“I saw that,” Jim said. “Michelle was slippery, too.”
I rose. “We need to search the house.”
We combed the house. We found no sign of the two other shapeshifters: Neither Mina nor August had been in the house for at least thirty-six hours. Their scents were old. I swiped the log from the front office and we escaped.
Outside the cold night air swept along my skin, washing away the nasty magic. I headed straight for Pooki and opened the log on the hood. Four different types of handwriting filled the pages. The last entry was three days old. I flipped back a month and scanned the entries.
“Are you actually reading this or just flipping pages?”
“Jim? Shush. I need to concentrate.” Shift changes, notes on shapeshifters caught in the city for one reason or another crashing at the house, routine, routine, routine … Mina’s entries identified different types of herbal tea she drank during her shift. Roger documented the patrol routes of three neighborhood cats, complete with battles for territory and places where they chose to mark it.
I kept turning the pages, and when I finally saw it, I almost didn’t realize it. Thursday before last, August failed to come in for the shift change. The log showed him signing in fourteen hours later. His ps, gs, and ys showed longer vertical strokes than usual. I ran my fingers on the other side of the page and felt the outlines of the letters. August had pressed too hard on the paper. He was excited when he signed in, confident, angry, maybe determined. His reason for the failure to show up read “overslept,” which made no sense considering the amount of pressure he put on the page. There was something grim about the way he wrote, as if he’d etched each letter into the paper.
I tapped the page, thinking. A nekomata was a Japanese monster. August was half Japanese, half white by birth, but American culturally. He couldn’t read kanji, and his Japanese was terrible. Atlanta had a large Japanese population, with its own school and stores, a place where American customs didn’t apply. August visited his family there, but he never quite got the Us and Them mentality, and being a halfer, he was looked down on. A few months ago he told me that one of his cousins was gay. August had gone to pick up the thirteen-year-old kid at Japanese school to take him to a family gathering and he’d seen the boy sit on his friend’s lap after recess. I had to explain that it was a cultural thing that didn’t indicate anything about his cousin’s sexuality, but it just didn’t compute from his Southern guy point of view. He didn’t completely believe me either and told me that if anyone ever picked on his cousin, he’d break their legs.
Magic tended to stick to nationality and region. People generated magic, and their superstitions and beliefs channeled it. If enough people believed that a certain creature existed and, worse, took precautions against it, eventually the magic birthed it into being. If you had an area densely settled by Irish, you got banshees. If you had Vietnamese settlers, sooner or later ma doi, the hungry spirits, would be haunting the streets. And if you had a Japanese community, you would get yokai, demonic creatures.
The residue on Roger’s skin really bothered me. Either the top layer of his skin had turned to dust, or he’d been liberally powdered with something. No creature I could think of could do that to a body.
Of the four people in the office, August would be the most likely to come into contact with a Japanese legend. We had to retrace his steps.
I flipped the pages. The entries were becoming shorter, more erratic. On Saturday some of them looked unfinished, as if the writer had simply stopped in the middle of a sentence. Sunday had no entries. There should’ve been some. On Monday, a single entry written in Michelle’s neat handwriting read, Can’t stay awake. Help. m.
Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
“We need to go to August’s place. We need to figure out why he was out on Thursday.” I looked up.
Jim was asleep leaning against the car.
“Jim!”
No response. I grabbed him and shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” He slid to the ground, still asleep. I slapped his face. He didn’t move.
I pulled Pooki’s door open, popped the trunk, jerked the extra gallon can of enchanted water out, and dumped it on his face.
The water poured. Come on, come on …
Jim coughed and shook himself.
I dropped the can and grabbed his shoulders. “Wake up!”
Dark eyes looked at me. “I’m awake.”
“Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep, you hear?”
He growled and pushed off the ground. “I’m okay.”
No, he wasn’t okay. We were in trouble. We were really, really in trouble. I paced back and forth. My heart was beating so fast it felt about to explode. Something was wrong with my Jim and if I didn’t fix it now, he would end up like Roger, a dry cadaver full of nasty magic.
“Calm down,” Jim said.
“I am calm! Get in the car.” Emergencies called for desperate measures.
He got in. I flopped into the driver’s seat and chanted the engine into life, watching him like a hawk. He stayed awake. I dropped the parking brake and gunned it out of the parking lot. “Roll the window down,” I yelled over the roar of the engine. “You need wind on your face.”
“Where are we going?” he roared back.
“To see my mother!”
*
MY MOTHER LIVED in a small cluster of apartment buildings in Riverdale. It took me more than an hour to drive over there through the crumbling city, and the entire time I watched Jim out of the corner of my eye. I punched him in the arm a few times to make sure he stayed awake. After the first eight times he told me to quit it.
I maneuvered down the smallish road and into the horseshoe formed by the squat two-story townhomes and parked in front of my mother’s house. The pale blue light of her fey lantern filtered through the window. I climbed out. Jim already waited by the door, surveying the houses.
“Why are those three buildings facing to the left?”
“Because this is an Indonesian community, mostly older people who practice magic. They’re more superstitious than usual. It’s bad luck to build a house facing north. Some people believe it will make you poor. The subdivision street was already laid out when people moved in, so those three families chose to build their houses facing east.”
“Aha.”“It’s bad luck to build a house facing a field, it’s bad luck to have the kitchen face the front door, and it’s bad luck to build a fence taller than six feet. This is just the way things are, Jim. Just go along with it.”
“Your fence is taller than six feet.”
I turned to him as I walked. “I didn’t say they were my superstitions. But they’re important to my mother.”
We headed to the door. The familiar scents washed over me: rice, onion, chili peppers, cumin, coriander. Mom was cooking nasi goreng, fried rice. I was home.
Help me.
Jim sampled the wind. “It’s past one. Does your mother usually cook after midnight?”
“No, it’s special for me. She sensed us coming.”
I raised my hand to knock on the door. Before my knuckles touched the wood, it flew open and my mother clamped me in a hug. Looking at her you could tell exactly how I would look in thirty years or so: tiny, skinny, dark, quick to move.
“Why are you so dirty?” My mother pulled a cobweb out of my hair. “What is happened? Come inside. Who is this man?”
Here we go. I took a deep breath and walked in. “This is Jim.”
Jim stepped inside.
My mother shut the door and peered at him. “He is dark. Very, very dark.”
Jim grinned, showing a tiny edge of his teeth.
I felt like slapping myself. “Mother!”
“What is it you do?” She leaned over to Jim. Her accent was getting thicker. “Do you have money?”
“He is my alpha. He’s in charge of the whole Cat clan. Very important.”
My mother’s eyes sparked. Oh no.
She leaned over and patted Jim’s hand. “That is so nice. My daughter is so smart. Always respectful and well behaved. Never any trouble and she does as she is told.”
“You don’t say,” Jim murmured.
“Doesn’t spend a lot of money. Two doctor degrees. Little problem with her eyes, but that’s her father’s side of the family. Very rare magic, a white tiger. One in seven generation. Very special. She can cure evil eye with a touch. And if you had your house cursed, she can purify it for you. Everyone respects my daughter. All our people know her.”
Jim nodded to her with a solemn look. My stomach lurched. I felt like throwing up. “Mother …”
She nodded to Jim, as if sharing a grave secret. “And she’s a good cook, too.”
Jim leaned a little toward her, his face deadly serious. “I’m sure she is.”
My mother smiled, as if he’d given her a diamond. “Best match. Of all the girls, mine is best match.”
Aaaaa! “Mother! There is something wrong with him. He’s magic-sick.”
My mother stood up on her toes and peered at Jim’s eyes. For a long moment they were eye to eye, my short mother and tall, muscular Jim, and then she switched to Indonesian.
“Let him go.”
“No.” I shook my head.
“He is strong. Very good in the body. But you must find another one.”
“I don’t want another one! I want him.”
“He’s dying.”
“I have to save him. Please help me. Please.”
My mother bit her lip and pointed at the chair. “Sit.”
Jim sat. She leaned over and pulled his right eye open with her fingers, examining the iris. “Something is eating his soul.”
“I figured that out. But I can’t see it.”
Mother sighed. “I can’t see it either. Until we see it, we can’t do anything about it. We need Keong Emas.”
The Golden Snail. My heart dropped. My legs gave out and I landed on the couch. The only place we could get a golden snail would be in Underground Atlanta. It used to be a shopping district in Five Points, where all the big buildings stood before the Shift. The Underground started out as a big train depot in the mid-1800s with shops, banks, and even saloons, but eventually the city had to build viaducts over the railroad tracks for the car traffic. The viaducts ran together until a good portion of the train tracks, the shops, and the depot were underground. Before the Shift, it used to be full of little bars and shops. Once the magic hit, the shop owners fled and the black market moved in. The mob-sponsored traders had burrowed deep, cutting tunnels running from their shops right into the ruined Five Points and Unicorn Lane, where the magic ran wild and no sane cop would follow them. Now the Underground was a place where you could buy anything if you were desperate enough.