Dim Sum Asylum

by Rhys Ford

  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, tossin
g 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.

  He and Goma exchanged a few quick words. Then the cook plopped a bowl of rice and fried tentacles in front of the man, the grilled char siu octopus slathered with glistening bright magenta glaze. I scanned the small huddle of people waiting in the dubious shelter of a couple of fire escapes with blue tarps strung up across the span. I recognized a few, mainly thugs who’d been hauled in a time or two when I’d worked patrol, but I was more interested in filling my belly, and unless someone acted up, I could leave well enough alone.

  That apparently wasn’t enough for the skinny guy at the end, because he bolted down the rest of his food and fled into the rain, knocking the stool over in his haste to disappear.

  “Should I worry about that one?” The stool rocked a bit under me when I turned to watch the kid disappear into the crowd, but I didn’t fall over. Wedging my foot against the stall steadied things out, and I leaned forward, resting against the plank.

  “Forget about him. You look like shit.” Goma squinted at me through his thick glasses, his narrowed eyes rheumy and suspicious.

  “It’s been a long day.” The ink on my back still felt like a million pounds of grief under my skin, and despite Gaines handing me back my badge and gun, I questioned whether I could still carry them. “They mourned the girl today. The one Arnett killed.”