Dim Sum Asylum

by Rhys Ford

  “Did the netsuke found in Jie match the one attached to me? I know the other one, the one on Takahashi, was an exact match.” I did a quick sketch of a scorpion rolled up in a ball, then a question mark next to Jie’s name. “I’m working on a theory of threes, but it’s sketchy at best.”

  “You’re not wrong,” he agreed, nodding his chin toward the examination table slickened with blood and bits of bone. “I did the preliminary on the piece before I gave my initial findings report to Captain Gaines. I had visual confirmation of the object matching the previous two found, and from what I could see from my base casting, they were animated in the same circle. Similar echoes of power were found on the other two victims, as well as the shrine god you tossed off that building.”

  I was about to deny destroying evidence when I caught the mischievous twinkle in Jaan’s eye. “Nice. Trust me. If I could have, I’d have caught the damned thing before it broke. It was more mobile than the scorpion that came after me. Supposition on that? Ceramic is more malleable?”

  “Yes, but also more delicate. The stonework netsuke would be slower because stone bends less than pottery. It’s a solid structure, whereas ceramics are an amalgamation, so the binding of materials is weaker.” He frowned, then got on his knees in front of a low cabinet, muttering something under his breath.

  “Can’t hear you,” I called out as he shoved his hand under the cabinet. “So, initial spell analysis confirms the threes theory. I guessed the statue could have been a last-minute swap out because of the change in materials.”

  “Either that or it was a test,” Jaan replied, his voice muffled by the shelving. I heard a lens shutter go off three times. Then Jaan’s hand shot up to place a camera on the clean evidence mat he’d laid down earlier. “Sorry, I’ve got to document where this fell. But yes, the change of materials is interesting, but it could be the caster simply trying out the components to see if it was viable. A dry run up to the main event, as it were. That’s a common practice for intensely powerful spell work. You’d want to see if something worked on a smaller scale before dumping all of your energy into a flawed ritual.”

  “Two people died simply to test out a spell?” I rested my hip against a table outside of the cordoned-off area. “It makes sense since I can’t find anything solid to link the victims, except for a nebulous thread to a woman who’s gone missing. Still, seems kind of extreme.”

  “Some people do not respect the sanctity of life, Inspector. You of all people should know that.” He stood up, his coveralls sticky with a smear of blood. “There’s something under here. If I can’t get it out on my own, do you think you can help me? I won’t think less of you if you say no. This is… I know this is difficult for you. She was your friend.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here and sent Trent to corral Ghost,” I said softly. “Wait… if this guy is doing an open-ended casting with the animation having a clear resolution, like killing me, and it doesn’t complete the job before it’s broken, isn’t there an overflow? Unused magic from the casting? If he’s doing a thirds casting and doesn’t want the magic returned to him, is the overflow going into the third object? Could that be why the netsuke exploded?”

  “You know, you’re wasted wearing a badge, Inspector,” Jaan said with a chuckle. “Are you sure you don’t want to be down here with me? Most cops just know the basics like salt, tea, or holy water.”

  “Magic theory’s an interest, and, well, I work in Dim Sum Asylum, remember? How am I supposed to track down arcane abuse if I don’t know what I’m looking at?” I made another diagram, working out the possible schematics of the spell. “It could be why the first third grouping included the shrine god. It was bigger and connected to the tanuki netsuke because both are symbols of fertility.”

  “The statue didn’t shatter into dust,” Jaan replied. “Not like the scorpion netsuke. I have hopes of retrieving the caster’s signature from the larger pieces because, yes, I suspected that is where the overflow is pouring into, because the caster wouldn’t want a line of power leading back to them. It would make them extremely traceable.”

  “I’ve got that missing woman I suspect he’s using to fuel the animations, but I’ve not got anything confirming that.” There were too many loose ends, and my frustration grew as I contemplated the lack of leads. “Do you think you can follow the signature of power to who he’s using to fuel these? Or do you think a caster could be powerful enough to animate these using his own essence?”

  “Possible, but that would be someone extremely powerful. I think your hunch of the missing person wouldn’t be that far off the mark. It’s happened before, just not for murder. Well, not that we know of. Who knows what goes on out there that we don’t catch.” Armed with what looked like a pair of barbecue tongs, Jaan was back on his knees, his face nearly touching the floor as he peered under the cabinet again. “I could roll this all out, but I don’t want to damage what’s under… ah, here we go. Got it!”

  Jaan came up triumphant, his skinny face nearly split in two by his broad smile. Carefully maneuvering the pair of plastic-wrapped tongs up and over the edge of the cabinet’s top, Jaan slowly straightened up, then placed the broad adze-shaped bone he’d found on the floor onto the pad next to the camera. The piece was intact, a bit of something fibrous feathering from one of its ends, and I watched as the grin on Jaan’s face slithered away into a frown.

  “Huh.” I had my own frown, trying to make sense of the bone he’d found. “Were there any other people in here? Well, dead people?”

  “No, just your friend.” Jaan moved on to full scowl, and he stared across the room at me, his face flushing a deep red. “This is not good.”

  “Nope. It is not.” The scapula was a bit battered but fairly whole. Dried blood spotted its surface, and its elegant sweep was unmarred by any markings or breaks. It was, for the most part, a perfect example of a scapula. “You knew she was faerie, right?”

  The majority of fae shoulder blades were distinctive: two pieces of bone, joints, and tendons evolution developed to support a pair of wings. Some, like myself, didn’t have wings, but the bone structure remained the same, a splayed-out piece connected to a shorter slice with a Hell of a lot of muscle attached to the whole area. Even though the fae hadn’t been airborne in millennia, our bodies weren’t aware of it and continued to act as if a pair of hollow, fragile appendages could somehow deadlift a hundred pounds off the ground with a few pumps of our shoulder muscles.

  It was one of the first things Forensics looked for in found remains, the qualifier in a laundry list of markers used to roughly identify a victim, and there was no way the bone Jaan just found belonged to Jie.

  “Of course I knew she’s faerie. I took down her particulars from Yamada. The body we had on the table matched the victim’s appearance,” Jaan ground out. “Her prints and blood samples were sent out, but she was IDed by multiple witnesses on the scene. Everyone there came back with the same identification, Jung Jie. The testing was simply procedure, so I let it go in without a rush on it.”

  “Well, I hate to break this to you, but that couldn’t belong to Jie.” Stating the obvious to Jaan got me a withering look, but I didn’t care. The headache I’d pushed back into the recesses of my skull came roaring back, grabbing at the space between my eyeballs and pulling at the muscles there until I could feel my teeth squeaking. “Okay, so two things: who was that on the slab, and then, where the Hell is Jie?”

  “WHAT DO you mean that wasn’t Jie?” Ghost rose out of his chair, and I had to place a hand on Trent’s ribs to stop him from shoving the sylph back down. “I fucking found her! It was Jie.”

  “And I’m telling you, the person we had on that table wasn’t Jie, Ghost.” I went in soft, keeping my voice to a rolling murmur. “Look, I’m as confused as you are, but that’s the truth of it. That wasn’t Jie. It looked like her, but that body… that woman… was human. So do me a favor. Tell me everything you saw and heard from the moment you entered the club right up until
you found the body.”

  I’d asked Trent to find a conference room or something to put Ghost in to cool his heels. The last thing I wanted the sylph to do was get his wings up and refuse to answer questions. So rather than use one of the offices, he’d commandeered the research library, plopped my somewhat-brother into a wing chair, and handed him a cup of tea. If the situation hadn’t been so fraught with emotion and tension, I’d have laughed my ass off at the sight of Ghost holding a delicate porcelain cup and saucer as he tried to figure out what he’d landed in to get served hot oolong.

  Dim Sum Asylum librarians took great pride in their workspace, transforming what had been an old records storage space into an area resembling an old Victorian study, complete with tall wooden bookshelves, tapestry rugs, and faux silk wallpaper they’d plastered onto the room’s water-stained outer panels. I’d seen more than one cop step back out of the library’s swinging double doors to make sure they were still in the station and not somehow relocated elsewhere, since that was a piece of magic no one’d ever mastered without dire consequences to the transported.

  There was a perfume to the library I loved, and I would have laid a bet down that Trent was secretly orgasming over the sweet vanilla muskiness of aging paper and leather permeating the air. I’d caught him making more than a few longing glances over at the stacks, and his rigid shoulders were the only sign I saw of him locking down his impulse control. When the archive’s chunky, temperamental winged caiman trilled at him from its perch on the top of the animal totem reference shelves, I saw Trent fall in love, and I was going to have to work to keep him from stealing the dark purple and lime green reptile and taking it home.

  The makeover of the library had been a not-so-silent protest against the arcane morgue winning the battle for the renovated basement despite the researchers’ expansion into the lab’s former area. Kept dry with a liberal application of dehumidify spells, the Asylum’s research library boasted one of the largest collection of spell craft and ritual forensic materials in the entire country, a bragging right they snootily rubbed Salem University’s nose in whenever a visiting librarian came by.

  I had no idea how competitive and vicious librarians were until I was assigned to the Asylum, and after that I learned to pretty much give them everything they asked for, because I never knew when I was going to need something. Case in point, a safe and comfortable place to question my demi-stepbrother about a woman we’d both known since we were sprogs.

  “Hard to believe you two are brothers,” Trent commented softly. “You look nothing alike.”

  “Brothers?” Ghost echoed back. “Yeah, I guess you can call us that.”

  “His father and my mother had a….” I hated to use the word “relationship,” because my mother had been hard on her life. There hadn’t been space for anyone in it but me, and sometimes it’d grown a bit tight between us as my own Scottish Odonatan stubbornness ramped up through my puberty.

  “A thing. They had a thing. On and off,” Ghost clarified for Trent. His anger lessened, his shoulders lowering and his wings unfurling from their tight clench against his back. “Spent a lot of my time either glad to see this asshole or needing to beat the shit out of him.”

  “It’s odd, but not surprising, how that seems to be the common reaction where Roku is concerned,” Trent drawled.

  “Cute. Both of you. Focus now. I need anything you can give me about this, Ghost. Anything at all.” I scooted forward, putting myself at the edge of the seat I’d taken in front of him. “What did you see when you went into the office? Did you see the netsuke attack her? Or was she already gone when you came in?”

  “She was… the woman was lying on the floor.” His eyes narrowed, gaze going distant. The pretty aloof charmer we’d seen at Kingfisher’s was barely visible in him now. Instead the brawling fierce sylph I’d grown up next to sat across from me, his ire flushing a bit of pink over his skin. “She was between the desk and the wall, on her back, so at first all I saw were legs and a skirt. I remember thinking that Jie must have been out of her mind. Her clothes… she was wearing a flowery dress. That’s not…. Jie would never wear that, but then I saw she wasn’t moving, and after that—none of that mattered.”

  “How was she lying down when you found her?” Trent interjected. “Did you move her? The report said one of her arms was under the desk, up against the back leg.”

  “I didn’t move her, but her throat was moving,” Ghost murmured, stroking down his throat. “Here. Right here, but her eyes were open, and there was blood all over her mouth. There were some drips, but everything was… dried. Or almost dried, but that could be from the air-conditioning being set high. That’s the first thing I noticed when I came in. The room was really cold.”

  “Jie hates the cold,” I clarified for Trent. “It’s something she and Ghost go back and forth on. She’d rather live in a volcano and—”

  “I’d live on a glacier,” Ghost finished. “She was supposed to meet with a supplier. He called me to ask where she’d gone because he was waiting for her at one of the upper district’s warehouses and she didn’t show up.”

  “So she often meets people outside of the club?” Trent moved closer, sitting on the edge of a table next to my chair. “Always the same place? Did she have a set route?”

  “You’re thinking she was grabbed outside of the club?” I cocked my head to look at him, turning over the possibilities in my mind. “And what? The body we got had a seeming thrown on it?”

  “Doppelgänger spells don’t last that long, and most of them fall apart as soon as you touch the person.” Ghost’s expression shifted, his body tightening. I could see him working the angles of what happened, discarding what didn’t make sense in his head. “The body was handled. I IDed her at the club, but the detective wanted me to give a statement down here. Wanted me to ID the body at the morgue. It’s why I came by.”

  “That’s normal. Even if you IDed her on the scene, they’d want you to sign a formal statement.” It was a procedure I hated, but it was necessary. Usually we asked a non–family member to do the IDing if the family was too overwrought, but Jie had no family we knew of, and Ghost was the closest thing to next of kin she had. “The person setting the netsuke out is intensely powerful. It’s possible he cast a doppelgänger spell that could hold long enough until the overload in the netsuke decimated the body he used.”

  “It—she—looked exactly like Jie,” Ghost protested lightly. “Seven Gods damn you, Roku, the power you’d need to hold that spell. It would be massive, and to get her appearance so exact—”

  “I think this woman was dead before Jie disappeared. She was put in Jie’s office, and then the seeming was cast and the netsuke activated. The caster we’re after needs Jie for something, Ghost, and I need to know what that something is,” I pressed, the hardness in my tone demanding Ghost look at me. “What was Jie doing? What was she plotting? Why would someone want her gone but not dead?”

  We had a complicated history, one fraught with misunderstanding and tempers, but just like I knew Bob the Cat would be waiting for me to refill her dry food dish when I got home, there was never any doubt I’d be going with Ghost to get a black star for Jie if she actually was dead—and we’d wear one for each other, should something happen to either of us.

  “Not a damned thing.” Ghost pulled his hair back, securing it with an elastic tie he’d had around his wrist. Out of his club clothes, he was harder, and his cunning intelligence played over his face in a range of emotions I knew Trent wouldn’t be able to pick up. “Do you think the mage or whatever this asshole is… do you think he used Jie to keep the seeming in place? Because if he mirrored her body onto that woman, that’d kill her.”

  “It explains how much the seeming looked like her, but why take her only to kill her by draining her energy?” I shook my head. “I think that’s why the netsuke was set to blow. Its function wasn’t to kill like the two it was connected to. The spell was probably set to explode so the body was w
iped out before anyone noticed it wasn’t Jie. It just didn’t do the job well enough, so we found out she was human long before he expected us to. Next question, what was Jie working on for the club? And was it something you two would have to worry about later on down the road?”

  “You own the club with Jie?” Trent cut into my questioning. “Co-owners? Because we’ll have to get an alibi for you to exclude you from her… this.”

  “We were….” It was amusing to see Ghost dance around how Kingfisher’s ended up in his and Jie’s laps. “She handles operations and house staff. I take care of the talent and security. We both make decisions on the facilities and memberships. If either of us dies, we don’t gain anything. Our halves go to someone else.”

  “Who?” Trent’s eyes widened, incredulous when Ghost glanced at me. “Roku? Roku gets the club?”

  I didn’t like Ghost spilling out Takahashi secrets in the middle of the cop house, especially since a few of the old-timers already thought I was on the take, but as usual, once Ghost began talking, it was next to impossible to shut him up without physically putting a fist into his mouth. Trent was all ears, probably adding notes to the files on me he’d stored up in his head.

  “Considering he’s the one who got it in the first place, ownership returns to him. It was the only way Takahashi would let him give it away,” my sort-of brother explained, ruffling his wings out. The fluttering sound brought the caiman’s hackles up, and it coughed a bit of a warning that Ghost ignored. “I don’t gain anything but a headache if Jie’s dead. He’d be an absent partner, and I’d have to find someone to manage Jie’s half. So yeah, I can give you an alibi, but no one in their right mind would believe I’d want Jie dead.”

  “Someone wants something,” I countered. “He has Jie. She’s useful to him. But for what?”