Dim Sum Asylum(72)

“Does she know where she is?” Trent began to pull moistened wipes from the plastic tub in his hand. “An address?”

“No, but that’s not the worst of it.” I listened to Gaines’s phone ring, mentally screaming at him to pick up. “She’s not alone. The son of a bitch doesn’t know what’s going to come down on him, because the fucking idiot didn’t just take Jie, he took my grandmother too.”





Eighteen


“JESUS, YOU fucking find her, MacCormick,” Gaines snarled as Trent and I left the squad’s briefing room. The force of his voice was strong enough to make the SWAT team gathered there flinch like a flaggerdoot of jackalopes hiding from a canyon roc. “Fucking find them before this whole city goes up in flames.”

We fled. It was the smart, right thing to do. Once the Asylum gathered all of its inmates and her warden barked out his orders, it was intelligent to begin moving in the direction of the door. Any door. Hell, if we hadn’t been three stories up, I was sure one of the uniforms would have crawled out the window if he could have fit his shoulders through the cramped frame. We’d each been given a section of the city, but it was going to be like finding a silver coin caught on a white dragon’s scales.

I’d never been so glad to see the inside of a cheese-scented, stained-carpet sedan in my life, and Trent nearly kissed the dashboard when he slid in, his shell-shocked expression at the enormity of our task pretty much saying everything I felt about the situation.

My stomach was too sour for anything other than strong black coffee with enough sugar to give my tongue cavities, and Trent tsked at the stream of white crystals I poured into my to-go cup until I reminded him I was faerie, and like most hollow-boned nonhumans, I needed to consume my body weight in sugar and carbs in order to survive.

Trent wasn’t buying it. I could see the doubt on his face, and it didn’t help when the coffee kiosk tender who ran so thick around his middle, his wings stuck straight out of his back, grunted his approval when my coffee turned to syrup. Still, I needed the kick, and I didn’t think food would stay down long enough for me to bother chewing it. We got in the car with our coffee and began driving.

Chinatown sobbed its heart out, drowning its gutters in an icy rain thick enough to turn its close-set buildings in shimmers of brick red and blue glass. Pain and sorrow were caught in the shadows, struggling to break free to fill me as Trent had not more than a few hours ago, but I couldn’t afford their affection. Not now. Dwelling on anything other than getting away from the station was a losing proposition. I couldn’t focus on the break in Jie’s voice when the phone died on her or the rustling whispers I’d heard in the background.

Too many of my tragedies happened offscreen, captured in a silent bubble where I’d been unaware of my world—of my life—ending. Those moments were gone, slippery fragments of time lost in a darkness I could never find again, and I hated wondering where I’d been, what I’d been doing when the people I loved took their last breath.

And scared to death my name had been on their tongues when the end came.

“Going a little fast there, Bucky,” Trent muttered from the passenger seat.

“Who’s Bucky?” I spared him a glance, which only made him clench the door grip even harder. Trent was whiter than Bob’s canine victims and about as wild-eyed. “Are you losing your mind?”

“It’s… never mind. Just…. Gods in Heaven!” He grimaced, bracing himself against the door. “Could you watch the damned road?”

“The road’s fine,” I grumbled, dampening the growl roiling from my belly. “We’re just… fucked. That’s what we are. I’ve got nothing. I have nowhere to go, and the lab’s got the call file, but there wasn’t enough time to tap where it came from.”

San Francisco was taking a beating, its skies filled with sheets of rolling lightning, sharp white flashes bright enough to blind and steal the color from the city below. The beggars under the East Gate huddled under its dragon’s enormous coiled body, using the reptile’s folds to shelter them from the rainwater. I’d seen the South Gate dragon abandon its post a few minutes before Gaines walked into the conference room, its angry screams of displeasure carrying through the streets, shaking out a flock of mock basan nesting in Washington Square Park. The basan were the reason Central moved out of the building, abandoning it to Arcane Crimes for less incendiary grounds after a nasty infestation of the fire-sparking birds scorched most of the roof. Arcane Crimes, thankful for the space, cleansed the nest and settled in, periodically sending a rookie dressed in an enchanted rooster mascot suit to dance around the perimeter to reinforce the protective wards.

There were no wards, and the so-called enchantment on the old rooster suit was nothing more than two bags of opalescent glitter liberally rubbed into the suit’s matted faux fur. Savvy to the initiation rituals of bored detectives, I’d not done the traditional welcoming dance of the flagging cock, but when a basan lightly settled on a stop sign near the farmer’s market’s entrance, I wondered if the molting suit would fit Trent and if I could con him into wearing it.

It was a stupid thought, but I needed something, anything, to stop me from thinking about Jie and my grandmother.

In my rearview mirror, the station faded off into the distance, a benefit of living in a city made up of hills and odd architecture. The rain poured in sheets from the bridges between the gōngyù and, in one case, made an alley I wanted to cut through impassable. Despite the early hour, it was difficult to find a clear shot away from the station. I was burning time working the side streets, but there was no avoiding the congestion of early-morning deliveries and the emergency crews working to get the flooded rooftops clear of people. We’d gone only three blocks when a chunk of metal and wood crashed down a few feet in front of the sedan, and I tapped the brakes, knowing full well the car would hydroplane sideways down the hill.