by Alyc Helms
“Well, that’s something. All right, let’s go. We’ve got some more bargaining to do.”
Templeton’s body sagged. His eyes widened and he gulped audibly, but the bulges in both cheeks remained. I patted his head in sympathy. My stalwart shadow rat companion. I couldn’t have asked for a better helper.
At Templeton’s urgings, the shadows led us to another set of black-lacquered double doors, similar to my own rooms. I knocked once, then tried the door. It wasn’t locked. It opened into the offices of a corporate CEO. The walls were a neutral dove grey, the carpets a thick Berber in cobalt, black and grey. A large, misshapen chunk of hematite graced a recess in one wall. Opposite that was an amethyst geode almost half my height. Both were lit from above by recessed lighting.
Lung Di sat behind a huge desk of black-lacquered wood, working on a laptop. Two client chairs were set in front of the desk, the kind that were designed to be stylish and uncomfortable. He looked up impatiently, as if I’d actually interrupted him in the middle of work.
“What, no executive assistant?” I asked to fill the silence.
“I had to let the last girl go. She refused to bring me coffee, and she kept demanding better 401k benefits. Also, she was stealing office supplies.”
I shrugged, “That’ll teach you to hire humans. ‘Anything that isn’t bolted down,’ that’s our motto.”
“I believe, ‘that’s why god invented boltcutters’ is a corollary,” he countered with a smile. We were bantering. Dammit. Why couldn’t he just be evil? Things were so much easier when I could dislike a person. I thought about Mian Zi sleeping forlorn and alone in Mei Shen’s bed, and then it wasn’t so hard to recall my purpose.
“I want to see my daughter. And by ‘see’, I mean speak to, touch, interact with, be in her actual presence for an extended period of time.”
He closed his laptop. “Why, Missy. It sounds like you expect me to deal unfairly.”
“You’re the one who set the tone of our negotiations. If you’re going to take me literally, then I’m going to be careful. Fool me once, and all that.”
He conceded the point with a one-shouldered shrug. “Have you thought at all about my ‘Manifesto’ or the other things I told you?”
“Huh. It completely slipped my mind.”
The smile dropped. “I would like to know your thoughts on those matters.”
“Is that what you want in exchange for letting me see Mei Shen?”
He shook his head. “Consider that as payment for your continued presence as my guest. For Mei Shen… I suppose it is still too early to request your pearls? You don’t appear to have much else of value.” His eyes traveled my body with a suggestive lift of a brow. I ignored the suggestion. Maybe the smarm was chronic.
“Appearances can be deceiving.” I put my hand in front of Templeton’s mouth. He whimpered and scrunched his eyes, but spat one of his baubles into my palm: a fire opal covered in rat-saliva. I strode across the room and dumped it, slime and all, into Lung Di’s lap. He glared at me before using his silk pocket square to pick it up.
“Your rat must love you dearly to keep sacrificing his treasures for you.”
“Is it enough?”
He wrapped the opal in the silk and set it on the corner of the desk. “It is, for now.” He pressed a button on a sleek black console that must have been some kind of phone system. “Bring the girl to my office.”
Lung Di turned back to his computer, effectively dismissing me. Templeton pouted. I pretended to examine the amethyst until I heard the door open behind me. I turned in time to take a daughter to the gut. I squatted and clutched her close until she squirmed for release.
“Mother! You’re here! I’m so glad to see you!” I resolved to spend some time in the future teaching Mei Shen how to lie better. Her pip-squeak cheer was a beacon to my paternal senses, indicating in neon, capital letters that SOMETHING was going on. Lung Di watched us, but he didn’t have the same paternal warning system that I did. The nurse hovered nearby, as shifty and pinch-faced as she’d been that day in the alley.
“Have you come to take me home?” Mei Shen asked. “I should like to go home.”
“Not yet, Maybug. Soon, but not quite yet.” I earned a raised eyebrow from my nemesis for that promise. I glared at him.
“I’d like to speak to my daughter alone.”
“You stipulated no such condition.”
“Oh, for the love of– Fine,” I bit out. “You can stay, but the nurse leaves.”
“Then your rat leaves as well.”
I waved my arms at the office. “What do you think I’m going to be able to do here? Against you?”
Lung Di leaned back in his chair. “It isn’t about that. It’s about making sure that you don’t get away with more than what was promised.”
I glowered, but turned to the rat. “Templeton, could you wait outside?”
“But, Missy–”
“Please, just do it.” He shuffled out the door, the nurse following in his wake. She shot a smirk at me over her shoulder as the doors closed.
“Why ‘Templeton’?” Lung Di asked in a musing tone.
“Huh?”
“Why name him Templeton?”
“He didn’t strike me as the Reepicheep type.”
“Ah.” He nudged the silk-wrapped opal with a finger. “I believe you were mistaken.”
“I think you might be right.”
“Who’s Reepicheep?” asked my ever-curious daughter.
“Who’s Reepicheep!” I sputtered in mock outrage. “Why, only the most heroic mouse ever to have lived.”
“A heroic… mouse?” Her skepticism was as exaggerated as my outrage. I shot Lung Di a forbidding glance and herded her to the far corner of the room. He snorted and went back to his work.
It told Mei Shen about Reepicheep and Narnia – how had I ever missed that particular hole in her education? I told her how much her brother missed her, and a lot of the things I’d said already in the qilin’s dream. Once she got into it, Mei Shen was better at playacting that we hadn’t already spoken. Unfortunately, she was so into it that I couldn’t determine whether she’d done her part. It was probably better that way. From the angle of Lung Di’s head and the lack of keyboard clacking, I was pretty sure he could hear every word we said.
After too short a time, Lung Di approached and put his hand on Mei Shen’s shoulder. She started to protest, but I shushed her with a warning glance.
“So soon?” I complained, because I knew he expected it. “You hardly gave us any time at all.”
“I gave you half an hour. Nurse,” he called. Within moments the hag was back. Templeton sulked by the door. “Take Lung Mei Shen Mi back to her rooms and help her get ready for bed.”
The old woman grabbed Mei Shen and whisked her away before I could do more than squeeze her hand in farewell. I gazed at the door long after it shut behind them. I could feel Lung Di’s eyes on me, but he had a dragon’s patience. I broke the silence.
“You’re wrong, you know.”
“About what?” He gestured toward the desk and the uncomfortable client chairs, but I stayed where I was. It was his choice to remain standing or sit at his desk and shout across the room at me. He chose to remain standing. Point for me.
“Everything.” I flicked a glance at him, then looked back at the door that had closed on my daughter. “Well, maybe not everything. You’re right that mortals need to learn to fight our own battles. We also need to learn the consequences of getting in over our heads and of messing with powers we don’t understand.”
I turned back to him and crossed my arms. “But we don’t need to become monsters in the process. You’re the one who decided that for us, and you’re the one making it happen. I don’t know if it will make us stronger. I don’t know if it’s the best way to prepare us. I doubt it on both counts, and I think it’s the kind of thing we should figure out on our own.
“What I do know is that out of all of your siblings, you’re
the hypocrite. They cut the apron strings. They retreated into Heaven. They have been letting us fight our own fights. Even Jian Huo tries to keep his nose out of things most of the time. You’re the only one who stayed down here, meddling with us, because you think you know better.” His face remained impassive, but his fists clenched at his sides, knuckles white. I stopped before my words caused him to forget his hospitality. The last thing I wanted was to be backhanded across the room.
He twitched a moment longer, then chuckled. If it weren’t for the tightness still around his mouth, I would have thought him unaffected. “You are blind to the complexity of the matter.”
“Probably. Undoubtedly. Half the time, I’m not even sure what’s going on right in front of me. But I know you’re wrong about what you’re doing. And about Jian Huo and me.”
“You know nothing. You’ve convinced yourself what you want to believe, simply because you want to believe it.”
“Maybe, but you didn’t manage to convince me that the how and the why don’t matter, and you never will. And doesn’t that just stick in your craw?”
One fist jerked up. I flinched back. That’d teach me to let my mouth run off in the presence of an angry dragon. Jian Huo was a bad influence on my common sense.
“Get out. Now. Before I forget that you are my guest and recall that you are less than nothing to me. Before I decide that killing you will be adequate to my purposes, and I put an end to your irritating little existence.”
I wanted to believe that it was an empty threat, but that fist hadn’t lowered, and his knuckles were still white from clenching. I bowed my head and forced myself to walk – not run – from the room. Templeton trailed behind me. I didn’t stop until I reached the questionable safety of my own rooms. Only when the doors were shut did I allow myself to give in to my fear.
I didn’t stop shaking for an hour.
* * *
“Missy. Missy, the shadows say he has finally left.”
It was late the next day – or, at least, I assumed the lighter murky green of my skylight indicated daytime in the city above. I’d spent a fitful night and a restless day. I didn’t dare leave my rooms until I’d given Lung Di some time to calm down.
“You’re sure?” I asked, more out of anxiety than doubt.
“They’re sure,” he corrected.
“Right. Right. OK.” I glanced around the room, as if any surveillance devices Lung Di had left would be visible. I was gambling on his overconfidence being his weakness, and hoping that my faith in my friends wasn’t mine. In the end, it all came down to Templeton.
I took a deep breath. No use wasting worry over my paranoia. It was now or never. “So, what did the nurse say? Did Mei Shen convince her? Will she do it?”
“She’s worried that your word won’t be enough to protect her from the wrath of Lung Di and Lung Huang. She said that she’ll only accept the second comb as protection.”
I sighed in relief. “So then, she’ll do it?”
Templeton hesitated. The rat had no respect for my blood-pressure. “Ye-es. But she said that if the comb was protection, she still needed payment. She wanted something more, so I…” he plucked up his hairless tail, worrying it between his paws. My stomach dropped even further. He hadn’t given up the entire game, had he?
“Templeton, what did you do?”
“I… Igaveheryourboots,” he confessed in a rush.
“My what?”
“Your boots. The ones in your bag. I was trying to find something in there to offer her, and she saw them, and she said they would do.”
“My… boots? Why would she want those?” I couldn’t fathom a reason. They were destroyed, the leather eaten away by–
“Demon blood,” Templeton answered a split second before I came to the same realization. “That’s what she said – that she could do a lot with the lifeblood of such a powerful demon.”
I tucked away my concern over the implications of that. I’d deal with it later when it came to bite me in the butt. Templeton misinterpreted my silence.
“I’m sorry, Missy. I didn’t mean to give away your boots. I hope I didn’t mess up the plan.”
I shook my head and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “No, you did good. I just brought them along for luck. I guess they worked.” His nose twitched in what I’d come to interpret as ratty happiness. There were times when I envied how easy his moods were. “So, she agreed to do it, then?”
“She… she wanted her knife back, too. She said it was sympathetic to the kind of magic that makes people see what you want them to see. But I told her it wasn’t possible, that you didn’t bring it,” he assured me in a rush. “She said she might be able to make do with something else, but it will be a shoddy copy. The illusion won’t last long.”
“I don’t need it to last long. Just long enough. Did she say when it would be done?”
“Tonight.”
“That doesn’t give us much time. Let’s hope Lung Di gets back before then. Otherwise, we’ll have to go with Plan C.”
“What’s Plan C?”
I frowned. “There isn’t one.”
The wait was interminable. I puttered. I changed clothes. I tried not to be irritated at Templeton as he crouched on top of my knapsack under the coffee table, whispering in the shadow-tongue to his final bauble. I forced myself to sit still on the floor near him. I concentrated on the incomprehensible whispers, letting the shadow speech chase away all my other fears. In my laid-back acceptance of the rat, I often forgot that he was formed of raw shadow, shaped only by the name I’d laid upon him. Just below the surface was a quiescent mass of primal terror – scrabbling on the floorboards, chittering in the darkness of the night. Plague, death, decay. If I concentrated, I could just make out those darker notes on the edge of my senses. I let the fears wash over me, clearing away my lesser anxieties. I meditated on Fear, and let my own go. Welcome to the dark side of the Force.
“Templeton,” I said after a time. “After the final trade, whatever happens, you’re free to go. In fact, I want you to go. Take my bag and meet me back on the plain where I first called you.”
He raised startled eyes from his bauble. His whiskers twitched. “Won’t you still need me? To guide you out of this place?”
“It will be too dangerous. We’ll just have to hope the shadows will follow your instructions after you’ve gone. If things go according to plan, Lung Di will be furious. I don’t think he’ll kill me, but there’s nothing to keep him from killing you.”
I leaned forward and placed a hand over his, covering the chunk of glass. “Thank you, Templeton. I know it’s been hard for you. I couldn’t have asked for a truer friend.”
“I will always be a friend to you, Missy.”
I said nothing. Templeton, not Reepicheep. I had inscribed avarice into his nature when I named him. I knew it. Lung Di knew it. But Templeton demonstrated that he was oblivious to that fact when he handed me his final bauble.
* * *
“I want to put Mei Shen to bed.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The shadows informed Templeton the moment Lung Di returned. We made our final preparations in silence. Even our goodbye was no more than a wet nose snuffling against my cheek as I hugged him a little too tightly. I left him giving the shadows firm instructions to help me or fear his wrath and that of the Conclave. I hoped it worked. I hoped it all worked. I left my room in search of my nemesis. I found him in an alcove off the main room, looking through thick windows into the murky waters of the Huangpu.
“I said, I want to put Mei Shen to bed: tuck her in, get her a glass of water, all of the things I normally do when I put her to bed. And I want to do it without you or the Nurse hovering nearby. An hour of quality mother-daughter alone time, that’s what I want.”
“Are you sure? Even with your rat’s treasures, you have little left to trade. Shouldn’t you save what you do have for something that matters?”
I crossed my arms and shot him a
challenging look. Let him think I was losing patience with his games. It wasn’t far off the mark. “This matters. To me. To both of us. And you and I both know that the next time we bargain, it will be for Mei Shen, and you won’t be accepting any baubles. I just want to have one last bedtime with my daughter.” My voice cracked, and it wasn’t entirely playacting.
“And what are you offering in trade? Your pearls?”
I shook my head and handed him Templeton’s third bauble, the water-softened chunk of glass. He took it and favored me with an enigmatic smile.
“We could just end this charade now, you know,” he said, taking my arm and pulling me deeper into the shadows of the alcove. “I would give you Mei Shen in exchange for the pearls. We both know it, just as we both know that you’ll do it – that you’ve already decided you’ll do it. Why keep stalling with these games?”
“You would just give her up for the pearls? Here and now?”
“Yes.”
“Why? If she’s one half of the weapon that will lead to your destruction, why give her up for anything?”
“And paint myself the villain in her eyes?” He arched a brow. “Anything I did to her would only make her will stronger, or turn her against me. Better to keep her for a short time, demonstrate what a ‘swell guy’ I am, and then let her leave as soon as her mother comes to get her. But you and I both know the truth of what I’m giving up, and I won’t give it up for nothing.”
“Why do you want the pearls?”
“I could sleep with you instead. It would do nearly the same damage, but…” He shook his head and turned again to gaze out the window. “No. Jian Huo could always deceive himself into thinking that you were unwilling. Forced. The pearls offer less in the way of visceral pleasure, but they are symbolic. He will know exactly what you’ve spurned in exchange for your daughter.”
“So, why not just take them, then? I’m here at your mercy. Why haven’t you just taken them?”
“And how would that be different from forcing you?” He aimed his question at my reflection in the glass. “You’ll give them to me, of your own will, to save your daughter. I will not have them by force or guile.”
