Authors: Margaret Ronald
“I—” I shook my head. “Wouldn’t it be better to
have a doctor instead? Come to think of it, wouldn’t a doctor—”
Yuen waved one hand. “The time for doctors has come and gone. And none of them would be able to understand what I am asking.” He sighed. “My wife agrees with me on this at least.
“Listen to me, Hound. I have had my sixth heart attack this year. My body will take no more strain. It is only through luck and will that I am alive this long, and it is your bad luck that I could not stay longer. I had planned for a friend to be here, but in his absence, I must ask you to do something for me. It will not…compromise…you in any way.” He hesitated over the choice of words, and his daughter imitated the hesitation, though I suspected she knew the appropriate translation immediately.
I nodded, first to Yuen and then to his daughter. She ignored me and unhooked the photo from the wall. A faint scraping noise followed—not the click of a safe opening that I’d expected—and a thin, putrid scent crept into the room. I flinched at the scent and started to look behind me, then thought better of it. Yuen, noting my reaction, nodded.
His daughter carried a small ceramic jar about the size of a large coffee mug to her father and set it in his waiting hands. Unconsciously, she wiped her hands on her slacks.
I motioned to the jar. “What
is
that?”
Yuen turned it around in his hands. It was unadorned, plain unglazed stoneware sealed with wax, and it made me ill. There was something both pitiful and disgusting about it, like a baby rat. “It’s a jar,” his daughter translated. “You tell me what’s inside.”
Yuen said something further—either
Have a look
or
Catch
or whatever the Chinese equivalent was—and tossed the jar at me. His daughter cried out, a second too late. I jumped backward to catch it, fumbled as the skin of the jar seemed to warp under my fingers, and caught it a second time, bracing it between my fore-
arms and stomach. The touch shivered across my skin like ripples from a stone. When I looked up, Yuen’s daughter’s head was bent, and she glared at her father’s hands.
I let out a slow breath. “Yuen, you pick the weirdest times for tests like this.”
He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “You tell me,” he repeated.
I turned the jar over in my hands, rolling it between my palms. It was lighter than I’d assumed, light enough that it had to be either empty or packed with something like feathers. I held it to my nose and sniffed, then scratched at the rope seal with one ragged fingernail.
“Don’t open it,” Yuen and his daughter said together, each in a different language. Some things don’t need translation to be clear.
“I don’t need to,” I said. “It’s not an antique, and not Chinese. Local clay, I’d say from New Hampshire. There’s something mixed in the clay, ivy maybe. Hard to say, since it was fired quite a while ago…” I shook it, gently, and watched their reactions out of the corner of my eye. Yuen’s daughter winced, but Yuen himself didn’t let a flicker cross his face. “It used to be in your shop, but it hasn’t been for some years. Five at least. You moved it…you’d had it on the shelf behind the counter, next to the stone turtle.”
At that Yuen raised his eyebrows, impressed. I smiled, but honestly I was a little weirded out. Not by the jar—well, not so much—but by how much I could tell about it. This time last year, I wouldn’t have been able to discern so much about a static object without a good hour’s concentration.
The trouble with having a blood-magic like mine is that sometimes it gets a little stronger than you’d like.
“As for what’s inside it…” Nothing. I wasn’t getting anything from the rest of the jar; it was just blank, like static or white noise. I turned it over again, trying to find meaning in its gritty, unmarked surface.
There. Like a spider scuttling out and over my fin
gers, the scent of it shivered across my senses. The smell of something not just rotted but frozen in that state of rot, with a horrible awareness about it, a gelid sentience like the idiot response of an anemone. I gagged and wanted to spit, but some things you don’t do in a nice house.
Yuen nodded. “So you do sense what’s in it. Good. Please give it back.”
His daughter came forward. I set the jar in her hands, noting the careful stillness that came over her the moment her fingers touched it. She didn’t like it any more than I did. “What’s in there?” I asked softly, speaking to her rather than Yuen.
But it was Yuen who answered, and his words she translated. “A mistake. A failure. An act of hubris.” He took the jar from his daughter and cradled it on his chest like a reliquary. “My father.”
I glanced from father to daughter, confused by the generational switch. “Your—”
“Please listen carefully, Hound. You can sense the…ghost…of my father—”
ghost
was in English, the word out of place and somehow incorrect in either language, “—within this jar. When I am dead, I will want you to confirm that it is gone. Do you understand?”
“I do,” I said. Never mind that I didn’t understand why; asking why in the undercurrent often leads to more answers than you’d ever want. And, when it came down to it, I did trust Yuen not to deliberately harm me. “And if it’s not gone?”
“Then my daughter will know what to do.” She didn’t even blink as she translated. “You will not have to wait long.”
I stepped back a pace. “That’s okay. Really. I can come back—”
“Please. Have a seat.” He spread his hands and smiled, then turned to speak to his daughter. She handed him the jar and listened, ignoring me entirely. I backed up to give Yuen’s daughter room to move, then tried to stay out of her way.
I’d been in the same position as Yuen’s daughter once before, waiting for my own mother to die. But I’d never been a witness to the same event from outside the family. Remembering how badly I’d taken it—for a number of reasons—I wanted to do what I could for Yuen’s daughter, even if all I could do right now was to give her space.
Space didn’t seem to be what she needed, though. She affixed several carved wands, each as long as my forearm, to the bed, then joined her father in repeating several phrases. They didn’t sound Chinese, but they also didn’t sound like any language I knew. This was a small-scale ritual, I realized, the last step of some magic already almost complete. That was what I’d scented on my way in; they’d gotten the big stuff taken care of first and left the last step until I could get there. The moment of that magic had drawn out tight on the brink of completion, and it occurred to me that Yuen’s wife was right to be mourning her husband already.
I glanced behind me, at the place from which Yuen’s daughter had taken the jar. It hadn’t been in a safe, only a niche in the plaster, lined with thin gold foil. That meant Yuen wasn’t too worried about keeping it safe, at least from mundane burglars. The photo that had hidden it lay on a nearby table. It was an old sepia-toned photograph, one I’d seen on previous visits and remembered only because it didn’t seem to match the aesthetic of the rest of the room. In fact, I had my doubts about whether it was real; it looked more like one of those photos you could get at an amusement park of you and your friends in cowboy costumes: six men in front of a building that could have been a saloon flat in any Sergio Leone film set. Their faces were all a little too serious for fake old-time fun: to a man, they squinted into the sun as if assessing its weaknesses. Every one of them wore a belt with a sixgun, even the weedy greenhorn guy in the middle, who looked like he belonged in a sanatorium rather than a saloon. I know, technically you could say the same
thing about Doc Holliday, but for my money Doc Holliday could have killed this guy by breathing on him. The photo had faded over the years, obscuring many of the other faces, though the man on the far left had a handlebar mustache big enough to lose a cat in.
“There are some things,” Yuen said behind me, “that you hold on to. Even when you know you shouldn’t. Even when holding on costs you everything.”
I nodded, then realized Yuen had spoken in English, without the protective formality of a translator. “Yuen?” I said, turning.
“Papa?” his daughter said with me, her voice barely above a whisper.
He clasped her hand. “Bring me the photograph. Not you, Elizabeth,” he added as she started to move. “Hound. You bring it.”
I did. He took it by the frame and, with a grunt, turned it around so it faced him. “Not that I’ve held on,” he continued, seemingly oblivious to our shock. “But we don’t like to think that our parents were fallible. It reflects badly on us. So if we cannot ignore those mistakes, and the worst of them we can never ignore, then sometimes the best thing to do is clean up after them.”
He regarded the photo a moment longer, and I noticed that there were two pages stuck to its back, tacked there with rusting staples. They looked handwritten, but carefully so, as if they’d been copied out by someone not entirely familiar with English letters. A faint scent of rot clung to them, maybe one that had seeped out from the jar, but with a heavier touch to it, like spoiled meat.
As if in rebuke for my scrutiny, Yuen flipped the frame around. “We clean up after them,” he repeated. “Because only the dead can kill the dead.” He handed the frame to his daughter—Elizabeth, though I’d never heard her name till now—then put his arm around her shoulders, pressing her forehead to his. “Take care of those,” he said, and more, too soft for me to hear. I
looked away and thought of my mother, and a woman not my mother, gone for not so long but in too similar a way. When I looked back, Yuen had that limp stillness that nothing alive can replicate. Even though I’d known it was coming, the shock of it still hit me like ice water to the chest.
Elizabeth, though, moved quickly, cracking a vial of what smelled like blood against the jar and using the broken ends to pry away the wax seal. She pressed the opened jar against her father’s throat as if applying a salve and muttered a phrase that I couldn’t quite hear. A gunpowder stink billowed through the room. My ears popped, and through that pressure came a faint gibbering, a babble that not only didn’t make sense but had been far away from sense for a long time. Then Yuen and his daughter together—don’t ask me how, since at this point Yuen was definitely dead—spoke the last word, and, like the stilling of a bell, the magic was complete and ended.
Elizabeth caught her breath in something not quite a sob, then let it out slowly. Without looking at me, she held out the jar. I couldn’t see her face, but I had a guess as to what it had cost her to spend that last moment carrying out that ritual instead of saying goodbye.
I took the jar from her and sniffed. There was a remnant of the putrid, corrupt smell, but no more than that, like a footprint that the tide has washed. No ghost, though what had been in there had not technically been a ghost, at least not as I understood it. The only trace of rot now in the room came from the pages on the back of the photo. “It’s clean,” I said. “Empty. Uninhabited.”
She drew a ragged breath, then turned away from me and took the blindfold from the statue of Guanyin. “You’ll be compensated for your time,” she said briskly, her tone high with suppressed shock but still somehow different now that she was speaking for herself. “I’ll send a deposit to your account.” She wadded up the white silk and placed it in the offering bowl.
I looked around for a place to set down the jar. “There’s no need—”
“There is. I intend to discharge my father’s debts, and this is one of them. You’re also overdue to come in for some of your armaments work—” so that was how Yuen referred to the bullets he cast for me, “—so I’ll put you in touch with someone who can handle that aspect of our business.” She took the jar from my hands and placed it on top of a cabinet, among the receipts to be filed. Her movements were brisk and efficient, and I thought of Yuen’s words about cleaning up after one’s parents.
Taking a long kitchen match from the stand by Guanyin’s feet, she struck it and touched flame to silk. “Don’t get me wrong, Miss Scelan. This wasn’t charity on your part, and it isn’t on ours.” She was still a moment longer, gazing at the flames. Then, moving like a spring uncoiling, she tore the hidden pages from the back of the photograph and chucked them into the fire. The flames blazed up brilliant green, turning Guanyin’s serene expression into a scowl.
“Wait!” I took a step forward, then stopped as she turned to look at me. “Er—didn’t he just tell you to keep those?”
“Yes.” She poked at the fire with the wooden end of a match, then dropped the match into the flames as well. It didn’t smoke, and the fire itself smelled like the residue under a slaughterhouse. “But it’s my house now, and I won’t have things like that in it.”
I glanced from her to the flames. Already the papers were gone, though the silk was taking more time to burn. “What were they?”
“All you need to know about them, my father already told you.” She glanced sidelong at me. “‘Only the dead can kill the dead.’ I’m sorry you had to be the one to see this.”
It wasn’t an apology. I understood her well enough. “Thank you,” I said, and picked up my courier bag, wincing from its drag on my muscles.
At the door I turned back. “What will you do? I mean, the Three Cranes is kind of a fixture here. I could help, maybe—” Yuen’s daughter shook her head. “Elizabeth,” I said, then stopped. “I—I don’t think I even knew what your name was.”
“You never cared before. What difference would it make now?” She turned her back on me, one hand on the jar that had held her grandfather’s corroded ghost. I nodded and let myself out, burning with shame at my own ignorance.
A
n ambulance drove by as I left Chinatown—no sirens, no flashing lights. Maybe they knew not to hurry. I pulled over anyway and stood watching it disappear down the street.
I used to be able to deal with these things better. I used to not care what happened in the undercurrent, so long as it left me unscathed. Life’s a lot simpler when you don’t pay attention. But lately the strict division I’d put in place between work and life had started to crumble. Maybe, despite my insistence to the contrary, it had never been all that strong to begin with, and the events of six weeks ago just cast that into stark relief.
A hulking SUV lumbered by, kids yelling from the backseat. I shook my head and moved back out into the street, flipping off the guy behind me as I did so. Six weeks ago the Fiana, the organization of magicians who had once ruled Boston’s undercurrent, had come looking for me, and all my boundaries between work and life had evaporated. I’d found out what had happened to my first lover, been betrayed by a man I’d come to trust, discovered more about my talent than I’d ever wanted to know, and become the pawn of a goddess seeking freedom. Along the way, I’d destroyed the Fiana’s top men and their power base.
The repercussions couldn’t just be written off lightly.
Too many people got that spooked, closed-down look when they saw me these days, too many of my old contacts got really quiet when I was around, and I still had nightmares about a golden chain wrapped around my throat.
But more important, two of my friends had been yanked headfirst into the deeps of the undercurrent. One, Sarah, had gotten involved knowing some of what she was doing, but that hadn’t kept her from getting hurt. And that made things more awkward between us, these days.
The other…Nate had as much natural connection to magic as a seagull does to rugby. But because of me, his little sister had been kidnapped, and he himself had been enspelled, dragged under Fenway Park, and mauled in a magically, physically, and emotionally nasty fight. And after the whole thing was over, when I was a basket case, he’d helped me come back up to the world.
And then he’d taken me to a Sox game. Damn.
There were obligations, and then there were things that you couldn’t ever pay back, not fully. I hung a left on Charles Street and headed over the river, toward MIT. Another truck had gotten stuck under a bridge on Storrow Drive, and the drivers in the long stream of stopped traffic watched me zip past with envy. I envied them only a little; at least they had air-conditioning for August days like this.
Not counting business trips, I’d been on the MIT campus only once before. (Counting business trips, it came to something over a dozen, but those were a different matter entirely.) It wasn’t my favorite place. It wasn’t that I disliked MIT; hell, aside from Nate’s psycho-control-freak advisor, most of the people I met seemed decent enough, and I shared the same attitude of bemused incuriosity that most Boston residents had toward this place. After all, most of their big defense work took place outside the city, and aside from the
occasional police car that ended up on top of a building, the university rarely made headlines.
But I’d dropped out of Boston University after a semester and a half, and I hadn’t had the best record there even before family matters intervened. I wasn’t a college girl, and I had never been. It wasn’t just class issues—my mother might have worked two jobs just to scrape up rent every month, but she had all the dignity of a duchess—but there was a sort of intellectual pressure to which I was a little too sensitive. It made me itchy.
Nate was about a year away from completing his doctoral work, which to an outsider like me meant that he ought to have an office all his own. But he didn’t; the last time I’d been here, all he had was a cubicle tucked away in one of the libraries. I locked up my bike and spent twenty minutes staring at a campus map trying to remember where I’d found Nate that last time—what was a cyclotron, anyway?—then said the hell with it and went with what I did know.
The scent trails crossing the green were as vibrant as any on Boston Common, with if anything a greater taste of the bizarre to them simply because of the different blend of people here. I didn’t even need to close my eyes before I’d locked on to Nate’s scent, a fact that I noted with more than a flicker of discomfort.
Nate had crossed the river on foot, probably after dropping off his little sister at day camp, then followed the river instead of taking the direct route. If I knew Nate, this was probably the only luxury of time he allowed himself. I followed his trail past the weird little brick thing that looked like a missile silo, past another building that looked like the rest of the buildings had been beating up on it, then into another, smaller hall. There wasn’t any security at the front door, but a desk stood on the landing of the third floor, manned by a sharp-nosed woman working on a crossword puzzle. “ID, please,” she said as I started to walk past.
“I’m meeting someone.”
“I still need to see your ID.” She held out her hand, and while she was still smiling, it had gone from the pleased-to-meet-you smile to the make-this-quick smile.
I tried to look innocent, or, failing that, honest. I knew what she saw—grubby bike messenger with black hair sticking out from under her helmet in all directions and the kind of sunburn you only get if you’re naturally pasty white but insist on staying out in the sun. “I’m not with the university. I just need—”
Down the hall, one of the chairs I’d thought was empty rustled, and a serious face—as serious as an eight-year-old could get, anyway—surrounded by flyaway brown hair peered out at me. “Evie!” Katie Hunter said, and slid out of the chair, lugging a book that was about as long as my forearm. “Are you here to see Nate? I brought my backpack!”
She hefted a bag that looked heavier than she was. “What are you doing here?” I asked as she dragged it around the security desk.
“I got out of day camp early. And Nate had to check some records.” She gave me a hug, whacking her book against the back of my legs.
I winced and patted her head, a little awkwardly. I wasn’t good with kids, but Katie seemed determined to forget that. “I’m with her,” I said to the guard.
Her eyes crinkled up at the corners. “Cute. But I still need ID.” She shrugged in response to my exasperated look. “Dean’s request. It’s just for the rest of the summer.”
“Evie.” Katie tugged on my shirt until I looked down at her. “We went to the Fens today for day camp, and we got to go into the Gardner Museum, only you weren’t there—”
A door down the hall slammed open, followed by a yell of “
Fuck
you!” I stepped in front of Katie—for whatever good that would do—just as the speaker reeled out into the hallway: a teenager in a polo shirt
and shorts. His face was the color of roast beef, and it only got redder as he yanked a textbook from his bag and threw it overhand into the office he’d come out of.
The security guard glanced over her shoulder and sighed. “What’s going on?” I asked, dropping to a whisper.
“Probably needed something for pre-med,” she said wearily. “Happens all the time.”
By now the angry student had moved on to throwing papers, none of which had the same dramatic impact as the textbook, and screaming about the professor’s limited mental capacity, tiny genitalia, and propensity for self-abuse. The security guard yawned, and Katie shrank behind me a little further. “Cover your ears, kid,” I said. That got me a scornful look, but at least I had deniability if Nate wanted to know where she’d learned that kind of language.
The kid concluded by yelling something about the professor’s mother and her predilection for livestock, then stood there panting. I started to relax, then tensed again as the door creaked and opened further, and Nate stepped out into the hall, thrown textbook in hand.
For a moment I didn’t recognize him, and that wasn’t good: I’d been following his scent, and scent is one of those things that, while it may shade one way or another, remains fundamentally the same. Nate’s scent had gone icy. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping his temper; this was a complete shutdown, the emotional equivalent of those big scary blast doors they have in second-rate action movies.
This wasn’t the Nate I knew.
But then
, I thought,
you saw another side of him, under the streets, at the same time as he saw another side of you…
The student seemed to recognize that he’d stepped onto dangerous ground, even if he was too mad to have any common sense. He went from red to dead white, and while Nate didn’t move any closer to him,
he backed up until he ran into the wall. The contact seemed to wake him up, and he muttered one last “fucking asshole” before taking off down the hall.
“Nate—” I stopped as Katie squeezed my hand hard: telling me to stop, or comforting me?
Nate darted a glance over his shoulder like a soldier expecting a new attack, then saw me. The lines of his shoulders slowly relaxed, and the man I knew came back into focus. “Evie? What are you doing here?”
“She’s with me!” Katie announced with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
He crossed the hall in a few long strides, caught me by the hands, and pulled me to him for a hug. “God, it’s good to see you.”
I stiffened and returned the hug about as smoothly as I’d returned Katie’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it—the opposite, in fact. But I didn’t often get this close to someone. And Nate was attractive, in a stretched-on-the-rack, all-elbows sort of way. And this was a very brotherly hug. Dammit.
“Thought I’d come see you,” I said, and pushed myself away at last. “What was all that about?”
“Summer classes,” he said. “It’s easy to slack off on them, but it’s not a good idea if you’re already taking a remedial course. He wanted a grade change, and I told him to go to the professor for it.” He smiled a tired smile at me, one that told me that yes, he’d been through this before, right down to the profanity. “It’ll be okay. Katie, you’ve got everything?” She nodded and took his hand.
We headed out onto the green, then along the Charles River, me walking my bike along the side of the road to keep out of the way of the militant joggers. Katie, following some obscure little-kid logic, ranged ahead of us like a dog on a long leash, coming back every now and then to point out something new. “Does that sort of stuff happen often?” I asked, once I was sure she was out of earshot.
Nate shrugged. “Not in that way, usually. Though
that’s actually easier to deal with than the truly contrite ones. It’s not a bad setup,” he added. “He’ll probably get the grade changed, but my advisor thinks it’s better to have someone turn down all requests first. I get to be the ogre at the gate.”
“That sucks,” I said.
“Sometimes,” he said, and I knew that was all the acknowledgment I was going to get of this particular situation. “So what brings you out here? I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Ages” in this case meant two weeks, and it was probably a bad sign that it had started to feel like ages to me as well. “Had a bad day,” I said. “Undercurrent bad.”
“Ah.” He waited till we’d passed a woman with a stroller three times the size of the baby in it. “You all right?”
“Yeah. A little freaked out, but okay.” I hesitated, then gave him the bowdlerized version of what had happened: called in to witness a death, then to witness what that death had done on a magical level. No mention of Yuen’s name, no Wild West photo, nothing of the weird guilt I had felt around Elizabeth, or the intense creepiness of the jar.
“Can you do that?” Nate asked after I’d finished. “Preserve someone’s soul after they die?”
“I
can’t. Wouldn’t. But it’s possible to trap a fragment of someone as a locus, yes.” I didn’t have to explain loci to Nate; he’d been around me when I was complaining enough to know that a locus was a magician’s link to power, and that it was usually a scrap of someone else’s soul. “But not after death—well, it’s hard to keep anything going after death. You get remnants, imprints of emotions, but actual sentience is damn near impossible, and especially not if you want it to keep any trace of the person it had been. It’d…I don’t know, rot or something.” Which was pretty close to what I’d smelled in the jar. But even with the rot taken into account, nothing should have lasted more
than a few months. Not years—and Yuen’s father had been dead when I got to Boston, so we were talking about decades.
I thought of the spoiled-meat scent of the pages Elizabeth had burned. That was closer to the kind of necromancy needed for something like this. Maybe she was right not to want them in her home.
“What really got to me was that I had to be there with him and his daughter at the end. I mean, I’m not good at this sort of stuff to begin with, and now I feel like I wasn’t just intruding, I was…” I kicked a flattened coffee cup off the sidewalk. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have been there, that’s all.”
“I get it.” He would. Nate and I had both been children of single moms, though they’d been single for different reasons. After high school, we’d both lost our moms at about the same time, mine to a nasty form of cancer, his to a stupid car accident. Neither of us had been around our fathers much, either before or since. Even so, it was a hard thing to imagine, and harder still because we both knew the loss of one parent.
“If I’d been in her place,” I said, partly to forestall that line of thought, “I wouldn’t have wanted anyone there, ‘verification’ or not. And I don’t even really like my dad.”
Nate nodded absently. Katie came ranging back to us, this time holding half of a pair of sunglasses. “Look,” she said, holding them up to her face. “Pink! And they’ve got rainbows on the inside.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
She turned the glasses over and looked down at them, frowning with an expression very like her brother’s. “Do you ever go to the Gardner Museum, Evie?”
Nate blinked, caught out of his momentary funk. “Whoa. Where’d that question come from?”
She glared at him. “We went there today for day camp. Remember? I
told
you. I was telling Evie.”