by Rhys Ford
Ringing. Blood. And the pain.
I never said I was the sharpest one in my family, and since I was pretty much the only one left besides Bob the Cat, that wasn’t saying much.
“Shit, Trent.” I tried to grab at his coat, but my fingers and arm weren’t working. Instead I flopped about like an oxygen-starved carp while my brain struggled to find the ends of my thoughts. Focusing on my partner’s handsome face, I slurred, needing him to hear me. “Trent, I think someone blew me up. If I die, make sure someone takes care of my cat.”
Nine
“I’M FINE,” I said for the thirtieth time in the last half hour. “Seriously, I only had the wind knocked out of me. Didn’t even bleed. Just a little bit dusty.”
It was the same response I’d given to everyone who asked. I was set to loop, or at least that’s what it felt like. After the fourth or fifth EMT poked at me, I was tired of answering questions, having lights shined in my eyes, and not coughing when someone thumped at my chest and ribs. The ringing stopped a few minutes after Trent got me to someplace warmer—a tea shop prepping for the early-dinner crowd. The owner was an enterprising young Coleopteran who’d taken one look at the emergency crews pulling up in the street and promptly began steeping stockpots full of black pekoe.
The short, squat Chinese fae urged his workers to give out as many cups as they could, ensuring the responders had something hot in their gullets when they took a moment to breathe. It was a good tactical move on his part. With the sidewalk closed down, he wouldn’t get much business, but cops and firefighters remembered who made their hard days a bit easier. Hell, I still went back to a Hawaiian food place on Third, not just because they made a mean lau lau, but also because they’d fired up their grills and made about a thousand teriyaki burgers and spam musubi for the crews working a double homicide at three in the morning.
“You’ve got blood coming out of your ears, and your irises are copper.” The hard-featured medic who’d snagged me before I could stumble out of the shop could have given the Southern Gate dragon a lesson in pissy looks. He ripped open a bag of supplies with his teeth, grunting for me to hold out my hand, then barked at a rookie cop to grab me one of the teacups before it made it outside. Extracting a packet of bright pills, he enunciated slowly, “These are painkillers….”
I snuck a look at the packet and mumbled, “Yeah, those are the same ones I’ve got in the glove compartment of my squad car. Don’t like them. Make my head fuzzy.”
“Your head’s already fuzzy. In about an hour, the adrenaline you’ve got running through you is going to fade, and you’re going to regret not taking these.” He shoved them into my hand as my partner returned from outside to loom behind the medic’s back. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted Trent hovering. “Maybe you can talk some sense into this guy. Either he takes those or I yank him from duty.”
“Did you find anything?” I asked Trent, then followed up with the question I dreaded hearing an answer to. “Did they find anyone inside?”
“It’s too hot. We won’t be able to get in. Building’s been evacuated. Same with the gōngyù on top and across the two sides.” He scowled when the medic pressed a finger against a sore spot on my temple. “That’s bruised. Why are you doing that to him?”
The medic didn’t answer him. He just rattled the pills at me again and glared. “In you or you’re out. Your call, asshole.”
“That’s Senior Inspector asshole to you,” I grumbled back. My pill hatred went back decades, starting with the fake grape lozenges my mother assured me were like candy and would help my sore throat. It was like sucking on Death’s big toe and tasted like roadkill, sorrow, and hedgehog poop.
“Take the pills, MacCormick.” Trent shuffled around a round table the owner’d set up for the medics to lay their gear on. “It’s Hell out there, and I’m not convinced you’re 100 percent. Unless these guys give you clearance to walk out of here, I’m going to shove you into the back of an ambulance, and Gaines will meet you at the hospital.”
I was torn between telling them all to fuck off, and returning to the case. There wasn’t any denying I was in pain. Every single one of my joints took the hit, and I’d been pushed by the blast, tumbling like a broken marionette being flung into a wall by an enraged toddler. But I didn’t want to take a walk.
So I took the pills.
They went down wrong, and the tea I swallowed to help them on their way was as bitter as my thoughts, but eventually the capsules ground their way into my stomach. Handing the half-full cup to Trent, I tried to shake off the pangs in my joints as I stood up, straightening carefully.
“Okay, let’s go do this.” I bit back a gasp when my ribs complained about the stretch. Trent studied me closely, so I kept my face as placid as I could, but there was nothing I could do about the twitching between my shoulder blades. My body, for some reason, seemed to think it had wings at the oddest moments, usually when I was trying to maintain some semblance of dignity. “What? I’m fine!”
“Yeah, I didn’t believe you the first fifteen times I heard you say that, but sure, we’ll pretend.” Trent edged behind me. “I’ll just be back here to catch you when you fall. Again.”
TRENT WAS right. It was Hell. Or at least as close to it as we were going to get.
I didn’t know what other businesses were in the building with the noodle factory, but something in there really liked fire. The ash pulled a darkness down around us, thickening the air with a sticky, wet veil. Sparks caught on the twists of hot air rising from the inferno, deadly streams of sprites and pixies no gargoyle could extinguish. The responders were trying, battling the flames with streams of foam and water, but the monster someone created was taking too long to die.
Then the rains took up the challenge, and we were left choking on an oily water deluge too thick to see through.
Gaines called me three times in the first fifteen minutes as I watched the building fold in on itself, taking its small gōngyù with it. I didn’t answer the calls but did send a short message, assuring him I was fine. I didn’t want to hear how he thought I should go home and crawl into bed, although he was plenty quick with texting me exactly that. An hour into the vigil, the responders shifted from trying to bring the fire down to tearing apart the bridges connecting the building’s rooftop to the outlying gōngyù on its rear side.
I hated watching people’s lives die, and with each hook dug into wood and steel, it was a gouge into a tiny community who’d huddled together to survive. It was crucial to take the bridges down, but I couldn’t help feeling it was like portioning out meat to a starving tribe before the dying person took its last breath.
“You might as well head back to the station, Inspector.” The fire chief, a gangly old faerie who’d tucked his wings beneath his yellow slicker, shouted at me beneath the roar of a bridge coming down. “No one’s going to get inside of there for hours. And I’ve still got to get my firebug guys inside to figure out what caused this.”
I wasn’t a fire guy. Even after I lost John and the kids, I couldn’t wrap my head around the impossibility of an all-consuming fire, the sheer storm of burning air and heat. It’d been explained to me countless times before—accelerants and oxygen flow—so while I got the logistics of it, the what didn’t matter to me as much as the why. The fire department wouldn’t be able to tell me why. They hadn’t then, and they wouldn’t now. That was on me. Someone wanted to erase something in that building, and they went big. It would be too much of a coincidence for the fire not to be connected to Wong’s death, but I couldn’t rule that out.
“What now?” Trent asked, backing away from the curb. “And before you ask, someone from the garage already dropped off another car. Ours is now evidence.”
“Crap, my tea packet was in there.” I peered at the slightly battered sedan we’d come in. “I’m going to have to make another stop on the way home.”
“Or you could take the painkillers. Those were released to me. I’ve got them in my pocket.” He
stood under my withering snort easily enough, then capitulated. “I can go ask if they’ll let the tea go, but really, do you think it actually does anything?”
“She needs a license to issue any concoctions she makes,” I pointed out. “How is that any different from—wait a second, you said something earlier.”
Trent’s attention was on the crowd now, his focus pinned to the faces in the demi-shadows. “I’ve said a lot of things to you. I’m not sure any of it stuck.”
“You wondered how expensive would it be to pull this kind of thing off. The netsuke are small, easy to animate, but they were focused. The shrine god was bigger but seemed like it was all over the place.” The thread of thought eluded me, glistening in the orange glow of the building’s death. “We’ve got two—no—three object animation events—one with a purpose, killing two seemingly unrelated people, and one shrine god that didn’t seem to have an endgame other than to cause a riot. And I’m putting aside Shelly Chan’s disappearance, but she was looking for a token at a temple vendor when she disappeared, so I’m not willing to take her off the board yet.”
“Could the netsuke and the god be unrelated? I don’t know the lay of the land here. How many object animations do you get in a week? One? Five hundred?” His focus snapped to me, a pale wolfish gleam in his eyes. There was something primal there, lurking beneath the hard surface, and it burned as hot as the noodle factory’s remains. “Give me a good idea on what I’m looking at, Roku.”
“If we got one a month, it’d be a lot. But that’s just here in C-Town. Some of the other districts might have more. That was something Records was chasing down for us. I’d have to tap someone there to see if they came up with something.” I dug through what I remembered about any past cases, but it wasn’t much. Animations were mostly a nuisance, not deadly. “What bothers me is the style of this magic. It’s too… much. Too controlled. Too powerful. Most of the animations I’ve run up against are jerky when they move, and the caster usually can’t force the magic into the vessel for that long. That’s why I wonder where the caster is getting this much juice. The netsuke hit pretty much within a two-hour period and went straight for their targets.”
“Maybe,” Trent pointed out. “We don’t know if there were actual targets or if these people just checked off all the boxes for the kill.”
“Okay, fair point. We’ve only got one witness with a maybe this thing was looking for Wong in the noodle factory. The rest were found dead. No one saw the attack.” The pills were beginning to affect me, and the world bent around me, sheets of cement and fire wrapping around my head. I blinked hard, forcing everything back into perspective, but what I really needed was something stronger than a cup of beetle-brewed tea. “Let’s start eliminating the one possibility I can get a handle on: whether or not someone’s paying a caster to do this.”
“How do you suppose we do that?” Skepticism weighed down his words. “Round up all the usual suspects?”
“No, just go to someone who talks to them all the time,” I murmured and made the mistake of looking at my buzzing phone again. “And we’ll do just that, right after I tell the Captain I’ve got all my fingers and you go get the tea out of the squad car they just hooked up to that tow truck.”
IT TOOK us a good forty-five minutes to get where we needed to go. Chinatown’s late-afternoon traffic was shitty during the best of days, but in the midst of closed-off streets, a thunderous rainstorm, and pedestrians wandering into the road to take pictures of the district’s beast-infested buildings, it would have been faster if we’d walked the ten blocks to Kingfisher’s.
We were on the far outskirts of Chinatown, skirting the edge of the bridge and the adobe mission-style homes set on the hills above the trolley lines. A few generations ago, the neighborhood ran more to Russian and Italian immigrants, but Chinatown was relentless, a pervasive root system hungry for ground to grow into. While the hillside houses ran to nosebleed selling prices, down below was a different story. The scatter of warehouses built up to provide storage for the countless cargo ships coming into the Bay boasted a glut of gōngyù with connective strands so thick and shack heavy, most of the side streets and alleys never saw the light of day.
I let Trent drive again, mostly because I was still fuzzy around the edges, and I needed both hands to sip at the stygian espresso soup I’d bought from a Death Pegasus coffee kiosk around the corner from the fire. It’d been too long since I’d eaten, and from the looks of things, it was going to be some time before I got some food in me. The oil from the coffee slickened my stomach, and I ignored the rumbles coming from my gut. Trent, however, didn’t and pointedly glanced at my belly after a round of gurgles.
“You’re going to tear up your insides if you drink that shit without having some food in you.” Glancing down the street I directed him to turn into, he frowned. “Or were you intending on dying with an empty stomach? As a special thank-you to the morgue? Because this down here? This looks… bad.”
“Yeah, it’s not the best of neighborhoods, but the place I’m taking you to makes the best damned gau gee,” I countered. “Park the car, Leonard. We’ve got a woman to talk to.”
We left what little watery light the pier section gathered up and trudged our way through the milky blue afternoon haze. I knew taking Trent into North Point wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, but he wasn’t the kind of cop who’d let me drop him off at the station while I went to dig around for leads. From what I’d learned of him over the past day and a half, he at least would have my back if things went ass-up bad.
“I smell chocolate?” He sniffed as we crossed a thin street. “Are we near the factory?”
“Close by. About a block down.” I nodded in the direction of the pier.
“I didn’t know Chinatown came down this far.” His collar was up again but for good reason. The cold crept along the piers from the Bay, a brisk curved shock to the senses after the warmer streets we’d just left.
“Yeah, we’re at the bottom tip. Lots of mingling down here. Kind of like a cultural minefield. Just try not to start any gang wars and we’ll be fine.” I was half joking. Trent was huge and as Norse godlike as I’d ever seen. There were still Russian elements in North Point, and I couldn’t risk someone mistaking his cop stare for a challenge. “Just don’t smile at anyone. It makes you look threatening.”
“I have a great smile.” He looked offended, but I couldn’t be sure. Sometimes he was as hard to read as leaves at the bottom of a teacup.
“You smile like a demented science experiment who escaped from Tyrell Corp.” The fuzzy was gone from the sides of my head, but the rattle in my eyes was back, probably from all the coffee I’d chugged. “Look, just stay… neutral. That’s all you’ve got to do. And if someone starts shooting, be sure to tell them you’re a cop before you start shooting back.”
He sounded nothing like a cop walking a little bit behind me. I’d been shoulder to shoulder with guardsmen and SWAT more times than I cared to count, and Trent’s footsteps, his demeanor, everything about the way he moved screamed black armor and heavy weapons. He moved like he should have been hefting heavy artillery and maybe a battering ram. Bringing him into this neighborhood was a huge mistake, but there was no going back now. My only hope was that he took me seriously when I said not to stir up any shit.
I wasn’t going to hold my breath. Mainly because my ribs hurt, and the way the day was going, we were due for another explosion.
Going deeper into the North Point labyrinth meant leaving not just the light behind, but also reliable backup. With the tangle of rooftop metal shacks and illegal power lines running through the district, reception was spotty, and we were going to go in deep. A few twists and turns and we lost sight of the streets. A few more and any sense of the city was lost to us, and our surroundings went from industrial to dangerously feudal.
The city did not rule in Chinatown’s warrens. We were going into a place where my badge would mean mostly nothing, except perhaps as a trophy f
or some kid who needed to up his street cred. The overhang thickened above us, an urban jungle canopy complete with savage predators.
The alleys were tight, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. I stepped aside to let an old woman with tattered, drooping wings get past me, and her eyes flashed scarlet when they landed on Trent hovering against the wall behind me. She skittered past, her back to the wall, and then disappeared into a doorway niche, pressing into the frame to watch us walk away. Yellowed paper lanterns from a ramen shop played a bit of gold over her deeply lined face, and I finally caught the red marbled lines running under her skin. The dustfire she was addicted to only amped up her paranoia, but she wasn’t wrong about us. We were looking for something, and she could only wait us out, hoping we wouldn’t decide she would do.
“Keep going.” I stepped around a plastic tree someone had put in front of a sushi shop’s sliding shoji door, probably hoping to draw customers in with a bit of cheer. “We’ve got a few stretches to go.”
The pier warrens were a jumble of shops and residences, a familiar mix of apartments set above a scrabble of food shops, cheap clothing kiosks, and bars. A few restaurants gambled on the area, but most residents didn’t have a lot of spare change to pay for takeout. Still, there was brisk business to be made in hot, edible food in a safe location. We turned a corner onto a side street thick with banners and neon signs, and Trent pulled up short behind me.
“This looks… bad,” he whispered, and without even looking, I knew he was reaching for his gun.
“Don’t.” I stepped back, pushing my shoulder blades into his chest to stop him. “You do that and you fuck us both. No weapons here. Keep your hands loose, and whatever you do, do not pull your gun out. This is a sanctuary street, and do you see that red door at the far end? That’s where we need to go. So just smile and walk the gauntlet.”