Dim Sum Asylum(16)

“You always hit on your partners?”

“Just making conversation, MacCormick.” A couple of pretty women trotted across the street in front of us when the light turned yellow, their generous hips swaying, and one threw a grin at us before she got to the other side. Leonard didn’t even blink or smile, staring at something off in the distance. “Although, I wouldn’t say no if you said yes.”

As blatant propositions went, it was bold. The only way he could have been more obvious was if he leaned across the car and kissed me. Thing was, his body language didn’t match what he was saying. Other than the heat in his hooded eyes, Inspector Trent Leonard could have been ordering a taco at a food truck.

“I’ll keep you in mind,” I murmured, turning left to head up to the temple where we’d arranged to meet one of the monks about the missing statue. “If ever I’m crazy or stupid enough to have sex with another cop.”

“Okay, here’s a question. What about your eyes? They’re—”

I didn’t get to tell him about my eyes or my opinion on his needlepointing.

One second we were following a delivery truck through slow traffic on Grant, and the next we were staring up the short ceremonial robes of a squat two-foot-tall Chinese man sporting an impressive Fu Manchu mustache when he landed on the windshield.

The glass gave under his—its—heavy feet, leaving two enormous starburst crinkles across the windshield. Part of me was amazed at the level of detail someone’d gone to, because the squatting golem’s robes flapped as the wind caught the hem, and we were gifted with the sight of its smooth, low-hanging sac pressed against the glass.

“Okay, correct me if I’m wrong,” Leonard muttered. “But doesn’t that look like the damned statue we’re supposed to be looking for?”

“Well, shit.” I tried to maneuver the car to the side to take it out of traffic. The thing swayed and rocked, riding the windshield as it buckled a bit more. “What the Hell is going on?”

The golem leered, waggling its tongue at pedestrians. An old fae woman gasped when it grabbed the ends of its robes and pulled them up, unfurling the anaconda sex organ it’d been given. It shook its mighty cock at the people on the sidewalk, its raspberry-red tongue circling lewdly around its fat lips. The lurid colors on its loose robes were vivid enough to burn the paint off the car, and its odd carnation-pink skin was mottled with faint dark crazing.

I felt the kick of its power, lust roiling under my skin and tightening my throat. Shrine God, my ass. The damned thing was fae-cursed, a fertility totem someone’d inexplicably dumped too much mojo into, and now we were going to have to rein it in.

“Get ready to get out,” I barked, searching for someplace to park, but it was too hard to see through the people. A hint of yellow paint on the curb gave me an out, and I eased the car forward, hoping to keep the damned thing straddling the glass from slipping off. “See if you can grab it.”

The statue had other ideas. It skittered down the hood, then dug its toes into the damp metal. Who or what animated it was still bound by the laws of physics, and while it had mobility, it was still simply stone bits, ceramic, and paint. I couldn’t spare a brain cell to figure out how it gained elasticity or how much it could move, but there were limits, and they were being stretched. Bits of multicolored glaze crumbled from its limber joints, leaving a powdery slick on the car’s crumpled glass and scratched metal.

The thing turned its head, cranking its neck about, and stared at me over its shoulder. An eerie intelligence filled its leering face and dead eyes. It was ridiculous, me somehow projecting a stupid sensation of malevolence and anger on a piece of glaze and baked clay. The statue wiggled its cock at me, a lurid and dusty taunt, and then it was gone, bounding off the car and scurrying down the sidewalk before I could catch my breath.

Beside me, Leonard was sucking in air, one hand on his gun and the other on the door handle, his sharp eyes tracking the thing moving through the crowd. People dodged out of its way, and it left behind a wake of intense confusion and fear.

“What the fuck was that?” he growled, struggling to get his seat belt off. “Statues don’t come to life. They just… don’t. How the Hell are we going to deal with that?”

“Grab a containment bag. We’re going to treat it just like anything else wild and dangerous.” I tucked the car up against the curb and shoved an on-duty placard onto the dashboard. Loading zone be damned, I wasn’t going to risk losing that thing. “Hurry your ass up, Leonard. We don’t bring that statue back with us, Gaines is going to have our dicks mounted on his wall to hold up his jackets, because I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life.”





Five


TRACKING THE cursed statue should have been easy. All we had to do was follow the trail of horrified looks and amused smirks along the crowded sidewalks. Chasing a two-foot-tall possessed golem would be difficult in the best of times. These were certainly not the best of times. Either Chinatown was having a half-off egg tart day or someone’d dumped five busloads of tourists right at the corner of Clay and Grant, because Leonard and I suddenly found ourselves swamped in a sea of immovable people.

“Do you see it?” he shouted above the chatter around us. “I can’t find—”

“There!” I pointed at a couple leaning against the wall next to a discount import shop. They were deep into each other’s throat, hands groping whatever body parts they could reach. The fae’s wings were plastered against the bricks, a pair of badly painted lion dancers nearly hidden behind her fluttering spread. Her human companion was larger, dwarfing her slender body, but his shoulders were nearly buckling under her strong grip. Normally I’d have dismissed the couple as an inappropriate display of affection, but something told me the human cop and the fae delivery girl who’d dropped someone’s noodle order all over the sidewalk hadn’t planned their torrid rendezvous.