Chapter 10 Red Bird
RED BIRD
Mercy knew at once she was dreaming.
The room was Erika’s, the furniture unchanged. She herself was crammed on a small couch, having left Erika her own bed. This was normal.
But the walls of the flat were gone. In their place, beginning where the floor ended, was a long stretch of ghostly sand on all sides. Some distance away, a turgid ocean stretched.
She sat up, already knowing what she would find.
Sea Sister waited by the shore, sodden and storm blown as ever.
“Shit on everything,” Mercy said. “What now? Haven’t I seen enough weird things lately?” Not real, she reminded herself vehemently. This wasn’t real. Somehow, that comforted her not at all.
The apparition opened its mouth, the muted screaming distorted and faint.
Sea Sister!
“Yes,” Mercy said. “I know! The same thing you have said for over thirty years! What about it? Are you choosing to be extra annoying just because it is Hungry Ghost Festival soon?”
Sea Sister lifted something: Cobra Lily’s jacket. The sleeves bore the same snake patterns as other triad members’, but with the addition of entwined lilies on the shoulders, and a large white lily over the heart.
“That’s not yours,” Mercy said. “Where’d you get it from?”
Sea Sister ripped the jacket in half and flung it at her. Mercy yelped as fabric landed on her head.
Mercy woke abruptly.
She stood in the middle of Erika’s flat, though she didn’t remember getting up and moving. Sweat still filmed her skin, but her heart rate was slowing, and the walls were actual walls, now. Not expanses of surreal sand. No torn jacket on her face.
Did that mean she really was awake this time? The idea that she couldn’t necessarily tell the difference between asleep, awake, and hallucinating was more than a little frightening.
From outside the flat, in the hallway beyond, someone coughed in a short, hacking fit. Footsteps scuffled, and another voice muttered. It sounded like the second person was complaining at the cougher. A third voice joined in, telling them all to shush.
The hairs rose on the back of her neck. Mercy got up and darted into Erika’s small bedroom. She shook the older woman awake, a finger pressed to her lips.
Erika blinked, sat up, fumbled for her glasses.
She was too practiced at years of resistance and spy work to cry out or exclaim in surprise.
When Mercy gestured frantically at the door, the older woman nodded curtly and reached in her bedside table to fetch out a pair of chopping knives.
Old habits died hard, for former spies. They took one each.
Outside, the footsteps shuffled closer. Someone tested the handle very carefully, pressing against the locks. Mercy shared a look with Erika. The other woman grinned and adjusted the grip of her weapon.
The door burst open, and the world fragmented into a series of chaotic moments. Mercy was dimly aware of herself moving, driven by a mix of instinct and adrenaline. Her first slice cut deep across the wild-eyed face of a young triad enforcer.
He screamed, startling loud against the relative quiet of the night.
Mercy caught him across the throat in a backswing.
He went down in a heap with blood sheeting down his chest. Erika took the next, lunging with a downward chop.
Bone crunched as her heavy blade hit the joint between shoulder and neck; the second man was down, too.
In the space of a few seconds, both women stood over two dead bodies, breathing hard, blades clutched in fists and blood all over the floor, their faces, their clothes.
Two more enforcers stood frozen in the hallway beyond, still shocked and reaching belatedly for their weapons. They’d expected a couple of middle-aged ladies asleep in their beds, not a pair of knife-wielding demons lying in wait.
It only got worse for them. Bao came bounding out of the flat, transforming as he leaped into his larger size. Ghost teeth bared in a ferocious growl. Mercy couldn’t help but smile fondly.
The two men turned and fled. Apparently, they’d decided the odds were no longer in their favor.
“Shouldn’t we chase?” Erika had a hand pressed to her sternum, leaning against the door to catch her breath. She was nearing sixty, after all.
“I’m too old to chase people, and so are you.” Mercy was already kneeling over the first body, turning it gingerly. The head lolled. “Besides, the damage is done. We’ve struck back at Cobra Lily’s men. Look, I know this one … his name is Li Jun De.”
A few neighbors stuck their heads out their doors, peering around at all the commotion. The sight of Bao sent them scuttling back inside soon enough, and no one came to disturb them as they searched the corpses.
There was nothing of interest on either body, beyond some ID and a set of keys. Mercy flicked through their belongings with a twinge of shame. She wondered if they’d come back as ghosts.
“I’ve done nothing to attract a triad raid,” Erika said, then amended it grudgingly to, “Well, not in the last five years, anyway.”
“They were here for me. This is Cobra Lily’s doing, I’m sure of it.” Mercy sat back on her heels. “But why? I’m not a traitor. I was supposed to speak to her later this evening.”
“Did you make her angry?”
“A little,” Mercy admitted, “but I’ve seen her worse. Her actions don’t make sense. Also, how did she know I was here?”
“A pity we can’t ask them.” Erika prodded one of the corpses with a foot. “Were you followed?”
“I don’t know? I didn’t think so, but I must have been.”
“Hmm. They know where I live, either way,” Erika said. “What will you do now? Will you try to see Cobra Lily?”
“I can’t go to my boss. If she tried to have me killed, we must assume she is done with talking.” Mercy began cleaning her chopper with her blood-ruined shirt. “I was actually going to ask what you would suggest, big sister.”
“Me? I think you should leave.” Erika jerked a thumb in the vague direction of the sky.
“Catch a ship or a plane out of Hong Kong. The world is big, and Cobra Lily is only one small snake. Even Kit Ling is just a councilwoman. You could be in LA tomorrow, or New York, or the middle of a desert somewhere.”
“What would I do in any of those places? They’re not my home. That’s not my life.”
Erika gave her a sidelong frown.
“What?”
“You always work so hard, for so little. Why do you care what Cobra Lily thinks? Leave that mean old woman and find a new job.”
“She lifted me out of poverty, gave me purpose.”
“Hnh. Are you a small child? Give yourself purpose, woman.”
“It’s not just about Cobra Lily,” Mercy said, gently. “This city is my home. It is Bao’s home. Good things are worth fighting for.”
“Is it good, though? This life you struggle to keep.”
“It’s not paradise, but it’s mine,” Mercy said. “Besides, I’m not going anywhere without my cat, and they’d never let a maogui on a plane.”
Bao lashed his tail.
Erika laughed uproariously. “You and that beast,” she said. “Very well, but I’m coming with you. We will solve this problem together. I can’t stay here, now that I’ve killed triad men.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mercy said, with fresh alarm. “I hadn’t even thought—”
“Tch, I went for them, too! Never mind. Best if we leave together, now.”
“No need to come with me,” Mercy said. “Lay low somewhere, stay away from both of these women.”
“I certainly will not! The sooner this is resolved, the sooner I can return. No, no, close that big mouth and don’t argue!
I am coming with you, and that’s the end.
” The older woman slipped her blade back into its case, and stuck it through her belt.
“But help me clean up this mess first, or we’ll have ghosts of our own to deal with. All over my clean floor—look at that!”
“Yes, big sister,” Mercy said humbly, and bent to haul the first body upward.
She thought briefly about mentioning her bad night’s sleep, then decided against it. They had more important tasks at hand.
The bodies were surprisingly easy to dispose of. Erika had many friends in the complex, some more savory than others by legal standards. In record time, unlicensed men carrying medical equipment and ice boxes showed up to scavenge what they could of the freshly dead corpses.
An hour later, the grisly remains (which even Mercy, with all her triad-hardened years, found hard to look at) were dragged off and taken to an industrial waste site. Afterward, they mopped up a few blood smears on the already-stained linoleum floors with bleach.
“Remind me never to anger you,” Mercy said afterward, washing her blood-soaked hands in the sink.
She had killed before, or assisted in killings under Cobra Lily’s leadership.
Triad law could not be enforced without the occasional head being removed from the occasional shoulders.
But the casual butchery of corpses was a new and unpleasant experience.
She hoped never to repeat it again, and wondered how often Erika had participated in such things.
Her friend had many layers, and not all of them were nice.
“If you ever did make me angry, I’d give you twenty-four hours’ warning, first. For old times’ sake.” Erika grinned around a cigarette, and Mercy could not tell whether the other woman was joking. “If you’re nearly done, I think it is time we paid a visit to Miss Tsang’s property.”
Torrential rain plastered Mercy’s clothes to her stocky frame in mere seconds.
Even with a sky sheltered by buildings, the rain got in, filtered through layers of pollution and metal.
Around her, the air tasted of ocean salt, undercutting the city stench of grease and pollution.
Signs rattled in the sideways wind, the gutters already flooded.
The first of the yearly typhoons must have landed in the night.
The weather was inauspicious, to say the least. It felt like another storm was coming.