Dim Sum Asylum(62)

I had no idea how competitive and vicious librarians were until I was assigned to the Asylum, and after that I learned to pretty much give them everything they asked for, because I never knew when I was going to need something. Case in point, a safe and comfortable place to question my demi-stepbrother about a woman we’d both known since we were sprogs.

“Hard to believe you two are brothers,” Trent commented softly. “You look nothing alike.”

“Brothers?” Ghost echoed back. “Yeah, I guess you can call us that.”

“His father and my mother had a….” I hated to use the word “relationship,” because my mother had been hard on her life. There hadn’t been space for anyone in it but me, and sometimes it’d grown a bit tight between us as my own Scottish Odonatan stubbornness ramped up through my puberty.

“A thing. They had a thing. On and off,” Ghost clarified for Trent. His anger lessened, his shoulders lowering and his wings unfurling from their tight clench against his back. “Spent a lot of my time either glad to see this asshole or needing to beat the shit out of him.”

“It’s odd, but not surprising, how that seems to be the common reaction where Roku is concerned,” Trent drawled.

“Cute. Both of you. Focus now. I need anything you can give me about this, Ghost. Anything at all.” I scooted forward, putting myself at the edge of the seat I’d taken in front of him. “What did you see when you went into the office? Did you see the netsuke attack her? Or was she already gone when you came in?”

“She was… the woman was lying on the floor.” His eyes narrowed, gaze going distant. The pretty aloof charmer we’d seen at Kingfisher’s was barely visible in him now. Instead the brawling fierce sylph I’d grown up next to sat across from me, his ire flushing a bit of pink over his skin. “She was between the desk and the wall, on her back, so at first all I saw were legs and a skirt. I remember thinking that Jie must have been out of her mind. Her clothes… she was wearing a flowery dress. That’s not…. Jie would never wear that, but then I saw she wasn’t moving, and after that—none of that mattered.”

“How was she lying down when you found her?” Trent interjected. “Did you move her? The report said one of her arms was under the desk, up against the back leg.”

“I didn’t move her, but her throat was moving,” Ghost murmured, stroking down his throat. “Here. Right here, but her eyes were open, and there was blood all over her mouth. There were some drips, but everything was… dried. Or almost dried, but that could be from the air-conditioning being set high. That’s the first thing I noticed when I came in. The room was really cold.”

“Jie hates the cold,” I clarified for Trent. “It’s something she and Ghost go back and forth on. She’d rather live in a volcano and—”

“I’d live on a glacier,” Ghost finished. “She was supposed to meet with a supplier. He called me to ask where she’d gone because he was waiting for her at one of the upper district’s warehouses and she didn’t show up.”

“So she often meets people outside of the club?” Trent moved closer, sitting on the edge of a table next to my chair. “Always the same place? Did she have a set route?”

“You’re thinking she was grabbed outside of the club?” I cocked my head to look at him, turning over the possibilities in my mind. “And what? The body we got had a seeming thrown on it?”

“Doppelg?nger spells don’t last that long, and most of them fall apart as soon as you touch the person.” Ghost’s expression shifted, his body tightening. I could see him working the angles of what happened, discarding what didn’t make sense in his head. “The body was handled. I IDed her at the club, but the detective wanted me to give a statement down here. Wanted me to ID the body at the morgue. It’s why I came by.”

“That’s normal. Even if you IDed her on the scene, they’d want you to sign a formal statement.” It was a procedure I hated, but it was necessary. Usually we asked a non–family member to do the IDing if the family was too overwrought, but Jie had no family we knew of, and Ghost was the closest thing to next of kin she had. “The person setting the netsuke out is intensely powerful. It’s possible he cast a doppelg?nger spell that could hold long enough until the overload in the netsuke decimated the body he used.”

“It—she—looked exactly like Jie,” Ghost protested lightly. “Seven Gods damn you, Roku, the power you’d need to hold that spell. It would be massive, and to get her appearance so exact—”

“I think this woman was dead before Jie disappeared. She was put in Jie’s office, and then the seeming was cast and the netsuke activated. The caster we’re after needs Jie for something, Ghost, and I need to know what that something is,” I pressed, the hardness in my tone demanding Ghost look at me. “What was Jie doing? What was she plotting? Why would someone want her gone but not dead?”

We had a complicated history, one fraught with misunderstanding and tempers, but just like I knew Bob the Cat would be waiting for me to refill her dry food dish when I got home, there was never any doubt I’d be going with Ghost to get a black star for Jie if she actually was dead—and we’d wear one for each other, should something happen to either of us.