a pair of brown snakes writhing on the pier. “Weishei,” I rasped, gathering them up. The serpents looked at me, and I found I could meet Lorraine’s gaze head-on for the first time. “Pretty good, huh?”
They were all tails and undulating bodies, but I held on tight as I fed the snakes snout-first into the bottles of weishei. One they were inside, I stoppered and tossed each weishei bottle, one by one, into the bay and watched them sink slowly beneath the waves.
As the last glimmers of light from the glass bottles disappeared beneath the waves, I went to find Boss Yang. His body was limp on the ground in the alley, but he was still breathing. My hands found the collar of spells around his neck; it snapped like a strand of decaying hair, and I fed its remnants into the water.