“No. What the hell is going on here? For a second, I thought he had . . . fangs.”
I took his hand. It was already swelling and starting to turn purple. “I hope you didn’t break it.”
“I do have fangs,” Alex confirmed. “Although I cannot turn into a bat and fly away. It’s the one part of the vampire myth that I really wish was true.”
Ted looked down at me. “What is he talking about?”
“Ignore him,” I said, releasing his hand. “Just go.”
Alex put his hand on the door. “He needs to stay, Melina. You can’t deal with this alone.”
“Then you’ll help me.” I turned to face him now, Ted at my back.
Alex’s face softened. “I can’t help you. Neither can Paul. You need someone on the human side. These are mundanes, Melina. They’re doing evil things, but they’re regular men and they’re subject to the laws of regular men and you need a regular man to deal with them.”
“Not this one.” I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head. “He’s off-limits.”
“But he’s so convenient. He’s right here,” he wheedled.
“If you need help with something, Melina, he’s right. I’m right here.” He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. “I do not have even the slightest idea of what is going on here, but I know you’re in trouble. Let me help you. Please.”
“Help her do what?” Norah asked from the door of her bedroom.
“I don’t have proof yet, but I believe she has to take down a Triad that’s using Chinese vampires to take out their rivals in the local drug trade.” Alex turned to Norah and gave her a big smile. “And how are you tonight, Ms. Norah?”
Norah tossed her hair. “I’m fine, Alex. How’s Melina?”
“Better.”
“What’s he doing here?” Norah asked, her eyes narrowing to slits as she gestured at Ted.
“Apparently attempting to be chivalrous and protect his Lady Fair.” Both Alex and Norah laughed.
“He doesn’t know her that well, does he?” Norah came in and folded herself into a lotus position in the papasan chair. Dammit. That was my spot.
Alex took a long slow sniff of us both. “He might know her a little better than we think.”
“I didn’t mean biblically. There’s knowing and then there’s knowing.” Norah nodded her head.
“You have a point.” Alex sat down on the couch.
I barely followed what they were saying. The electric buzz, my arcane warning system, had started to buzz. I slid between Ted and the door.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.” I lowered slightly, shifting my center of balance to be ready for whatever might come through the door. “There’s something out there.”
“How do you know? I didn’t hear anything.” Ted laid his hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t shake him off, but I didn’t have time for long explanations either. “I’ll tell you later.”
I heard breathing on the other side. I inhaled, but it was hard to sense what was there with all the other smells surrounding me and hard to differentiate the buzz I was feeling with Alex and Ted messing with my systems the way they did.
I looked through the peephole and decided the surprise route might be best. I flung open the door.
Paul stumbled through, with Meredith right after him holding a covered dish. “Melina,” Paul said. “I came as soon as I heard. Are you all right?”
THIS WAS A NIGHTMARE. AN ABSOLUTE FREAKING NIGHTMARE. Ted, Alex, Paul, Meredith and Norah were sitting around in my living room, eating some kind of casserole made from brown rice with sunflower seeds sprinkled across the top and discussing my options for dealing with the
kiang shi
. Okay. In all fairness, Alex wasn’t eating. He and I were the only ones. He didn’t need to eat, and I was still full from the grilled cheese.
“The first thing we have to do is figure out who this Henry Zhang guy is and how connected he is,” Ted was saying. “Mark my words. When we’re done, we may well trace this thing all the way back to Hong Kong. And by the way, this is darn tasty.” He gestured at his plate with his fork.
Norah giggled and pointed to our window onto the street. “If this was a movie, that window would shatter in a hail of gunfire right now. And he’s right. I really like this. Can I have the recipe?”
“Of course.” Meredith smiled. “It’s sort of a variation on a dish my mother used to make all the time. I changed it up a little bit with more organic and whole grain ingredients.”
“I can’t believe you knew about me,” I said to Norah, ignoring the fact that she seemed to be taking as much delight in the situation as she was in the spinach and rice casserole. Had they all lost their minds?
“I can’t believe you didn’t know that I knew. How stupid do you think I am?” She was curled up in the papasan chair now, leaving me to sit on our love seat next to Ted.
I huddled in the corner, probably looking as miserable as I felt. He took up more than his fair share of the space, physically and metaphorically. The ’Dane in the room. It was worse than the gorilla or the elephant or whatever the hell the metaphor is. “Not stupid. Naïve, maybe, but never stupid.”
She shook her head. “You didn’t think I was very observant either. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice a Big Foot on a Girl Scout camping trip? Or that dude out on the landing the other morning? He was sort of hard to miss.”
I put my head in my hands. I didn’t think I could stand much more of this. It had been bizarre enough listening to Alex explain to Ted what and who I was. Honestly, I don’t think I’d ever heard it explained before. At least, not in words. No one had explained it to me. I just was what I was. I hadn’t heard Mae explain it to Sophie either. I’d missed that conversation.
Oh no, Sophie. I closed my eyes. Maybe they wouldn’t be onto her yet. She might well be safer if I left her alone. I certainly wasn’t anywhere near as slick as I thought I was.
Listening to Norah chiming in with anecdotes about brushes with goblins and fairies leaving packages on our doorstep and a bunch of other events that I thought I’d done a marvelous job of covering up was humiliating. She’d been humoring me for fifteen years while I’d thought I was protecting her. I wasn’t sure whether I was more pissed off about the condescension or the waste of the energy I’d put into my efforts. It was a little like finding out you were sterile after being on birth control pills for years.
And then there was Ted, sitting there and taking up space. I could not even begin to count the ways I didn’t want him involved with this. I couldn’t believe I’d let it come to this. I knew better than to get emotionally involved and here I was all tangled up in blue.
It wasn’t just him, though. I didn’t want any one of them involved in this.
“You’re the one with the resources to find out about Henry and about the grow houses,” Alex was saying to Ted. “Especially now that the grow houses are busted. Half of Sacramento PD must be working on this right now. You could do some clever digging and no one would think it was out of the ordinary.”
“No, no, no.” I put up my hands. “It’s not safe. Are you forgetting what they did to Mae? What is he supposed to do if they sic the
kiang shi
on him? I am not watching another person I care about die.”
Ted’s big square hand covered mine. “That’s what you’re there for. You and Alex and Paul, I guess. To take care of those . . . things.” How the hell was he supposed to fight this fight if he couldn’t even say the names?
The truth was, this wasn’t his fight. I looked around the room. The fight didn’t belong to any of them. Henry Zhang wasn’t going after Alex or Ted or Paul, at least not yet. I’d thought that busting the grow houses would slow him down, but instead, it had just made him angry. I was the one who had poked the hornet’s nest with a stick.
“It will take months for the police to trace those grow houses back to Henry,” I said. “They may never be able to do it legally.”
“So we don’t wait for that,” Paul said. “We take them down now and let the police figure it out after we leave their bodies on the doorstep.”
Meredith looked up at him with big gooey eyes. Was she squeezing her thighs together? I think this whole thing turned her on.
It wasn’t turning me on. Not one bit. In fact, it was making me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Paul ripped apart and bleeding, the way Mae had been.
The second any one of them threw down in this fight, Henry Zhang would turn on them in a New York minute. It would be their fight, too, then. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
I stared at my feet for a few more minutes and then I got up and went back to bed.
21
“ARE YOU OKAY?” TED BRUSHED THE HAIR OFF MY FOREHEAD. IT was hard to believe that hands that big could be that gentle. Maybe he was more magical than he knew.
“I’m just tired.” I wasn’t okay, though. I might never be okay again. I hadn’t even realized how okay I had been before until I’d lost that okayness. Mae was gone. It kept repeating in my brain. For a second or two, I would forget. I’d get swept up in thinking about George and Henry Zhang and the
kiang shi
and the grow houses and the gangs and I’d forget. Then it would flood back into my brain like a screaming siren. Mae was dead. I’d never sit on the mat at River City Karate and stretch with her again. I’d never spar with her or watch the way her eyes closed when she ate chocolate. She was gone.
I talked to ghosts every now and then, so I knew there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that I’d see her again, but she wouldn’t really be her. At least, not all of her. There’s a reason they call them shades. They’re only shadows of who they were in life.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said and pulled the covers up over my shoulder.
“Ted, have Alex or Paul walk you to your car,” I murmured.
He stiffened. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that. These things, they’re dangerous. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. You should run screaming in the other direction.”
He sat back down on my bed. “I sort of did that already. When I saw you . . . and them . . . back at the dojo. I’m sorry, Melina. I thought I’d lost my mind. I thought I was turning into my father, except for instead of hearing voices, I was seeing things. Schizophrenia destroyed his life. He was going to be an architect. Instead, he ended up walking around San Leandro in his slippers, talking to people nobody else saw and covering our front windows with aluminum foil.”
“What made you decide you weren’t crazy?” I’d certainly felt crazy enough more than a few times living the life I was leading and neither of my parents were nuts.
“Wikipedia.”
I lay back down on the bed. “Stop messing with me.”
He grinned. “It’s true. I looked up schizophrenia to see what the early onset symptoms are. I mean, I don’t really remember when my dad started acting loopy. I was only a little kid. I don’t think I really knew how bad it was until my mom took off. Anyway, it turns out, with schizophrenia, you only have auditory hallucinations. You don’t see things, you hear them. My dad never saw anybody, he just heard the voices telling him Bill Clinton needed him to stay up all night to keep an eye on the neighbors in case they were collaborating with Monica Lewinsky.”
“So the fact that you actually saw the
kiang shi
made you realize that you weren’t crazy?” How was that for some whacked-out logic?
“Pretty much.” He kissed my forehead. “Go to sleep. We’ll figure this out together tomorrow. We don’t need to involve any of those clowns out there if you don’t want to.”
I kept my eyes closed as he left the room. My heart ached. Those clowns were a million times better prepared for what needed to be faced than Ted was and I still wasn’t going to take them with me.
How much longer would I have to keep up this charade? Norah was checking on me every fifteen minutes, too. I needed them to believe I was asleep and safe so they would leave me the hell alone so I could get down to business.
I had to find Henry Zhang and I had to kill him. Henry was the head of the snake. If I cut off the head, the rest of the animal would wither and die. Without the grow houses supplying product and without Henry to lead them, I was certain that the Triad would pack its bags and go back to San Francisco where it belonged and leave me the hell alone.
Alone. The way I belonged.
IT WAS NEARLY DAWN WHEN ALEX LEFT. HE WAS DEFINITELY pushing his luck. I guessed the tint on the windows of his Porsche must block UV light, otherwise he was going to be smoking by the time he got back to his apartment.
Paul and Meredith left at about the same time, although not before Meredith snuck into my room, slipped some kind of amulet under my pillow, muttered something in Latin and tiptoed back out. Norah peeked in at me one last time before she went to bed. It wasn’t hard to fool her into thinking that I was deeply asleep.
I waited for five minutes after she started making the little humming noise she makes as she falls asleep. Then I got up and dressed. I pulled on a pair of yoga pants with a lot of stretch to them, a sports bra and a tank top. I threw a hoodie on over it. It wasn’t exactly high style, but nothing would restrict my movements. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk. I don’t own a lot of weapons. Mainly, I am a weapon. I pretty much can kill someone with my pinky finger. Generally, I choose not to brag about that. Letting others know would only draw out people who want to prove me wrong. It is, however, still true. Still, these weren’t what passed even for my idea of normal times, and I definitely needed something beyond normal measures.
