Chapter Seven. Jenny’s Girls
CHAPTER SEVEN
JENNY’S GIRLS
The person at the desk jumped and swore, scattering papers over the floor. Adeline froze. It was not her mother. But any rising disappointment was replaced rapidly with a loud beating in her ears, as a much more immense possibility descended upon her.
It was Tian, the cabinets open around her, their contents covering the desk.
Tian, looking supremely wary, hedging for a fight.
And more importantly—Tian, alone. Adeline half expected other Butterflies to materialize and chase her away, but instinct told her it was just the two of them in the store.
And that meant she was thinking again about sitting behind the funeral parlor for several slow cigarettes’ worth of time, a low drain gurgling nearby, the petals of replenishing fire and the taste of smoke lingering the whole night.
She felt a bitter scratch in the back of her throat. “What are you doing here?” she said. It didn’t come out like the accusation she’d intended it to be, and Tian’s defensiveness shifted.
“Are you crying?”
Adeline swiped at her eyes. “I said, what are you doing here?”
“What happened to your face?”
She’d forgotten that her cheek was plastered where Elaine had mauled her.
Disarmed, she pushed Tian aside to start gathering her mother’s papers up.
They were archive catalogs and sales receipts, invoices and import orders and other incredibly regular documentation.
She didn’t know what Tian was doing with any of this, suspected she wasn’t even looking in the right place.
Tian caught her arm. Adeline spun and fixed her with such a glare that she dropped it, but she was still looking at Adeline’s face with too much concern for someone who’d pulled a knife on her the day they met. “Are you okay?”
“Fuck off,” Adeline said, but then found herself continuing, “I got into a fight at school. Genevieve and her husband kicked me out.”
Tian’s brows knitted farther. “Do you have somewhere to go?”
“You think I don’t? My mother owns this shop.”
She didn’t know why she was being so rude, when her first thought upon seeing Tian was that she had another chance to go with her.
But it was exactly that humiliating desperation that had Adeline scrambling.
This was not a film that she could sit back in and trust to wrap itself up.
She had to find the right things to say, do, and that overwhelming alarm, combined with Tian’s genuine concern, was twisting words in her mouth.
“Where’s your other Butterflies?” she said, going back to ordering papers. “They wouldn’t like you talking to me.”
“I didn’t tell them. And obviously, I didn’t know you would be here.”
Adeline paused. So Tian was here against Pek Mun’s wishes. Even barely knowing them, she understood this was significant. “So what are you here for?”
Tian seemed to weigh her options. When she spoke again, it was with a kind of confession.
“A Butterfly died two days ago getting shot by Three Steel. I’ve been at the wake all day.
We don’t even know where it happened or what happened, except they brought the body in, and she was burned besides the bullet wound …
We were told her own fire turned on her somehow, but I don’t believe we could lose both her and your mother to accidental fire barely a week apart.
Mun isn’t convinced Three Steel killed your mother.
She thinks it’s unwise to ask for a fight.
If I get any of the other girls to go under her, it’ll divide us. But I had to do this for myself.”
“Three Steel and a burnt body again,” Adeline said, catching on.
“Am I wrong?” Tian demanded. “For thinking we should do something about it? At least question before giving up?”
They wavered. Adeline suddenly understood what had driven Tian pointlessly here, tonight of all nights.
It wasn’t really because she thought there was anything to find in the purchase records.
Like Adeline, she’d been looking for a reminder of the woman who’d called the shots here.
She’d been looking for anything at all that would allow her to charge into this quest, take a different way out.
The answer was not in the files. Fate had crossed both their paths tonight. What Tian needed was not her Madam Butterfly, exactly—it was a moral authority higher than her older sister’s, that would absolve her guilt for disagreeing with her.
“As her daughter,” Adeline replied, “I’d be disgusted by anything less.”
Tian’s eyes widened, presented with an answer she perhaps hadn’t even realized was in front of her. “Your mother took me in when I had nowhere else to go,” she said, voice low and fierce. “I don’t believe she’d just—”
“Me too.”
“Mun thinks I’m being reckless. She thinks your mother’s death was an accident and Three Steel’s too big to provoke thoughtlessly, even now. She never believes I can do anything on my own. She always thinks she knows better than everyone.”
Adeline’s heart pounded. “Well, it was my mother, not hers. And I say if there was even a chance it was them, we should know.”
Tian looked at Adeline like she’d only just realized what she’d gotten herself into, what Adeline had just let her do, and that there was no way she could withdraw now that it had come out.
Adeline knew because she’d fallen off that cliff already.
The moment she’d first seen Tian light that fire, the moment she’d first heard the words Red Butterfly, she had known, deep down, that she would have to pursue it or live no life at all.
The key had been turned in a door she had been staring at her whole life.
She could not possibly stop herself finding out what lay on the other side.
Tian tried, though. She turned abruptly away to the window, grasping at the curtain. She might decide, after all, to walk away. Adeline had, that night at the Orchid. Sometimes they were not ready. Sometimes a desire broke out of them before they were ready to grapple it.
Unable to look at Tian until the decision was made, Adeline turned away, too. Lady Butterfly, she thought. If my mother was your anchor. Then give me what I want.
She had never been devout. Her mother took her to the temple sometimes, before exams or other important events. She didn’t have incense here, or any other ritual objects. But she had fire, didn’t she, which meant the god’s power came through her directly?
It was difficult to pray without an image.
She had no idea who she was sending her thoughts to.
Except—no, she had to remember again, she did have a piece of the god with her.
It was orange and bright on her nails. It was light coming from within her.
It was a dark core like a pulsing heart and gold wisps like wings.
The sound of crackling startled her. The surrounding air was heating up— a fire had started behind her. Her prayer couldn’t actually have worked. Adeline couldn’t actually have summoned a god.
But she had asked for it, so she turned. And for the second time that night, it was not who she wanted to see.
“Tian?”
Tian was frozen by the window, curtain crumpled in her hand, and both she and the cloth were burning. “Tian?”
Flashes of her mother staggering, the house burning, butterfly turning to ash. “Tian!” Adeline seized Tian’s arm, above the fire licking at her wrist, and yanked. Tian’s head jerked up. Her eyes were yellow and empty. Without thinking, Adeline slapped her across the face.
There was a pause. Then Tian tackled her to the ground.
Adeline screamed and kneed Tian in the stomach as her own side erupted with searing heat.
She rolled away from Tian, who had curled up motionless on the floor with her lit palm pressed against the tiles.
Thankfully, that would not catch. But without an outlet, the fire was beginning to crawl up Tian instead, racing for her elbow.
The dead Butterfly had lost control of her fire, too.
Suddenly Adeline knew that this was no regular fire.
This did not burn the same way. This was Butterfly fire, this was her fire.
She turned this flame on and off like breathing, could make it turn and dance at will.
Besides her mother, perhaps, it was the thing she had studied closest in her life.
It didn’t matter if this one belonged to someone else. She decided it would simply listen.
Almost in a trance of her own, Adeline knelt over Tian, placed both hands over the fire, and squeezed.
It didn’t burn like it should have. Instead, Adeline felt her own warmth boil up under the skin to meet it.
A response came through her veins—indestructible, undeniable, inevitable.
Adeline was intimately familiar with fire, but she had never thought of it as truly alive.
This fire felt old and primal. It felt gleeful, like something escaped.
It felt urgent. It sang with the reunion Adeline had thus far been robbed of.
She met Tian’s fire with her own will and finally, after breathless seconds, the flames went out.
Struck by sudden cold, Adeline pulled back her hands. Her palms were pink but unscathed.
Before she could marvel at herself, the corona in the corner of her eye reminded her that the curtain was still burning.
Adeline scrambled up and threw open the cabinets until she found the extinguisher her mother kept without fail.
She pointed it at the window and pulled the pin.
The burst of white foam nearly knocked her backward.
Smothered, the fire hissed to its death. She’d put it out, just pulling a trigger. And before that, by just laying her hands on Tian. Overwhelmed by a sense of alarming power, Adeline tossed the extinguisher aside.
The loud clanging woke Tian. She rolled onto her back, staring up at Adeline and then at her own hand, which was an ugly red up to the wrist. “What did you do?”
“You were burning. Like the girl you were telling me about.”