Year of the Tiger (Changeling Sisters) (20 page)

“You! You are the sun!” she gasped.

I glanced at the tiny red candles. We cast the same amount of light. “Erm, yeah. Perk of still being alive, you know.”

“But you must share some!” She was so weak she could only crawl after me, dislodging the lid of her kimchi pot as she did so. “Please! I make you special deal! I can give you powerful, brilliant light! Fire from your ancestors!”

“I have enough power to deal with.” Wolf didn’t even have the nerve to feel abashed. I scowled.

Her cries pounded my back long after I rounded the bend. I forced the guilt away. If the pack’s plan succeeded, then all of the ghosts’ problems, not just hers, would fade away. They could move on again. Not stay boxed up here for all eternity.

I gazed around at the amount of ghosts clogging the temple grounds: Some were bundled up under ledges, and others stared off vacantly. The offering tables were all empty.

The monkey stood absolutely still in the middle of a huge stone slab. I glanced suspiciously around the courtyard and stopped. The monkey hadn’t led me to vampyres.

It had brought me to Old Man Zhi.

Chapter 24: Penance

The old lantern maker sat hunched under a craggy cliff face. His thin fingers struggled to patch together one of those lovely sunshine lanterns made of mint green and sunflower yellow paper, but he was oblivious to the water dripping with a steady
pat-pat
from above, leaving him holding soaked papier-mâché. In a fit of anger, he ripped the paper to pieces, and was left holding an empty cage. He raised the cage high above his head, but then my hand caught his wrist.

“Old Man Zhi. It’s me. I’ve returned.”

His forehead crinkled above his empty sockets. “Only one girl kept calling me old. Even though I told her it was a title I could do without. You are the wolf-girl.”

I smiled, even as my heart thumped nervously. Last time I’d seen him, I’d been fleeing from his shop with a bunch of stolen lanterns. (Well, that had been Fred’s fault, but I was still an accomplice.)

“What happened to your shop? All of those lanterns? Memory, Fire, Sun—”

“Lotus.” He answered my question with another question: “Did you complete your bargain with the demon fox?”

I winced. “I didn’t know what he was then, Old Man—erm, Zhi-
nim
. But yes, I fulfilled the bargain. Then the
kumiho
double-crossed me. I survived. I ran into him again, and he tried to…betray me. Again. But that time I got what I wanted. The Lotus Lantern is now safe in the hands of my wolf pack.”

“So you learned something.” A small smile showed the whites of his teeth. “Don’t let there be a third double-cross, wolf-girl.”

“Oh, I promise. Next time I see that dratted kumiho, I’m nailing its tail to the wall.”

“If you presume to stand against a creature of so many lives and experience, then the Vampyre Queen really should have reason to fear.” His restless fingers pulled out another sheet of papier-mâché. He began folding it in the shape of a butterfly. “That is why you have come, is it not?”

My confidence broke down. I released the fists at my sides. “I’ve come to find my sister,” I choked out. “Bring her back home for good.”

Or what’s left of her
, Wolf whispered.

SHUT UP!

Old Man Zhi dropped the paper to the damp ground, as if physically struck by my inner anger.

“What do you want, wolf-girl? Your apology is far too late, and you’ve only succeeded in hurting my hurting business.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I don’t know why the thought occurred to me, but I said it anyways: “I’m here to help you see again.”

His hands stopped moving. “How?”

I cursed myself. I shouldn’t be here, wasting time—

The monkey chattered. I remembered how guilt had chased me as I fled Old Man Zhi’s shop. He obviously hadn’t fared much better since then. I’d known I’d been guilty of wrong-doing. I owed him.

“Well, I’m still working out the details—”

Old Man Zhi sighed. “I thought as much. I have seen older and wiser doctors than you, both while living and in dying. But, if you are set on sticking around, you can at least make yourself useful.”

He handed me a wire cage. “Hold this still. Watch what I do.”

“Yes,
Laoshi
.” I’d learned the Mandarin word for “teacher” from the goshawk clan.

“Does your friend want to come in?”

I peered out through the mist to where No-Name hunched among the other ghosts, her long black ponytail coiled in a puddle.

“She’ll come when she’s ready.”

The water dripped. Wordless, Old Man Zhi beckoned me further under the ledge.

***

We made lanterns. Tiny, heart-shaped ones to guard baby cradles. Orange lanterns that smelled of sweet persimmons. Thick braided lanterns sewn from wicker that glowed underwater. We made lanterns, and I couldn’t be quiet. It was just too awkward, watching this stranger I’d offended on more than one occasion, glue layers over layers, expressionless. I chatted about my family and New Mexico. I talked about my embarrassing language misunderstandings with that cute Korean boy at the movies. Yes, I even told the dreaded poodle-haircut story. Old Man Zhi never said anything, but handfuls of ghosts drifted over, filling up the doorway to our crevice until there was barely any fresh air.

“You are the loudest thing in this temple,” Old Man Zhi said finally. “And if you do not stop talking, then you will attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ghosts, tired of your ceaseless prattling, will come take it from you. Or I will. Your voice,” he said, holding up a black lantern with jagged ribbons streaming down its face like bars. “I have built cages for souls. You think I can’t build one for a chatterbox?”

I shut up.

“Do you think that’s what happened to you?” I ventured later, when some of the ghosts had drifted away. “That someone passed by in the night and took your sight?”

He clammed up again, a box without a key. I suppressed a sigh.

“I’ll go fetch us some water.”

He said nothing, except, “You need a break already?”

***

I lingered longer than necessary by the well, cherishing the feeling of fresh air rolling across my face.

“Dog-girl.” No-Name had finally approached. Eve had not been good to her. She’d lost her shoes, the silly girl. “Do you make more soul-catching cages, now?”

“No.” I closed my eyes wearily. “A while ago, I made a mistake I need to fix.” I shot a vicious look at the old man’s back. “Although it sure is taking a hell of a while. I expected to be meeting with the vampyres by now, not tinkering away in Lantern-Making 101.”

She drew back. “They will kill you! They will kill both of us! For what we took.”

“They can try. But we’re both still standing, aren’t we?” I looked her up and down, curiously. “Shouldn’t you be in Seoul, trying to win back Duck Young’s soul?”

“No.” Unexpectedly, No-Name giggled. “You are right. We are both still standing. I think…Vampyre Queen is not angry that we took her son’s soul. We took something else that night, something much scarier to her.”

I cocked my head. “What would that be, No-Name?”

“Our freedom.” She smiled, opening her hand to reveal a handful of squished cherry blossoms. The breeze sent them tumbling away. “Maybe I find my name now. Maybe it is here. Maybe it is there. Then I will not be a stranger to myself. Perhaps Mother knows. I find her, now.”

“Well. Looks like little soul-searching sojourns in Eve can work after all. You’ve certainly caught on faster to your purpose here than he has.” I jerked a finger toward the stubborn lantern-maker.

No-Name pursed her lips. “Well? Do you know his name?”

She might have stayed longer, but Old Man Zhi sparked flint to light a tiny sun lantern that would chase the chill away. I finished my water in a single gulp and slunk back to my penance.

“Your friend…she still will not come?”

“She doesn’t like fire.”

The cavern filled with smoke and the silence of our secrets, until I felt ready to explode under the weight of them. I mean, I had rather confidently proclaimed that I would restore Old Man Zhi’s sight. He should be opening up to me like a book, not treating me like a stranger.

I stopped in the middle of delicately weaving together the wires for a butterfly lantern’s wings. That was it. Strangers. Damn, No-Name had been right. We were still on an “Old Man” and “wolf-girl” basis. Why should I expect him to open up to me?

“What is your name, Laoshi?”

His paintbrush quivered over the pink fabric of a bell-shaped lantern. “You forget?”

“No. I think I don’t know it.”

He began painting moonflowers again. “In my day, strangers never introduced themselves to one another. They waited for someone they both knew and trusted to introduce them before exchanging names.”

“You’re from feudal China. I’m from the twenty-first century. The chance we know someone in common is zero.” I thought about a certain fox. “What happens if a mutual enemy introduced us?”

He chuckled. Old Man Zhi,
chuckling
! “Then we should exchange names. If only to know our enemies better.”

“Citlalli Mejía-Alvarez.”

“Zhi Renshu.”

And just like that, we started talking. Well, I would ask a question and pray for a response. Sometimes I received a grunt, or a light slap on the hand. Then I would cast around in my mind—
you’re asking the wrong question, the wrong question
—until I came up with the right one. It was usually about lanterns. Every lantern he touched had a story. And slowly, one by one, he gave them to me.

“He made this one a fortnight before the Shangyuan Festival.” Old Man Zhi held up a deep red rose lantern adorned with lace. “ ‘It will light up when your true love is near.’ I didn’t believe in the power of his lanterns, then…but I did believe such foolishness would sell. He was always scared of showing his work. So I took them. And amidst the love-filled air of Shangyuan, hundreds of people poured out their pockets to own a Zhi Son Lantern. We lived in a small village, then. So word spread fast when the lanterns started magically burning, out of thin air! Some people were joyful; others condemned them as ‘bad spirit magic.’ It didn’t matter. After my own love lantern lit up when Anli smiled at me across the dance floor, I knew we were going to move anyway. On to bigger cities. Bigger worlds. I convinced him to come with Anli and me to Beijing.”

“Zhi
laoshi
, I thought you were the lantern-maker. Who is this ‘him’?”

His eyeless sockets stared at me for a while, and I thought he would chide me for asking too many questions. But emotion won over.

“My brother.”

We made lanterns far more quickly after that. Lace, papier-mâché, wire: all passed beneath his scissors with swift snaps, and he growled at me for moving too slowly. The lanterns took on a patchy appearance, as if they were bandaging up old wounds that still leaked through.

“Whoa, slow down there! Can we talk about this?” I held up the cheery yellow lantern, which smelled of sweet summer grass. “This is the lantern that calls out the sun, right? How did you
create
something like that?”

“You still don’t understand, do you, Citlalli?” His lips pursed as the dozens of sequins he was sewing on came undone. “I didn’t
create
any of these. My brother did. And inspiration for genius is easy, when the Emperor’s guards are threatening your family’s lives.”

“Y-you mean—? After you arrived in Beijing—?”

“I sought an audience with the Emperor, to show him what my brother could do. It took many long hard years, and many meals of plain rice, but I knew my brother’s gift was the key to elevating the Zhi family off the streets. Into a fancy lord’s home. When word finally reached the Emperor, the opposite happened. Guards came and took my brother away to the Forbidden Palace. I was the only one allowed contact with him, and our conversations were always the same: Were Anli and the girls okay? Was Mother all right?

“Barely, I always told him. They were four helpless women, and I was a lowly blacksmith. We needed him. If he didn’t meet the Emperor’s wishes…then the Emperor would make us disappear completely. Quicker than snuffing out a lantern.”

“Never trust the dude wearing the crown,” I growled. “That type is always corrupted. But you thought you could provide a better life for your family. My mother thinks much in the same way.” My throat tightened at the thought.

He slowly looked up at me. “Did your mother also lie to you about how bad your lives were?”

I shut my mouth.

“Lanterns that called out the sun. Fire lanterns for his warriors. Dragon-beard lanterns that summoned the ancestors. The Emperor became famous throughout the Old Kingdom. Japan feared to invade for fear of his ‘lightning lanterns,’ or the dreaded ‘cage lanterns,’ which could imprison a man’s soul. None of these existed, of course. But legend grew. And I was the Emperor’s most trusted lord. The one who could convince my stubborn brother to listen to the Emperor. To make him build more lanterns for his family’s sake. I had long ago left Anli in favor of the more beautiful ladies of the court, and my daughters were enrolled with famous scholars. Mother alone seemed discontent with the rich wonders of our new world. No matter the expensive wine from Europe that was placed in front of her, or the expensive yak fur that was draped around her shoulders—she only wanted ‘to see her real son.’ That always hurt. I was the one who had brought wealth and honor to our family’s name. My brother had the talent, but he’d wanted to hide it. Keep it to himself. I was the one who had shown these miracles to the world.”

He shoved away the tattered remains of the kite lantern and crawled to the very back of our cavernous abode. I thought he didn’t want to talk anymore, but he returned with an old box engraved with a bonsai tree. Two small glass lanterns lay inside: one was a sphere the size of a fist, and the other, a rhombus. He removed the former. The glass glimmered with every color of the rainbow as it caught the candlelight.