Scale-Bright (8 page)

Chang'e rubs one of the patches where fire laps under flesh. "Xihe. She could've granted you this without hurting you. I know you killed her children—"

"Were a demon to hurt Julienne, you'd permit them no leniency."

"I'd see them dead just the once. You've already been through mortal death and afterlife. Promise me. Don't do this again. For eons you've repented. It's enough."

"It's not so simple."

"Promise me." Chang'e presses her mouth to Houyi's fingers, lips fluttering over each knuckle one by one. It reminds Houyi, immediately and acutely, that they haven't touched since Chang'e came back, that too much has kept them preoccupied and apart. Their thoughts might have coincided, for Chang'e looks up. "I could be very, very careful."

"No."

"No?"

"You don't have to be too careful." Houyi licks the edge of her wife's lips, the inside of her mouth and the rimed teeth that do not thaw under Fusang's heat.

As her duty has changed Houyi, so her wife's sentence has altered Chang'e. Immortal doesn't mean immutable; better than most they know this.

Her belt falls, a clatter of buckle and leather on parquet floor. She stays Chang'e's hand and clasps it to her breast. "The months you were away—to bear your absence is to suffer a wound. If I've ever given you cause to doubt me..."

"You haven't." Chang'e traces her thumb over the base of Houyi's throat, and pushes her back—far back, until her head and shoulders are off the mattress, until she's suspended under her wife's weight sharp as winter.

She whispers "Chang'e—" like a bowstring pulled to its tensile threshold, stretched between one harsh gasp and the next.

"When you say my name so," Chang'e murmurs, "there's nothing I wouldn't do. Nothing."

Houyi's hands tighten on fistfuls of linens as her teeth clench down on her wife's name. It is one word; it is every word.

She dangles, limp, from the bed's edge, her pulse a drum against the thin shell of her skull. Her voice, when it emerges, is hoarse. "You'll have to let me up."

It is some time before she gathers herself and grips her wife's hip, pushing away the skirt with a haste that causes her wife to laugh, then to cry out.

They settle twined, side by side.

"Sometimes I forget that you can be so sudden, so definite." Chang'e sighs, her eyelashes tickling Houyi's cheek. "I've missed you so much. Your skin, your mouth."

"But not my conversation or company?" Houyi navigates the width and curvature of her wife's spine. They've mapped and measured each other so well, every knot of bone and tendon, every indentation and ridge, the width of waist and thighs. Houyi cannot remember a time when this knowledge, this awareness of Chang'e, was not embedded in her deep as marrow in bone. "This must be the modern sensibility I've heard so much about."

"Oh, shush, you haven't even taken me to dinner or bought me beautiful things." Chang'e wriggles when Houyi's hand traces up her calf, stops at the back of her knee. "Take all of this off. Don't leave a stitch."

She obliges, undoing hooks and buttons with fingers long made nimble from fletching. This time they pace themselves, and when they finally part to lie loose-limbed and sweat-glistening it is as if—for all she's told Julienne otherwise—they are new brides. Intoxicated, delighted, every care pushed aside.

Houyi does not say that the year she's wrung out of Xihe will soon be up and that there might not be another after it.

2.3

Houyi listens to the push of water against water, the passage of pelicans and hornbills, and watches a parrot peck at a pomegranate. A white mynah flits by and settles on her shoulder. Animals often do that, drawn to her stillness, in blithe disregard of what she does.

It is so lulled that it remains perching on her after a blue-white feather, the quill sharp as any arrowhead, strikes where she sat. By then she has stepped behind the lanky boy who smells of pomade and leather. She seizes his hair and, pulling it back, opens his throat.

The mynah darts into the canopies. Houyi catches the body as it crumples; they are obscured from mortal sight and security cameras, but the blood may stain. She holds him over the water as he turns from boy to bird the size of a hound. His pinions are indigo, his belly ivory.

"Why did you kill him?"

"He believed he'd win unrivaled glory by attacking me." She wipes the blade on the feathers; later she will have to properly clean it. "Do serpents not kill?"

"Only for food. He couldn't cast out his spirit in time—he died, in truth and finality, with his flesh. As they say, you have no mercy." The snake crosses her arms. She remains under palm shade, keeping a distance they both know is more cosmetic than useful. "It's not even that you kill in anger."

"I rarely do that."

"That makes it worse."

"He did," Houyi says as she wills the knife away, "stalk my niece. To devour, as far as I could make out. Certainly not to make friends."

The sound the viper makes is too specific, a hiss too protracted, to come from human tongue or larynx. "He did, did he? Give me his carcass. I'll eat his innards; that way he'll never reincarnate."

"A moment ago you were criticizing my lack of mercy."

"Julienne—" Olivia hunches into her thin sundress. "How is she?"

When Chang'e found her, Julienne had worn herself out crying. An anxiety attack, she explained, one that would pass—as though it was nothing, as though she was not on the verge of breaking. "We'll talk about that. First tell me what you did to her. Be precise."

"Are you looking to dismember me?"

"Not yet."

"I gave her the same brew any mortal must take who enters and exits banbuduo. Yes, I added something to make her forget me from the moment we met—her recall would've been inconsistent otherwise. I've kept the monk away from her, as I promised you. What more do you want?"

"Julienne's been upset these last few months over what she can't remember." Houyi lets go of the bird that was a boy, now that its throat has run dry. The corpse starts to dissipate.

The snake glances down, for the first time showing shame. "I didn't mean to hurt her."

"That's ever the refrain with your kind. Whatever your intent was, it'll buy you no clemency. Undoing this damage might."

"You've the lunar rabbit. The best apothecary heaven has to offer."

"My wife considered that, but apparently it'd need to know what went into the brew, whether the memory was blocked or outright erased, and how much. You alone would be privy to that." Houyi frowns at the streaks of gore on her clothes. She'd need to remove them before she sees Julienne again. Her niece has never seen her kill; best to keep it that way. "Unfortunately."

"I can't believe how arrogant you are when you're asking for my help."

"I'm astounded at your ill manner when it's evident you want something from me. It can hardly be concern for Julienne that drove you here. Appalling though it is, we've something the other requires."

The viper's jaw tightens. "Among immortals Lady Chang'e is said to be one of the most beautiful. Why hasn't she divorced you yet? What does she see in you?"

"The simplicity of frankness." Houyi is well aware that she isn't always frank: but that is for another time. "Not that your species values such a quality."

"You insufferable—" Another reptilian noise. "Very well. I can try to reverse what I did. But before we get to that, I want to know if you've given the monk your blessings."

"Should I want to hunt you down, I'd do it myself. Why?"

"Nothing. Let me see Julienne. I'll have to do it in person."

Houyi holds out her hand.

Olivia looks at it as though it is a consecrated blade. "Just tell me where she is."

"You'll have to forgive my discourtesy when I say that I don't trust you to be alone with her. The sooner this is done the better, and you cannot move through the mortal world as I do."

The demon inhales sharply, taking her hand, and the park falls away.

* * *

They reappear in a hotel corridor that Xiaoqing knows well. Not the exact floor corresponding to the one she inhabits back in banbuduo, but the layout is identical.

When she stumbles the archer keeps hold of her, balancing her weight in one hand. She jerks away and leans against the wall, forehead against wood paneling, gasping as her bones and stomach resettle. This method of travel must surely kill a human.

Houyi is murmuring into her phone, a black bar sheathed in aluminum. Somewhere between there and here her clothes have become immaculate, not even a drop left to mark the bird boy's passing. "Seung Ngo and Julienne will be back shortly."

The archer lapses into silence, evidently not one for small talk. In spite of herself Xiaoqing supposes she understands what Lady Chang'e might find appealing about this creature, in body if not in personality: a frame tall and muscle-taut, a ruthlessness of being. It still doesn't seem a good basis for a relationship eons-long.

The lift opens, and at the sight of Julienne the knit of Xiaoqing's thoughts frays apart. The girl gives her an uncertain smile. "Do I know you?"

"This is Olivia Ching," Houyi says. "She can help you."

"I didn't know you had a therapist friend." She turns to Xiaoqing. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you, Ms. Ching. I'm Julienne Lau."

Lady Chang'e gives Xiaoqing a direct, searching look. The rumors are true: she is lovely, a chiseled face and skin like dawn-touched pearl. Xiaoqing keeps her eyes demurely downcast. By all accounts Chang'e is easier to appease than her wife, though next to the archer a stone would be sweet and tender

Xiaoqing kneels before Julienne, and wishes for nothing more than to put her head in the mortal's lap and whisper,
My dreams have been full of you. I couldn't stop thinking of the girl who took me into her arms. I...
"I'm going to need to touch you," she says, "and this might be uncomfortable."

Julienne smiles, uneasily fussing with her hair.

Laying her hand on the girl's belly, she searches for the fleck of ground scale that she added to the tisane. As a piece of her it answers immediately, passing through stomach lining and flesh and skin: no larger than a grain, glinting wet and green.

Julienne leaps to her feet, gagging. The bathroom door doesn't close in time to shut out the noise of her vomiting. It goes on for too long, as if she is retching up her lungs and everything she's ever eaten since she grew teeth. When she emerges her eyes are streaming and she grips the doorframe for support.

"Olivia?" The mortal's voice is hoarse.

Without meaning to, Xiaoqing reaches for Julienne. She's shoved back. It's without strength, but the surprise stings far more than the push.

"Don't touch me," Julienne says, wiping her eyes, "not after what you did."

Xiaoqing stares at the girl and resists the urge to scream at her.

"I need to be alone. Aunties."

Julienne storms out. The archer follows, mouth pursed shut.

"My wife will keep her from doing anything foolish," Chang'e says, settling at the desk's edge. "I believe you've been wanting—what was it—an audience with me."

"I've hoped for it." Xiaoqing drops to one knee, bowing her head. "One in better circumstances, Lady Chang'e."

"They surely can't get any worse, but I shan't tempt fate. What is it?"

"I'm Bai Suzhen's sworn sister. A monk, Fahai, trapped her in a pagoda without just cause. It's a wrong I've sought to right since."

"It's a rare demon that doesn't deserve her chastisement."

She bites the inside of her cheek. "Her only crime was to want more than what was allotted her. It was such a small thing, to have a husband and a child, and to live in peace as any human woman might. Great Guanyin took pity and granted her reprieve once; what was one mortal man, monk or not, to contradict that?"

"Men have a habit of not listening to women, monk or not." The goddess bends her mouth, between grimace and amusement. "The monk has help that's celestial if not holy. Is that why you're looking to us? Neither of us can confront another immortal, least of all on your behalf."

"I'm not asking for that. The monk's been relocating the pagoda to keep ahead of me, and I've scoured all the worlds. Heaven alone remains a realm I haven't searched, one I can't reach. An immortal favoring him—" As she suspected. "That means he may enter heaven."

"Xiaoqing, is it?"

"Yes, Lady Chang'e."

The goddess paces, graceful even at that. It's hard to believe she could have been some village girl. "I'm not pleased you got my niece involved. Do your peers seek to harm her?"

Your peers
, not your kind or your breed. Xiaoqing marvels at it. "Only the very young and the very foolish. The archer's reputation precedes her and those on good terms with me would never bring Julienne hurt. I took her to an opera in banbuduo."

"Did you?"

"I meant—she was perfectly safe there." Xiaoqing's knee aches. She doesn't know what possessed her to mention that.

Chang'e waves her hand. "Take a chair. Fahai is beneath notice, but the immortal behind him has long held a grudge against my wife. The laws of heaven being what they are…" A toss of long, gleaming hair. "Were Houyi a man she could have demanded judicial restitution or a test of arms, warrior against warrior. She would win, too, and that'd have concluded the sorry mess."

"Do you want me to remove him? Heaven's customs hold no sway over me."

"Then someone would be obligated to come after you," Chang'e says, dispassionate. "Likely Houyi. You wouldn't want to be her quarry."

"As long as Bai Suzhen can be free the risk would be as nothing."

"To have the pagoda located, is that all?"

"Yes."

"Not so unreasonable. I may even be able to convince my unreasonable spouse that it is not. You'll have something of Bai Suzhen."

She gives it to the goddess, a box where Bai Suzhen's scales lie preserved: the white of polished silver, of new ivory, of jasmine in first bloom. Xiaoqing does not know if she will have them back, these last pieces of her sister.