Dim Sum Asylum(44)

“Trust you?” Trent scoffed. “How the Hell can I trust you when you won’t tell me anything? Every time I turn around, it’s another illusion or lie. I’m kind of done with your smoke and mirrors, MacCormick. I want some damned answers.”

It was a decent jog to where we’d left the vehicle, one I’d done as quickly as I could, mostly to avoid any lingering crap from the altercation inside of the club, but also because I didn’t want to stand in the drizzle and explain to my new partner how much I’d crossed a few lines and potentially started a civil war within a powerful yakuza family.

If someone asked, I would blame it on the head injury I’d probably gotten in between explosions, fires, and death-defying leaps off squat benevolent society buildings, but the truth was, I was just sick and tired of playing a game of politics I had no hope of winning.

Ever.

The hard scrape of something on wet cobblestones made a distinctive tick-tick-tick, and this something was moving fast. I couldn’t track the sound. It was moving too fast, and I couldn’t make sense of its snap-close repetition. My first crazy thought was a rattlesnake somehow found its way into the city, but the echoing tapping waves weren’t right. Something harder, meaner was heading toward us, and I couldn’t find out where it was coming from.

It hit me the thing sounded like a crab—we got plenty of those in San Francisco—but it was too far from the pier, or else someone’s dinner escaped the pot and was on the run. We were close enough to the water to get the scent of salt in the wind if it shifted right, but there was no way any crustacean would survive that long haul.

“MacCormick! I said, wait up.” Trent’s hand closed over my arm, and he nearly yanked me off my feet.

He probably saved my life—or maybe killed me. I wasn’t sure which because I didn’t have time to think when we skidded across a patch of mossy scum on the walkway, ghosting over the wet, mottled concrete and asphalt.

Gods, what I wouldn’t have done for an actual pair of fricking wings.

I tried turning when Trent grabbed at me, but the uneven stones were slippery, and my feet slid out from under me. We went down hard enough to rattle my teeth, and as I tried to blink the stars out of my eyes, a flash of white sprung out of the shadows and scrabbled across my mouth.

Then forced its way past my lips and hooked its claws into my tongue.

There might have been screams—my screams. I couldn’t tell because all I heard was the thing’s vibrating body rattling against my teeth. I tasted stone and magic, a cold and bitter smear tainting the fear-laden sweat trickling down my throat. It was sour, hints of fouled garbage and rotting vegetables from the gutter the thing had sprung from. Every instinct told me to swallow, to clear the foul dribble on my tongue, but I knew if I did, I’d be inviting the animated creature to burrow itself into my lungs.

Its tail whipped about, nearly gouging my eye, and I caught a brief glimpse of what I was fighting. Segmented and ending in a curved hook, the scorpion twisted and dug out bits of flesh from whatever it could reach. The insides of my cheeks suffered a flurry of attacks, and my tongue’s edges shredded beneath its claws.

Panic coursed into my chest, tightening the space around my heart, and I clamped my teeth, closing in on its body and refusing to let it gain any more purchase. From what I could tell, I hooked it right behind its front pincers or a little past its head. Either way, it left me vulnerable for its heavy forward claws. I couldn’t get my hands loose, and for a brief second, I thought Trent was holding me down—a plant or something to help kill me—but he rolled me over, putting me on my side, freeing my arms.

“Hold on, Roku!” Trent spat out a mouthful of blood-tinted spit, a ruddy film coating his teeth from the cut on his lower lip. “Stay still. I’m going to try to grab it.”

I tried to snag the stony tail threatening to blind me, but it was too slippery to get a firm hold on it, and my panic was building, choking down the air I could pull into my lungs. My throat convulsed, and the scorpion slid in farther, its claws nipping at the tender flesh at the back of my throat. I couldn’t open my mouth to spit out the blood filling the space behind my teeth. If I did, the stone monster would lodge itself in my throat. But I was suffocating on my welled-up spit.

“Turn your head,” Trent ordered, angling my shoulders and partially cradling me in his lap, his thighs bracketing my head. We were lying in the gutter, the small rise of the curb digging into my back and the top of my head pressed into Trent’s hard stomach. I was getting spit and blood all over his pants, but he held me tight, refusing to let me budge. “Let that drain out of your mouth, and whatever you do, don’t let your jaw go slack until I tell you.”

Stupid things were leaking into my brain. Really idiotic last moment of life things.

Red and gold bokeh burst across my eyesight, spangled lights drawing fragmented hexagons from the string of tears in my eyes. They jeweled the dreary gray storefronts around us, a bleak landscape of boarded-up windows and failed dreams. A damaged plaster ahi hung from a rafter, advertising a fish store I couldn’t ever remember being open in all the time I’d come down to the warrens, and one of the spots caught the fish’s bulging eye, making it appear to wink at me as I struggled to breathe.

Trent loomed over me, a hard plane of bone, damp skin, and impossibly pale blue eyes. I could smell a citrus note in his cologne, and the little whispers in my head cackled that I wouldn’t make it to the girls’ grave to leave tangerines and Pocky if I died before Girls’ Day. Probably the dumbest thing I could focus on. It wouldn’t matter what day I died on, I’d always miss the next Girls’ Day, but it seemed so much more tragic to be just at the cusp of it and let them down.