I didn’t doubt him. I had seen firsthand what Henry was capable of. “But why?” I asked. “Why is he doing this? It makes no sense.”
“When does violence ever make sense? All I know is that more violence to people I love will happen if you don’t leave this alone. If I don’t do what he says, they will kill my brother priests. Do you understand? These are gentle men, men who have dedicated themselves to living spiritual lives. Get out of here, Melina Markowitz. Get out and stay out.”
14
I WENT FOR A RUN BEFORE I WENT TO THE DOJO. I HAD TO CLEAR my mind, which was clicking and buzzing and grinding like an old computer trying to link up with the Internet. What did I know?
I knew that George and Henry Zhang were brothers. I learned that George was the one who had discovered the
kiang shi
buried under the temple floor and had told his brother. I knew that his brother looked for all the world like a successful Asian American businessman intent on giving back to his community through a service organization. I knew that the seven members of that organization’s board of directors had all purchased homes in Elk Grove using the same real estate agent and getting loans from the same bank. I knew that all those homes were being used as grow houses.
I also knew that Henry was forcing his brother to make the
kiang shi
attack Latino gang members in some of the worst neighborhoods in Sacramento by holding his fellow priests hostage. Then those Latino gangs had retaliated by attacking an Asian gang, and a good portion of the city was now shooting at each other and babies were ending up in my emergency room.
Basically, I knew enough to make my head swim. It was already well over eighty degrees, and after about four miles, I was drenched with sweat and no smarter than I was when I started. There’s a reason I don’t run much. I hit the shower back at the apartment and headed to the dojo to talk to Mae.
If there was anyone who could help me make sense of this mess, she was it.
The dojo was quiet, dark and locked when I arrived. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but it wasn’t crazy weird either. Mae did have a life out of the karate studio. She just didn’t spend all that much time leading that particular life. I was used to her always being right there when I needed her or just wanted her.
I was pretty sure that present circumstances represented need much more than want. I unlocked the door and started stretching out. I didn’t bother turning on the lights. More than enough daylight streamed through the big plate glass windows at the front of the studio for me to see what I needed to see, and there was something restful and tranquil about the semidarkness. It was . . . crepuscular and I liked it.
The second I walked onto the mat, I felt that sense of grounding that I so often experience at the dojo and nowhere else. I hoped that Mae and I were past whatever had made her snap at me the other day. If I understood better what it was, I’d apologize for it. Right now, I was afraid that bringing it up would bring it back. Grandma Rosie always says least said, soonest mended. I hoped it would be true for Mae and me right now. I’d be lost without her guidance. In fact, I was lost. I needed her shining like my bright North Star to bring me home.
I knew she was there before she got to the door. Her presence felt like a slight warming of my blood, not quite the full-fledged buzz that vibrated through me in the presence of something truly supernatural, but still a disturbance in the field, if you will. Except that with Mae it was more of a comfort than a disturbance.
Even though I knew she was coming in, I stayed still on the floor, willing myself not to move or react first.
“You’re here early,” she said, her voice normal and calm, as if the last thing she said to me hadn’t been a harsh indictment.
“A little,” I said. “I needed to stretch. I went for a run today and it left me feeling tight.”
She nodded. “Good idea.” Then she went into the office and locked her purse in her desk drawer. We may pound the idea of integrity into the head of every student who walked through the door, but not all of them catch on right away. It’s best to keep wallets and things locked away.
Then she went into the back room to change. I folded myself into a lotus position and waited for her to come out, trying to figure out how to ask for her help. I’d never had to ask Mae for help. Her help had always just been there. It wasn’t like she even offered it to me; it was just a constant presence in my life, there for me to use whenever I needed it.
Moments later, Mae joined me on the mat. “You hate running, especially in the heat. What’s up?” she said as she began to stretch herself.
I nearly wept with relief.
I poured it all out to her, the whole enchilada, gooey undead cheese and spicy Native American sauce and all. She sat still and listened, nodding occasionally, never interrupting. I knew I’d missed talking to her the past few days, but I’d had no idea how much until I experienced the relief of laying my problem out before her on the dojo mat as I’d done so many times before with problems big and small.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked when I was finally done.
“I’m not sure what to do.” I had no idea where to turn next. I didn’t know what it all meant or what I was supposed to do about any of it. “I’m not sure it’s really my problem. It’s definitely way above my pay grade.”
Mae looked at me sharply. “There are all kinds of ways to be compensated.”
Oh brother, had we ever had this talk before, and I was so not interested in rehashing it. Yes, there were perks that came with being a Messenger. The being superfast and extrastrong thing was nice. The healing quickly thing had its moments as well, as did the part where I didn’t need much sleep.
The part where any chance of leading a normal life rode off into the sunset without me? That part required more compensation than all of those other things plus an occasional winning lottery number combined.
But like I said, I wasn’t interested in having that conversation again. We weren’t going to see eye to eye, and I didn’t want to have another argument so soon after the last one. “I know. It’s just a phrase. You know what I mean, though, don’t you?”
“More than you realize,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I was going to have the patience for Mae to go all Master and Grasshopper with me. Truly, I hated that stuff. It’s bad enough that I have to do this job. They could at least make it straightforward for me. There was the problem of knowing who the
they
were. It had never been fully explained to me, but I knew something was out there. “So what do I do now?”
“You make a decision,” she said as if it were as easy as deciding between New York Super Fudge Chunk and Cherry Garcia in my grocery’s freezer section. Come to think of it, that decision isn’t all that easy either.
“If I knew what decision to make, I wouldn’t have had to spend forty-five minutes pounding on the pavement in eighty-degree heat,” I pointed out. Eighty degrees doesn’t sound like much, but you can pretty much add twenty degrees to the actual temperature after about a mile. It was hot.
She smiled and placed one cool hand on my arm. “I know. It’s time, though. You can’t keep floating along the surface of things, letting the current take you where it goes. It’s time to decide your own direction, for once. Make a choice. Build a dam. Or get out of the stream all together. Decide and do it.”
“Won’t you even talk it over with me?” I was trying to keep my temper, but I was losing that battle fast.
“I am talking it over with you,” she said.
Okay. That was an opening if ever there was one. “So do you think I should go back to Aldo?”
“Aldo’s not going to help you.”
What were my other options? “What about Paul, then? Or Alex?”
She considered that for a moment. “They’d make good allies, but they’re not going to take action on their own.”
“Well, neither am I,” I exclaimed. I was a Messenger, damn it. I carried and toted. I bowed and scraped. Was I suddenly supposed to morph into Joan of freaking Arc and lead some kind of holy battle?
“If you don’t, then no one will, Melina.” She seemed completely calm.
I wanted to shake her. “Why won’t you help me?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
I stood up from the mat. “It sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.”
I knew I sounded petulant. I didn’t care. I was sick of this. I was sick of Mae not helping. I was sick of no one doing anything to stop Henry Zhang. I was sick of little babies getting hit by stray bullets while they slept in their cribs.
I was sick of just about everything.
AS I DROVE HOME IN A HUFF, I FIGURED I MIGHT AS WELL DEAL with my flute problem this afternoon. Apparently I was going to have some time free since I was in the middle of a temper tantrum and was unwilling to teach. I hadn’t a clue how to summon an imp. Well, actually, I had a clue and the clue was that I didn’t have the skills.
I can’t actually do magic. I don’t know how to cast spells or create hedge circles or ward doorways and windows. I’ve tried and I don’t have the skills. Not everyone does. It takes an openness to the world that I can’t seem to muster. It used to frustrate me, especially in moments like this one when being able to cast a summoning spell could really come in handy.
I knew a couple witches who could probably do it. The one that irritated me least was a woman named Meredith, but her services didn’t come cheap.
Yet another drawback of being a Messenger, there was no one to whom I could submit an expense report to get reimbursement. I spent what I spent.
I called her as soon as I got home. “Hey, Meredith, how are you?”
“What do you want, Melina?” She sounded rude, but it was nice to deal with someone who wasn’t playing games with me for once. I’ll take rude over manipulative any day.
“I need an imp summoned.” Oh, to be direct and to ask for what one needs. My heart sang a little song.
“Do you need a specific imp or will just any old imp do in a pinch?” Meredith asked.
“A specific one.”
“Got a name?”
“Joe.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You have no idea how much I wish I was.” If that wasn’t the understatement of the year, I didn’t know what was.
She chuckled. Meredith had a low throaty voice and her chuckle sounded sexy even to boringly straight me. “I have an inkling. Imps are pains in the ass.”
Amen to that sister. Still . . . “Can you do it?”
She sighed. “Do you have any hair or talon clippings? Anything he might have touched and held?”
Talon clippings? Eww! Who would keep imp talon clippings around? I did, however, have a flute that he must have handled at least a little bit. “As a matter of fact, I do have an object that belongs to him.”
“Well, that will make it easier. Are you in a hurry?”
I certainly didn’t want Kokopelli making any more unscheduled visits to my apartment. That kind of trouble I did not need. “Kind of.”
“Will tomorrow night do?”
“Absolutely.”
“Meet me at McClannigan’s at eight.”
Uh-oh. Now we were treading on some thin ice. “Meredith . . .”
“Do you want your imp or not?”
That was an easy question to answer. “I want him.”
“Then be there at eight and bring some folding money, if you know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant. Meredith likes to get her drink on. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call her a drunk, but only because I wasn’t keen on being judged myself. She didn’t even have what my mother and her friends refer to as “a problem.” My mother’s friend with “a problem” was picked up by the police when she ran down our street naked screaming that the Israelis were out to get her, exposing her drinking problem, her lily white ass and an extremely unattractive anti-Semitic streak all at the same time. You would never have known if you’d met her at bridge club. Well, you would have known about the drinking problem because she generally smelled of booze by ten in the morning and you could probably have guessed about the lily white ass, but she kept the anti-Semitic thing nicely under wraps most of the time.
In contrast, Meredith tends to get a little sloppy, and the already somewhat low necklines of her blouses tend to get a little lower yet, especially if Paul is around. Paul was undoubtedly why we were meeting at McClannigan’s. Rumor has it that Meredith and Paul hooked up one night a year or two ago and Meredith has been lobbying for an encore ever since.
Part of me didn’t want to be involved and part of me wanted a ringside seat to what was bound to be a gossip-worthy event. I agreed to the time and place and we hung up.
I SPENT FRIDAY SLEEPING AND LICKING MY WOUNDS. IT WAS beautifully quiet and uneventful, and I was ridiculously grateful for it. Paul did not seem overjoyed to see me when I walked into the bar, however. In fact, he scowled, rolled his eyes and then turned his back on me.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to see you, too,” I said.
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said.
“Do with what?”
“Whatever it is that brought you here.”
So unfair. So judgmental. That was just so totally werewolf. “You don’t even know what it is! It could be fun.”
“It’s not going to be fun. Nothing you’ve gotten yourself involved with lately is fun.”
Alex was right. My business was on the underworld gossip hotline. This was not a pretty turn of events. “What do you know about it?”
