“And do what with the information? Aldo doesn’t want it. Paul doesn’t want it. Alex doesn’t want it.” I was starting to get a little steamed. How the hell did this become my problem?
“Once you know more, maybe that will be clear.” Mae smiled at me.
I glared back. “Fine,” I said, marching off the mat and grabbing my clothes. “I’ll get right on that.”
“You can’t keep living like this, Melina.”
I’d thought the same thing to myself about a hundred times a week, but I wasn’t sure what Mae meant by that. “Which this? The this where I work three jobs and have no personal life? Or only doing the one job that doesn’t pay and makes me a walking oddity worthy of my own basic-cable reality show?”
She walked off the mat and stood beside me. “Neither. Or maybe both. I’m talking about the one where you don’t take responsibility for anything.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. “What am I supposed to be responsible for? I take the things I’m supposed to take to where I’m supposed to take them. That’s my job. I do it despite the fact that no one ever asked me if wanted to do it or not.”
Mae flung up her hands. “That’s right. Poor Melina. She’s stuck in a situation that she doesn’t like. I’ve been hearing this song since you were seven years old. It’s time to drop it. Do something. Stop just reacting. If you don’t like the status quo, change it.”
“How precisely am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know.” Mae shook her head. “I just know that if you stay on this path, you’ll end up bitter and alone. Is that really what you want?”
Sure. Isn’t that what every girl dreams of? A solitary life with an ill-tempered cat? Maybe I’d spend my time sitting on the front porch yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
Of course that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted what all the other girls my age wanted. Fun and romance and following dreams. It wasn’t, however, the hand I’d been dealt. I’d tried. I’d been slapped down over and over.
What hurt most was that Mae had always been the one who understood that. For the past nineteen years, she’d been the only person I could talk to and be completely honest with. She was the only one who knew who I really was and what it all really meant. She’d been my shoulder to cry on. Now, suddenly, she was telling me that she didn’t want to be that person anymore.
“You know it’s not what I want.”
“Then do something about it besides complain, Melina. Take charge of your life. Do it before it’s too late.”
Too late? What the hell did that mean? “Mae, do you know something about what’s coming?”
She looked down. “You don’t have to be prescient to see what road you’re on, Melina.”
That hadn’t been what I’d meant and she knew it. I began to wonder if Sophie’s appearance in our lives had a much more sinister overtone than I’d considered before, but if Mae knew anything, she wasn’t saying. She just stood there and looked at me.
I let the door to the dojo slam behind me.
I TOOK A SECOND HOT SHOWER. I STOOD UNDER THE SPRAY until the water started to turn cold, grateful that our water was included in our rent. When I got out, I put on my jammies. I was so done for the day. I was going nowhere, no how. Wanna know how done I was? Stick a fork in me.
Sadly, that was only a fantasy. I’d have to leave for work at the hospital in a few hours. I could pretend, though, right? I could pretend to be a regular girl who was going to spend the evening watching DVDs in her pj’s.
I flipped open my laptop. I had a rather long list of things I didn’t know, and the Internet seemed like a good place to start. My first hurdle was figuring out how to spell
kiang shi
. It turned out there were probably about five different ways of spelling it in English, but they all brought up pretty much the same set of Web sites, all of which had pretty much the same information.
A
kiang shi
is a Chinese vampire, the first site said. Well, duh, that I knew already. Next was a lengthy explanation about the two souls that the Chinese believe inhabit the body. Long story short: there’s the superior soul or the
hun
and the inferior soul or the
p’o
.
Kiang shi
are created when the inferior soul remains in a body after death for too long, usually because of a violent death or too much time between death and burial.
The hopping thing? It’s because they’re stuck in rigor mortis. They aren’t fully dead, so the muscles can’t relax. They’re stiff so they have to hop. Who knew?
Then I hit an explanation for the Post-its on their foreheads. Well, not Post-its, talismans. Again, who knew? The talisman was a yellow piece of paper with symbols drawn on it in chicken blood by Taoist priests. Suddenly everything was starting to come together. That’s why Henry, whoever the hell he was, needed his brother George and his buddies. He couldn’t control the
kiang shi
, only a Taoist priest could. How lucky for Henry to have one in the family. His mother must be so proud.
At least I knew what I was dealing with now. Except, I really didn’t want to deal with them. Those dudes were nasty.
I read on anyway.
Kiang shi
are nocturnal. I’d pretty much gotten that. Oh, and apparently they are rapists. I guessed the cholos were lucky that the
kiang shi
were straight, otherwise they might have been subject to even more indignities than just being torn limb from limb and munched on like Kentucky Fried Gangstas.
Here was a frightening thought: as they feed on more people—and Alex was wrong; they might drink blood, but they actually feed on people’s chi—they become more powerful. Instead of just being able to rip people apart, they would be able to stab people with their swordlike fingernails and lasso them with superlong eyebrow hairs. Seriously, eyebrow hairs! I knew I could use a trip to the salon for a little wax and trim, but I couldn’t imagine how long they’d have to be to lasso someone. Thinking of them sucking the chi out of me made me place my hands over my abdomen, the center of the chi, almost reflexively.
I moved on to more important items, namely, how to fight the suckers. Supposedly they’re blind and track you by following your breath. I can hold my breath for a long time, but I wasn’t sure I could fight and hold my breath. Part of a good fist strike or a kick is the timed release of energy. Breathing is big part of that. That’s why we teach seven-year-old girls to shriek as they kick and punch. It certainly isn’t for the health of our eardrums. Still, good to know. Until they’ve killed enough people to start to fly,
kiang shi
can only hop. A barrier across a threshold of about six inches or so can keep them out. I guessed that stairs would be a problem, too, and gave a mental thanks for having a third-floor apartment. I don’t always feel that way after grocery shopping for the week, but it seemed like a happy thing at the moment.
I’ll take what happy I can get where I can get it.
Kiang shi
also can’t cross running water or—get this—a line of glutinous rice. I love sticky rice! I’d have to keep some around. In fact, Norah might have some in the cupboard leftover from an ill-advised attempt at making her own vegetarian sushi. It’s harder than it looks.
You can apparently also stun them with one of those eight-sided feng shui mirrors. I’d have to ask Norah, but I was pretty sure she had one of those. I remembered her mapping out the quadrants of our apartment when we were moving in.
So . . . mirrors and Post-its and sticky rice. It seemed pretty easy to arm yourself against these things, if you knew what you needed. How many people would know that, though? Despite having spent the majority of my life as a ’Cane, I’d never even heard of
kiang shi
much less figured out how to protect myself from them until now.
And how were you supposed to kill them? I saw lots of information on slowing them down, freezing them in their tracks, containing them, but nothing on how to kill them.
I clicked through another page of search results. Half of the entries had the same information as the first page I’d clicked on. Finally, on the third page of results, I found it.
How to kill a
kiang shi
? You have to decapitate it and then burn it. That seemed a little trickier. Maybe I’d stick to sticky rice and eight-sided mirrors.
I yawned and stretched and shut down the computer. These things weren’t hard to defend yourself against if you knew how, but you had to know how. Which meant that you had to know what you were defending yourself against in the first place. I doubted the Norteños were home googling
kiang shi
, because they had no idea what to google. They had no idea what they were fighting, and that put them at a serious disadvantage.
They certainly didn’t know they were battling something supernatural. Why would they? People can and will ignore almost anything if it doesn’t fit in with what they expect. There was one case where people kept walking into a subway station that was on fire because the belching smoke didn’t fit into what they expected. They ignored the smoke and many of them died. Smoke was natural, normal. If people could ignore it, they could definitely ignore Chinese vampires.
Although, come to think of it, what I really wanted to know was why? Why were people siccing Chinese vampires on a Latino gang? What could they possibly gain from that? And who were they? I glanced at the clock. It was after ten. I’d call Aunt Kitty tomorrow. Right now, I needed to get to work at the hospital. I changed into a pair of black dress slacks and a button-front shirt and headed out for the hospital.
I WALKED INTO THE HOSPITAL AND MADE MY WAY TO MY DESK. As I walked past my fellow office workers, each one stood up. It was the weirdest thing. I’d gotten past about two of them, when the first one, Jenny Brown, began to clap in a slow rhythmic beat. Next to her, Rachel Green joined in. The front desk volunteer turned around and started clapping, too. Pretty soon about a dozen of my coworkers were just standing there clapping. I stopped and looked all around me. I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were applauding.
Doreen walked over and patted me on the back. Literally patted me on the back. “Good job last night with that baby.”
I was seriously confused. “But I didn’t do anything.” It was Alex that had rushed Maricela into the OR. It was Dr. Perry from pediatrics who had done the surgery. I’d filed an insurance claim with California’s Healthy Families. I didn’t think it warranted applause.
“That’s not what Dr. Bledsoe says,” Arlene, the front desk volunteer, said. “Dr. Bledsoe says that if it wasn’t for you, that little baby would have probably died in our waiting room and the hospital would be facing a massive lawsuit.”
We can’t have that. God forbid there should be a massive lawsuit. Oh, the dead baby would have been bad, too. There’s nothing that will make you lose respect for human life faster than working in an urban emergency room. “Anybody would have caught it.”
“I don’t think I would have,” Jenny said. “We were so busy. I wouldn’t have even looked at that baby much less noticed anything was wrong. You’re a hero, Melina.”
They surrounded me. They patted my arms and back. They even brought cupcakes. I damn near cried. I worked with these women night after night. It wasn’t like I never talked to any of them, but not really. They knew nothing about who I really was and beyond who was married and who was single and who had kids and who didn’t, I really didn’t know a damn thing about them.
Now here they were, bringing me baked goods and calling me a hero. I felt like one of the gang. I couldn’t remember ever feeling like that anywhere. Even at the dojo, I’m a little bit of an oddity. The men don’t like me much because I’m hard on their egos. Martial arts tend to attract powerful, dominant men, alpha males. Alpha males don’t much like it when someone smaller than they are takes them down. They hate it when that person is also female. It’s not a pretty thing to say and maybe it even sounds sexist, but it’s true. I find it a bit ironic that the one place in the world where I actually feel at home, I’m not well liked or even appreciated by a big section of people.
Here at the hospital, I try to keep my head down and do my job. In the ’Dane world, if someone is noticing me, it usually means that something weird is going on that they shouldn’t see. On this particular night, however, they were noticing me and it was for something good. They thought I was a hero. It would almost have felt good if I hadn’t known how wrong they were.
Maricela had a piece of shrapnel in her belly because I hadn’t done enough to stop what was shaping up to be open gang warfare. I was the only one who knew and cared who had really started this fight, and all I’d done so far to stop it was make a couple of anonymous phone calls.
The thought made the cupcake turn to glue against the roof of my mouth.
The rest of the evening was blessedly quiet. I suppose even gangbangers had to take days of rest from killing each other. We had huge stacks of filing to catch up on from the rushes of the previous nights, but I’ll take filing over looking into the eyes of another boy with a knife wound any night. In my heart, I’m way more of a lover than a fighter. I just somehow can’t seem to arrange my life to represent that.
I ran into Alex in the hallway on my way to the cafeteria to grab a cup of weak, putrid coffee. “Ms. Markowitz,” he said with a slight incline of his head. “Congratulations.”
“Very funny, Alex. I know you’re the one spreading it around that I’m some kind of hero. We both know better.”
He shrugged. “I only told people what happened. That baby owes you her life.”
Wow. Way to twist the knife. “That baby owes no one anything. If anything, we all owe her something. She shouldn’t have to live in a place where gunfire can erupt while she sleeps in her crib.”
