Fifth Line of Nine: The dragon on the wing in the sky. It will be advantageous to meet with the great man.
---Book of Changes
There is a thing formed in chaos existing before Heaven and Earth. Silent and solitary, it stands alone, unchanging. It goes around with peril. It may be the Mother of the world. Not knowing its name, I can only style it the Spirit Realm.
---Laotzu
///////
Joyce wiped away the sweat on her forehead. They'd been in Canton for three days and she didn't think she could ever get used to the climate. She envied Spade's immunity to the humid heat and his ability to wear the full set of Flying Dragon robes, long sleeves and all.
As Spade predicted, banishing the plague spirit had been a great advertisement. Pania had shown up again last night a few hours after her earlier visit with a request from Hengshan to find a spirit and banish it, carrying a suitcase of money like a gangster in an 80's Hong Kong mafia movie.
Pania would probably look great in a hitman outfit, though a trench coat and white scarf would probably drop her with heatstroke in this season.
"What spirit are we looking at?" Spade had asked. Pania shrugged very muscular shoulders in response.
Joyce wiped at her forehead again. Drawing from her expertise in five-minute internet searches, they were probably looking for a dark-water spirit. After all, the spirit that had caused ten different car accidents in five days had done so exclusively in spots where there were sewer drains.
Spade had flatly rebuked that they were in Canton, and there were sewer drains every foot of the road.
She hung back in the shade as Spade finished speaking with the latest victim, who was gingerly nursing a broken arm. Whatever they were dealing with, it probably hadn't been seen before, or major organizations with huge-ass archives and a ridiculous number of talented shamans wouldn't be turning to them.
Spade made his way back, a slight frown on his face. Checking that they were far away enough from Pania, he leaned in to speak. "The man's lying." Joyce's eyes snapped to his face.
"Oh shit, was he heading to meet with his lover?" she glanced in the direction of the victim's wife. Spade let out an angry huff.
"That's the first thing you come up with? Really?" he turned to look back briefly as well. "Stop looking at them, they'll notice."
Joyce stared at him. "You turned your head 180 degrees to look, I'm pretty sure they've noticed. It's fine, if he's innocent he doesn't need to worry anyway. His wife won't start doubting him just because you turned to look at him. Didn't Confucius say something about that?"
"No," Spade hissed through gritted teeth, "Confucius did not. And his wife knows he's lying, she's in on it too. It can't be an affair. Look at her hairstyle, any woman who can wear her hair like that in this weather would definitely scratch his face off if he were cheating."
Joyce took in the sweat-inducing hairstyle that the wife wore with grace. "No side girl, wife's in on it, I have no idea what we're supposed to make of that," Joyce said. Spade sighed. At least she didn't seem to be the source of his exasperation this time.
"We should go speak to some of the other victims," he said, "We have enough money on our subway pass. But before that, let's go talk to some spirits."
Joyce nodded, waving cheerfully at the couple who uncertainly waved back.
//////
Pania raised a brow as Joyce squatted by the fence of the parking lot, eyes squeezed shut. The girl completely ignored Spade's impromptu cursing match with the vending machine as his purchase got stuck, deeply engrossed in whatever she was doing with the plant spirits.
Pania had never heard of shamans communicating with minor spirits. The spirits with enough years on them to take humanoid shape were often well-spoken, but the smaller spirits...Pania glanced down at the faintly glowing green blobs floating around Joyce's head and decided not to ask.
She wasn't the only one to be unsettled by the pair, she knew that for sure. Most of the shamans in town were warily watching the Flying Dragons after their brain-hurting debut. To Pania's surprise, the duo hadn't even put wards on their small apartment. It was as bold as it was arrogant, a double-sided boast that served as a challenge and a warning.
'Try us if you think you can take us.' It said, and 'You know you can't.' The message was tauntingly clear. Three days in and no one had tried. She wondered if the two even knew how unusual it was for a new faction to show up and not have a minimum of seventeen different groups come to start a fistfight.
People had hung back after they caught wind of how Feng Xia's tracking spirits had been trapped. Feng Xia was Jia Xu's favorite student and one of the most talented in the younger generation, toe to toe with Pania herself. For Feng Xia to have failed was more-or-less a slap in the face of anyone else who would think to try.
Spade finally got out his drinks after delivering a roundhouse kick to the side of the vending machine. Joyce leaned back onto her heels and looked in his direction.
"The plants prefer eggshells to fertilizer," she said. Spade hurled a canister of herbal tea at her face. Joyce caught it and began prying it open with her teeth.
"You've been there for seven minutes!" Spade snapped, stomping over like a principal who heard a child cursing under his breath. Joyce cracked the cap open and shrugged.
"The ones from the front yard also complained about too much coffee grounds in the fertilizer." Pania blinked. When had Joyce stopped in the front yard?
"Coffee grounds?" Spade frowned. "What does that matter?"
Joyce smirked. "He ships wholesale coffee grounds. Pre-packed ones." She gestured at the weeds. "So why would he be mixing coffee grounds in his fertilizer?" Spade stared at her blankly. Pania felt vaguely compelled to do the same.
Joyce sighed, tilting her head back before swiveling to look at them. "Guys, we've got a drug trafficking ring."
"A drug ring." Pania said flatly before she could stop herself. Joyce threw her hands up.
"Guys, haven't you heard of people smuggling drugs in coffee grounds before? The smell can confuse police dogs and it's also powder so it could pass a scan. It's perfect! If you don't know what you're looking for you won't even be able to tell." Joyce said.
Pania blinked, making a mental note for Joyce's file. The teen must have been raised in a place where the police used dogs. Pania couldn't think of anywhere in Asia other than Russia or the British quarter in Hong Kong, though there was still the possibility of Europe.
"You really think it's a drug ring?" Spade asked, rubbing at his temples. "That...why bother smuggling when they could just sell it normally?"
Pania froze. Unbelievable.
Pania whirled towards him, anger rising in her chest. 'Did he just-' The blond man looked at her, careless and unrepentant.
"Don't look down on us!" She snarled. Spade stared blankly. Her chest squeezed with a need to throttle him.
Pania glared. "Where do you think this is? This isn't a place you can take that lightly! Just because you could take down the wards doesn't mean you can look down on us, you piece of-"
Joyce sprang to her feet, holding out her hands in a pacifying gesture.
"Whoa, shit, that's not it!" She said. Pania turned towards her sharply, eyes blazing with rage. Joyce didn't even flinch, looking at her with an innocent expression.
"As she said, that wasn't my intention," Spade said cautiously, slipping into formal tone. "I apologize, I simply was not aware of the norms here."
Joyce nodded vigorously. "Right, up North you could buy cocaine at the morning market next to the soymilk vendors. I thought the South would be a bit more careful given the opium and all, but we didn't exactly check up the lawbook before coming here. Please don't get too mad."
They would claim ignorance? Were the wards the only thing they researched? Pania stared at them in disbelief, anger replaced by incredulity as she found herself at a loss for a response. She shook her head, pangs of irritation stabbing at her temples.
"Whatever...you- drug ring. Keep talking about the drug ring." Pania sighed. She could sort things out with them later when she felt less like killing someone.
Joyce glanced at Spade, who gave her a nod. Joyce continued.
"The couple doesn't have plants inside their house so I couldn't confirm anything, but this could totally be a drug ring you know?" Joyce looked at the parking lot thoughtfully. "What if the spirit is drawn to certain things? Like drugs?"
Pania let her breath out through her nose slowly. "You think the spirit is attracted to drugs."
Joyce shrugged. Spade cut in before the teen could say anything else. "There's nothing we can say for sure without checking with the other victims. And we can't know if the owner is involved in a drug ring either. We'll do some more checking."
Joyce crinkled her brows. "Something's shady either way."
Pania looked at them in confusion. "Did you not track down the plague spirit less than an hour after leaving the Shaman Council? Why is this one so difficult?"
Spade slowly tilted his chin up and down again, raising and lowering his brows. "The plague spirit appeared by itself," he said diplomatically, "this will take some more effort. From the files you guys gave us, we don't know enough about the victims to say anything for sure."
Pania couldn't tell if they were lying or just lucky. Who the hell runs into plague spirits by accident? Both the plague spirit and whatever this was had baffled Hengshan Association for weeks, and they wanted her to believe that they had just been lucky.
Spade moved forward and lightly slapped Joyce's shoulder. "Alright then, let's hit the shrine and move on," he said. Joyce took a gulp of her herbal tea and pouted.
"Let me get a snack or something first," she complained. "I'm hungry."
//////
Joyce frowned as she typed into her phone with one hand, other hand clutching her food. "I hate this typing system," she grumbled. Spade sighed.
"Tell me what to write and I'll write it," he said, "And choose between eating and typing, you're getting grease on the phone."
Joyce rolled her eyes. "Nope, never. Any self-respecting member of the public education system has the ability to type and eat something ridiculously unhealthy at the same time. This isn't even greasy enough to qualify for the game. At the very least, I want something fried. "
She squinted at the sticky-rice chicken. "Like a cheeseburger. What's the point if it doesn't contain 18 grams of unsaturated fats and the potential for Type 1 diabetes?"
Spade ignored her, shaking his head in disbelief. He pulled out a notepad from under the bag of salt in his sleeve. Under Pania's suspicious gaze, they had gotten through questioning three of the victims and lurking outside the houses of four more.
Joyce scribbled something on the notepad, finishing the last of her food. Spade squinted at the English words, searching for familiar phrases and finding none. He didn't bother asking what "yeet" was.
"Let's go over this again," he said. Joyce scooted closer as if they were in another planning session for crossing a warzone. Those had never amounted to much.
Spade would swear on the sacred memory of his favorite dumplings, sold from the back of a van in the middle of the night by an old lady in sunglasses who only accepted cash or opium, that Joyce was a living magnet for chaos, with the uncanny ability to make the most serene of villages suddenly decide to rise up against their chief by unleashing an army of pigeons to hold his thatched rooftop hostage.
They never got past step one of any plan without giving up or resorting to improvisation, and that hadn't changed even after they'd arrived.
Even their plans for grocery shopping had been derailed by Pania's visit last night and Joyce's subsequent gushing about the fine points of 80s Hong Kong films. That they had managed to get through the morning without starting a car chase or chucking a broomstick into someone's face was a miracle in itself.
That Pania hadn't smacked him in the face yet was an even greater miracle. He made a mental note to offer a prayer to the next shrine he passed in gratitude. When Lin Bo was this age...he internally cringed at the faint echoes of slaps in his memory. Lin Bo had never hesitated to smack him across the face with the bottom of her wooden sandal in her youth.
'Any idea why she taught Pania?' Joyce had asked earlier, actually remembering not to speak out loud in Pania's hearing range for once.
'It's the personality.' He had replied. 'Lin Bo wouldn't teach someone that couldn't survive.'
Whether or not he would be slapped before the end of the day, he certainly wouldn't get paid again if they couldn't find the spirit.
"First guy," Spade began, "possible drug dealer because of your coffee grounds theory, wife in on it. Second guy, always comes home near morning, never drinks in the house, has keys to two cars. Third guys an accountant. And he's got glasses and a secret office behind his office, so probably-maybe-definitely in money laundering. Other four have nothing of note, other than living in places above their pay levels."
Joyce nudged him. "At least we have a good guess what the spirit is attracted to. It likes bad boys." She ignored his withering glare.
"I'm kidding. But the spirits can sense energy, right? These guys probably all accept cash, and the internet says that dishonest wealth draws bad luck."
"The internet," Spade began mockingly, stopping as he remembered an old legend, "The internet might be right for once," he continued. Joyce made a peace sign with her fingers.
"There can't be that many spirits who would be drawn to dishonest wealth," he ignored Joyce's smirk, "Even in a city this large there wouldn't be that many places for it to go."
"Red light district and the harbor," Joyce said, scrolling down her phone screen. "At least that's what the Brits say. I could just summon them over though, you think we could make that work?"
Spade glanced back at Pania. "I honestly don't know at this point whether things would be worse if we went to the actual place or just summoned them here," he said, "But it's probably not a good thing for our first visit to be an investigation."
He didn't want to piss off the guys at the harbor, and he definitely did not want to piss off the red-light district. After all, Luhan the Pretty Pole Dancer had friends here too, and rumors would definitely circle back to him before Spade could smooth things over.
"Ok." Joyce shrugged and closed her eyes. She lightly clenched her fingers around the wrapper from the sticky-rice chicken, ignoring the greasiness that would require copious amounts of hand sanitizer later as she sent a faint pulse of energy downwards into the soil.
Tapping into their link, Spade felt the energy sweep out like the unfurling wings of a bird, fanning throughout the metropolis with careless abandon until he felt like a tiny dot in the epicenter of a sprawling explosion.
The pulse of the city drowned out the sound of Joyce's heartbeat. Their blood vessels were no longer their own but the rush of water-spirits in sewers and pipelines, a chaotic web of life that hooked into the urban jungle.
'Help me out,; Joyce's voice emerged from the spirit's blurred whispering. Spade obliged, combing through the blinking energies until he caught on knots that felt wrong.
'Think these match,' Spade tugged, dragging with an increasing amount of force until it felt like yanking on someone's hair in a catfight. The spirits tore free from where they had huddled downwards into their spots, soaring towards them in uneven arches.
Joyce's energy snapped back as fast as it had spread out, giving Spade a mild case of whiplash.
"Oh shit!" she shouted, stumbling to her feet. Spade blinked as the spirits flailed into view, ignoring Pania's yelp of surprise.
"Which one is it?" he called after Joyce as she ran towards the sidewalk. "What are you doing?!" He swiveled towards the spirits that were seconds away from breaking free and zapping out of sight. Several metal-spirits, a plant spirit, an incense-spirit he had mistakenly dragged from a shrine that they would need to offer apologies to later, and a- he frowned. The odd spirit out looked like a mantis ray.
A fucking mantis ray. That was definitely out of place.
"Joyce!" The spirits broke free before he could lunge forward, fleeing in different directions. The mantis-ray did a 360-degree flip, flapping down the street at an ungodly speed.
An orange traffic cone slammed over it.
Joyce leaned her weight on the plastic, struggling to keep it in place as an angry spirit threw a tantrum underneath. Joyce sent a plea for help at him with wild eyes.
"Spade, the fucking salt!" she screamed. Pania ran forward, stopping short a few feet away with a helpless expression as Joyce held down the rocking traffic cone.
Spade grabbed the closest piece of cardboard he could find and headed over.
"Alright, carefully," he warned, squatting down to slide the cardboard underneath. Pania made a strangled noise they both ignored. As the traffic cone's tilted with the spirit's thrashing, Spade shoved the cardboard underneath and slammed his foot down on the corner. Joyce gratefully accepted the reprieve, pulling out a bag of salt to pour through the tiny hole on top.
They waited until the flailing stopped.
Joyce let go of the now-empty traffic cone, leaning back in relief. "I knew it had a thing for bad boys," she said triumphantly. Spade struggled to contain a giggle at the look on Pania's face.
He'd bet his left shoe that she'd never seen a spider-eviction-style banishment before. Welcome to my life. She would get used to it soon enough.