The Girl with Ghost Eyes (31 page)

It wrapped its bone fingers around my waist and plucked me off its chest. It raised me up to face it. In the cool night air we looked in each other’s faces. The flames of its eyes were flickering like dying candles. Behind the thin cracks of its bone-yellow face plates, I saw so much pain. A hundred men. The rage and pain and hunger of a hundred men who died here, far from the gravesites of their ancestors. Some were killed when gold mines collapsed around them. Others were massacred by mobs of bigots. There was no good reason for any of it. Each of these hundred men came here with aspirations and dreams. Each of their lives ended in tragedy.

Liu Qiang and Tom Wong had exploited their tragedies.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and threw my sword into its Elegant Mansion point.

I had fallen earlier from about thirty feet. At that time I slowed my fall by grabbing at a balcony and smacking down on an awning, and still the impact left me battered.

I was fifty feet in the air over a cobblestone street when the Kulou-Yuanling came apart.

All the magic that held it together vanished at once. The light of its eyes snuffed out, and its skull and its jawbone, the teeth in its mouth and the vertebrae in its back, all the ribs in its ribcage, its arms and legs, all collapsed into ash and sand at the same moment, straight down on Sacramento Street.

I fell with it. I experienced a moment of odd curiosity as I watched the street rush up to break me.

Then there was a sound of wings, a feeling like my clothes had been snagged in thorns, and I stopped falling.

The spirit gulls had caught me. I turned my head. The flapping of a thousand wings sounded like a choppy sea. Jiujiu was leading them, a look of satisfaction in all her eyes. And riding on her back—

“You saved me again,” I said to the spirit of my father’s eye.

Jiujiu took the lead. I floated behind them, with Mr. Yanqiu on my shoulder. Held aloft by a cloud of three-eyed gulls, we drifted over the streets of Chinatown, surveying the damage as we passed. Two buildings had been reduced to rubble. We saw the corpses of four dead men.

“He ate them,” I said to Mr. Yanqiu. “He was so hungry. So many of the corpses that made up the Kulou-Yuanling were men who starved to death in the mines, hoping for rescue that never came.”

“That was all the mind it had,” he said, with a brisk nod of his eye. “The Kulou-Yuanling had to obey Liu Qiang, but all it could remember was hunger.”

“But it had no stomach to fill. It ate the men and remained hungry. It would have stayed hungry if it ate all the men in Chinatown.”

Mr. Yanqiu shook his eye and sighed.

We arrived at the intersection of Dupont and Sacramento, where I had last seen my father. I had left him propped up to prevent him from choking on his blood, and then I had dashed off to destroy the Kulou-Yuanling. He was sitting up now. His eye was open wide and he stared at me with a slack look.

“Bring me down,” I said to the gull spirits.

“Li-lin, what are you …” said my father, his voice hoarse and uncertain. “What is …”

“Let her down,” Mr. Yanqiu told the gulls, and they lowered me to my feet.

“Can you stand?” I asked my father. “Let’s get you to the infirmary.”

“You are …” he said. “The seagulls … How could …”

“They are the Haiou Shen, Father, and I am their protector. But you need to see Dr. Wei. You’ve been shot.”

“It’s just a broken rib,” he said. “Where is the Kulou-Yuanling?”

“It’s dead. Its bones crumbled to ash on Sacramento Street.”

“Dead? How?”

“I killed it, Father.”

“Lil-lin, what did you …” he said, “how did you …”

“I used dian-si-shuei on it.”

My father rose unsteadily to his feet. He stood facing me as one would face a stranger. A stranger holding a very large knife. “You know dian-si-shuei?”

“Not really. I made Liu Qiang teach me the basics. The five meridian strikes and their order. Enough to kill a very big target that’s moving slowly and has its energy meridians right out there in the open. Father, you’re bleeding.”

“Liu Qiang.” My father spat on the ground. “Where is he?”

“He’s beaten. His demonic arm is dead. I’ll tell you all about it at the infirmary, Father.”

“I’ll go when I’m ready,” he said. “Do not tell me how I should act.”

I sighed. He needed to get to the infirmary, but if I insisted on it, he’d only refuse more strenuously.

“Father,” I began, “when I killed Liu Qiang’s arm …” I was having a hard time saying the words. “Something strange happened.”

“What happened?” he asked me.

“It changed into a strand of long white hair.”

A significant look passed between us. “No,” he said, looking away. “It isn’t her.”

“Father,” I asked slowly, “is the Bai Fa Monu alive?”

“No,” he said, blinking too fast. “The White-Haired Demoness is dead.”

“Why did we come to America?”

He looked down. “Our village was gone,” he said.

“Is that all there was to it?”

He would not meet my eyes. “Our village was gone,” he said, “so we came to America.”

“Mr. Wong said you refused to leave me behind.”

“What of it?”

“Why did you insist on bringing me with you?”

He raised his gaze to mine. “You’re really asking me that?”

“All my life, I was a disappointment to you. You wanted a son.”

“Of course I wanted a son, Li-lin.”

“Instead, you had me.”

“I wish I had my pipe right now,” he said, “or a cup of tea.”

“And I would be happy to bring your pipe or prepare your tea, Father. But why did you bring me to Gold Mountain? You could have left me behind.”

“Could I?” he said. “Yes, I suppose I could. But I had lost so much …” His voice trailed off.

“Your wife was dead.”

His gaze searched my face. The silence that fell between us was deep and painful. “You don’t remember,” he said.

I stared at him for a long time. “What don’t I remember?”

“You don’t remember any of it,” he said. “I should be glad of that. No one alive can remember my shame.”

We stood quietly, facing each other. A breeze blew down the street, carrying brick dust and ashes, the smell of burning, destroyed things.

“Please tell me why you brought me to America, Father.”

“You want to know why?” he said. “Your mother was dead. And so many others. My apprentices, my mother, my cousins and friends, they were all dead. My temple, my home, everything was gone. Not a stone remained of the village it was my duty to protect. Do you understand, Ah Li?”

“I was the only one you had left.”

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. Eventually he looked away with a laugh, a raw, bitter laugh. “Is that what you think? You think I saw you as some kind of trinket, a souvenir?”

“I … I …”

“I brought you with me because you were the only one I managed to save. I failed everyone else. Out of everyone I was sworn to protect, you were the only one who made it out of the massacre with me.

“You were the only reason I did not loathe myself utterly, Li-lin. The one life I managed to save, other than my own. Our village was a charnel-house when I found you in the well. I found you alive. No one but you. My daughter. My redeemer.”

There were tears in my eyes. I waited for him to continue.

“You clung to me, Li-lin, do you remember that? I carried you out of the ruins of our village. You clung to me.”

“You called me Little Monkey,” I said.

He gave a short laugh. “You wouldn’t let go.”

I wasn’t used to seeing the expression on his face. It took me a moment to recognize it. It was affection.

Father’s eyebrows made him look severe, but he also looked pale and sallow. He’d taken such a beating in the last few days. He could barely stand. His beautiful silk robe was now stiff with drying blood. He wiped sweat from his face and said, “What did you do with Liu Qiang?”

I took a breath before I answered. “I broke his index finger and let him go, Father. With the broken finger he won’t be able to write any talismans or shape any shoujue gestures. He won’t be performing any more harmful magic. And besides,” I began, “I told him—”

“Why did you let him live?”

I sighed. “Because I made a promise to someone.”

“Who?”

“Shuai Hu,” I said. His look was blank, so I said, “He follows the Buddhist path. He’s a tiger with three tails.”

Father’s eye went wide. He took a step back. “What are you saying? You have been consorting with monsters?”

“I needed his help, Father,” I said. “He follows the Buddhist path.”

My father held his hands out in front of him. It was a defensive gesture, as though he was certain I was going to attack him at any moment. “What has happened to you, Li-lin? You are a Daoshi. You have no business among the dirty spirits of gulls, let alone tigers. You have performed forbidden magic. And you let Liu Qiang go free.”

“I promised Shuai Hu that I would kill no one tonight,” I repeated. “And before I let Liu Qiang go, I told him if he ever causes trouble again, I would hunt him down. Wherever he hid I would find him and I would beat him down, break his thumb, and piss in his face.”

I smiled. My father looked shocked, and then he looked bewildered. He stood staring at me, uncomprehending. And there were more questions I needed to ask.

“What happened to the Plague Box, Father?”

He stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“Li Zhenren, the founder of our lineage, had a Plague Box full of evil spells. The box would have been passed down through the generations of the Maoshan lineage, from senior student to senior student. It would have been passed into Shifu Li’s hands. Shifu Li would have passed it to you, Father.”

He glowered at me, saying nothing.

“The spell to create the Quanshen, the spell to create the Kulou-Yuanling … They would have been quarantined in the Plague Box. What happened to it, Father?”

He lifted his face to me. His eye burned with anger. “Enough,” he said. “You ask too much. You have chosen a left-hand path so many times tonight, Li-lin. You tell me you are a protector of monsters, that you made a promise to a monster, that you performed dian-si-shuei and let Liu Qiang leave with his life. I do not know you anymore. You are erguizi.”

I looked down. Erguizi. A child with two ghosts. A Chinese ghost and an American ghost.

He continued looking at me with a harshness only my father could manage. “Is there more?”

I swallowed and made myself face him. “Yes, Father,” I said. “Tomorrow I go to work for Bok Choy and the Xie Liang tong. And I’ve decided that I’m not going to destroy the spirit of your eye.”

He paled. I saw a look on his face I had not seen since I was a small child. On that day long ago, we walked in silence. We went from house to house, looking for survivors. There were none. I had never forgotten his expression. He looked like a man who had lost everything, who had lost any reason to live, a man whose every hope had been ruined.

My heart broke for him in that moment.

He cleared his throat. “I have failed you too,” he said. “From this moment forward, I have no daughter.” He turned and walked away.

It had only been a matter of days, but it felt like years had gone by. Just days ago Mao’er had shown me a niche between two walls off of Fat Boy Alley. I made my way back there, in the human world this time. It was a cold night to sleep outside. I curled up and slept.

I woke in the morning, sore and tired, feeling chilled to the bone. I sat up, rubbing my head where I’d been kicked. The events of last night played out in my mind. I had defeated Tom Wong in a fight, bested Liu Qiang’s magic, killed his evil arm, and demolished the Kulou-Yuanling. It had been a victory, of the sort that legends tell of. I grinned a bitter grin, knowing that life goes on when the legends end. The hero triumphs, but then his story continues. He grows old, suffers, and dies.

After the heroine triumphs, her father disowns her, her social order rejects her, and she must spend years sweating in a dim, dank room, a plaything for men.

The injustice of it all made me want to howl, to weep, to tear at my hair and face. I had saved Chinatown, using my wits, my courage, and my power, and now I was going to become a whore.

It was for the best that my father had disowned me. If he no longer had a daughter, then my whoring would cause him no loss of face.

I stood to stretch my sore muscles. Every movement reminded me that I had taken a beating. It hurt to stand. It hurt to move. The sky above was cloudless for once, an unending expanse of blue that ranged from a crystalline, frost-blue to an inky cobalt I just wanted to dissolve into.

Moments earlier, I had felt like weeping for sorrow, but I did not shed a tear. Now, looking into the gorgeous depths of California sky, the beauty humbled me. I would not weep for Xian Li-lin, but I wept for beauty.

I came out to walk around Chinatown. There were hardly any men out this morning. No fish sellers, no vendors. Most were afraid, I guessed. It would take a day or two before people calmed down after last night’s events.

I began walking. Everywhere there was rubble. Red brick dust and wood chips mingled with the yellow-white ashes of the Kulou-Yuanling.

Two buildings had been demolished. Two of the Xie Liang’s gambling halls. Bok Choy would probably tell the constables there had been a fire. If I knew how the tongs worked, Bok Choy and Mr. Wong would send letters back and forth until an agreement was reached. Tom Wong would be blamed for the fire. The constables would take him to prison.

I wanted to remember Tom as he’d been before hatred twisted him. The pretty young man who had been my husband’s friend. Rocket’s death had struck us all, a devastating blow, but Tom had allowed resentment and bitterness to rule his days and actions. He sought a kind of power no one should pursue. Now he was going to go to prison. He was never going to be able to walk unassisted again.

My future looked bleak. No one would choose to become a fatherless widow working as a whore. But I knew I had what it would take to survive. I knew how to roll with the punches.

I should know. I’ve been punched a lot.