by Jaye Wells
“First you lie to me, and now you reject my hospitality.” She shook her head, making the light spark off the tip of her jade horn. “A less generous person might be insulted.”
Since Morales was the one with experience with this crew, I decided to keep quiet. He held up his hands. “We meant no disrespect. By all means, we would love to try your duck.”
She nodded briefly and ran a small hand over the crisp skin of the duck’s carcass. “Peking duck is a delicacy where I come from.”
“Hell?” I guessed.
She ignored my joke. “Beijing. Luckily, my people brought the recipe with us when we moved to Los Angeles. You ever try it when you were there, Special Agent Morales?”
His jaw twitched. “You made it for me on several occasions and you know it.”
Yü Nü pulled a cleaver out from under the butcher block. My hand automatically went to my sidearm. She paused and gave me a disappointed look.
“Relax, Detective. It’s for the duck.”
To punctuate her point, she brought the blade down in the center of the duck’s back. The butcher knife chopped through the crispy skin easily. I wasn’t sure whether I should feel worried or hungry, but I was both.
“I knew a man looked like you,” she said in a conversational tone, “but he called himself by another name. What was it?”
“Tommy Swan.” Morales bit off the name like a curse, only it sounded like he was damning himself instead of her.
She looked at me. “Did you know your partner used to go by an alias?”
I didn’t move or answer.
She lifted the cleaver again. “Tommy Swan disappeared right after my cousin got arrested.”
Morales crossed his arms. “He sold dangerous potions to minors.” He looked at me. “Sold at illegal raves. Last count, about twenty kids OD’d on his shit before we tracked him down at the supplier.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Did Tommy ever tell you about the night that cop died? Sure didn’t seem like the law then.”
Morales had never mentioned that he’d actually been there the night that cop had been murdered. He’d only told me he helped cover up the murder in an effort to continue his part of the investigation. I shot him a sideways glance. He refused to look at me.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Yü Nü said with a smirk. “Anyway, I know why you are here.” With a single, decisive whack of her left hand, she lopped the duck’s neck clean from its body. “You harassing us because we’re immigrants.”
Morales tilted his chin to a don’t-bullshit-a-bullshitter angle. “Give me a break, lady. We’re Arcane agents, not INS.”
“Arcane, huh?” The cleaver came down on the torso again, cleanly cutting it in two. The carcass split open to reveal the glistening meat. “We simple restaurant folk.”
When we’d come in, she’d barely had an accent, but now she was talking like a caricature of a Chinese immigrant.
“Simple, sure,” I said. “Why would simple folk be in business with Abe Prospero?”
“Who he?”
“He’s the head of the Votary coven,” Morales said. “Just like you’re the head of the Fangshi.”
She tilted her head back and cackled. “You crazy. Yü Nü is simple cook. No Fangshi here.”
“Most cooks don’t have a private security team.” Morales tilted his head at the women standing in a semicircle behind Yü Nü.
She hacked off a wing. “Babylon is dangerous. Never know who gonna stab you in the back.” She sliced a chunk of meat from the duck’s breast. Juice and fat oozed from the roasted meat.
My shoulder blades tingled. I glanced over my shoulder. To my relief, no one was sneaking up behind me.
Morales took a step forward. The Handmaidens tensed, their hands going to their voluminous sleeves, where Lord only knew what kind of weapons were waiting to be employed.
Morales held up his hands. “Easy, ladies.” To Yü Nü he said, “Look, we all know how this is going to go down from here. Once you let us go, the first thing we’re going to do is call a judge to get a warrant. I figure we already got you on threatening federal officers, unregistered firearms, and a few hygiene violations, not to mention I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I tend to get pretty angry if I don’t eat.”
“It’s true,” I said. “He’s a bear when he’s hungry.” I shuddered theatrically. “Which means I’ll have to spend some time trying to get him to calm down and not try to get your restaurant shut down altogether.”
The cleaver came down on the duck’s other breast, lopping the entire thing off. “No one has threatened you and you’re free to go whenever you’d like. You came to me, remember?”
I noticed she’d dropped the fake immigrant accent now that we were getting down to the real business.
“As for the firearms,” she continued, “my Handmaidens are merely mentees of mine, and the armed guards outside work for the Benevolent Society of the Thousand Suns.”
Beside me, I heard Morales curse under his breath. I shot him a look but only received a quick headshake in return.
“As for closing down this restaurant, you are more than welcome to try.” She slammed the cleaver down on a wing, severing it from the torso, to punctuate her words. “I should warn you, though, that Mayor Volos loves our duck.”
I started laughing before she finished talking. Beside me, Morales cracked a smile. I slapped my knee and wiped my eyes. “Woo, thanks for that!”
Yü Nü’s scowl scored deep grooves on either side of her downturned mouth. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.
I cleared my throat and got ahold of myself. “‘I’m close personal friends with Mayor Volos,’” I mimicked. “Lady, you have no idea how little that scares me. In fact, it sorts of makes me want to try that much harder to bring you down.”
“Kate,” Morales said in a warning tone.
She clearly wasn’t keeping up, which was fine with me. Instead of continuing the back-and-forth over our errant mayor, she changed tacks. “You can stomp around in your boots and issue threats all you want, but you’re just a little girl playing a dangerous game.” Her hands glistening with fat, she began scooping the bits of skin and meat into a takeout container. She moved with an economy that hinted at years of experience butchering roasted meat in busy kitchens. “He said you’d be trouble.”
The bait she’d tossed was hard to resist, but I managed not to ask for a name. “Damn straight.”
She took my cockiness in stride. “Little girl, I been around too long to trust the word of any wizard. Especially ones that carry a badge.”
“You don’t look so tough,” I said.
Morales cursed under his breath.
Yü Nü held my gaze and lifted the cleaver into the air with her left hand. She placed her right hand flat on the chopping block, fingers spread. “You daring me, girlie?”
“Um, no?”
Her eyes glowed with disturbing zeal. Without looking down, she swung the blade. The unforgiving edge hacked right through her thumb.
Bile rushed up the back of my throat, but I forced myself not to close my eyes.
Yü Nü didn’t cringe or cry. She smiled.
The chopping block was splattered with blood. She didn’t move her hand. Watching her, I wondered what she was trying to accomplish by cutting off her damned thumb.
It didn’t take long to get my answer. The green horn began to glow, as if lit from inside. Yü Nü finally closed her eyes and the light spread until she was bathed in it.
The thumb on the chopping block began to vibrate. I blinked, wondering if it was a trick of the light. But when I reopened my eyes, sure enough, the thumb was moving toward the hand.
The light intensified once the thumb touched the wound. I stepped forward for a closer look. The skin where the thumb had been severed bubbled and hissed. It was almost as if the horn’s light was cooking the thumb back in place.
Once the smoke cleared and the light receded, Yü Nü lifted her hand. One of h
er maidens came forward with a basin. She dipped the hand in, carefully washing off the gore. When Yü Nü lifted it out of the water, the skin was unblemished.
Yü Nü clenched her hand into a fist and then wiggled the thumb to demonstrated that it was uninjured.
I swallowed hard. Morales had said she was rumored to be immortal, but I hadn’t believed him. Wizards, especially ones who worked in alchemy, were always claiming to have found the elixir. But I’d never actually met one.
Despite the kitchen’s heat, I suddenly felt chilled to the bone.
“You want to try?” Yü Nü said tauntingly.
I put my hands behind my back. “I’ll pass.”
She cackled.
“All right,” Morales said. “Where’s Alexander Hung?”
She scraped the edge of her blade over the cutting board’s bloody surface. “Who?”
“Part owner of this restaurant.”
She licked the fingers of her left hand. “Don’t know investors. Just cook.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
She raised her greasy hands and looked around, wide-eyed. “Do you see him?”
“I saw him come here the other night,” I said.
“Maybe he picked up some egg rolls,” she said without missing a beat.
“All right,” Morales said to me. “It’s time to go.”
I nodded and started to turn away.
“Take this with you,” Yü Nü’s voice rang out. “The least I can do for interrupting your dinner.” She held out a white plastic bag with a large yellow smiley face on the front. “I threw in some fortune cookies, too.”
When we hesitated, she sighed and came from around the back of the counter. She shoved the bag into Morales’s hand but held on, forcing him to look at her. “You listen,” she said in an undertone, “Coming after Yü Nü is a waste of your time. I didn’t kill anyone.”
He pulled back. “Oddly, I don’t feel inclined to take your word for it.” He handed the bag back to her. “And I’ve lost my appetite. Let’s go, Kate.”
He turned to walk out. Instead of following immediately, I snatched the bag out of Yü Nü’s hands. “I haven’t lost my appetite.” And then I turned on my heel and marched past the armed men.
“Detective Prospero?” she called.
I turned and raise a brow.
“He’s going down soon. You want to sink with him?”
I laughed. “For what?” I held up the duck. “All I did was pick up dinner. You’re the one putting on the display here.”
“The Fangshi have resources you can’t begin to imagine. We’ll find something that will stick.”
“Not if we do first.”
She raised her chin and the light caught the jade horn, making it spark milky green. “You don’t want to start a war with Yü Nü, little girl.”
I snorted. “No, lady, you don’t want to start a war with a Prospero.”
Chapter Nineteen
The last thing we wanted to do after leaving Jade Moon was go back to Gardner and let her know we didn’t have Alexander Hung. I was pretty sure telling her we managed to get ourselves on the shitlist of a Chinese sorceress was also not news that would excite her.
Also? Morales hadn’t spoken to me since we left the restaurant.
“Do you think Yü Nü put the hit out on Krystal?” I said, as he pulled the SUV from the curb.
He stared out the windshield as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Hello?”
“What?”
“Earth to Morales, it’s me—your partner.” I leaned forward and waved my arms. “Don’t shut down on me now, okay?”
He finally looked over. “We just kicked a hornet’s nest in there.”
“All the more reason to find Hung and bring him in for questioning.”
He shook himself, getting back in the game. “Let’s head over to the apartment building. See if we can rustle him up.”
Ten minutes later, we pulled up in front of the Phoenix, a luxury apartment building on the Steel River. The project had been built by Volos’s real estate development company as part of their larger project to revitalize the Cauldron. Volos lived on the fourth floor, which, according to Shadi’s notes that Gardner texted me, was the same floor where Hung was staying.
“Hold on,” I said. “Hung is staying in the apartment where Mayor Owens used to live.”
Mayor Skip Owens had run Babylon until a psycho who thought he was the second coming of Dionysus killed him and tried to frame Aphrodite for the crime. He had lived in one of the penthouses in the building and Volos had the other, but now I guessed Volos owned both. Typical.
“Looks like,” Morales said. “I hope they at least put a new bed in there.”
Owens had been poisoned and his body had been found wearing a gimp mask and arranged like the Hanged Man from the tarot.
“Odd that Volos is keeping Hung so close,” I said.
“Is it really?” he said, getting out of the car. I jumped out to, and when we met up again on the sidewalk, he said, “It’s looking more and more like the Chinese are making lots of interesting alliances in town.”
We headed toward the art deco doors. “What I’m curious about is whether Volos and Abe know about each other. Seems like the Chinese would want to keep each of their side pieces unaware of each other.”
Inside the lobby, there was a security guard dressed in a slick navy suit. He had jet black hair and a scowl as imposing as the Great Wall. Oh, yeah, and he was of Asian descent.
Surprise, surprise.
“Who are you here to see?” he demanded. Guess they didn’t teach public relations at scary security guard school.
I was pretty sure that the second we told him we were looking for Alexander Hung, he’d push a button on a console to alert our quarry to scurry out the building’s back exit. “Mayor Volos,” I said.
Morales didn’t turn to look at me, but he did nudge my ankle with his toe—a subtle What the fuck? signal.
“He expecting you?”
I shook my head. “No, but he’ll see us. Tell him Kate’s in the lobby. We’re old friends.”
The guard didn’t look convinced but he did pick up the black phone from the console. He turned away as he spoke quietly. After a couple of moments, he looked back at us over his shoulder and said into the mouthpiece, “I understand, sir.”
My stomach dropped. Had my visit to the mayor’s office ruined any pull I had over Volos?
The guard hung up the phone. “He says he wasn’t expecting you.”
I licked my lips nervously and opened my mouth to try to BS my way out of this, but the guard wasn’t done.
His face cleared. “But he said you can head on up.”
Shock held me motionless for a second, but then Morales tugged on my sleeve. Next thing I knew, we were alone in the elevator, on our way up to the fourth floor.
I could practically feel Morales holding back on a lecture he didn’t dare deliver. Volos had every inch of the public spaces in that building under surveillance. There was no doubt he was watching and listening to us.
“Nice night,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” Morales crossed his arms.
Fine, so he wasn’t happy. I could handle that. If we could have talked, I would have told him that I made the play because I knew the guard wouldn’t let us up there if we mentioned Hung’s name. This way, we could get to the fourth floor, no problem. We just had to figure out how to shake Volos and get over to Hung’s place.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened. I’d sort of been hoping we could just sidle out and head to Hung’s place. However, Volos waited for us in the open doorway of his apartment.
“Kate, Morales—what a nice surprise!”
“Shit,” I said.
“Lucy, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do when this is all done,” Morales said under his breath.
“Just follow my lead,” I said under my breath.
Before he could point out we were in that situation becau
se I’d taken the lead, I raised a hand to wave. “Hey, Mr. Mayor.”
Volos’s posture changed from a gotcha stance to that of an animal who smells an ambush. “What brings you here?”
We exited the elevator. “Actually, the guard misunderstood,” I said. “We were on our way to meet your new neighbor.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the door jamb. “Is that right?”
“You didn’t mention Alexander Hung was living in your building when I saw him at your office the other day.”
“Did think it was any of your business, Detective.”
The switch in address was meaningful. When he thought he had the upper hand, he called me “Kate” or “Katie.” When he thought I had something on him, it was always “Detective.”
“Anyway, we’ll just show ourselves over.” I turned toward the door on the opposite end. Halfway there, I realized two things. First, Morales wasn’t behind me. Second, Volos wasn’t trying to stop me.
I turned to see them both watching me with their arms crossed and near-identical expressions of masculine annoyance on their faces.
“What?” I demanded, feeling pretty annoyed myself.
“He left this morning.” Volos pushed off from the jamb. “Anyone else need a drink?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Morales said, and followed him inside.
I stood alone in the hall for a second, wondering what just happened. Volos and Morales never agreed on anything. Why in the hell did they have to pick being pissed off at me as their first time?
I heaved a martyred sigh and marched into the apartment. Inside, Volos was at the bar, pouring three drinks, and Morales stood at the windows, looking out over the darkened water.
“What do you mean, he left this morning?” I demanded.
“What isn’t clear about that statement?” Volos shrugged and offered me a glass with two fingers of something amber-colored.
“He’s a suspect in a murder investigation, John. Don’t fuck with us here.”
