Dim Sum Asylum(59)

“No.” I laughed. “I know who that is. Give him a minute to work that out of his system. Then we’ll shove him in one of the rooms so we can have a little talk.”

A flash of white caught the corner of my eye, and I turned to see Ghost shoving his way through the cops, his wings spread out around him, their heft shoving people aside when he flexed them open. Trent took up most of the doorway, but it was open enough for the sylph to spot me. His eyes were wild and his expression ugly, a far cry from the aloof, sensual creature who’d dismissed Trent with a flick of his gaze when he strolled past. This was a different Ghost, one with the stink of Chinatown’s gutters ground into his skin, whose stomach remembered the hollow pit it’d been for weeks on end.

“Roku!” he snarled, fending off a beat cop who’d thought he could take Ghost down. I knew better. There was strength in his lithe, compact frame. He switched to English, but his words were heavy with the thick cant prevalent in Chinatown’s rooftop villages. “Do you know who did this to her? What are you going to do? What are you going to do about who did this to Jie?”

“He seems a bit… pissed off at you,” Trent remarked. “You sure you don’t want to toss him into a cell? He looks like he wants to wring your neck. I’m kind of scared he’s going to hurt you.”

“Nah, not Ghost.” I turned my attention back to Jaan, who’d moved away from his original spot and was now scraping something tacky from the front of a cooling unit. “Ghost won’t hurt me, Trent. I’m his brother.”





Fifteen


“YOU DON’T have to come in here,” Jaan finally said after staring at me standing in the doorway while I debated my conscience. “I can tell you what you need to know in one of the conference rooms.”

Trent was off dealing with Ghost. It was easier to send him to do battle with the sylph than to have him next to me while I fell apart. He had questions, and I probably was going to be grilled like a piece of shrimp on a hibachi once he came back from putting Ghost into an interview room, but for now I was going to be able to face the room without anyone waiting to catch me if I stumbled. I already knew I was going to crack. There was no getting around that. But despite what Jaan or Trent said, I needed to step into the room and face what I was hunting, even if that meant walking through some of my childhood friend’s remains.

I took a step inside, breaking the threshold spell placed around the entrance to keep outer elements from compromising the morgue, and took the scent of Jie’s death into my lungs.

The barrier kept most things in: gases, the occasional curse, and any ambient odors. In this case, the spell held Jie’s dignity, keeping the foulness of her abused body behind a thick impenetrable wall of sigils. I stepped in carefully, avoiding the areas Jaan taped off as part of his crime scene. There was no avoiding the outer droplets, but the booties I’d shoved my feet into would go a long way to warding off any damage I did.

“Just stay outside of the yellow line and you’ll be fine,” he said, glancing at me. “Don’t throw up on my evidence.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I horked on Jie.” The joke fell flat, mostly because my heart wasn’t in it and Jaan wasn’t the best of audiences. Jie would have found it funny. She’d laughed heartily at anything remotely macabre, her sick sense of humor honed to a cutting sharpness from living on the streets.

I hated looking at her remains. I couldn’t reconcile the carnage with the vibrant, sarcastic fae whom I’d gotten drunk with, stole oranges with, and did a million and a half mostly illegal things with when we’d been too young to go to jail for them. I missed that Jie. The woman she’d grown into hardened a shell around herself I couldn’t break open, and after a few years, admittedly, I’d stopped trying.

“Shouldn’t have stopped trying, Jie,” I murmured, swallowing the regret and sourness burbling up from my stomach. “You shouldn’t be here. Not like this. Did you forget? You’re supposed to come to my funeral, drunk off your ass and wearing a dress short enough to make the priest lust after you. That was the deal. Now who’s going to pour whiskey in my coffin and tell them I’m ready to go?”

I kept walking, circling the lab and the space I was allowed to be in. Jaan worked silently, humming to himself and talking into a recorder. Forcing myself out of my past and into the present, I looked at the scene, divorcing Jie and everything she’d been from my mind. I didn’t want to punt the case over to someone else, and Gaines was risking his neck by giving me a crack at the investigation. Least I could do was to put some effort into bringing Jie’s killer in.

“When did this happen? Was anyone besides you in here?” There wasn’t much left of Jie’s body, only the splatter and a few larger fragments, along with a grit I’d assumed was bone, but the color was wrong. Or something was off about it. “What happened to her skeleton? If the explosion was big enough to….”

I took a breath, reminding myself Jie’d been dead when the curse went off. If I went down that dark hole, I’d think about how she’d died, and then I’d be next to useless. My brain flirted dangerously with the imagery anyway, wondering what part of the gore at my feet held her off-kilter smile.

“Most of the subject’s remains have already been retrieved, but there are a few pieces I’m missing,” Jaan informed me. “Stay over there. I don’t need you to step on anything.”