Dim Sum Asylum

by Rhys Ford

  “Let her go, Myron.” I didn’t have a lot of hope that he’d listen. Arnett never gave off the impression of being stable, and now as I stared him down, he appeared to have cracked open. “There’s nowhere to go. Come on. Make this easier on yourself. You’ve already killed one person. Let her go.”

  “That insect? These aren’t people! They’re goddamned faerie,” he shouted. “Figured you’d take their side. Fucking splice! You’re a disgrace to the badge. We fucking bled to protect this damned city, and things like you walk on in and take rank. Makes me fucking sick.”

  “Killing fae holds the same sentence as it does a human, Arnett,” I said, trying for calm, but my voice sounded unsteady even to my ringing ears. Between the hum of the dragons and the shot going off near me, it was hard to hear myself think. “No matter what happens here, you’ll be nailed for that. Don’t make things worse.”

  “Shit, I should do SF Metro and the Asylum a favor and cap you. Damn cross-breed! I couldn’t believe the Captain when he told me I had to work with a splice—”

  “I’m not a splice, Myron,” I refuted. It was more a distraction than anything else. Something to keep him off-kilter. “I’m natural born. It does happen. My parents didn’t manipulate genetics to get me. I just happened. You know that.”

  It didn’t matter what I was or wasn’t. Arnett wasn’t having any of it. I’d seen the same kind of wild in his eyes during the Riots and when I’d been working a beat in cop blues. Reasoning with him wasn’t an option now. Maybe it’d never been. If I had any doubts left, he put them to bed with a wad of spittle flung into my face.

  “Bullshit. Your kind doesn’t happen unless someone fucks with things. It’s a damned conspiracy to pollute the human race. Is that what you’re planning on doing, huh? Lay your fucking insect eggs in our bodies?” Arnett’s lips were speckled with foam. “We should have gassed the lot of you a long time ago but now it’s too late and you bastards are everywhere, like damned roaches.”

  The woman’s dark eyes were wide, and she trembled in Arnett’s grip. I didn’t blame her for whimpering. With a gun pressed against her temple and seeing her friend killed in front of her, she had every right to go into shock. What I needed from her was a shred of common sense, and I hoped she understood me when I flexed my shoulders forward as I stared hard into her frightened face.

  Hitching her breath, she groaned when Arnett pulled her farther back. He held her tightly, wrenching her to the side. With her fae-fragile body, she was no match for his strength, but nature had a way of equalizing things between predators. Biting her lip, the woman squared her body and lifted her shoulders, unfurling her thick-framed wings.

  Most humans assumed a fae’s wings were fragile, but their veins are rigid and as hard as steel. Her span unfolded swiftly, wings slamming into Arnett’s face and knocking him back when their radius struck him hard. Stumbling, he tried to maintain his balance, and the skein hummed behind me, weaving up and down in arcs, hungry to latch onto his exposed skin. Tucking her wings fully back, she hit him again, and the pterostigma on her membranes flashed before she hit the ground and rolled away.

  For luck, I thumbed the three black stars inked on the inside of my left wrist, sent a plea to Pele, then took aim and squeezed off a shot, then another. The Glock jerked in my hand, pulling up slightly as each round went off.

  Myron spun about, his mouth open wide in shock. The third bullet hit him square in the upper arm, burrowing into his torso. He spat, choking on a mouthful of blood, and the dragons fell on him, rage packaged in tight serpentine bodies. The smallest one dug through Myron’s jacket and shrieked loud enough to be heard over the ferry’s departing bellow. I lost sight of it for a second. Then it surfaced, a faceted golden orb clutched tightly in its teeth. Another emerged with an egg, spiraling upward so another could forage through Myron’s pockets. The others worked at his torn flesh, digging down to the bone and tearing out long strips of meat and muscle.

  “Drop it!” the voice behind me barked, edged with authority, but it didn’t give me much warning to anything beyond taking my next breath.

  The rush of footsteps behind me grew louder, and I staggered when the first uniform hit me, then went down under the next. My arms were pulled up behind me, and a foot pinned my gun hand to my back. Handcuffs bit my wrists, and my elbow was twisted sharply, pulling my shoulder blades together. Someone’s fingers grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled it back. The sidewalk came up fast and painful when someone plowed me into the boards. I twisted around, spitting out the salty dirt carried over from the Bay’s shore. The cut on my face reopened, and my blood dripped onto the pier. The wood was too damp to soak it in, and it pooled, smearing on my chin as one of the cops dragged me across the plank, then up to my knees.

  “Hey!” I flicked out the debris on my lip. “Check my belt. SF Metro, Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division. Senior Inspector MacCormick, Roku. I’m under Captain Gaines.”

  A plainclothes cop fumbled around near my waist, the credentials on his lanyard hitting my face. He pulled my badge from its hook on my belt and stepped back, then called in the number for confirmation. I heard the squawk of a radio and then a string of Cantonese from the officer’s dispatch. He approached me carefully, eyeing Arnett as the medical techs attempted to separate the dragons from their buffet.

  One of the smaller dragons was digging through his suit pocket, rolling the eggs out for the larger ones to retrieve. Their chittering and enthusiasm would have been adorably cute if it weren’t for the shreds of meat hanging from their muzzles and the thick layer of drying blood coating their rainbow-prism scales.

  “Let him up. He’s C-Town’s,” the inspector grumbled, holding my badge out to me as a uniform released my wrists. They hurt from being bound too tight, but I wasn’t going to argue. If I’d arrived on the scene late as they had, I’d have taken down any shooter I saw too.

  The wind grabbed my hair and whipped the black strands around my face, stinging my eyes. I’d left it long around my jaw to piss off the Captain, but at times like these, I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to cut it off. My long leather coat kept most of the chill out, but the knees of my jeans now had holes in them, and the cold gnawed on my legs. I thought longingly of the department vehicle I’d left parked on Kearny. It was too wide to drive hard through Chinatown after a fleeing thief, but at least the interior had been warm and out of the wind.

  The cop tilted his head up to look me in the eye. “You okay? Who’s the gunman?”

  “My partner,” I said, bending over to catch my breath. My lungs felt like I’d inhaled splinters, and my ribs ached where I’d been slammed into the pier. “Inspector Myron Arnett. Raided a dragons’ nest of eggs worth about eleven million yen. He’s responsible for the civilian loss.”

  “Dirty? Damn,” the officer said flatly, staring over my shoulder at Myron’s twitching body. “What’s this world coming to?”

  “Yeah,” I said shakily, taking my gun back from the uniform when he handed it over. Internal Affairs would want it, but they were giving me the courtesy of handing it over myself. That went a long way in my book. “Thanks.”

  “Guess we should help the EMTs get those lizards off of him.” He didn’t look inclined to move. The force was spread too thin, and catching one of our own with dirty hands didn’t sit well among us.

  No one moved. There was some throat clearing, and I heard one of the uniforms warn someone out of the crime scene perimeter, but that was about it.

  “We could. We should,” I replied, watching the lizards getting their breakfast in. “Better yet, how about if you take her statement? I’ll see about notifying the deceased’s next of kin. The least I can do is let them know it was quick.”

  Unclipping his notebook, the cop said, “I’m sorry about your partner, Inspector, but I’d have shot him too.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded. “Hopefully the dragons will leave something behind. I’d like my Captain to have something other than my ass to chew on.”
/>
  Two

  IT’S NEVER a good thing when my shift starts with me standing in Captain Gaines’s office.

  It’d been more than a week since I shot Arnett, and Internal Affairs still owned me. Or at least they still shackled me. A lantern-jawed interrogator wrung me out for three days, then left me with a toddler-sized pile of paperwork to complete by hand. They’d taken my badge and gun, leaving me with a cramped wrist and generally pissed off at the world. I’d been separated from the rest of the squad, told not to go anywhere near the division.

  I had no second thoughts about shooting Arnett. If anything, IA could hold me in limbo as long as they wanted, poking and prodding at me, but I would never have an ounce of remorse about my actions. The biggest regret I had was not shooting Arnett sooner. If I had, the young fae he’d killed would have been picking out her work clothes for the day instead of her family having to choose what she would wear on her funeral pyre.

  Not one single regret except for the weight of her death on my soul.

  It was almost too much to hope I’d be free, but I couldn’t think of any other reason Gaines would call me in. Except for the small matter of me blowing off a dinner he’d ordered me to come to—but a quick phone call to his husband excused me from that without me having to say a single word to the Captain.

  I stood at the front of his desk with my gaze pinned to the wall directly behind him. I knew the wall intimately. It was close to the color of creamed peas and had a hairline crack running from the ceiling down to the large painting of a seascape hanging behind Gaines. It wasn’t a good painting, but the sloppy G signature on the bottom right of the canvas kept me from making any critiques. It was the same signature as on my birthday checks, and while I might lack common sense, no one could say I was stupid.

  Even with me standing and Gaines lounging in his office chair, his head bobbed into my view, a tight military cut to his salt-and-pepper hair and the wink of gold from the rims of his glasses. Gaines’s tailored uniform made him seem enormous, a thickly muscled strongman from an old-time carnival show with his full heavily salted mustache a fat bush under his hook nose.

  I’d spent the last week avoiding this talk, but eventually even the devil has to pay his due. And my time’d certainly come.

  “Tell me something, MacCormick,” he barked, and I glanced down, inwardly wincing when I saw a vein jerking on his temple. “Explain to me again why you shot your partner? I’ve got IA’s reports, and I’d sooner shovel out stables than read through that pile of crap. Report’s too damned long to read. You’d think those assholes got paid by the word.”

  “He indicated a desire to remove the dragon eggs from the nest we’d been tagged to barricade off from the general public, sir. I told him it was ill-advised. The species is under protection and the eggs were relatively protected where they were. Chances of reintroducing human-incubated crested dragons to a skein are slim. I’d assumed he was talking about protecting an endangered species, not removing the clutch for his personal profit.” I kept my voice even, but the Irish in me rose, lilting my words. “While I was retrieving the barricade tape from our issued vehicle, Inspector Arnett approached the nest and extracted what appeared to be the entire clutch.”

  He didn’t interrupt me, so I continued, keeping my verbal report as matter-of-fact as I could. “He then fled the scene through the Chinatown warren, forcing me to follow on foot, as the vehicle is too wide to be driven through that area. When he approached the pier, Arnett fired his weapon, killing a civilian and endangering not only the protected species but also other bystanders in the area, sir. I chose to respond accordingly.”

  “So you shot him?” Gaines’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Yes, sir.” I shrugged. “I was aiming for his knee, Captain, but it was difficult to get a good aim with the dragons on him. Considering I was shooting him for taking the eggs, it didn’t seem right to hit the lizards.”

  “You shot your partner in front of the morning ferry and let a pack of dragons ravage his still-breathing body?” he rumbled. “You don’t find anything wrong with this?”

  “As I told the officer on the scene, I intended only to slow him down,” I said. “I didn’t think the dragons would eat him, sir.”

  “They ate his eyeball, kid. Sucked it right out of his skull, according to the doctors.”

  “Arnett took their eggs, sir. He’s lucky they didn’t take his testicles off.” I met his gaze head-on. “They don’t mate often and lay eggs infrequently. Even if only one of those eggs hatched, it’d have bolstered the skein’s numbers. Arnett took his chances and lost. Respectfully, sir, if at that moment the lizards asked me for shoyu and hashi, I’d have given it to them.”

  “Respectfully?” Gaines growled. “Kid, you haven’t respected anyone in your damned life.”

  “Sir.” I kept my mouth tight, refusing to crack a smile. “Don’t forget the sir, Captain, and I beg to differ. I’ve respected the hell out of you.” I took a short breath. “And my mother.”

  “They tell me he’ll recover in a few months. Just in time for a fall court session.” The Captain’s voice was a mix of resignation and disgust. “Sit down, Rokugi. I want to talk to you without having to strain my neck.”

  He’d used my full name and didn’t say anything when I flopped down, then hooked my leg over the arm of his visitor’s chair. Gaines was my godfather and had been my mother’s partner until she’d climbed into the political cesspool of San Francisco’s police department. I’d grown up swimming in the backyard pool of the house he and his husband, Braeden, lived in, and Gaines was the one who found me in the middle of the Riots to tell me my boyfriend, John, and our two daughters were killed in the raging block fires. I’d called him Uncle Will until I joined his division. Then he became Captain in public, but we still caught afternoon baseball games on hot summer days, and he was forever telling me to cut my hair. The concerned look on his face was troubling. Those were the kinds of looks Gaines got right before he meddled, and I’d never met anyone who loved to meddle more than my Uncle Will.

  “I have to ask this. I’m required to.” He leaned back in his chair, straining its hydraulics. “Was this a fae thing?”

  “What?” The question confused me. “What are you talking about? How is Arnett’s eye a fae thing?”

  “Would you have used less force if Arnett hadn’t grabbed a fae or called you a splice?” Gaines’s frown deepened at my eye roll. “I’m serious, Rokugi. IA is firm on this. I’ve got to log a response. Did you shoot him because of past insults? Was this in any way a retaliation for something Arnett said or done to you before that incident?”

  “He called me a splice. So what?” I snorted. “I’m half fae. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it. That’s not why I shot him. I shot him because he was an asshole and killed an innocent bystander. IA called it a righteous shoot.”

  “You’ve met a lot of assholes in your life, Roku. You don’t make a habit of shooting all of them. And I know what IA said. I have their report. I just want to know if you’re okay and that this isn’t something racial.”

  It was a valid query. The Riots took a shit-ton from me—mostly everyone I’d ever loved—and IA spent a lot of time sniffing around my ankles for even the barest hint of prejudice in what I did while wearing my badge. I’d have taken it personally if I didn’t know they hounded everyone. The city couldn’t withstand another firestorm like the Riots, and while I had no one left to lose, there were a lot of families who’d emerged intact. I’d sworn to protect them, pledged on a gold badge and a piece of my dead mother’s wing that I’d stop anyone who tried to do harm to the city and her citizens. So I didn’t begrudge IA their digging. I’d be more worried if they didn’t dig at all.

  “He could have been a ninety-year-old grandmother with orphans hanging off of her teats and I’d have shot him. Arnett was armed and fleeing the scene of a crime.” I exhaled, shaking my head. “He unloaded a round into a woman. I had to go in front of her parents to tell the
m that their daughter was killed by a cop. It is not a fae versus human thing. It’s a people thing. If I had any way to go back in time and stop him from shooting that girl, I would do it in a split-second. No parent should have to wear a black star for their kid, and him being a dirty cop? That just makes things even worse.”

  “I believe you, kid, but God, you let the damned lizards eat him.” He winced, then rubbed his face, trying to scrub the weary out of his eyes. “IA’s thinking you did it out of revenge.”

  “Revenge? I’d have done it if he’d shot a dog.” I softened my voice. “He was one of ours, Uncle Will. She should have been safe. That girl shouldn’t have died under blue fire.”

  “I know,” he agreed and nodded at me. “No one knew he was dirty. IA didn’t even suspect him.”

  “He hid it pretty well. I only figured it out because I caught him red-handed. If I hadn’t been early, we never would have known. He could have sauntered in after stashing the eggs and found me cursing up a storm because the eggs were gone. I’d have assumed something or someone else got them,” I replied, sliding my leg down to sit fully in the chair. Gaines looked away, but I knew him well. He was angry and ashamed of Arnett. One of his own let him down. “He sucked as a partner, and because of him, I’m still Internal Affairs’s bitch.”

  “Not anymore,” Gaines said. “These are yours. As of tomorrow, you’re back on duty.”

  He reached into his drawer, pulled out my badge and gun, and placed them on the desk between us. They made a satisfying clunk on the wood, a familiar, comforting metallic echo I’d grown up with. That sound meant my mother was home. Then a few years later, it meant I was home and ready to peel the day off my back. With John and then my daughters, I’d grown into the habit of stashing my weapon in a lockbox as soon as I came through the door. I’ve since gone back to laying it on the table, and now the sound was a siren for Bob the Cat to come looking for a scritch and food. That sound—right now—meant I’d be pinning my badge back on, and I never felt more at home than behind my badge.