Scale-Bright (11 page)

Very deliberately Julienne says, "I'm sorry, but people don't eat raw animals."

It is a barb obviously hurled, transparent in purpose and tactic. It should miss, but it does not. Xiaoqing has never had cause to find her nature shameful.

But no human she's ever chosen was allowed to know what she is. All she gave them was a name, a few weeks, a few months. They were transitory.

The starlight blazes gold, delineating each blade of grass and clod of dirt in precious metals, and burning her eyes with the salt and heat of tears. Quickly she learns that there's no prey great or little to be had, and the brittleness of her flesh gets no better. She spits venom onto a rock, turning it to a mirror, and takes off her blouse to discover a line between her breasts that has opened to her true self. Snakeskin thrusting through a gap of human flesh.

Xiaoqing buttons up with shaking fingers. She's never lost control of her body before, and though she forces all her power into that thin seam, it does not seal.

* * *

Julienne remembers this terrible invulnerability: it is like having Hau Ngai's energy inside her, divinely strong, and nestled within it the knowledge that this isn't really hers. That it will expire and she will return to dull ordinariness, to being just herself—frail and frightened.

But this strength, though unearned and unrightful, clears her head and keeps her content, so much that Olivia's presence no longer hurts. Like this she will never need another pill. No tinted bottles lining up at the vanity, no appointments in fluorescent-lit clinics.

When Olivia points out fruits by the wayside and says, off-handed, that they can cleanse away mortality, Julienne goes still. "What are you hoping to accomplish?"

"Nothing."

Hau Ngai told her that she will feel no thirst or hunger here, which is true, and that she is not to touch anything edible in heaven: not even water, rain or dew or lake. "What about
you
? Isn't that what demons try to do all the time—eat virtuous monks to achieve immortality?"

Olivia laughs, but its pitch doesn't ring true, ring joy. "I'm approaching two thousand. My kind live for a very, very long time and it takes a lot to kill us."

"I'm not eating those." They don't look normal. Longans the size of watermelons.

"Suit yourself."

But the seed has been planted and watered, and the roots flourish. Julienne tamps down on the speculations that rear and hiss and ask what it'd be like to live unaging as her aunts do. To have poise without trying, to have beauty without effort. To be impossible.

Hau Ngai prohibited this.

Julienne mulls on the reasoning behind it. There must be one, and she doesn't think it is because her aunt guards the divine state with any particular jealousy. She sinks into this question so deep that she doesn't notice anything wrong until Olivia collapses to her knees in the high singing grass.

"Are you all right?" Immediately she feels a fool; Olivia obviously isn't.

"Aren't you cold?" Olivia's teeth chatter.

"A little," she says, puzzled, as she divests herself of her jacket. The weather is mild, even pleasant, autumnal. There's frost glazing the leaves and crusting bright on the fruits, though she hasn't felt that. She puts the jacket around Olivia and zips it up. "Is it because you're cold-blooded?" No tactful way to put it.

Olivia has curled fetal, hoarding heat between her chest and knees. "I've walked through ice courts in hell." She chafes shaking hands together. "This shouldn't be happening."

"I could build a fire." She doesn't know how or have the tools.

"It won't help. I just… need a moment."

Julienne doesn't see how a moment could make Olivia better. "We'll find somewhere to rest."

There's no pavilion this time, but in a pine's shade they find a platform bed carved of a single iron slab, curtained in tortoiseshell combs linked together, teeth-clicking. It unsettles Julienne, but Olivia doesn't look as though she's up to going any further.

Julienne lies down beside the snake. She meant to keep a distance, but Olivia turns around and tugs her close. "You're warm."

"I'm at normal body temperature." But when Olivia's forehead nuzzles the crook of her neck, Julienne's pulse leaps. She pushes her mind away from the thought of
that
day in
that
hotel room on
that
bed. A tactile memory. "Are you feeling better?"

"I will be." Olivia sighs into Julienne's collarbone. "Did your lovers ever tell you that you're without compare?"

Elena said only that she cleaned up well. They communicated in English since Elena speaks maybe two sentences of Gwongdongwa, and that phrase always bothered Julienne. The Australian liked her to look good when they were together in public, and that meant twenty minutes picking out an outfit Elena would approve, twenty more piling on the makeup that
had
to look natural and elegant. Elena despised eyeliner too thick, eyeshadow too vivid—tawdry she called them, no class. "They weren't liars."

"You mean that they were boors. I've met demons who could seduce monarchs to their deaths. To me they are nothing. But you."

"What kind of compliment is that?"

"For a year you forgot me. I remembered."

She doesn't speak after that, subsiding into something not quite like rest. When they are up and moving again Olivia's eyes are brilliant, clear. She marches tireless and rigid.

The second time Olivia falls, she tells Julienne to stay away.

"You can't even stand on your own," Julienne says.

"I haven't eaten." Olivia's panting races shallow and fast. "I haven't eaten and my belly believes it's been starved for decades. You smell like strength and passion, and every wonderful and delicious thing that ever was. I slowed my heart and my blood to stem my hunger. It wasn't enough."

Fear palpitates in Julienne's wrists and punctures that bubble of invulnerability. Standing there over Olivia's heaving shoulders she asks herself what is she doing there, what was she thinking, this is insane. She isn't in a story and she has no place in one—a legend, a narrative in which only those larger than life like Olivia and Bak Seijuen can possibly be real, be true.

Julienne puts her arms around Olivia. "You promised you wouldn't feed from me again."

"When I said that, I wasn't famished." Olivia's voice is thread. "I don't know what I will do."

As before, Olivia is light. Lighter. No weight to her at all, no substance. "I'm holding you to your promise."

* * *

Time trickles. In this state Xiaoqing can think only in smells and sharp jabbing pains. She knows the rough direction—the closer she gets the surer she becomes—but she can barely push forward the mass of her own body. Her human skin is breaking. When the layer of this form has been flayed away heaven will eat through her true self, corrosive poison.

When she can concentrate, she detaches from the frame of her sinews and arteries, floating free in the coils of her memory. But flesh pulls her back and the hunger would return in howling waves. It claws at her, and tells her that there
is
food, that it is sweet and full of youth and life. Hunger becomes all she knows, all she can think of, eclipsing both the idea and the eminent actuality of Bai Suzhen.

She loses count of the precipice-moments where she almost opens her jaw wide and seizes the human in her fangs; for all her feebleness Xiaoqing is still predator, and Julienne only prey. It wouldn't be a feeding of simple power. It would be a rending of throat and breast, where she sinks her teeth deep and finds the treasure of pancreas and liver, the gorgeous sensation of innards sliding down her gullet.

Not this mortal. Not Julienne. Julienne who is practically carrying her now, who holds her upright, who trusts Xiaoqing blindly.

Unconsciousness interrupts her, and when she jolts alert Julienne is loosening her collar. "No." Her voice unravels.

"You need to breathe." Julienne's fingers fumble and falter, pinching a button. "Oh."

"Stop. You don't need to see the rest."

"I've already seen the rest," the mortal snaps, impatience vaulting over shock. "You made sure I saw everything there was to see."

Xiaoqing wants to laugh. "Not—" She gags on the air that her lungs desperately require. "Not the same. This I can't control. I'm not going to look human."

"We'll see
then
. How far are we from… from your sister?"

"Near."

She hopes.

When she first catches scent of something other than Julienne—something food—she does not think. She springs for it, the last of her strength rippling scale-bright.

Flesh soft-sweet in her mouth, a heart that throbs all the way down to her stomach. Cartilage that bends then breaks between her teeth. Entrails spiced in animal musk. She swallows and swallows in her haste to devour, to have as much as she can. She breathes in the viscera and slows down to separate each scent into its distinct entity, its hue and texture.

A soft sound that she gradually recognizes as human.

Blood cools on her and she's looking at a girl with a fist pressed to her mouth, teeth over knuckles, making quiet noises as she chews on her own skin.

Xiaoqing tries to remember the human's name. At her feet, a lynx-headed body lies. One glassy eye stares up at her; the other socket is empty, dribbling fluids, and she remembers that crunching on her tongue. Cuts sting her front and her blouse is in shreds. He must have fought.

Legs and arms. She still has those, for no good reason. It would be good to assume the shape that she should be; it would feel right. There's still much she hasn't eaten, and she shouldn't let such plenty go to waste. In her native form she can gobble up the world.

We are more than our nature, younger-sister.
But we shouldn't have to be ashamed. Just because we want to gain human form.
Yes, but sometimes it is useful to rise above instincts.
Bai Suzhen's hand on her wrist. Staying her.

"Julienne." Xiaoqing tests the word, remembering the shape of it. Her tongue flicks, forked. "Julienne."

Xiaoqing pulls away from the lynx's remains. She knows without looking that she is more scales than skin, that she is only human in outline, a vessel into which the serpent is uneasily poured. This has happened before. Bai Suzhen's human lover and his terror at the glory of her true form. A threshold over which there is no stepping back. A truth no human can witness and accept.

"That was a servant of—the god. Daizeon's."

"It is?" She has forced her tongue, at least, to become mammalian. Words come slowly. Intellect returns in fragments, slotting together badly.

"Hau Ngai warned me about them."

When Julienne extends her hand Xiaoqing can only gaze at it in wonder, as though it is a holy lotus offered by Guanyin herself. The hand is not withdrawn. Its back is a knot of teeth-print bruises, reddening. "Why aren't you fleeing for your life? I just butchered this lynx."

"You didn't try to eat me." Julienne exhales. "It'd have been easy for you, too. This thing had claws; I don't."

Xiaoqing touches the fear-etched marks, teeth driven over and over into flesh. "In all my centuries I've never met a mortal so fearless."

"It's hard to be really scared here—I should be in hysterics. In Hong Kong I would probably have run and not looked back. I don't know."

"You sell your courage short." She takes the hand, finally, and pulls herself up. Every part in her courses with renewed potency. Her feet light, her muscles coiled, weapons whetted and ready in their sheaths. "Never allow yourself to believe you're anything but extraordinary."

Julienne considers her for a moment before saying, "You're reeking."

* * *

The lynx must have been hiding it, for when Olivia has crushed the last of its internal organs there is a door. Splintered wooden frame and tattered paper.

Julienne considers doing something more dramatic than biting her knuckles raw. The last time she reacted to anything strongly was at seventeen. She can't remember what it was about, now—an accumulation of life in general or rage at her own sexuality—but she tore apart her room, and afterward had to clean it up by herself. Shattered mugs and a monitor cracked from having a desk lamp slammed into it over and over.

Stitching that episode back together she is almost more afraid of it than she is of Olivia. But nothing like that ever happened again, while Olivia rending the lynx apart happened barely minutes ago.

Beyond the door, opaque fog churns thick with nothing, heavy with nowhere. Hau Ngai said that the borderlands of heaven are not geography but thought, waiting to be shaped by the desires and preferences of the immortal allotted that patch of land, that bit of mountain or that bend of river.

"It's safe," she says. "My aunt said to keep wading through until we find the pagoda. It's been recalled to its normal size. Not big. Six floors. Some fifteen by fifteen at the base. Meters, that is, not… what unit do you count in?"

"By how fast I can cover a distance is how I measure it."

"Sounds like something Hau Ngai would say. Aren't we going through?"

"This is my battle. Not yours."

More than courage it is vindictiveness that drives Julienne to step around Olivia and into the gate. The mist doesn't feel like anything. No clinging dampness or vapor. It obscures everything ahead and behind, and after a few brash steps she realizes that she can't see Olivia.

Until the other woman takes her elbow. "Mortals are mad, every single one of you. Just a matter of how much and what kind."

The pagoda hovers in emptiness. There is no ground beneath it, no grass surrounding it, no sky above its yellow steeple. Vertigo seizes Julienne. Like a free-fall nightmare, terminal velocity without motion yet with the certain knowledge that impact is both inevitable and imminent.

Julienne expected to see the man—the monk—looming over the entrance in his suit and rolex, muscled and monstrous. He is not there.

Two figures with smooth glazed faces, one chiseled ivory, the other carved teak. Gesturing to the pagoda they bow to Olivia. One says, "Madame Siuching will find us of little temptation to her appetite. I began life as an official's seal, and my brother a lute."