Dim Sum Asylum(85)

“Stay there! It’s getting hot!” Trent yelled, twisting about to loosen the creature’s hold on him. He broke free with a jerk, then bolted toward where I stood, my hands wet from blood and rain and pulsating with the power of the spell components clinging to the snarled skin on my palms. “It’s going to blow, Roku! Stay the fuck—”

Something snapped inside the dragonfly’s body, a knot of metal unraveling, or even the ball of magic the caster shoved into its center, but whatever it was, the spell the librarian and I had cobbled together under a bank of florescent lights on a stack of tea-stained pages did the trick. The ice on its body peeled off in chunks, and the rain hitting its body turned to steam while black splotches spread over its joints and head.

The glass in its wings broke first, the metal channels used to form the sweeps melting away in dribbles of scorched silver. It fought to maintain its path, straining to reach Trent, but its legs folded in, unable to support its weight anymore. Its tail gave way, dropping onto the walkway, gouging out a length of rubble behind it where its exposed steel frame dug in. It shuddered once, then stopped, turning its head toward me, jaws gnashing at the air.

Movement near the wall pulled at my attention, but I couldn’t spare the time to look. With pieces of the dragonfly’s body falling away, the rain struck the white-hot metal framework caught within the sculpture, sending up clouds of metallic-scented mist into the air. Trent grabbed me, and we both went down, his muscled arms forming a cage around my ribs, and we half ran, half crawled to huddle behind the only shelter we had, a four-foot-tall stone pagoda, its top green with prickly, thick moss.

When the pagoda went, the blast blew the scream clean out of my lungs.

Flaming pieces of concrete rained down on us, studded with metal and glass bits from its wings and frame. A large part of one eyeball smashed into the pagoda’s roof, shearing the ornamental bulb. The shrapnel and stone went wide, blowing out into a circle around the fountain. With the shock wave still ringing in my ears, I untangled myself from Trent when I heard shifting in the rubble near the wall.

While the other dragonfly had begun to twitch, it’d taken some damage as well, its abdomen and head cracked nearly in two and its wings twisted around its back. Still, its mandibles were moving, and more importantly, it was now loose from the tree, scrabbling on its remaining three legs, heading straight for the large Japanese cop picking his way over the fallen outer wall.

“Fucking Hell, it’s Yamada.” I breathed a sigh of mingled relief and resignation. “Damned late and headed straight for the other blasted dragonfly.”

I swished my hands in a puddle on the walk, hissing at the slight sting on my palms. There was nowhere to dry them. Hell, there wasn’t a dry patch left on my body. My T-shirt was clammy beneath my protective jacket, and my jeans were caked with mud on my thighs and knees. My gun was somewhere, probably lying in another puddle near where Trent tackled me, and my ribs hurt when I breathed, but seeing Yamada show up lightened the ponderous ache in my chest.

“We don’t know if he’s on our side,” Trent cautioned, standing up slowly. Unlike me, he hadn’t lost his gun, and he raised it, leveling it at Yamada, who’d spotted us near the dragonfly’s remains. “He could be—”

The still-moving dragonfly lurched toward Yamada, and he yelped, reaching for his weapon. Planting his feet firmly into the gravel, he fired three rounds, taking off sections of the sculpture’s head, but the insect kept moving forward, shoveling itself across the loose, swamped rocks to reach him. It was shuffling forward at an alarming rate, and Yamada backpedaled, nearly losing his footing.

“Okay, so maybe not,” Trent confessed sheepishly, then handed me his gun. “Go! I can get this. You go find Jie and your grandmother.”

“Don’t get Yamada killed,” I ordered, shoving his heavy firearm into my holster, then flipped my jacket back down. The gun didn’t fit as well as my own, but it was going to have to do. I still had my knives, but I was running low on magic I could pull out. If I found something as large as the dragonfly waiting for me, I’d need help. “I’ll be right back. If you don’t hear from me in a few minutes, come after me. I might have run into the asshole who started all of this.”

“If you do, just shoot him,” he growled. “Don’t dance around with him. No monologues. Just fucking shoot him and come find me. We’ll be waiting right here.” Yamada let loose a wild, off-key scream, threw a rock at the dragonfly, and hit its wonky left wing. “Okay, I better go help him or it’ll just be me when you get back.”




AS TEMPTING as it was to cut through the mansion, I didn’t want to walk through the death someone left scattered about the rooms. There was an eerie disquiet about the house, and I had little hope there was anyone left alive inside of its thick walls. The wide porch wrapped around the house, serving as an outer hallway for the interconnected rooms, and the killer left more than a few of the doors open, giving me glimpses of sliced-open bodies and the anguished expressions of the tortured dead. The scent of blood and gore followed me, and finally, after a long jog through a side yard thick with ornamental bushes and tumbled gravel walks, I found the estate’s quaint teahouse and its tiny gardening shed.

The rain had eased up to a mist by the time I got to the slight hill built up in the backyard, but the ground was slippery, slick with wet leaves from the thick canopy of maples, willows, and elms. The house was nearly lost in the foliage, only its roofline visible through a stand of junipers at the hill’s crest. A wide staircase of thick black rock wound down the slope, and I took it carefully, drawing Trent’s gun in case I found company waiting for me at the end of the path.