Dim Sum Asylum(34)

“You’ve got blood coming out of your ears, and your irises are copper.” The hard-featured medic who’d snagged me before I could stumble out of the shop could have given the Southern Gate dragon a lesson in pissy looks. He ripped open a bag of supplies with his teeth, grunting for me to hold out my hand, then barked at a rookie cop to grab me one of the teacups before it made it outside. Extracting a packet of bright pills, he enunciated slowly, “These are painkillers….”

I snuck a look at the packet and mumbled, “Yeah, those are the same ones I’ve got in the glove compartment of my squad car. Don’t like them. Make my head fuzzy.”

“Your head’s already fuzzy. In about an hour, the adrenaline you’ve got running through you is going to fade, and you’re going to regret not taking these.” He shoved them into my hand as my partner returned from outside to loom behind the medic’s back. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted Trent hovering. “Maybe you can talk some sense into this guy. Either he takes those or I yank him from duty.”

“Did you find anything?” I asked Trent, then followed up with the question I dreaded hearing an answer to. “Did they find anyone inside?”

“It’s too hot. We won’t be able to get in. Building’s been evacuated. Same with the gōngyù on top and across the two sides.” He scowled when the medic pressed a finger against a sore spot on my temple. “That’s bruised. Why are you doing that to him?”

The medic didn’t answer him. He just rattled the pills at me again and glared. “In you or you’re out. Your call, asshole.”

“That’s Senior Inspector asshole to you,” I grumbled back. My pill hatred went back decades, starting with the fake grape lozenges my mother assured me were like candy and would help my sore throat. It was like sucking on Death’s big toe and tasted like roadkill, sorrow, and hedgehog poop.

“Take the pills, MacCormick.” Trent shuffled around a round table the owner’d set up for the medics to lay their gear on. “It’s Hell out there, and I’m not convinced you’re 100 percent. Unless these guys give you clearance to walk out of here, I’m going to shove you into the back of an ambulance, and Gaines will meet you at the hospital.”

I was torn between telling them all to fuck off, and returning to the case. There wasn’t any denying I was in pain. Every single one of my joints took the hit, and I’d been pushed by the blast, tumbling like a broken marionette being flung into a wall by an enraged toddler. But I didn’t want to take a walk.

So I took the pills.

They went down wrong, and the tea I swallowed to help them on their way was as bitter as my thoughts, but eventually the capsules ground their way into my stomach. Handing the half-full cup to Trent, I tried to shake off the pangs in my joints as I stood up, straightening carefully.

“Okay, let’s go do this.” I bit back a gasp when my ribs complained about the stretch. Trent studied me closely, so I kept my face as placid as I could, but there was nothing I could do about the twitching between my shoulder blades. My body, for some reason, seemed to think it had wings at the oddest moments, usually when I was trying to maintain some semblance of dignity. “What? I’m fine!”

“Yeah, I didn’t believe you the first fifteen times I heard you say that, but sure, we’ll pretend.” Trent edged behind me. “I’ll just be back here to catch you when you fall. Again.”




TRENT WAS right. It was Hell. Or at least as close to it as we were going to get.

I didn’t know what other businesses were in the building with the noodle factory, but something in there really liked fire. The ash pulled a darkness down around us, thickening the air with a sticky, wet veil. Sparks caught on the twists of hot air rising from the inferno, deadly streams of sprites and pixies no gargoyle could extinguish. The responders were trying, battling the flames with streams of foam and water, but the monster someone created was taking too long to die.

Then the rains took up the challenge, and we were left choking on an oily water deluge too thick to see through.

Gaines called me three times in the first fifteen minutes as I watched the building fold in on itself, taking its small gōngyù with it. I didn’t answer the calls but did send a short message, assuring him I was fine. I didn’t want to hear how he thought I should go home and crawl into bed, although he was plenty quick with texting me exactly that. An hour into the vigil, the responders shifted from trying to bring the fire down to tearing apart the bridges connecting the building’s rooftop to the outlying gōngyù on its rear side.

I hated watching people’s lives die, and with each hook dug into wood and steel, it was a gouge into a tiny community who’d huddled together to survive. It was crucial to take the bridges down, but I couldn’t help feeling it was like portioning out meat to a starving tribe before the dying person took its last breath.

“You might as well head back to the station, Inspector.” The fire chief, a gangly old faerie who’d tucked his wings beneath his yellow slicker, shouted at me beneath the roar of a bridge coming down. “No one’s going to get inside of there for hours. And I’ve still got to get my firebug guys inside to figure out what caused this.”

I wasn’t a fire guy. Even after I lost John and the kids, I couldn’t wrap my head around the impossibility of an all-consuming fire, the sheer storm of burning air and heat. It’d been explained to me countless times before—accelerants and oxygen flow—so while I got the logistics of it, the what didn’t matter to me as much as the why. The fire department wouldn’t be able to tell me why. They hadn’t then, and they wouldn’t now. That was on me. Someone wanted to erase something in that building, and they went big. It would be too much of a coincidence for the fire not to be connected to Wong’s death, but I couldn’t rule that out.