Chapter Twenty-Six. Heart of Steel #2
“Listen to me. Her name was Lina Yan. She was seventeen. The bookkeeper was a regular customer who said he would buy out her contract. She came here to work one night a few months ago, and he and his friends brought her to this house, but they went too far with her. They were high, and they made her take the pills, and they lost control. When they realized she wasn’t moving, they dumped her body in the river.
The Eyes helped wash it out to sea. The police have never found it.
They brought her in through the tunnels down here and brought her back out again, dead. ”
Meaning was flickering in her. She was breathing. She was listening. She was taking in the room: raw concrete walls, piled boxes—a trailing current of energy.
I think that house was where one of my friends was killed. Three Steel’s bookkeeper really liked her. She went to see him one night—
—and he and his friends brought her to this house, but they went too far with her—
“Damn it. This is what she told me to do. Is it working? Should I—fuck it. Fuck it.” Something slid out of a case. A knife cut her arm.
Distantly, Adeline heard a scream.
The specter of the dead girl slipped through the offering, reawakening every frozen muscle in her body.
Emotions more than images blurred through her mind.
Unlike the ghosts of other places she’d been, this imprint was fresh and searing, blazing out from behind locked doors and dark rivers and vast lost oceans, stretching toward its willing recipient.
The shadows pooled in the corners shifted and darkened until they looked almost like blood.
Too far—
Too many—
Too much—
You’re hurting me—
I see a god—
Oh god oh god oh god.
Adeline gasped as heat shot through her. The man’s knife was traveling down, cutting her bonds, shaking her cramped fingers free. “That’s all I can do,” he said rapidly. “Take the tunnels. You’re on your own.” He fled out the door, leaving it ajar.
Adeline couldn’t move. Part of her couldn’t understand what had just happened.
The other was preoccupied with the echoes, still.
Lina’s voice, the flare of her death, the exact pitch of her scream burned into her memory.
Nausea and fury churned, and she drank it into her limbs.
Sensation returned to her fingers. She clenched and unclenched her fists, and on the third time her fingers unfurled, they were trailing fire.
Tian was alive. Lady Butterfly had returned.
Take the tunnels. Of course—Genevieve’s husband had told her as much, at that dinner so long ago.
Adeline knew she should be running before another Steel or that Needle returned and found her freed, but now that her fire was back, the pit of fear in her was turning rapidly to fury.
She was hollowed out otherwise—had not eaten or drunk in who knew how long, hadn’t seen light—and all that filled her as she rose slowly from the chair was the intent of burning the house down as she left it.
But even as she settled her weight back onto her feet, clenching and unclenching warmth off her fists, she heard the noises from outside.
Faint clashes, faint thuds. The sounds of a fight.
Through the crack of the door she saw a Steel running up a flight of stairs, wielding a large parang.
There was a yell. She recognized Mavis’s voice.
Adeline suddenly found the energy to run. She got to the foot of the stairs just in time for the man to come crashing back down. His head hit the edge of the last stair and he sprawled on the ground unmoving, flushed up the neck to his temples, where warmth proceeded to seep out of him.
He radiated so much heat she could feel it off his skin. Within her, there came a responding flutter.
She looked up to find Mavis at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed with triumph that rapidly switched to shock.
“Adeline.” Mavis ran down two steps at a time to hop over the Steel and throw her arms around Adeline with such force Adeline staggered.
“Shit. Sorry.” Mavis stepped back and took her in from the feet up: wrists, shoulder—she paused at Adeline’s face.
It felt swollen to hell and her mouth still tasted like blood; she must have looked a sight. Mavis sucked in her bottom lip.
“How are you here?” Adeline demanded. “And—” She gestured to the man. “Did you just—”
“We figured it out.” Mavis gleamed. “How hard to push.”
“We?”
“Upstairs. Come on. Do you need help?”
“I’m fine.” But Adeline bent to pick up the dead Steel’s machete and startled herself by how hard she gripped it.
In the short time it took to follow the sounds of the fighting, Mavis told her how they’d gotten past the gate: she’d simply walked up to it.
She’d dressed to cover all her tattoos but show off all her cleavage; she’d put on some lipstick and gone right up to the guards and said she’d been told to come.
It didn’t need to be true. It just needed to be plausible.
She just needed to show a little skin and show no weapons, and they dismissed her enough for one of the guards to head inside to see what his boss wanted to do with her.
The second guard had leered at her, which was when she touched his chest, touched his arm, and shot him through with fire.
She only stopped being afraid of the line and then crossed it effortlessly.
He’d crumpled bloodlessly, and Mavis had opened the gate.
All very good and well, and hurrah indeed for Mavis, but—“Who else figured it out?”
“Oh. Tian’s furious. I didn’t even have to show her how.” Mavis paused and leaned in, a little wickedly. “It’s kind of hot.” Adeline shot daggers at her. Mavis winked. “Well,” she said, striding into what was clearly a large living area. “We missed the fun.”
There were four girls amidst wreckage, at least three men dead on the floor, and two more kneeling with their wrists bound.
Tian was standing over one of them, but at Mavis’s voice her head sprang up. Her eyes met Adeline’s. Then she was crossing the room and pulling Adeline into her.
Crushed by her hug, Adeline could hardly breathe.
Tian gasped into her hair, so wildly, indescribably, absolutely solid and warm.
They rocked on the spot and Adeline was suddenly overcome with the memory of when Lady Butterfly had appeared to her at the ceremony, and a feeling of recognizing her: there you are.
And also: here I am. “I’m going to kill him,” Tian whispered.
“I am going to kill him.” She pressed her lips to Adeline’s forehead and drew back, performing the same scan Mavis had, but she stopped right at Adeline’s eyes.
She turned to Mavis, who shook her head.
“What?” Adeline said.
Tian tipped her chin up, as though trying to better catch the light. “Your eyes are yellow.” She did glance down then, at the rest of her, and her expression hardened on the edge of something she was almost afraid to ask. “Did they touch you?”
“No.” Well, not really, not in the way Tian was asking, yet when Tian pressed her lips to her forehead again Adeline felt her own breath come faster and faster.
“Shh. Shh. It’s okay.” Tian cupped her face and stared her in the eyes again, gaze worrying at what she saw there.
There was a lot to tell, if Adeline could remember it—the details had slipped away.
Hare, crone, Needle, Lina. But the before, before the pills, she remembered.
It returned with a deep, sour fear she would rather have not felt again.
“Fan Ge?” It was too much to hope he was dead. At the same time, she wouldn’t have wanted him dead so easily.
Tian’s thumb ran over her cheek. “We waited until Nine Horse saw him leave. I wanted to get to you first. I didn’t want him in the way.
” Tian felt feverish herself, and Adeline could feel her own fire attuning to it.
Tian’s eyes, Adeline realized, were slightly tinged with yellow, too, like they were when the goddess was nearest. Lady Butterfly had changed Adeline the same way somehow.
“But these guys were around,” Tian continued, satisfied.
She walked over to the first dead man, kicked him in the thigh.
“That’s the bookkeeper. Two more over there.
And those two kneeling are headmen for different operations.
We’ve got the other girls checking the rest of the house.
But we take out this group, Three Steel will need months to get themselves back in order.
” And they wouldn’t be able to promote or recruit either, ran the unspoken addition, since their tattooist was presently eating with the fishes.
If the rest of the house was anything like this room then it was a mess.
Beer bottles toppled and shattered, peanuts strewn, slices of jerky squashed underfoot.
But shockingly bloodless, for the number of bodies.
She could tell immediately which ones were Tian and Mavis’s doing, since they lay like they’d simply run out of time.
The telephone on the wall had been knocked off its cradle.
Adeline had seen destruction before, but it had never been for her. She looked at its architect and incandescence thundered in her ears.
Tian, unbidden, smiled slightly. She was enjoying herself.
“All right,” she said, while Adeline tried to remember seeing anything that wasn’t her.
“Let’s clean this up.” Tian strode over to the first of the kneeling men and squatted in front of him, elbows on her knees.
“Soong Tze Chee, isn’t it? You’ve run the opium side of things.
” Fire bloomed over her right hand, and the man’s eyes swung to it instinctively.
“We heard Fan Ge’s hiding something here. Happen to know what it is?”