‘I did what you asked,’ Tommy Zhang said. I wasn’t even sure whether he was speaking English or Thai. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. ‘She disappeared. Like magic. Was that supposed to happen?’
‘It is all part of the plan,’ Fuller said. ‘Play along, pretend she has left of her own free will. Hint that she may have staged some kind of stunt to escape the police, because she has had some trouble with the law back in New Jersey. But don’t make any open accusations, and be sure you show every concern for her safety.’
‘Yeah, uh, that’s what I wanted to ask you. There’s a problem with her insurance. They’re asking me if the show will pay for her treatment. My lawyer says the show is not liable. So do I pay or not?’
‘You pay for the best doctors,’ Fuller intoned gently. ‘Don’t be foolish about details. Act as though you’re dreadfully worried about her and say you will pay.’
‘They talking about flying in a specialist from Chicago. How much is this gonna cost me?’
‘Don’t be a bloody cheapskate, Tommy.’ Mr. Richard’s voice went from mellow to biting. He rifled through the papers on his desk as though looking for something. ‘They don’t even have a body. How can a specialist charge for a patient he never sees?’
Tommy said, ‘Richard, I don’t like this. It’s not what we agreed. You are landing me in the middle of—’
His voice cut off. Fuller had come up with a large color photograph, which he now showed to the webcam.
Tommy said, ‘No, wait, I thought—’
‘It’s not your job to think, Tommy. Never has been. You do what I say. Sort it out, or this image and others like it will be all over the internet in a matter of minutes.’
‘OK, OK, calm down, I—’
‘Shut up, Tommy. It’s too late to change your mind. Jade Barrera is dead. Deal with it.’
Fuller cut the line.
His words rang in my mind, over and over.
Jade Barrera is dead?
A Family Way
THE ONLY THING that could distract me from the news of my own death was the fact that I recognized the photograph Richard Fuller had shown Tommy. The same picture Shea had showed me at the diner. The old white guy was Fuller, pictured with a tall Asian beauty.
When Shea showed me this picture in the diner, I’d thought the beautiful girl looked familiar. At the time I assumed she was a model, somebody I’d seen on a magazine or in a shampoo ad. I’d missed the truth entirely.
I’d seen ‘her’ before, all right. She’d put on muscle since then, and she was was older. And she didn’t dress as a ‘she’ anymore. In fact, ‘she’ had been on the cover of men’s magazines, displaying ‘her’ abs.
I had beaten her up in defense of a cat named Quinton.
‘She’ was Tommy Zhang.
It all made sense now. Richard Fuller knew he had control of Tommy. The old man wanted Mya back, and he knew Mya would come for the antidote to save me, so he set Tommy up to put the poison on Gretchen’s gloves. Fuller must have been behind Tommy’s fake change of heart towards me, too.
I can’t even describe how I felt. Tommy Zhang had set me up. When it came to my murder, he seemed more worried about the effect on his wallet than on his karma. I should hate him, right?
But I felt uneasy. I remembered the ladyboys that visited Coat’s gym. I remembered Nong Toom and her courage in fighting Muay Thai in lipstick. I knew ladyboys were a normal part of life in Thailand, but people in the US wouldn’t get that when this picture was splashed all over the tabloids. They’d see Tommy’s past as shameful and hilarious—especially his beer-swilling, monster-truck-driving fan base.
Maybe that was why Tommy acted so macho and aggro—to compensate for the reality of his situation. Or maybe Richard Fuller had pushed him into it. To get his career in Hollywood Tommy had beefed up and swallowed charisma drugs and spin-kicked his way into the ultra-macho world of action movies. Now he had fanboys all over the world who worshipped him as a Real Man.
Tommy used to annoy the hell out of me because he posed as a fighter without being the real thing. He’s an acrobat, a model, an actor, yes. But a fighter? No way. The deception pissed me off because the risks I take in the ring are real, not CGI.
Still, if I’d known Tommy was hiding a bigger secret, maybe I wouldn’t have been so quick to relocate his nose. I felt a weird pang of sympathy. Faking your martial arts is one thing, but having to hide who you really are? That has to eat away at you.
My head was ringing and flashing like a pachinko machine.
I thought about the video contact list and Richard Fuller’s stationery with its international names. I pictured the nasty old dude with his invisible tentacles spreading across the world, manipulating power-hungry rich people.
And now he wanted to possess Mya. It was sick.
‘Give back the phone that you stole.’
The phone held murder evidence. What would the old guy do when he found out Mya had set Shea free with the phone?
Mya didn’t move. She needed protection, and here I was disembodied, powerless to protect her. Some bodyguard. My blood was boiling. OK, my blood would have been boiling if I’d had any blood. All I had were thoughts.
Somebody had to stop this evil piece of shit.
‘Mya, you better get out of here,’ I said. ‘Forget the antidote. Get out of here before he does something bad to you.’
‘I can’t,’ she whispered. The old man’s gaze followed her glance to me, but he couldn’t see me. I guess he wasn’t so magical after all.
‘Have you been talking to ghosts? I warned you about that.’
He turned his back on Mya. He returned to the prayer room and dumped the blue powder into a metal bowl.
‘Last chance to change your mind, Mya. It is your fault she is poisoned, and her death will count against your karma.’
‘What about your karma, bucko?’ I shouted noiselessly. I tried to grab him but he was completely unaware of me.
He lit a match.
‘Wait!’ Mya lunged toward him. Fuller held the match, poised, above the powder. That was my life, in that bowl.
‘Wait,’ she said again. ‘I don’t have the phone. But I can get it.’
Richard Fuller dropped the match in the powder and my last chance went up in green and white flames. A smell like burning hair filled the room.
‘You’re lying,’ he said in a distinct, measured tone. ‘I’m not a violent man. You know that I practice compassion for all beings. I eat no meat. I kill no insects. I’ve helped countless young people escape desperate circumstances. But you. You test my patience.’
Mya had been backing away as he spoke, until she literally had her back to the wall. She slithered sideways, toward the computer, jerking when she passed the stuffed monkey.
‘Get the photographs and go,’ I told her. ‘They’re right behind you.’
She groped behind her back and took the sheaf of them, easy as pie. Her grace under pressure was amazing.
‘Did Tommy send you?’ Fuller seethed. ‘The two of you are ungrateful children. Tommy owes me his career, and you owe me your life. And your family’s lives. All of them would be dead if I hadn’t sent for you. Think what I will do to them if you betray me.’
‘Mya,’ I cried. ‘Run! Go to the forest. He has no power over you. Don’t listen to him. Run!’
But she didn’t. She was too young, and the way he used her family to control her, it was sick. He had her believing he was the powerful one when all along it had been Mya who could do the business.
Everything about it was wrong.
She made herself small. I saw her looking into the branches of the trees that grew close to the house. The wind tossed droplets from their branches on to the porch.
‘Your family live or die by my command.’
Her face went completely still.
‘Goddamn it!’ I shouted. ‘In and out of my kitchen like it’s Grand Central Station but now she stays put? Mya, get out of here!’
Mya’s lips moved in prayer. She called the forest, and it came. The house was built on stilts ten feet above the ground, but now the other forest was outside with its floor right here on her level. All she had to do was step out of the porch and she would be free. She lifted one leg over the railing.
Richard Fuller grabbed her by the shoulders. He jerked her back into his world.
‘You dishonor your family, your ancestors, your nation,’ Fuller whispered against her neck. And she was buying it. I could see the drug haze around him, the aura of the medicines he took that made people so gullible around him. It was like actual visible bullshit pouring into her ears and eyes and nose. Poison. Mya’s whole being seemed to compress in fear and dread.
‘Mya, he’s a fake. He has no power. He can’t go to the forest. He can’t even hear me, right now. He’s just a scuzzy blackmailer. He’s not a wizard, he’s a child abuser. He’s not fit to be in the same room with you. Dust him, already.’
The old man was all up in her face, and his fingers flexed on the fabric of the t-shirt I’d given her. Visions of his violent death passed through my mind, but I couldn’t do jackshit.
A yellow smile seeped from between his lips.
‘You are becoming strong, Mya. A superior vessel for my power. That is why I let you go. You didn’t think you escaped on your own, did you?’
In my disembodied state, I could feel Mya’s pulse as if it were my own. Her heart skipped a beat when he said that. Of course she had escaped on her own... but now he was making her doubt herself.
I’d seen my father do it to my mother. They call it gaslighting. The abuser makes the other person think they’re crazy. Erodes their confidence in their own powers, so the abuser can control them. Mya was only twelve years old. He had her in the palm of his hand.
Mya looked away from him, toward me. Her gaze fixed on something behind me and her body gave a jerk.
‘Mya!’ I called. ‘Don’t listen to him. Get out of here!’
What was she waiting for?
‘I wish I could have saved you, Jade,’ she said. ‘He is too powerful. I can’t leave her.’
Leave her? Leave who?
‘Just leave!’ I said. ‘Just—’
Then I saw the new kid. She must have come from inside the house and now stood beside the computer. She looked like a younger version of Mya, and for a second I thought Richard Fuller had somehow dialled her up from out of the past... but her face was a little different. And she had none of Mya’s ability to control her emotions. Her mouth was half-open and her eyes were wide.
‘Mya!’ the girl breathed. ‘My sister!’
The Fight in the Dog
THE OLD MAN told Mya, ‘If you go, I will join myself to her instead. But you won’t go, will you?’
Mya’s face went blank as a mask. Her eyes turned inward. She didn’t even seem to see her little sister, who bit her lip and stood uncertainly, waiting for a response.
‘If you let her go home I will stay,’ Mya whispered.
He smiled.
All my life I been getting angry. All my life I been acting out. I’ve made a career of it. Put somebody I don’t like in front of me, and I will hit them until they bleed or pass out or beg for mercy. And I’ll be happy about it. Because it’s a fucked-up world and the power to fight is the one thing I got.
Until now. Now the fight in me had nowhere to go. My spirit was moving through some other plane of reality, where ghosts and animals and gods and mortals are all mixed up, and the trees move and the flowers are too bright and the light is never the same as the light on Earth. A place beyond the world. And I was plugged into everything: dirt, sky, trees, worms, elephants. I was in everything.
I was mad as hell but I couldn’t do Fuck All.
That’s when this weird fogginess came over my vision. I was so angry that at first I thought I couldn’t see straight, but it wasn’t that. The room was distorting, just like that time in New York when the buildings changed to trees. In my peripheral vision the masks and statues began to shift a little. To breathe. The other forest was close by. Flowers, vines, bark. I could feel the rain and the Himalayan snows and the bottom of the river where nagas swam. I could feel it just as if the forest was inside of me.
Richard Fuller opened a cupboard and took out a bottle and something that looked like a Bunsen burner from high school. He moved into the middle of the covered porch, moving slowly and with an air of great concentration.
‘I have completed my work on the medicine,’ he told her. ‘We will do this tonight. I will enter you as a smoke. All of my knowledge will be yours. All of my ambitions. We will join forces. I will lead you high in the world. You need never fear for your family, not after this. Together, you and I will be powerful and untraceable.’
I saw her eyes. I couldn’t read her. Did she believe him?
‘I am not afraid,’ he said softly. ‘My life as I know it will end. My body will die—and I will escape any investigation that would put me in prison. But you, Mya. You will gain immeasurably.’
He said he wasn’t afraid, but his hand shook as he struck a light.
‘Stay back, Thiri,’ Mya said to the other girl.
Mr. Richard began mixing his medicines. He heated a liquid over a flame, and it began to smoke. With my altered eyes I could see his body beginning to break down like a digital image. Where the smoke touched him, he was pixillating, turning into light...
‘Mya, don’t do this. Take your sister and run for it!’
She ignored me. Her eyes were closed. Her lips didn’t move, but she held her hands in the pose for meditation, or prayer. I hoped she was praying for the same thing I was.
The trees were full of life. The night moved.
I could feel it. The forest was here, and it was bringing its own consciousness. Eyes like jewels formed tiny windows looking out from the jungle. Ghosts.
Richard Fuller’s spirit body surrounded him like a rainbow. It began to drift towards Mya, a hungry cloud. She kept her eyes shut.
‘Mya, please...’
‘Jade, you must have jai yen,’ she whispered.
Jai yen, my ass. I needed some kind of weapon. Where was Kala Sriha now?
Mr. Richard’s spirit surrounded Mya now. Light coruscated off her as though the surface of her were made of moving water. His body sagged, his eyes flickering white as they rolled up in his head. I could see the outlines of his bones.
‘Kala Sriha,’ I prayed. ‘We got this far together. I’m asking you, please don’t abandon Mya now.’
A living thing was coming out of the forest. The creature was forming out of light and shadow that solidified as it passed out of the forest and into the porch. Trailing vines and moths, the shadow took the shape of a dog. I could see its bottleglass green eyes and I could feel its ribs move as it barked. When it entered the porch its head burst open, turning inside out like a piece of popcorn until it had changed into an elephant’s head before our eyes.
Richard Fuller saw the dog-elephant and let out a startled yelp. The old dude’s concentration was broken, and the rainbow light around Mya began to disperse. The dog had changed fully into an elephant and took up most of the porch. Other animals were coming now, shifting forms as they arrived.
‘Now, children,’ he said to the strange creatures, licking his lips. ‘You know you are not permitted to come to this world.’
Yeah, right. Like he could do anything about it. More creatures burst out of the forest. A winged snake wound down from the branches above. I saw its head become a unicorn’s head; then it seemed to change its mind and went back to being something like a dragon with no legs.
The animals were all familiar from paintings and statues I’d seen in Thailand—creatures that were a mix of parts of different animals. It never occurred to me until now that the artwork might not be meant to show an elephant-headed dog, but instead a dog that could become an elephant. Or vice versa.
Because that’s what I was seeing now. Animals that could beco
me other animals. And when they changed shape, I could feel their freedom like blood running in my veins all over again.
I looked up and saw that the ceiling was gone. Trees stretched into sky.
The animals crowded around Richard Fuller, driving him back across the polished wood floor. He gripped Mya by the hair, holding her up in front of him so that she was between his body and the immortal animals. They forced him back toward the house until he bumped into the apothecary table and knocked over the stuffed monkey. In mid-fall the monkey came to life. It leaped screaming at Fuller’s face, scratching and drawing blood.
That made him let go of Mya, and she scrambled away between legs and under wings. The old man began to gabble and bark in fear. Words failed him as claws came out and teeth glittered. Mya waved her sister back into the house, but Mya herself crouched in the doorway, fascinated and horrified.
Richard Fuller was about to become a snack for the wild things. He fully deserved it, too. I hoped they ripped his head off. I hoped...
Whoa, Jade. Slow down.
Through the brightly-colored, wild bodies of the immortals I could see something else. I could see another side of them, flickering like an old movie reel. Under the feathers and fur, slipped into the half-beats between moments, I could see children.
There were human beings mixed in with these divine animals. Their human potential was still there. It hadn’t been destroyed. Now I understood why Mya had been feeding them—they had a chance to come back, if they could remember the human world.
I thought about Shea and how he’d been willing to sacrifice his life to expose Richard Fuller’s involvement in human trade. My life was already over, but theirs could be just beginning. They had a second chance. They could eat human food, learn human ways again. They could return with their spirits intact, kept alive all these years by the animal guardians of the great forest. That was the way to defeat Richard Fuller.
Not by killing him, but by the children reclaiming their stolen lives. And they were about to throw that potential away.
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