I’ve always had a score-settler’s streak. You cross me, I don’t let it go.
But that dog of a man on the sixth floor at the High-Society Banquet — the one who bites — I’m not going to get a chance at payback. Not now. Not ever.
Because I’m running.
The wind tugged at my hair as I hurried down the street, and as my pulse slowed I finally remembered exactly who he was. His surname is Si — Si Jiangchen. A managing partner at the multinational venture firm Lengshan Capital. Projects he touches run into the hundreds of billions. People like him live in a different sky than the rest of us.
I’d seen his face a dozen times in the little newsstand beside our shop. Not just in the sober business weeklies — even the gossip rags loved him. There’s a woman in our tenement who works in a high-end office tower; she devours those magazines on her days off and comes to my stall to gab about the glittering upper-crust life. Thanks to her, and those glossy, illustrated stories, I got to know the man who lives so far above us.
Tonight, that hand who controls billions had his face smashed by my family’s old jujube-wood compass. I’d shattered him — literally. If that were the whole story, I might already be dead.
Worse, I discovered a secret about him that I can’t keep to myself.
He isn’t human.
There was no life in him.
I have the yin-yang eye. I can see the dead, and I can see the living’s qi. Birth and death, rise and fall — everyone carries a faint, colored aura. The healthy glow is bright and steady; the sick and cursed fade. The dying walk wrapped in black smoke, all but gone.
The three biker assholes in front of me were all wrapped in thick black miasma — they were already on the radar of a woman who’d died a violent death and was trailing them. Still they revved their engines and goaded each other on, courting fate like men who think they have forever.
And I couldn’t get the image of Si Jiangchen from the banquet out of my head. In that sixth-floor bedroom I’d seen the woman who died there, and his eyes — blood-red, out of control. Those eyes could eat a soul. Even now the memory made the hairs along my arms stand up.
No. I couldn’t stand and brood. Everything that happened tonight was enough for that Si to sign my death warrant.
I had to get rid of these three before they tangled with me any further.
“You little—putting on a show?” I spat.
“Little bitch! Playing ghost games, huh?!” The one they called Little Li couldn’t hold back. He’d already swung a leg over his bike, jaw set. He gunned the throttle so hard the machines snarled. “I’ll kill you right now.”
“You gonna try?” I smiled, not letting the amusement leave my face. In the dim yellow streetlight my pupils were black as oil, cool and flat.
Little Li laughed, a nasty bark. He glanced at Wei Yuan and swaggered, “You think you’re something? Killing you would be like squashing an ant.”
“Hold on.” Wei Yuan — the rich kid they called Wei Dashao — was tense. The woman clinging to his arm had told me his name earlier. Now his face had gone white; he stepped between his boys and me, impatient but careful. “If I don’t see a ghost tonight, I’ll make you lose half your face.”
His voice sounded low and dangerous; under it I heard a tremor he wasn’t letting show. Big men who put on fronts are always the ones trembling inside.
“That bitch tried to set us up last time — the classic honey-trap. We dragged her a kilometer. In the end it was just an ‘accident’; she got a little money and shut up.” Little Li, as a loyal hanger-on, had to back up his boss. He hated being there as much as the others, but if he ran now he’d lose any chance of riding out with these rich boys ever again.
“Move it,” he warned. “Dilly-dally and I’ll drag you to death.”
His face was thin, cheeks hollow and bluish — the kind of man who looks more sick than mean. He’d been jabbering so much I’d had enough. I formed a hand seal — the Heaven-Eye seal — and whispered the chant fast and low.
“Heaven’s law clear, Earth’s rule bright,
Mirror of Yin and Yang, reveal your sight.
Show true form, dispel the lie,
By the Three Mao’s will, so be it, so I cry.”
With the words, a pale teal shimmer leapt from my fingers and brushed the brows of the three men. Right between their eyebrows — the spot our Daoist side calls the Heaven-Eye, the third eye — the old hidden screen flickered alive. Everyone has that little sense, some call it a sixth sense; in most people it closes by adolescence. Tonight I gave theirs a spark for just a few seconds, enough to let them see what lays between worlds.
They flinched as if struck by lightning.
“Ah…ah!!” Little Li — closest to Wei Yuan’s bike — was hit first. The woman’s mutilated profile snapped into being right in front of him. He screamed and tried to scramble away, but his legs turned to jelly; he managed only one step before collapsing, the damp stain blooming down the back of his pants.
Dong — who’d been behind me — didn’t fare better. His face drained of color; he’d been bracing one foot on his heavy machine, and it toppled with a metallic crash.
“W-Wei…Wei Dashao, behind you!” Dong croaked, pointing with a shaking finger to the pillion seat on Wei Yuan’s bike.
The ghost, her face a torn, half-melted thing, realized she’d been seen. A grotesque smile tugged at what remained of her mouth. As the muscles twitched, a lump of gore and brain slid off and plopped onto Wei Yuan’s shoulder.