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Part 3
Page 2
On Friday, when King Kougaiji found he had another
oddball delivery to need sorting out, he dialed Xiao Shujuan's cell.
It should be understood that Beijing has a very
poor wired system. Ground lines were rare, outdated and unreliable. Most
people, anyone that could afford it, had a cell phone. Kougaiji had strived
to last as long as he could on letters or, failing that, copper lines,
but even he had had to admit defeat to this flow of culture when he was
on business trips. Xiaolong had two, one to keep at the office and one
that its leader kept with her while roaming. When she desked, Wenlong took
her phone, as Kougaiji discovered on accident calling her one afternoon.
But now the girl had disappeared.
Her phone was inconceivably off. Not charging,
not muted, not ringing incessantly and telling him cheerfully that he ought
to leave a message. She'd even disabled the message service.
Maybe she didn't make payment and had it cut off?
But doing the math, he couldn't see how she could have undershot, unless
other expenses had come up. Could be that she was overdue from before and
late fees mounted, but that didn't seem like her. Perhaps with the other
phone together the charge was still too great?
Kougaiji was very bad at being other people's unofficial
accountant.
A check of the registry indicated it was still active,
just disabled. And he didn't know their office cell.
"Don't suppose I could persuade you to let this
go," Dokugakuji tossed up, as the king rose and went for his overcoat.
He sighed. "No, I guess not."
Kougaiji had come into power of the throne because
he had no way not to. That was how the royal lineage worked. The youkai
king was not sovereign to a nation, he was ruler to a pure and intangible
force. The King of Demons held a reservoir of magic so vast and so dense
it could bend physical space. Many kings used part of that energy to keep
themselves immortal. Kougaiji's father Gyuumaoh had. Kougaiji had too,
on the condition he could use more magic to keep Dokugakuji with him.
Immortality was not a switch to flip on and off.
Every second was a renewed fight against biological processes. The strain
increases with the centuries. So much magic spent on their bodies over
the years, it was a wonder the only seepage had been in their eyes.
But what to do with the rest of the magic. Left
free and floating it was potentially damaging every place the king set
foot; the only reasonable answer was to use it on something. Other kings
had waged wars and warped the world to their will. Kougaiji had decided
to use it for memory.
The brain, of course, can only take so much data
that is fresh and minutely detailed. Most of the information not needed
on a daily basis Kougaiji stored in the magic network. It wasn't like he
had worry for someone else encroaching on his aural territory. Apart from
the traditional crime against the throne (rather akin to hunting pheasant
in the king's forest and like indiscretions), there was so much unused
magic out there these days that the likelihood of running dry in one's
own vicinity was pretty minimal.
Lately there had been the observation that aurally
speaking, the Youkai King was an unimpressive individual. On the Richter
Scale of magic, Kougaiji probably just barely passed a 3.0. The memory
was a large part of the reason.
In the present situation, though, it meant he knew
exactly where to find the Xiaolong Delivery Service's office despite only
visiting it once or twice before. Several hutong locals that had seen the
man wandering the alleys before made some comment about it, but only offhandedly.
As feats of magic went, it was a very downplayed one.
Kougaiji knocked.
He heard the sigh of a boy long before footsteps
started toward the door. "We're closed for lunch--" Wenlong began, opening.
Kougaiji took a sudden step back.
The boy before him was up to his elbows in blood.
It was washed over crumbling transparent gloves and splattered liberally
over his shirt and pants, that seemed caked in old stains of the same.
By the look of it he had been conducting major surgery.
"Oh, you again," said Wenlong. His glasses were
skewed but he was not in a position to thumb them back into place. "Is
it truce then? For someone claiming not to be sage-like you do go around
being a kung-fu master a bit much."
"You--"
"Shujuan said if we scrapped wit' you again she'd
have our asses, hope yer happy," the teen sniffed, stripping off the gloves
without concern for Kougaiji's alarmed look. "But you might as well go
on back 'cos she's not here, mister."
The king breathed, with effort. "What the hell were
you doing, ritual animal slaughter?"
Wenlong cocked his head to one side. "Solstice isn't
for another few weeks-- Oh!" he exclaimed, looking at the swath of red
over his clothes. "Haah, I'll bet this does look bad..."
"Who's at the door, Wen?" Jian's voice came from
inside. "Izzit the old guy?"
"Yeah," Wenlong called back casually.
"'Old guy'?" Kougaiji repeated.
"Yo," Jianmin said, appearing beside his boyfriend
in the doorway. "Sorry t'waste your time, bucko, but..."
He noticed the king's eyes on his hair. He grinned.
"Like it?" he said, pulling at a streaked lock.
"S'my new shade. Fuckin' crimson as fresh blood, yo."
"Though oddly enough," Wenlong spoke up brightly,
"the side of the box said 'candy apple red.'"
"Quiet, Wensley..."
The back of Kougaiji's brain may have been appropriately
sorting things into place now, granted, about why he could have assumed
blood on the slighter boy's clothes with the strange chemical smell and
suchlike, but watching the other one happily tilt his head to revel in
what he even called blood-red hair...
...It was more surreal than imagining animal sacrifice...
"Anyway," Jianmin continued, shaking back the bangs
in a jangle of various piercings, "she ain't here today."
"I missed a meeting to come over this way," Kougaiji
guilted, a bit unconvincingly because, well, it wasn't like he had really
wanted to go, but that was beside the point. "When do you expect her in?
Tonight?"
"Er, no."
"Tomorrow?"
"Try Monday," Wensley suggested.
"Monday?" the youkai cried. "That's three
days off! Isn't that lost productivity for you people?"
"...Well," the beglassed boy mumbled, wringing his
hands that had escaped the red hair dye, while beside him Jianmin started
to cough and take an interest in the ceiling. "...She's on her period,
you see, and... and we wouldn't but we had to startin' a few months back
when we started getting calls about her breaking some clients' arms, and...
Mister?"
"Sorry," he said, clearing his throat to get rid
of the last of the laughter.
Real PMS. It figured.
He was going to tell Dokugakuji about that one.
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