The Mirrored Shard (13 page)

Cal pointed to a teahouse with signs in Chinese and English proclaiming it the Jade Monkey. “In there,” he said. “It’s quiet.”

I didn’t want to stop—I wanted to find this man my mother had told me about and get it over with. But I could tell from the set of Conrad’s shoulders that he wasn’t going anywhere, and I was going to have to convince him that this was what I needed to do.

I let him and Cal lead me across the street. The red light we’d seen came from hundreds of lanterns strung between the thin, encroaching buildings of Chinatown. Red silk glowed like living things floating in the steam that reached from the manhole covers and grates scattered haphazardly across the rutted street.

Shouts and cries and a dozen languages floated around my ears, but I felt safe in the throng. I was anonymous here. Nobody cared, and I relaxed for the first time since Cal and I had boarded the airship.

I could see why Dean had loved it here. This place was like him, alive and hotheaded and unpredictable.

The Jade Monkey had ornate wooden furniture, low cushions to sit on, and a censer belching sweet smoke toward the ceiling. Statues of dragons and foo dogs looked down at us from alcoves, their blank ceramic eyes catching the low light and seeming to spring to life.

A figure paused outside the glass but then moved on,
and I finally allowed myself to relax. The Proctors wouldn’t come here. Nobody was going to recognize me, take up the cry of “destroyer” that I hated, whether it was pejorative or worshipful.

“Tea, please,” Conrad said to the woman who approached. She was wearing a smart dress and had her hair done up.

“Maybe some food, too?” she said. “You look hungry.”

I thought back to the girl at the jitney station in Bakersfield who had betrayed us. But I
was
hungry—starved, in fact—so I nodded.

“Mm-hmm,” she said, as if it had been completely obvious we’d say yes. “Be right back.”

“Now,” Conrad said, turning to me, “explain why you ran off to follow some idea that’s obviously suicide.”

“Explain why you followed me when you’re putting yourself in far more jeopardy,” I countered. Conrad always acted like he knew best simply by virtue of being older, and it always got my back up.

“Because when my kid sister runs off, it’s my job to bring her back.”

“I’m doing this for Dean, Conrad,” I said. “It’s the only way. I have to make up for what I did. It’s my fault he got shot, and Nerissa said …” I drifted off, not able to continue my train of thought. My mother’s information was probably just a flight of fancy, but it was all I had.

Conrad rubbed his forehead and then spread his hands out on the table, a move that reminded me too much of our father. “Aoife, you have to know that it can’t be real. To visit the Deadlands, you have to be dead.” He moved
one hand subtly, to cover mine. “I don’t want you to be dead.”

I felt a stab in my gut then. Conrad could be a pain. He was vain and superior and had a bad temper, but he was my brother, and I’d never doubted for a second that he loved me.

I couldn’t say that about anyone else.

I turned my hand to give Conrad’s a squeeze. “I’ll be careful,” I promised.

“How can you be careful if you’re dead?” Conrad demanded. “This is exactly the kind of thinking that led to this whole mess, that led to that hole in the sky and our father being in a coma.”

“Hey,” Cal said. “If it weren’t for Aoife, you’d still be hiding in the Mists and I’d still be under the thumb of the Proctors. She saved us both from that.”

Quickly as I’d come to feel guilty about doing all of this to Conrad, anger replaced it, like flame turns water to steam.

“No,” I said to Cal. “Let him get it out. No secrets between us, Conrad.” I fixed him with a glare. “If you’ve got a problem, lay it on the table.”

Conrad’s lip twitched, the nervous tic he got when things weren’t going his way. “I never should have sent you that letter.” He sighed. “I was scared, and I made a bad decision.”

He might as well have pulled back his hand and slapped me, because that was what it felt like. The letter—the one that had touched off my leaving the Academy, finding out what my family could do, encountering Tremaine—had
been so simple.
Find the witch’s alphabet. Save yourself
. A desperate plea from Conrad to stave off the iron poisoning that had consumed him, to free him from the Mists.

“So I should have stayed in Lovecraft?” I whispered. “I should have gone mad, just like our mother?”

“No!” Conrad snapped. “No … I just meant … you weren’t ready. You let Tremaine sway you and I couldn’t help you, because if I’d left the Mists he’d have found me, too.”

There it was. The unspoken ball of anger and resentment between us finally had a name. Conrad blamed me for falling for Tremaine’s tricks. Even though I’d tried to fix it. Even though there was no way I could have known the Fae were liars.

“You’ve got some nerve,” I told Conrad quietly. I felt like turning over the table, throwing my tea in his face and storming out, but I wasn’t one to give in to my rages.

“Do I?” he said. “I love you, Aoife, but you caused a lot of this, and I take partial blame because you didn’t know about anything involving our family, and you weren’t ready to fend off the Fae. I might not have a Weird, but at least I was prepared for the truth.”

“Not because of that,” I said. “That’s all true. I let Tremaine trick me.” I stood, smoothing my hands over the rough uniform the Proctors had put me in on Alcatraz. “You’ve got nerve for pretending that if it had been you he was offering the bargain to, you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing.”

I started to leave, quietly and without a tantrum. I could scream once I was out in the street. Cal moved to stop me, but before he could, I was intercepted by the waitress,
holding a bevy of plates piled with steaming meats and vegetables.

I seethed. Conrad was incapable of seeing that he would also have taken the Fae’s bargain. And I seriously doubted he would have tried so hard to set his mistake right after the fact, all the way up to voluntarily going to the Brotherhood and using Tesla’s gate to the realm of nightmares. Bargaining with the Old Ones. Any of what I’d endured.

It made me sad, in an odd way, to know we were so fundamentally different that we’d never again be a family the way we had been when we were kids.

But then, that was what happened when you grew up. You found out that people you trusted weren’t who they said they were, and that big brothers you idolized were painfully human.

It was the worst feeling in the world, and I waved the plate away when the waitress offered it to me. “I lost my appetite.”

“Aoife,” Conrad started. “Don’t get upset. Don’t be like that just because you don’t like the truth.”

I pointed my finger at him and gave him my worst glare, one that I’d first seen framed by Grey Draven’s angular face. “Don’t start with me, Conrad.”

“Listen,” the waitress said. “I hate to interrupt, but there’s two
gwai lo
across the street who’ve been staring a hole in this place since you came in. Anybody you know?”

I examined the figures who’d been staring in the teahouse window. Hats pulled low over their faces, long coats, completely nondescript.

The Brotherhood’s goons.

“We have to go,” I said to Cal and Conrad. “Right now.”

“There’s a back door,” the waitress said. “I don’t know who you ticked off, but I got no beef with you. I didn’t see anything.”

We started for the kitchen as a throng of vendors pushing steaming carts passed, obscuring us from the Brotherhood for a few seconds.

“One more thing,” I said to the waitress. “I’m looking for a scientist. His name is Horatio Crawford. He does experiments with the dead. Have you heard of anyone like that anywhere in the city?”

Her eyes widened, and she took a step away from me. “I don’t mess with that stuff,” she said. “And I ain’t heard of no scientists. You want the dead, you go to the Spiritualist séances, down on Boneyard Row. But I don’t mess with that. Dealing with ghosts is bound to make you one yourself.”

“Boneyard Row?” I said. “Any particular Spiritualist?”

“I never been, but I hear the best one is Madame Xiang,” the waitress said. “Now get out of here before those goons decide to come in.”

We wound our way through a cramped and boiling kitchen and popped out into an alley.

“Well, this is perfect,” Conrad said. “No money, no plan and the Brotherhood a dozen yards behind us at all times.”

“It’ll be all right,” Cal said. “We can hide.” But he was fidgeting, and I knew he wasn’t any more optimistic than Conrad.

I wasn’t as down in the dumps. I
did
have a plan. “Come on,” I said, winding my way between rain barrels and piles of debris.

“Where are we going?” Conrad demanded.

“To see Madame Xiang,” I said. “You can come or not. I don’t really care.” I held his gaze until he dropped it to his shoes. I did care what happened to Conrad, of course—I wasn’t heartless. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so angry at him, and when we walked, I made sure I was in front so I didn’t have to look at him.

Finding Boneyard Row wasn’t much of a trick—everyone we asked knew where it was, and pointed us through an encroaching series of row houses, wooden and brick, thrown down seemingly at random and creating narrow alleys and streets teeming with people, carts and the occasional single-vent jitney, its two wheels bouncing over the rutted pavement.

We had to move at the pace of the crowd, and we inched along until one of the brightly hung windows, resplendent with gilt paint, silk curtains and crookedly painted statues of Chinese animals, read MADAME XIANG: SPIRITUAL COMMUNICATIONS FROM BEYOND THE AETHER TO YOU.

The surrounding storefronts all told the same story, but the burly man with a Fu Manchu mustache and long braid manning the door practically dragged us inside.

“Up the stairs and to the left!” he boomed. “Madame is always happy to help those in need,
gwai lo
or not.”

“Don’t know why they call us that,” Cal muttered as our combined weight made the stairs creak and snap.

“It means ‘foreigner,’ ” Conrad said. “It’s not very nice.”

Madame Xiang’s drawing room was done in the same
opulent style, walls hung with red silk embroidered with flowers and forest scenes, deer and tigers and the aftermath of their meeting.

A table covered in green velvet sat at the center, a single ornate chair at the head and four chairs arrayed around it.

“Hello?” Cal called, peering cautiously toward the beaded curtain at the far end of the room.

The whole place gave off the air of a carnival—arranged for a specific purpose, but not real. I’d heard stories about Spiritualists, of course, mostly from Proctor information. They were heretics. Not only did they believe in a soul, an afterlife and magic, but they claimed they could use magic to communicate with the dead.

Believing in ghosts, the Proctors would allow. Believing in magical powers that allowed a living person to commune with the dead essence of their loved ones—that would earn you a fast trip to a heretic prison.

Madame Xiang might be full of it, but hopefully she’d know where Nerissa’s doctor was, or if he existed at all.

When she appeared, Cal gave an audible squeak. I felt like joining him, and only a lifetime of not showing my true reactions in self-preservation kept my face composed.

Madame Xiang wore a long blue-and-gold gown weighed down with so much embroidery it bowed her shoulders. Her eyebrows were dramatic, and a tiny crimson bud of a mouth bloomed from the vast wasteland of white pancake makeup on her face. Her hair was done in elaborate loops, and giant glittering hair sticks protruded from the crown, studded with a bloody handful of rubies that swung and caught the golden light of the oil lamps.

“Welcome, travelers,” she intoned in a perfect British accent. “Do you seek the counsel of spirits this night?”

“We …,” I started, but she minced across the room, sat in the largest chair and stuck out feet roughly the size of my fist.

I’d read about foot binding in my history classes, but to see the result was gruesome. I tried not to stare.

“Sit!” Madame Xiang commanded, then rang a small silver bell that she pulled from her voluminous sleeve.

I felt now as if we’d not only walked into a carnival but also gotten on a ride with no end in sight.

A servant appeared. He was enormous—quite possibly the largest fully human man I’d ever seen. So tall he had to duck under the beaded archway, his suit strained at every seam and the tea tray he carried was comically small in his hands.

I didn’t know where to look—at Madame’s face, at her feet or at this mountain, who set down the tea and retreated.

“Thank you, Fang,” Madame said, and smiled at us. “Please. I can discern through the aether that you are weary. Warm yourselves.”

We all took a small handleless cup, more to be polite than anything.

The tea was bitter. It reminded me of medicine Nerissa used to force on me when I was feverish and coughing.

“We have a question for you,” I said.

Madame waved me away. Her nails were painted gold and shone like eagle talons under the lamps. They looked like they could rip my flesh.

“They all come with questions, but the spirits already know the answers,” she said. “Drink! All will be revealed in time.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Conrad said. “We didn’t come here for a reading.…” He trailed off, and blinked in confusion, looking at Cal and me as if we’d all woken up in a particularly gaudy bad dream.

Worry started deep in my mind and quickly blossomed into alarm. Conrad’s words sounded as if they came to me down a long tunnel, and were drowned out by the booming of Madame’s precise English syllables.

“Just relax, dear hearts,” she said. “It’s nothing fatal. Just a little nip to help you sleep.”

Too late, I recognized the taste hiding under the bitter tea. Medicine, yes, but the kind Nerissa used to help herself sleep. Strong opiates that would tumble you down a tunnel of dreams as quickly as you could swallow it.