Dim Sum Asylum(12)

“Yes, give her my number. I’ll have Penji talk to her. Probably better that way. Only thing I know is she stopped to get a good luck token from one of the stalls outside of the temple, and from there she was supposed to go to the teahouse. That’s half a block down, maybe?” He shifted sideways, and his shirt strained with the press of his wing stumps. “Temple tokens are expensive, but they work, yes? Worth the price.”

“Was she unhappy? Having a bad time?” I frowned, wondering if Shelly hadn’t just walked off, too overwhelmed to deal with whatever it was that drove her to the temple to seek relief.

“I don’t know,” Goma confessed, looking slightly bashful. “But then, does anyone really know when someone’s having a bad time of things? Do we actually really know anyone?”




C-TOWN’S INSPECTOR area sat on an open loft above the uniforms’ bull pen. I climbed a sweeping staircase and reclaimed my desk amid the quiet rumble of the afternoon shift. It looked like I was alone except for the sparse light of computers flipping wallpapers of exotic beaches none of us would probably ever see in our lifetimes. Someone had cleaned the top of my desk while I’d been gone, wiping it down and neatly stacking my cold cases. A bottle of tequila, complete with a worm in the bottom and wrapped in a blue bow, sat in the middle of my now organized mess.

“When you get a free weekend, we’re so going to get hammered on this, V and B,” I read with a grin. “Aw shucks, now I know you love me. You know I puke after about three shots of this shit. Thanks, Vasquez.”

“Only the best for the guy who took Arnett down.” Vasquez crossed the room in a few long strides to embrace me in a short but bone-crushing hug.

“Shit, the lizards took him down. I just put the cuffs on him.” I turned the bottle around, making the worm dance in its liquid tomb. “Maybe I should go down to the nest and share it with them.”

“Yeah, like you’d waste shitty tequila on a bunch of lizards,” Vasquez shot back. “Good you’re here, MacCormick. Place was quiet without you.”

Inspector Mike Vasquez was one of the good ones in Chinatown, as much of a legacy cop as I was. He and his partner, Thea Browning, shared the other half of the quad with me and Arnett. Myron hated both of them. Judging by the sparkling clean empty area that used to house Arnett’s crap, Mike and Thea had no love for him either.

“Hey, my man! Rumor mill said you were back like five minutes ago.” Yamada grabbed me from behind, lifting me off the floor in a bear hug. Brian’d been a B-Class sumo wrestler before he became a cop, but no one had told him he didn’t have to keep up the beefy physique he’d earned in the sumo stable. My ribs cracked, and I yelped out a squealing hello as he put me back down. “Good to have you back.”

“Just in time for you to kill me. Jeez, what’s with the hugging? Didn’t any of you do any work while I was gone?” I gurgled, catching my breath as I slapped him on the shoulder. “Good to see you. What’s up?”

“The Captain finally got your ass up off the couch. Must be nice to sit around all day watching cartoons while we’ve been busting our butts.” Yamada wiped at his broad forehead, pretending to be overexerted. “Good to have you back. Even if you did let Arnett steal those eggs.”

“Thanks, asshole.” I made a face at him and sat on the edge of my desk. He lumbered off, his bristle head bobbing as he thundered through the maze of desks and chairs. After picking up the bottle again, I studied its label carefully, wincing at the worm bobbing about. “So when are we planning—”

The chatter around me came to a stall when Gaines’s slick leather loafers touched the loft’s floor. He stood at the top of the stairs, a harbinger of good and evil armed with the power to lengthen our shifts with a single grunted command. As a Captain, he was one of the best. A cop never had to worry if Gaines had his back. That went without saying. Most badges would give their left nut, tit, or wing to work under my godfather’s command, which made Arnett’s dirtiness an even greater betrayal. Smearing me and our partnership was one thing, but Arnett got his filth on the whole department and put a big black mark on Gaines’s record.

My old buddy Myron would be lucky if he made it out of the local jail with the same number of teeth he had going in.

Gaines wasn’t a surprise. The human behind him was, and from the look of my godfather’s squared-up shoulders and steely-eyed glare, I was going to guess he’d brought me a new partner. It was too soon for me, but not for Gaines. The man liked to have things in order, and one of the things he insisted on was a cop never went out alone.

From his square jaw and muscular build to his dirty blond fade haircut, everything about the guy screamed ex-hard-core military. He moved as if expecting a riot to break out in the upper loft, icy blue eyes scanning each of us, stopping only long enough to mark our presence before moving on to the next cop.

He found me first and then again, last. His gaze pierced me, assessing and judging in a way that did not say cop. I wasn’t sure what was found wanting, my shaggy mane or my odd ommatidia-faceted pupils, but something made his nostrils flare. I definitely spotted the moment he saw my pupils’ copper-green sheen. His head jerked back a few millimeters, and his chin jutted out.

If my new partner had a thing against fae or fae-bred, we were assuredly going to have a problem.