While traveling to the United States to hunt Fahriye Budak’s target, Elizaveta Hua meets an ancient enemy from her family’s past—and learns something unexpected about herself.
By Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Devi Lacroix
Eleven Years Ago
The convention is in San Francisco, a city I have never set foot in; I know nowhere good to eat. Since we’re trying to keep a low profile, the normal mage establishments are to be avoided. I can’t be seen with Budak—this has been the case for the entirety of our working relationship—and while my name will get us a table at any place worth eating at, no meal ensconced in some semi-tangible restaurant above the Financial District is worth the blowback if I am suspected in McDonald’s impending assassination. But I have my ways.
“What’s the best place for dinner in this city?” I whisper in the bathroom of our motel room, standing in the shower with the curtain pulled closed.
The summoned imp shifts their weight from foot to foot, hemming and hawing. “I am contractually obligated to tell you that the Tadich Grill is the oldest continuously run restaurant in San Francisco and the third oldest in the United States.”
“How is that in anyway useful to me?” I growl. “Wait. Are you pacted to advertise for this… grill?”
The imp nods.
“And you telling me this isn’t against your pact?”
A crooked little smile. “The head chef-turned-amateur warlock was a better chef than warlock.”
“So despite being a self-acclaimed tourist guide for the West Coast—”
“Look, it’s not common knowledge. I don’t tell just anyone I’m compromised. I simply make a point of being honest with any member of the Hua household. I mean, what if I recommended the Tadich Grill and your date—“
“It’s not a date,” I hiss, power flaring in my eyes.
The imp whimpers, and on cue Fahriye calls through the door, “You alright in there, Liz?”
“I’m fine!” I call back, quickly leaning out of the shower to flush the toilet. I turn back to the imp, fury rising; the bathroom light flickers. “I’ll tell no one about your obligation and you tell no one about my date.”
The imp nods frantically and disappears in a puff. I run the sink for an appropriate amount of time and step out into the motel room; faux wood paneling, an uncomfortable bed, and a large woman are there to greet me.
“I apologize for the accommodations,” Fahriye says, sheepishly standing above her hard-cased luggage, checking the weapons inside; even though I teleported it and us here, it evidently never hurts to be sure. “I reserved it when I thought it was going to be just me. Inspector’s salary and all.”
“Please, Inspector. This might surprise you, but I’ve stayed in worse motels before.” She scowls with the effort of imagining that reality. I shrug at her lack of imagination. “Being the warlock of her age isn’t all fine wine and silk sheets. Sometimes it’s tiny bars of soap and bad continental breakfasts. All the same, next time we can rough it up in my family’s Scottish cabin. You’ve not been yet, right?”
For some reason, the woman flushes. She’s much larger than the imp, but she shifts in the same uncomfortable way, avoiding my eye. At least she is more handsome: a partially unbuttoned dress shirt hinting at strong shoulders and deep cleavage, rolled sleeves framing rough knuckles and a forearm with a long, deep scar. “You can have the bed,” she quickly says. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Please, Inspector,” I repeat, with more exasperation. We’ve slept together before, and whatever chastity existed between the inspector and I fell apart when we reached the ‘occasionally tear each other’s clothes off’ point in our professional relationship. “There is no way I’ll allow you to condemn me to this lumpy bed while you get the more comfortable carpet. We’ll just have to live and die together.”
“Alright, alright. I didn’t want to assume.” She visibly relaxes, and it is as if a veil has been lifted; her smile returns, and with it her confidence. “I know you said you wanted to pick dinner. But if you have no objection—”
I maintain my steely demeanor, as if I am bestowing on Fahriye my largesse and not relieved that I may no longer be responsible for researching where to eat. “What do you have in mind?”
“Well—it’s more of dinner and an adventure. Pre-murder enrichment; trespass is involved, but nothing more serious than that. Do you trust me?”
I trust her more than any person on earth. “I guess.”
She takes us to a crusty looking food truck in front of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; emblazoned on its side is a rendition of a gyro so hideous I think that it, too, should be classified as modern art. “My niece got a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute and virtually lived in the SFMOMA while she was working on her degree. She took me to this food truck once, said it’s the best place to eat in town.”
She orders in Turkish, and the wizened old man behind the counter gives a wet, gregarious laugh. I have improved my skill with the language enough to understand that Fahriye is evidently recognized; I pick out references to Fahriye’s niece, to family back home. When the gyros arrive, they are stuffed with more meat than should be physically possible, and a piece of baklava has been thrown in for free—“for the pretty lady.”
But Fahriye doesn’t hand over my food. She keeps it wrapped and instead extends the nook of her elbow for me to take. “I want to take you somewhere to eat it,” she explains. “There’s a special exhibit at the SFMOMA that I think you’ll like.”
“At this hour, the museum is very much closed,” I answer, suspicious. “And I’m certain they don’t allow food. And… the doors are behind us?”
“Details, details,” she says, turning into a side alley. “As if you’ve never gone somewhere you shouldn’t. Hold tight.”
She speaks an esoteric phrase, and the next moment we step through the exterior wall into the back hallway of the closed museum. “A useful cantrip,” I murmur, instinctively keeping my voice down.
“One of the first we learn in Sealing and Containment,” Fahriye replies as she orients herself. “Though I suspect that says something about how we perceive laws as not applying to their enforcers.” She again speaks something esoteric, and I feel something akin to a draft, and then the light touch of fog. “That one is a little spicier.”
I taste the magic, teasing apart its warp and weft, appreciating it as one might a song or a piece of art; fitting, for a museum. “You cloaked us from… anything on the electromagnetic spectrum?” Again, not uncommon among my ilk. But Fahriye doesn’t have much innate magical talent, so her ability to wield these minor spells with a workman’s familiarity is impressive; I recall what she told my daughter this morning, about the usefulness of applied magic. “You’ve taken to your lessons well.”
“I have an exceptional teacher,” she says without looking up from the map she’s found, then gives a little hmmm of approval. “This way.”
Fahriye leads through the empty back hallways of the museum; through a staff exit we emerge into the heart of the exhibits, statues and paintings illuminated by pools of gold in the darkened wings. We finally enter a large, central gallery dedicated to one exhibit: a series of ominous paintings, dark reds and blacks in vague, rough geometric shapes, lines and squares looming ominously over the viewer.
“Are these Rothko?” I ask.
“The very same!” She grins.“The Seagram Murals, brought together from all over the world for a unique, unified experience. I’ve always wanted to see them.” She finds a bench and starts to pull out our street food. “Did you know Rothko was commissioned to paint these to hang in a fancy restaurant? But he decided to say ‘fuck you’ to the rich commissioners and made them ominous, foreboding, completely at odds with a dining atmosphere. He supposedly said, ‘I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.’”
I laugh, touched by this sudden and unexpected artistic depth to the inspector. And she’s not wrong: the paintings are rectangles of deep color, dark and without clear meaning, like windows looking into an impenetrable and unknowable hell beyond. “So we’re honoring the artist’s original intent by breaking all of the museum’s rules and eating in front of his paintings?”
“Hmmm. He very controversially backed out of the commission and kept the paintings. Apparently, Rothko actually ate in the restaurant they would be hung in and realized, ‘Anybody who will eat that kind of food for that kind of price will never look at a painting of mine.’ So I think it’s debatable if we’re honoring him or not.”
She glances over at me as I take a big bite from my gyro. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she continues with a smile. “I just listened when my niece talked.”
“You don’t talk about your family much,” I point out.
“I… well, you don’t talk much about your family much, either!”
“Is that why you stopped by my estate this morning?”
Fahriye glances away. I catch her face in profile, framed in the bloody maroon red of a painting behind her: apposite, for how stricken she looks. “I apologize. That was untoward of me.”
I should tell her that wasn’t what I meant, that it wasn’t much of a bother, that I’m glad she stopped by. That Olesya still regards her with incredible respect, that Viveca knows we have had our liaisons. That I—
“Yes, it was,” is what I say, an unexpected bite to my tone. “It was foolish and foolhardy and you put yourself at risk. Risk you’re asking me and my family to assume.” I don’t know why I am so suddenly angry. “What do you even see in me, Inspector? You know that I’m precisely the sort of rich and powerful person whose appetite Rothko wanted to ruin?”
“And I’m a hatchetman for those types of people. That’s what Sealing and Containment is on its worst days, right? Just a tool for High Command to bludgeon slightly less powerful mages? And look at me: I wanted the experience of eating in front of these paintings, damn the rules. I don’t think that makes me that much better.”
“Inspector, you must know that on my worst days, I’m little better than Kenneth McDonald. You’re… you. Sneaking into a museum doesn’t make you a comparable monster.”
“In the years I have known you, you have not killed children. You have not targeted the defenseless, you have not inflicted needless cruelty. I would know; I’ve done my research. I am not so besotted that I would maintain a working partnership with someone like that.”
You’re lying to yourself, I want to scream. You’ve latched on to the carrion lord and imagine her a noble queen. Instead I do my best to lighten the atmosphere: after a strategic silence, I speak up. “So you’re besotted with me now, are you?”
“A… slip of the tongue. Also untoward.” As the temperature of the conversation drops, I can feel Fahriye hardening to stone, like magma cooling to obsidian. A defense mechanism, to maintain the distance we so often fall back on.
I try again. “I’m not actually angry you came over. I mean, you can’t make a habit of it, but Olesya and Viveca and I are all grown women. We can deal with the consequences of the guests we invite into our homes. And it gives me an excuse to someday call on you in your office.”
The absurdity of it seems to shake Fahriye from her sullenness. “You absolutely won’t succeed in that effort. I think every scryer and sensor in Sealing and Containment is attuned to your comings and goings.” She might like me, but she responds with the conviction of a loyal fan: for all her misgivings about Sealing and Containment, her team can’t lose. But she also concludes with a conciliatory, “They’d be fools if they weren’t.”
“Inspector, they can’t even keep track of your comings and goings.” I make a show of opening the paper bag our food came in and looking for the baklava, if only to hide the real concern in the next sentence. “It’s why I worry about you. Someone should watch over you.”
Fahriye stares hard at the painting in front of us, her jaw set. “Rothko killed himself. Did you know that? Cut himself open and bled out in a pool of blood as rich and dark as the paint on these canvases. I won’t pathologize or glorify the choice; he did it for reasons known only to himself. But it was a choice. We all have a choice.”
“Career suicide?” I can’t help needling. “Or actual suicide? I don’t believe S&C gives deserters a nice severance package and lets them walk away.”
“People have resigned before. I intend to keep working until I can’t, though.”
I hold back the Why? We’ve been over it before. Fahriye believes, more than any other S&C officer I’ve ever encountered; more, maybe, than her superiors. Or rather she believes something quite different from the rest of her institution. Therein lies the problem.
The conversation fizzles out after that, as it usually does: the sexual tension of our mutual attraction, the uniqueness of this thoughtful date destination, all of it fumbles and falls before the implacability of our opposing ramparts, our mutual inability to find common ground. The two of us are doomed to be out of sync, never quite saying the right thing, never quite being at the right place. Her job and my family, these will always come first; these are the legacies we will build and, eventually, leave behind. It is idle fantasy to imagine the world where she and I love one another with the depth and commitment we deserve.
She sleeps on the motel floor that night.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
On the day we come to take Kenneth McDonald’s head, he’s giving a talk on venture capitalism and angel investors. This makes him like every other businessman that resides in San Francisco: promising the world with a perfect smile and a headset mic, indistinguishable from a used car salesman. Even McDonald’s cultivation of human suffering doesn’t set him apart from the crowd. But Fahriye Budak has asked that this man die, and that is enough for me to act.
The auditorium is dark, enormous; above ground, but it feels subterranean, the atmosphere of a ritual chamber. The seats aren’t full, though not because McDonald is unpopular. Rather it’s the ticket price—this talk is meant to be exclusive, the audience is meant to know they’re part of the select few. The place is filled to roughly a quarter of its capacity.
Fahriye and I are approaching from different directions, the better to execute a pincer attack. We move unseen and unheard through the throng, under the aegis of a cambion who specializes in assassination. There are disadvantages to murdering McDonald in such a public place, but he usually inhabits a home far more fortified—as Fahriye said, this is the best shot she’s had at the man in years. Whatever misgivings my companion has about such a public killing, the speculations at her workplace that’ll ensue after, she’s put them aside. She is determined to bring this man to justice, trusting that her doppelganger in Ibiza and my influence will preserve her anonymity. I don’t intend to let her down; if it comes to it, I’ll pluck all of Sealing and Containment’s eyes out.
Admittedly, a far better plan would have been to send the cambion on their own, or a particularly deadly succubus. But again, we also don’t want this connected to my family. Inconvenient questions about demons might let Fahriye’s superiors trace this back to our association. So: public crudity.
And what public crudity it is! The speakers drone on with whatever McDonald is peddling, all worthless. The audience is mostly non-practitioners, here not for secrets of the arcane, but secrets of wealth, of base capitalist endeavors. I wonder why this man has chosen this guise to present to the outsiders, then decide this is his way of being king among peasants. Whatever his thaumaturgic gifts, they make him middling at best among mage society, High Command connections or not. To non-practitioners, he’s among the highest echelons, the best of the best, by simple virtue of how much money he’s accrued. Power, for non-mages, is so vulgar.
It’s when I am halfway toward the stage that Kenneth McDonald looks up—or looks away from his enraptured, slobbering audience—and locks eyes with me. He grins, baring the results of expensive dentistry, not that they’ve improved him much. There’s no saving the meat-slab rectangle of his face, least of all under this harsh lighting.
He turns back to his crowd and winks. The sight makes my skin crawl. “My friends!” he cries, which is when I realize his audience is mesmerized, and that he’s more dangerous than I thought. “Today we have a very special guest. Please welcome Mrs. Elizaveta Hua, the greatest warlock who’s ever lived—so far!”
Their heads snap toward me, as one.
“I’ve told you all about my pursuit of health and enlightenment—meditation with the yogis on the Himalayas, Zen gardening with the Shinto priests of Japan, sky dancing with Pueblo tribes.” I have a sharp headache between my eyes, either from a failed attempt to mesmerize me, too, or from McDonald’s utter inanity. “But it wasn’t until I visited Armenia that I found the secret of true immortality: the blood of a Hua in exchange for life eternal.”
The crowd stands and roars in applause.
“Now, I see that look in your eyes, Mrs. Hua. My patron didn’t think this public spectacle would lure you out, but I was right!” A patron—is the man consorting with demons now? None that I’ve heard of. “Of course, you’d have to come see me for yourself. Now, dear audience—everyone has a gift package under your chair. Could you take it out and put it to your throat?”
The applause stops only for a moment, as these wealthy audience members are reduced to pawns, pulling out box cutters and switchblades to dutifully place against their jugulars. I stride through the wall of cacophony, unfazed. If he thinks he’s going to hold them hostage against my good behavior, he’s going to discover very quickly that I don’t have any moral core. They are fools and mean nothing to me.
Except, I realize as I see Fahriye charging through the auditorium from the other end, they do mean something to her. It would bother her to see these mesmerized flesh puppets die; the weight of guilt would be another burden on her already bowed shoulders. Well, then. I can moderate my force.
But Fahriye surprises me. “I planned for this,” she whispers in my ear through our bluetooth connection. “Keep him distracted, I can take care of the crowd.”
A distraction is not necessary. The moment I set foot on the circular stage, a barrier springs up around us. McDonald’s craft fails to impress: I can take apart this wall in a minute, and it isn’t fortified against the passage of my cambion. But this man has expected me in particular—he’s a small fry, yet something here has me unsettled.
“I don’t believe I know you,” I say, “Kenneth McDonald.”
“Yet you have my name!” He guffaws. “Not my True Name, to be sure. That would have gone badly for me. But please, I’ve always wanted to meet the world’s most famous warlock. We must talk shop.”
I stare at him, at his presumptuous and uncomely face. “About what exactly.”
“About all kinds of things, Mrs. Hua. Power. Legacies. You have two promising scions, I understand—”
Whatever he has to peddle next is lost. A being of black shadow and obscured red has seized him, pulling his head back, exposing his throat. His arms are pinned to his sides. He makes a croak—finally something about him is amusing—as his eyes roll around, trying to see what’s immobilized him. I suppose it might do him some good if he’s able to identify the species of my bound demon, if he has learned how to banish those.
“My patience and time are both limited, McDonald.” I gesture and the demon lifts him a few centimeters off the floor. “You’ve implicitly threatened my children.”
“I haven’t! I—”
At another signal from me, the demon draws its claw across his throat. A line of blood shimmers.
“I can tell you which of your enemies gave me patronage,” McDonald starts, the moment before his limbs twist, each bone from ball joint to digit breaking with a satisfying snap. The man screams—and then, in some stupid and impossible act of focus, continues to try to negotiate, as if obligated to stay in character as a smarmy tech bro until the bitter end. “I know things,” he sobs, “about your enemies. High Command, Cecilie Kristiansen. I could—”
“I have no real quarrel with you,” I answer, “outside of you being a man and an American, of course. But I’m here as a favor to a friend who detests you and your covetous grasping for power, who wants justice for the innocents you have slain in pursuit of eternal life. This constrains my avenues of negotiation; you’ll not live for more than a few seconds, and I’m above teasing you with that possibility. Goodbye, McDonald.”
“Nuawa! I know about Nuawa; I made an agreement with it. I’ll tell you—”
Nuawa.
Fear, complete and unexpected, seizes me. Nuawa: every Hua is raised to know the name, to know that our legacy is built upon a singular promise to powers unknowable, that we will bind the eldritch being Nuawa and, eventually, destroy it. For a time, my family succeeded in the first aspect, but the beast slipped its chains many generations ago and once more wanders free. We have maintained our vigil in the centuries since, as best the vagaries of our power and social standing have allowed, waiting for Nuawa to reappear. My grandmother saw no sign, nor my mother after her; all the same, I was made to swear that I would always be ready to act, that any sacrifice was acceptable in the fulfillment of this ancient oath.
McDonald sees the flicker in my eyes, my sudden hesitation. “I met it, and it promised me power. I can tell you where I did, and what it offered, and—”
I’m not the good person Budak thinks I am. I’m not even an okay person. Of course I consider McDonald’s offer; that he knows Nuawa’s name is proof enough that he knows something. Not going through with the assassination, lying to the inspector, ferreting McDonald away and taking my leisure interrogating him: I’d be a fool to not think these thoughts, and McDonald will die all the same—who would be harmed by my white lie?
But McDonald’s patron makes the decision for both of us: he gags as his tongue turns from red to a garish purple, and then to ice blue—no, not the blue of ice, but of crystal, of glass. It shatters in the next moment, razor-sharp shards pouring from his mouth, slicing his lips to ribbons as they fall. But the blood flows only for a moment longer: it, too, transmutes to glass, the corruption spreading across his flesh until what was once a body shatters in a cacophony of crystal, the shape of the man disappearing into rubble.
“Your days are numbered,” a voice hisses among the ringing and clatter, and then again in the susurrus of the sand-like remains. “Death to you and your children, thirteenth scion of Hua.”
A gasmask-wearing figure marches through the dissipating remains of McDonald’s barrier a moment later, gun drawn; I’d recognize Fahriye’s swagger anywhere. Behind her, the crowd is coughing and gagging as smoke fills the hall. “Tear gas,” she says, pulling the mask off. “Aerosolized lachrymatory agents have a way of causing such specific discomfort that they can disrupt the effects of mesmerization.” She gives a hard look at the pile of glass, comes to her own conclusions about the nature of his execution; McDonald’s spell must have suppressed both sight and sound from her. “A blood mage dying in a pile of desiccated dust. Fitting. Did he say anything, at the end?”
“No,” I lie. “Nothing worth repeating, anyway.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I teleport us back to Fahriye’s apartment, a dingy little thing in a shitty part of Hong Kong. She invites me inside, and against my better judgment I accept. I don’t know why I do. Maybe turnabout is fair play: she’s visited my house more than once unannounced, so it’s only fair that I see how the other half lives. Or maybe I’m rattled and scared by McDonald’s parting comments. Maybe I just want to be with a friend for a little longer.
Her place is clean and well-organized: no dishes left in the sink, no food left to rot in the trash can, laundry put away. Clean and spartan, the apartment is a window into a life defined in equal parts by self-reliance and self-care: a bastion of peace and order, standing defiant against a world that would tear it down. She apologizes for the one bit of clutter on the dining room table, a model airplane that is halfway constructed. Even this is a work of precision: the parts are neatly trimmed, the brushes cleaned and well-maintained.
“I don’t really have the space to keep them,” she explains, “so I build them and then donate the finished models to exhibits at aeronautics museums.”
She pulls two bottles of beer from the fridge—another apology from her, that it’s cheap swill—and we sit on her little patio, watching as night falls across the apartment complex. Down below, children are playing with their families in the complex’s swimming pool; chlorine wafts up to us on the summer breeze; cicadas and crickets begin to serenade us, a humble band for a humble night.
It’s such a quaint little expression of humanity: the perfect home for someone like Fahriye Budak, and so at odds with the estates my family maintains. I’m struck by the absurdity of the contrast and, a little buzzed, blurt out, “Cities are a synecdoche for the human condition.”
Fahriye regards me with a serious look and replies with something equally insightful. I remember I laugh, but not what I reply with. We end up talking for hours about cities and people, urban planning and festering rot, the injustice and the beauty of it all. We forget ourselves for a moment, a moment that stretches out and out: I wish I could recall it all—not a transcript, but the feeling of being, of perfect contentment.
What I remember instead is the conversation that comes later, the one we have as I move toward the door.
“Your walls are remarkably bare.” I motion to her red toolbox, returned to its rightful place on a bookshelf. “Have you considered using that thing to mount some paintings? I hear Sealing and Containment has a pin-up calendar.”
She chuckles. “No, no, hanging anything violates the terms of the lease. I won’t put any permanent holes in the drywall.”
I blink in confusion. “You just assassinated a mage, but you won’t break the terms of your lease? Hells, Fahriye, you could just fill in the holes with toothpaste like the rest of us do.”
“Kenneth McDonald was a terror of a man that deserved death in recompense for the murder and misery he wrought. On the other hand, I’d really like my deposit back when I move out. And on the third hand, you’re not like the rest of us, Master Hua.”
“I have dealt with leasing agents before, believe it or not. I assure you, you’re not going to get your deposit back; when it comes to contract clauses, they’re worse than warlocks.”
“That would be their choice. But mine is to obey the terms of the agreement I signed.”
“Then what’s the damn point of the toolbox, if you can’t use it on anything in this apartment?” There’s a hard edge to my tone, and I have the inkling that I’m angry about something deeper than lease agreements and rentals, that I’m talking about the rules and absurdities that bind the inspector’s life and mine, the strictures that we all seem to follow without complaint, the ones that keep us separate.
Fahriye is pensive in thought. “I keep the toolbox as… a promise, maybe? Whether or not I can use it for myself doesn’t really matter. Maybe I’ll have my own place some day, or maybe I’ll always rent. I can’t say. But what I do know is that there will always be people who need help. Your porch swing, my neighbor’s sink, my other neighbor’s busted carburetor—there’s not always a need for help, but when there is, I have the tools and the knowledge to make someone’s life better. And that makes me happy, Liz.”
I remember this conversation, in all of its stupid, tiny details, because it is the precise moment I realize I am in love with Fahriye Budak. That I have been in love with her for a very long time, that I delight in her proximity and miss her when she is away, because she is so frustratingly principled and clever and kind and strong. Sometime in the almost two decades between meeting her and now, I’ve fallen for this loyal, foolish paladin of a woman, so slowly that I never noticed how far I’ve plummeted.
The shock of it, the joy of it, carries me through my rushed goodbyes and all the way home. My children are asleep or out, so I sit alone in the warmth of my study, feeling as giddy as a schoolgirl, shocked at the brilliance of this epiphany, confused as to what this means for my future.
It is only slowly that reality reasserts itself, gravity bringing my thoughts back down to earth. Cold logic and hard thoughts return, and with it comes a newfound clarity: I may be in the autumn of my life, my daughters grown and my legacy secure, but there is still life ahead of me, joys to uncover and share. I want that future to be with Fahriye Budak—for this, I’ll pay any price. But if I’m to realize these bright auspices, if I’m to protect the people I love and seize the happiness I deserve, I must settle my old accounts first.
This burden will not pass to Olesya and Viveca. It will end with my generation. And once that is finally over, then I will have everything.
I summon my familiars—all of them, every imp and demon I have ever consorted with, every malicious demiurge or flippant fae I have ever bound. I keep my instructions simple: “Nuawa has returned. Find it. Leave no stone unturned.”