Dim Sum Asylum E-Book

Rhys Ford

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 488

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Welcome to Dim Sum Asylum: a San Francisco where it's a ho-hum kind of case when a cop has to chase down an enchanted two-foot-tall shrine god statue with an impressive Fu Manchu mustache that's running around Chinatown, trolling sex magic and chaos in its wake. Senior Inspector Roku MacCormick of the Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division faces a pile of challenges far beyond his human-faerie heritage, snarling dragons guarding C-Town's multiple gates, and exploding noodle factories. After a case goes sideways, Roku is saddled with Trent Leonard, a new partner he can't trust, to add to the crime syndicate family he doesn't want and a spell-casting serial killer he desperately needs to find. While Roku would rather stay home with Bob the Cat and whiskey himself to sleep, he puts on his badge and gun every day, determined to serve and protect the city he loves. When Chinatown's dark mystical underworld makes his life hell and the case turns deadly, Trent guards Roku's back and, if Trent can be believed, his heart... even if from what Roku can see, Trent is as dangerous as the monsters and criminals they're sworn to bring down.

Leseprobe

Dim Sum Asylum

By Rhys Ford

Welcome to Dim Sum Asylum: a San Francisco where it’s a ho-hum kind of case when a cop has to chase down an enchanted two-foot-tall shrine god statue with an impressive Fu Manchu mustache that’s running around Chinatown, trolling sex magic and chaos in its wake.

Senior Inspector Roku MacCormick of the Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division faces a pile of challenges far beyond his human-faerie heritage, snarling dragons guarding C-Town’s multiple gates, and exploding noodle factories. After a case goes sideways, Roku is saddled with Trent Leonard, a new partner he can’t trust, to add to the crime syndicate family he doesn’t want and a spell-casting serial killer he desperately needs to find.

While Roku would rather stay home with Bob the Cat and whiskey himself to sleep, he puts on his badge and gun every day, determined to serve and protect the city he loves. When Chinatown’s dark mystical underworld makes his life Hell and the case turns deadly, Trent guards Roku’s back and, if Trent can be believed, his heart… even if from what Roku can see, Trent is as dangerous as the monsters and criminals they’re sworn to bring down.

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Epilogue

More from Rhys Ford

Readers love Rhys Ford

About the Author

By Rhys Ford

Visit Dreamspinner Press

Copyright

This book is dedicated to Lynn West, the Queen of the Flying Monkeys and Fantastical Things. You wanted faeries and dragons. Here you go, babe.

Acknowledgments

MUCH LOVE to the Five, the sisters of my soul: Tamm, Lea, Jenn, and Penn. Also to my other sisters, Mary, Ren, Ree, and Lisa.

A huge heartfelt thank-you to Elizabeth, Lynn, Grace, Naomi, lyric, and everyone at Dreamspinner Press for all of their hard work and faith. And Anne Cain for the rocking covers.

One

I HATED running first thing in the morning. Even in a fog-drenched San Francisco when the temperatures were on the colder side, it was too early and too damned hot to be pounding through the narrow sidewalks of Chinatown as merchants set up for a packed farmer’s market. I wasn’t made for long hauls at full speed, which was funny considering my faerie half pretty much should have handed me every stamina advantage. But evolution happened, so there wasn’t any need for a faerie’s wings to carry their body over long distances anymore, and since I didn’t inherit actual wings, I probably hadn’t stood in the genetics line for a fae’s stamina either.

For one of the few times in my life, I wished I’d inherited more of my mother’s fae hollow-bone structure than my father’s build. I could have run faster if I wasn’t built so human. I wouldn’t have said no to a pair of dragonfly wings either, even if they didn’t work. I’d gotten some ancestor’s long legs, and they came in handy to leap over a pile of decaying durian left on the sidewalk. My boot toe brushed one of the fruits, and I briefly wondered if I’d ever get the smell out of the leather as it exploded under the pressure of its rotted meat.

High above me, the gōngyù bridges spanning the streets cast long, hard shadows onto the pavement, the network of tangled arches burdened with the poor’s makeshift villages, resting a disjointed minicity above San Francisco’s tall buildings. Someone in a gōngyù nearby was smoking ducks, the crisp, spicy smell of curing meat settling down to the street below. If my mouth wasn’t already thick with saliva from the overexertion, the smell of roasting fowl would have done me in. I hadn’t eaten anything since a stale donut nearly twelve hours ago, such a typical cop trope, and I’d lived on high-octane coffee ever since I’d swallowed its last crumb.

Thank the Gods for the coffee or I’d have been flat on my face after the first few steps. Although my rage probably would have taken care of me because right at that moment the adrenaline pumping through my blood could have fueled a fleet of ferries across the Bay. I was that angry.

Dodging a stall of dried fish, I rolled over the counter of the next booth, narrowly avoiding a line of bins filled with cuttlefish and rock cod on ice. The stream of Cantonese that followed me wasn’t as hot and angry as the skein of Korean-crested dragons flying in my wake. While the lizards were only the length of a dachshund, there were at least ten of them with mouths filled with long pointy teeth, and they were extremely angry. No matter how small something was, if it had teeth and it was angry, it was something to be reckoned with.

Luckily, I wasn’t the one who’d pissed them off.

The man I was chasing was fat, wearing a badly fitted suit, and smelling of bean burritos. I’d have given up chasing after him if it wasn’t for one thing—eight things: he’d stashed an entire clutch from the crested dragons’ nest in his jacket’s deep pockets.

Above me, the crimson-and-green crested dragons dove past my head. They rode the air in undulating waves, their heads weaving side to side as they gave chase. Most draconian beings, big or small, flew using their wings. But Asiatic lizards’ flight was powered by the pearls in their foreheads, so I didn’t have to worry about being slapped in the head as they flew. I wasn’t even sure if I registered in their tiny little brains.

The odds of the dragons getting to him first were good, but having them actually do something to him was slim. Crested dragons were scavengers down to the bone. I’d seen one run from a live rat one-third its size but then savage a plucked turkey to ribbons after it had been left out for only moments while the cook heated up oil in the deep fryer.

Of course, I’d also never seen them after someone plundered their nests, so I could have it all wrong. For all I knew, they were going to carve him up into tiny jellied slices once they caught up with the egg thief, and I was going to have to fight them off just to make an ID. Whatever happened, Arnett was going to get what was coming to him, and hopefully it wasn’t going to be me pounding his face in because he’d screwed me over.

The early-morning chill made it difficult for the crested dragons to gain speed and altitude. Steady afternoon heat from the city’s streets gave them thermals to ride, and if they’d been a more aggressive species, I’d be looking at Arnett’s picked-over carcass draped with full-bellied, contented frill-headed lizards. Still, they were motivated to get their eggs back, and they buzzed around me, diving up and down above the heads of the morning foot traffic.

After the last wave of Asian immigrants a few years ago, the Chinatown district grew, extending down to Davis. The closed-in sprawl of the historic district migrated. Buildings were packed with entire generations of single families, and the area was difficult to maneuver in, walls moving as more or less space was needed by the inhabitants. I grew up in its sprawl. Arnett had not, and now he was running blind.

“Arnett!” I yelled at his retreating back. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t slow down.

Assholes never slowed down when they were running from the cops. Even if they knew they weren’t going to get away, they still had to try… and Arnett knew better. There wasn’t going to be any end to this scenario that didn’t include him being caught. One way or another, I wasn’t going to let this go. I’d run him into the ground.

The stream of people closed in behind him, moving uphill toward the business centers past Washington. One of the district’s newer gates loomed over me, the large golden dragon on its crossbeam watching the skein carefully as it zipped by. It paid no attention to me. The draconian sentry sat purely for its own reasons, a bargain struck with the Triad Consortium long before the Golden Gate Bridge was built. Its tail swung and wrapped around the thick stone column supporting its perch. The rippling membrane at its end flowered, snapping out, nearly knocking me over. Despite, or perhaps because of, its criminal activity, the Triad knew what it was doing to keep its territories protected. The dragon was massive, a fierce reptilian watchdog mostly satisfied to remain on its post in exchange for a substantial amount of food every week.

So I couldn’t count on its help with Arnett.

For a big man, Arnett could run—which was amazing, because for as long as I’d known him, he barely stirred himself to refill his coffee cup. He’d wait for a uniform, preferably one with round hips and pert breasts, and he’d beg her for a new pour. It hardly ever worked, but he tried.

“Too damned early for this shit,” I grumbled. “God, I hope they get him first. I hope those fuckers burrow under his skin and suck out all his nerves like spaghetti. One by one. That’s what I want.”

Leaping to the side, I avoided running into a bicycle rack. The lizards moved faster, their legs tucked in tight against their undulating bodies until they were brilliant streamers with bared white teeth. Closer to the pier, the air was cooler. Downhill, the streets opened up, and the wind off the Bay whipped quickly through the tall buildings. The chill was nearly arctic, and the dragons hit the cold front, slowing their flight.

Arnett was heading down to the pier, probably hoping to get lost in the crowds of tourists. The dragons jogged to the right, and I skidded after them. They were following instinct, driven to protect their young, while I was chasing Myron because he’d pissed on our assignment. Once I caught up with him, I was going to kick his ass.

I spotted Arnett crossing over the BART tracks. His pockets swayed back and forth, heavy with eggs, and he kept his pace up, looking back every once in a while. He saw the skein before they honed in on him, and he bolted, crossing against traffic. Horns blared, and a truck’s tires smoked as the driver slammed on his brakes. The burning rubber cloud filling the street dissipated as the dragons punched holes through it in their pursuit. I followed, a little bit warier of the traffic than Myron but no less determined than my serpentine rivals.

Morning commuters heading into the financial district were climbing out of the railcars, their minds on the day and not on the sweaty-faced man stumbling toward them. Lines of office workers and suits were forming around the scattered bao carts on the main causeway, vendors doing brisk business in char siu or lotus paste steamed in white bread balls.

Arnett stumbled through the commuters, jostling them from their orderly queues. Shoving began, and it threatened to escalate when the dragons dove into the mix, their frilled manes puffed up around their triangular heads. Arnett nearly fell, and fear closed my throat. The eggs weren’t fragile—they had to survive the jostle of their clutch mates and the skein—but the shells wouldn’t hold up to Myron’s weight. Grabbing the handle of a turnip cake cart, he kept to his feet, but the lizards were honed in on him, turning in as a tight swarm. I closed the distance between us, crossing the pavement with a few strides. Turning the cart, Arnett shoved it at me, knocking over customers. Hot oil splashed from the frying element, scalding people nearby.

“Arnett, think about this.” I bounced out of the way and put my hands up, still hoping to de-escalate the situation. “You can still walk from this. Gaines would section you—”

“Fuck you, MacCormick. Goddamned faerie,” he spat and tossed the vendor’s kitchen utensils at my face. One of the smaller knives hit my cheek, the tip digging into my skin, nearly hitting my eye. Blinking, my vision refused to clear, and rubbing only seemed to blur things more.

One of the smaller dragons wove in, its talons bared and spread. Apparently no one told it that it was supposed to be fearful and docile, so it attacked, its mane spread about its face. Arnett screamed and jerked away, his face scored with deep grooves. His foot hit the steaming oil, and he went down. The rest were on him, and Arnett rolled onto his knees, a black steel service revolver in his hand. They scattered when he turned, frightened by the sudden movement.

He was up and off again before I could get a bead on him.

Front Street was closed to vehicle traffic in preparation for the Moon Festival that weekend. Workers stood on spackling stilts, hanging banners and stringing fae lights along temporary canopies. Arnett twisted as he ran, shooting at me. His arm hit a support leg, pulling a man down onto the pavement. Something in the worker’s body snapped when he hit the cobblestones, and my teeth ached in sympathy pain. A string of paper lanterns fell, rolling around underfoot as people scattered away from the concourse.

Wary, the lizards hovered above the heads of the fleeing crowd, their fierce draconian cries lost in the chaos and screams. Arnett took off, tucking his gun against his body and holding the flaps of his jacket down. Shaking my head, I ran after him with the dragons floating behind me.

“Sure, now you hide behind me, you damned scaly chickens.” I panted, rounding the corner and almost falling into the heavy morning traffic near the Embarcadero. Arnett was only a few yards away but still too far for me to tackle him to the ground. A transport ferry from the other side of the Bay was pulling up, announcing its arrival with a blare of its horn. “Son of a bitch. Don’t get on the ferry. Please. Shit.”

A pod of uisge bobbed up and down in the water, their merman handlers herding a smaller transport boat into its moorings. The ocean fae nudged their mounts around, smacking at the uisges’ flanks with their tails to keep the creatures from approaching the pier. One of the larger water horses pulled up sharp, its attention drawn by the commotion on the pier. Its rider wrapped his hand in its seaweed-entangled mane, forcing it to move into the rolling tide. The growing panic on the dock made each uisge nervous, and they rankled, drawing their front legs out of the Bay and slapping their algae-encrusted hooves against the water.

A crested caught up with me, snagging a warm current from an exhaust vent in the sidewalk. From its aggressive crooning, I guessed it was the deranged mutant who’d attacked Arnett. Buoyed by the hot air, it shot forward and snatched a mouthful of Arnett’s balding scalp.

Startled, Arnett let a shot off, but the lizard refused to scatter. He grabbed at the lizard, reaching behind him with his free hand, but the creature’s sleek body was too slippery for him to get a stranglehold on, and it slipped out between his fingers. Riding behind its prey’s wake, the dragon plunged in again, snapping at anything it could grab before Arnett was out of reach. It hounded him, leaving bites and raw pockmarks where its teeth hit.

“Get out of my way.” He fired into the air, sending the crested to flight, and the crowd panicked, becoming a tidal wave of rushing bodies. “Move!”

The ferry’s horn sounded again, followed by the high shriek of its warning klaxon, sounding its imminent departure. Angling across the wooden planks, he ran straight for the boarding deck, the back of his suit dark with sweat and a thin streak of glistening scales chasing him. Arnett was using everything he learned being a cop to drive the crowd into a stampede, but there was nothing I could do to stop him short of shooting him, and I did not want to shoot my partner.

I ran through the sea of frightened people, confusion reigning as they stumbled out of Arnett’s path. Many were workers heading to their buildings, but a few were tourists, up early for a tour of the fog-drenched Bay. The skein mostly kept pace with me, only falling behind when they hit a cold pocket, but they were the least of my worries. If Arnett made the gate, he’d be on the ferry when it pulled out, and there was no way I could make it on. I’d lose him, and with what he had in his pockets, he could make himself disappear for good….

From out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of fae women walking by Arnett, their nearly human faces sparkling with compound, pupilless irises, mascara-blackened eyelashes, and gloss-painted lips. The one on the right was a set of curves in a red suit and pretty features, while the other wore a velvet jacket cut to accommodate her slender wings. Red suit’s waifish body and pert triangular face were typical of an Emerald Isle fae, but her bicolored white and purple hair, cut into a messy bob, was rare. She was the type of woman most men would stop to talk to if there was time. As it was, I momentarily glanced into her widened eyes right before Arnett blew a hole through her head.

Oh Gods, her beautiful, ruined head.

Arnett’s shot left a gaping black hole where her nose and mouth had been, and her chin crumbled as her skull collapsed. Her blood splattered my face, and I tasted her death on my tongue. Her slender butterfly-patterned wings fluttered, catching the wind coming up from the water. Their connective spines lost their rigidity as she died, and they framed her delicate body, blowing out as she fell forward.

I couldn’t catch her. I had to let her fall. Her body kept moving, kept breathing, but her eyes were already dimming—then she was gone.

A scream pierced the air. The woman walking with her broke down and keened, a haunting sound that ended in tears. Her sobs were heart-wrenching, and her hands trembled as they covered her mouth. The round puff of a half-eaten bao tumbled from one of her hands, the bright char siu filling dull against the sharp red of the dead woman’s blood.

People scrambled to get away from Arnett, but in the confusion the crowd thickened, then thinned, making it nearly impossible for him to push through. I saw him turn, his eyes wild, and he reached for the screaming fae. He grabbed a handful of her long blue hair, jerked the woman against him, and placed the gun’s muzzle on her temple.

“Back off, MacCormick. I’ll kill this bitch too.”

Pulling out my gun, I came to a stop, panting hard. A cloud of fury and scales flew past me; then the skein retreated, hovering in the air. They dodged in and out, assessing the situation. At a standstill, Myron’s heft and size finally triggered their danger sense, but the drive to rescue their eggs would soon push them on, and I’d be stuck fighting off one of the largest skeins of crested dragons in the California Upper Regions.

“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 Scottish 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 them 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.

I still didn’t like the gleam in Gaines’s eye, though.

“What’s the catch? From what I was hearing, it was going to be another month.” I didn’t reach for my things. I knew that look. There were going to be conditions of surrender. I could see it. “What do I have to give in to?”

“You’ll have to get a new partner.” He placed a folder next to my gun. “I haven’t figured out who’s pissed me off the most yet. I’ve narrowed it down to two. I’ll let you know in a little bit.”

I left the folder where it lay while my fingers itched to grab it. “Can’t I go solo for a while? I just shot my old partner. No one’s going to want to work with me.”

“Just be thankful he didn’t die.” Gaines handed me a grape lollipop. He’d handed me a lot of lollipops over the years, all of them grape or cherry. “If he did, Internal Affairs would be chewing on your badge for dessert.”

“He could still die. Infection. Someone shoving a pillow over his face—”

“I need you to keep your nose clean. That’s it,” he replied, unwrapping a lollipop for himself. He stuck it into his mouth and sucked the candy into his cheek. “That folder? It’s your IA release. They think you’re a little crazy, kid, and I’m inclined to believe them. You haven’t been the same since….”

He trailed off, but I knew what he was saying. After I lost John and the girls, life seemed easier when lived on the edge. I took more chances than I should, pushed harder than I needed to. Of course, if I’d pushed a bit harder, perhaps I wouldn’t have worn that young girl’s blood on my face. I wondered if the dead fae’s parents would wear a black star on their wrists or if they’d pierce their wings with an onyx star. The fae wore their grief out in the open for all to see. I hated giving her parents the chance to decide how to mourn her. I knew how heavy a black star could get. The three I wore on my wrist grew heavier each year, and today I’d add more ink to my body, weighing me down further.

“I’m good, Uncle Will.” I crossed my heart with a finger. “Promise.”

“Try to stay out of trouble for a few months. That’s all I ask,” he said. “Brae, on the other hand, wants you over for dinner next Saturday.”

“Can’t make it,” I replied. “Girls’ Day.”

“That’s why he wants you over. You shouldn’t be alone again this year. If I had my way, you’d be living in the apartment over our damned garage and maybe even wearing an ankle bracelet so I can keep track of you.”

“Look, Uncle Will, I’m not going to be good company after—”

“We’re not looking for good company.” He’d cut me off in a voice sharp enough to slice frozen bread. “We’re looking for our godson. So be there, Roku, at seven o’clock and with a good red wine. Brae’s making lasagna. Don’t be late or I’ll stew your gizzard for a pie.”

THE GILLEY family were traditionalists, and in their grief, they clung to the old ways to comfort them.

I understood that need for comfort. My mother’s Scottish traditions ran to whiskey, and that was one I’d embraced gladly and fully after my family’s deaths, so I was hardly one to cast a stone—polished or rough—at the wild-eyed swaying young man with furled wings being held up by an older fae man near St. Patrick’s front doors. He stank of rotgut gin, a cheap but quick way to blur the pain eating through him, but grief ravaged his youthful, handsome face, carving years into his sallow skin and pulling down a mouth more used to laughter than crying.

The kid was too young to be Moira Gilley’s boyfriend, and his wing patterns matched hers, so either a brother or a cousin. Someone must have thought he’d be strong enough to greet the streams of devastated people heading up the short flight of stairs, but they were wrong. He was barely holding himself together, and with each face passing him, with each footstep ringing on the stone, he cracked a little bit more.

I went in, carrying the funerary bouquet I’d bought at a flower stand near the end of the block. The roses were pink, the only bit of color left in the selection, so I’d guessed I hadn’t been the only one to do a quick stop to grab a bit of tribute. The inside of the church was enormous, a mellowed stone interior embellished with scrollwork and curlicues. Other than the stained glass windows ringing the nave, it was lean on the normal extraneous decoration, and the soft golden tones of the stonework provided a parchment-hued backdrop for the riot of explosive color faerie funerals were known for.

In death, Moira Gilley’s wings hung as a centerpiece above an altar weeping with broad ribbons of flower cascades and bouquets. The practice was an old one, something a lot of humans had a hard time getting past, but if there was any indication of how tightly the Gilley family clung to the traditional clan ways, it was the sight of their daughter’s detached wings spread out to their full span and reposed over a sea of blooms.

I stopped at the inner threshold, unable to force myself to go one more step. The other mourners flowed around me, a burbling brook of sorrow and whispers. Someone jabbed me in the ribs, a little too hard to be accidental, and I caught a heated mutter about cops and failure, then the glimpse of a red flare across a honeycombed copper gaze. It’d been too much to hope I could slip in unnoticed, unseen. My face was all over the local news, a random shot caught by a reporter in the crowd. I’d been standing in the light afternoon rain, hunched over Moira’s blurred-out body, defeated with my shoulders rolled down, while a few feet away, a pool of blood from Arnett’s claw-and-tooth-induced wounds turned the cobblestones pink, a trickle of darker red nearly running into one of her beautiful limp wings. Accompanying that picture was my official Chinatown Arcane Crimes Division photo and a lovely formal shot of Moira, probably for a graduation or life event. I’d grumbled about the lack of Arnett’s face being plastered all over the news right alongside mine, but life wasn’t ever fair. If it had been, I’d be attending Arnett’s wake instead of staring up at the altar set at the far end of the nave.

So any chance of the jab being accidental? Slim to none. The jabber knew exactly who I was and got a dig in for everyone who thought I should have shot Arnett long before he put a bullet into an intelligent fae’s pretty smiling face. The jabber ducked, unable or unwilling to hold my stare, but I didn’t need much more than the sour look on her face to know I wasn’t welcome.

“Son, can I speak to you for a bit?” A weathered human hand rested on my shoulder, and I turned to find a frocked priest standing next to me. Tall and serene, his clear blue eyes were troubled beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows as white as the snowy mane tumbling back from his pink-flushed face. “The family would like to ask you—”

“It’s okay, Father. I’m not staying. I just needed to send our department’s condolences.” I edged away, politely shaking him off without making a scene. Shoving the flowers I’d brought at him, I smiled as gently as I could. “Can you please make sure the card in there gets to the family? There’s donations from the squad in the envelope.”

“I’ll be sure of it.” His relief brightened the air between us, and his smile nearly cracked through the calm mask he’d put on before approaching me. “Thank you for your understanding. Perhaps later—”

“Just… tell them we’re sorry for their loss.” There was a lot more I’d wanted to say, but the truth was, I’d failed their daughter.

Even as Internal Affairs cleared me of any wrongdoing, I would still see Moira Gilley’s life leaving her face and the light in her eyes dim, the color bleeding from them until they turned ashen in death. I overestimated Arnett’s humanity, and Moira paid for it. There were no words I could say to soothe her family’s grief, and no amount of wishing could pull the clock back in time for me to shoot Arnett before he hit that full-out run on the piers.

“I’ll do that, son. And thank you.” An announcement rang out from by the door, calling everyone lingering outside to come in. “Ah, that’s my cue. The family’s ready to begin the star-striking. You’d best head on out before the doors close. I’ll take this to the family.”

Another jab, this time hard and nearly into my kidney. If I didn’t leave the vestibule soon, I was going to be pissing blood later. The inside of my wrist ached from the memory of needles jabbing in the three black stars I wore for my dead family, and sometimes the five-pointer I’d put on my shoulder for my murdered mother itched, a prickle to remind me of her pushing me to become a good cop. I didn’t have the right to wear one for Moira, not a true star, but she was definitely going to mark my skin along with the others I carried.

“Thanks, Father. I appreciate it.” I sidestepped to the right, making way for the grieving young man who held up the threshold and blindly provided the mourners with a family face to greet them. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

Three

CHINATOWN IN the rain was often painted as a romantic mosaic of murmuring tires on wet streets and misty strings of neon dragons curling up around old-fashioned streetlamps shaped like ancient pagodas. In reality, the district becomes a tangled spiderweb of shadows and rank smells, the sewers thickened with washed-through debris, and the gōngyù bridging the district’s tight alleys turned the rooftop runoff into sticky foul waterfalls, making walking treacherous.

The city lights bleached out the evening sky, turning it the color of a merrow’s dried bone, a smear of algae green and steeped blue nearly hidden beneath clots of suet-gray clouds, their lower layers turned rancid yellow from the rooftop ghettos’ cooking fires. Somewhere close, someone was turning over a batch of fermented kimchee, its fishy, acrid aroma momentarily blotting out some of the stink.

Most cops didn’t tramp through Chinatown’s underbelly in the dead of the night, and certainly not during an icy storm thundering in from the Bay, but the neon and shadow alleys were more familiar to me than my own hand. I’d been raised in the C-Town stews, and I’d run wild with packs of children, both fae and human, a lost innocence weighed down by prejudice and the badge I now wore on my hip. Many of the kids I’d run with were either looking over their shoulder for the law or dead, but there were a few who’d kept to the straight and narrow, and they’d fled Chinatown as soon as they were able, leaving its five-spice and sewage perfumed alleys far behind them.

Not me. I fought to stay there, returning again after John and the girls died. Gaines cautioned me against the move, but I’d needed to be anchored somehow. I’d been drowning in my loss, and Chinatown was… home. For all its smells, noise, and grime, the district wrapped itself around me in a tighter, warmer embrace than I’d ever gotten from my rawboned, sharp-tongued mother, cradling me in its sticky comfort.

The small of my back ached, a stinging reminder of the tiny black star I’d just paid to have inked alongside the other stars I wore for the dead I’d failed. Some were nameless, bodies frozen in death from crimes I couldn’t solve. Some were the murdered I could have saved, their footsteps haunting my nightmares, their empty eyes staring out of the darkness at me, mournful and accusingly harsh. Moira would be one for my dreams, her slender hands shaking me awake as she died in front of me time and time again.

Unlike the memorials I wore for my family, the dead riding the small of my back were tiny reminders of what I did for a living, driving me forward to bring the wicked to justice. I didn’t fear the screaming faces flowing through my dreams as much as I feared that one day, I’d run out of skin to put them on.

I turned a corner and entered Chinatown proper, the entrance to the district’s hidden weave of backstreets and doors leading to places most sane people wouldn’t imagine existed…. Like Brass Fish Alley.

The alley was wide, nearly wide enough to drive two delivery trucks down to its end, but I’d never seen it emptied of the tiny carts and temporary stalls set up along its broad expanse. It was a marketplace of sorts, a rotation of food carts, stalls, and people only the locals could keep track of. I’d lived near the Brass Fish for nearly all my life, and I still had no idea of all its inner workings.

People came by to sit on chairs, dispensing advice and sometimes holistic medicines, but were gone only an hour later, maybe never to be seen again. Nearly permanent structures cobbled together with discarded pallets and wood scraps lined the alley walls. Some of these were minidiners with fierce, loyal followings that would argue the merits of one stall’s ha gow over the next, disparaging the congee from the stall two spaces down. Makeshift tents and hastily built awnings over truck beds offered for sale practically everything under the sun—and a few things that never should have seen the light of day. It was colorful, loud, and full of people who’d be happy to slide a knife into someone’s spine just for the pleasure of warming their cold hands with hot blood.

Man, it felt just like coming home.

Like many places in Chinatown, the alley ran to bright and garish, but a few shadowy corners held up the sides. The stall I wanted was at the far end of the Brass Fish, nearly at the juncture where the walkway split into four slender pathways leading deeper into the stews. Getting through the crowd was easy enough, only a bit of a shuffle past a fresh vegetable stall selling cheap mangos and lychee. The jostling I took as my due. If I was stupid enough to be walking down the marketplace after sunset, I was going to have to expect some roughness. Most of the elderly Asian women—human and fae—were cutthroat shoppers, willing to dig an elbow in between someone’s ribs and dislodge their lung if it meant a cheaper price on lup cheong or shoyu eggs. One caught me in the sternum, expelling the air out of my chest, and I quickened my pace, excusing myself in Cantonese while I waged a territory battle with a flock of little old ladies who could give a gate dragon a run for its money.

I also kept my arm tucked in, protecting my newly reacquired gun and my wallet. As comfortable as I felt in the stews, I wasn’t stupid.

Goma and his stall were a Brass Fish fixture, the squat, round-faced fae man working the grill and noodle pots in the too narrow space between the cooktop and the long plank bolted to the front of the stall’s metal frame that his customers used as a table. I’d known Goma and his family since before I could walk, when eating at his stall meant a break from my mother’s horrible attempts at cooking a meal. He was Odonata like I was, but Japanese—a different bloodline of the same clan—and at some point in his life, he’d lost his wings. I’d asked my mother about it when I was young, but she’d been as closemouthed as ever, saying if Goma wanted me to know what happened, he’d tell me.

He never brought it up, but his shirt poked up between his shoulder blades, uneven juts creating a short span of hills on either side of his spine. I still wondered what happened but now was afraid to ask. I couldn’t imagine anyone hurting the gentle, slightly gruff man who served me noodles and snuck me sweets, but the world was a horrible place despite my best efforts to change it.

Six stools lined up for customers, but only five were open to the public. The sixth was reserved for Goma’s favorites, and he was stingy with his invites. My mother sat on that stool whenever she came by, and one oddly strange normal day, he’d stopped me from sitting down at one of the five with a deep, harsh grunt, pointed to that stool at the far end of the stall, the one closest to where he stood to cook, and ordered me to sit there instead.

I don’t know what I did or said to earn my ass a place on that rickety, cracked vinyl–topped wooden stool, but I fucking sat down as quickly as I could and have sat there ever since.

Goma looked up from his steaming pots, then pointed with a wooden spoon at the stool directly across of him. I was bigger than I’d been when I was fifteen, and the stool creaked slightly under me when I gingerly adjusted my weight across the seat. Thankfully it held, and I hunkered in closer to the plank, using the stall’s wide awning to keep the thickening drizzle off my back. The other stools were full. A skinny guy at the end kept glancing at me nervously and began to suck down entire mouthfuls of noodles, working his chopsticks in and around the steaming threads in an attempt to shovel them faster down his throat.

An elderly black woman burped, then slid off the scratched-up gray metal stool next to me, tossing a few coins into the dented coffee tin Goma used to collect tips. She was barely clear of the seat when she was replaced by a young man in a suit, his black-and-orange wings tucked up as tightly against his back as he could get them, the folds wrinkling his jacket’s darted back.