Night Shift (Kate Daniels #6.5)(36)

“Eyang Ida?”

Iluh nodded.

I remembered Ida Indrayani. She was nice lady in her late sixties with a friendly warm smile. She still worked as a hairdresser. The family didn’t really need the money but Eyang Ida, Grandmother Ida, as she was usually called, liked to be social.

“How long has she been missing?”

“Since last night,” Iluh said. “She was supposed to come to my birthday party in the evening but didn’t show up. Sutan, he’s my husband, and I stopped by her house on the way back from the restaurant. The lights were off. We knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. We thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again. Her hearing isn’t the best now, and once she falls asleep, it’s hard to wake her up. My parents keep wanting her to move in with them, but she won’t do it. We went back to her house first thing in the morning, but she wasn’t there. She hadn’t opened her shop either, and that’s when we knew something was really wrong. My mother has a spare key so she unlocked the door. My grandmother was gone and there was blood on the back porch.”

Not good. “How much blood?”

Iluh swallowed. “Just a smudge.”

“Show her,” my mom said.

Iluh reached into her canvas bag. “We found this next to the blood.”

She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her purse. Inside it were three coarse black hairs. About nine inches long, they looked like something you would pull out of a horse’s mane.

“We tried going to the police, but they said we had to wait forty-eight hours before she can be declared missing.”

I opened the bag and took a sniff. Ugh. An acrid, bitter, dry kind of stench, mixed with a sickening trace of rotting blood. I shook the hairs out on the table and carefully touched one. Magic nipped my finger. The hair turned white and broke apart, as if burned from the inside out. Bad magic. Familiar bad magic.

Iluh gasped.

“I told you,” my mother said with pride in her voice. “My daughter is the White Tiger. She can banish evil.”

“Not all evil,” I said, and pushed a sticky-note pad toward Iluh. “Could you write your grandmother’s address down for me? I’ll go visit the house.”

Iluh scribbled it down and got a key out of her purse. “Here is the spare key.” She wrote down another address. “This is my parents’ house. I’ll be over there today. Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.” She would just get in the way.

“Do I need to pay you?”

My mother froze in the kitchen, mortally offended.

People often confused ethnicity and cultural upbringing. Just because someone looks Japanese or Indian, doesn’t mean they have strong cultural ties to their country of origin. Cultural identity was more than skin deep. Because of the nature of my magic, I was known to many Indonesians in Atlanta, and learning about the culture and myths of my parents wasn’t only a part of my heritage, it was part of what made me better at what I did. Iluh chose to have less ties to Indonesian families. Culturally she was more mainstream. You can’t be offended by someone who simply didn’t know how things worked.

“You don’t have to pay me,” I explained gently. “I do this because it’s my obligation to the community. Generations ago my family was given the gift of this magic so we could help others. It’s my duty and I’m happy to do it.”

Iluh swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, I’m sorry you felt uncomfortable. Please don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Please find her. She is my only grandmother.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I told her.



I walked Iluh out to the door. When I returned, my mother crossed her arms. “Pay? What, like you’re some kind of maid?”

“Let it go, Mom. She just didn’t know.”

“She should know. That’s my point. Are you going over there?”

“Yes. Let me just get dressed.”

“Good,” my mother said. “I’ll make you dinner while you’re gone. That way when you come back, there will be something to eat.”

No! “Thank you so much, but I’m okay.”

“Dali!” My mother opened the refrigerator. “There is nothing in here, except rice. You might have to purify a house today. You don’t even have cakes for the offering.”

There was nothing in there because I was planning to store leftovers from Jim’s and my dinner. Jim, who was currently hiding upstairs and whom I had to sneak out of here. “I was going to go grocery shopping today. And I’ll steal some of your donuts for the offering.” I had apples in the fridge and my garden was in bloom. That would be plenty for the offering.

“I’ll make you something to eat. Look at you, you’re skin and bones.”

“Mother, I’m perfectly fine. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“Yes, you are. Your sink smells funny, your refrigerator is empty, and your trash is overflowing. And!” My mother pulled two dirty wineglasses out of the cabinet.

How did she even know? It was like she had radar.

“What is this? Have you been drinking?”

Help me.

“Drinking alone? That is not healthy for you. Look, you couldn’t even bother to wash the glass. You just got another one and then stuck the dirty one in there. That’s what alcoholics do.”