Tian jolted. Adeline waited to be charmed. For her mouth to open and to summon the girl who could get half of Chinatown to talk to her about anything, who always remembered the right details and said the right things, who produced knowingly flattered smiles and promised, without words, that you were the most important person in her world in that moment.
But instead, Tian looked guiltily at Pek Mun.
Adeline flinched. “What were you going to do if I didn’t agree with your choice?” she spat. “Get all the girls to hold me down and get the knife out?” From Pek Mun’s expression it had clearly at least occurred to her, but Adeline wouldn’t have expected anything less. She was really only demanding from Tian, who couldn’t meet hereyes. “Did you think you could feed me and pet me and walk me around and I’d roll over like a dog?”
“That’s not what it was,” Tian snapped. She’d never snapped before, but it was less intimidating and more desperate, a weakness that infuriated Adeline further.
“How long did it take you to realize you messed up when you told me that Pek Mun didn’t care about my mother’s death? You just wanted someone to listen to you, and where did that get you? I don’t need your food or your house or you, like you keep trying to tell me. You need me more than I need you.”
She dared Tian to say otherwise, or to admit it, or to fight her—but instead, Tian looked despairingly at Pek Mun once again. And so Adeline turned on her heel and walked off.
“Adeline!” Tian finally shouted, but when Adeline looked back she hadn’t moved, was still frozen by Pek Mun’s side.
“I don’t want anything to do with you. Burn for all I care.” Adeline pointed at Pek Mun. “She would kill Red Butterfly if you let her.”
Adeline marched on until the five-foot way broke for a junction. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. But she couldn’t go back either, they’d never let her back in now without groveling, and she would not go back if she was just a vessel. Let them regret it. Let them figure out what to do when they started bursting into flame again without her.
But her vindictiveness felt like an act even to herself. If they needed her so badly, why did it feel like she’d just cast herself out?
She turned around, and found no one there. Digging her nails into her palms, nearly hard enough to draw their precious blood, she crossed the street and walked.
CHAPTER SIXTEENHOMECOMING
Somehow Adeline had forgotten the house was burned down.
The rain had retreated into a drizzle, so she stood on the pavement for a moment staring at the blackened shell of her mother’s home and feeling like a child. The house hadn’t been torn down yet, so it still marred the otherwise pristine street, its pretty facade scorched entirely away. The setting sun cast all the blistered imperfections in a warped purple light. In some angles it looked like a ravenous black mold had come and devoured it.
She could probably have it rebuilt, but the thought of living in this house alone made her nauseous. After tonight she didn’t want anything to do with it, either. Her mother might have taken grave offense, but her mother was no longer here to have a say. Mid-autumn had taken over ghost month swiftly and brightly, and there were lanterns in the windows. The living no longer had to fear the eyes of their ancestors watching as they did what was needed.
Still, restlessness crawled from Adeline’s bones like memory.
Her fire was responding to the site so strongly that she had to light it on her palm, let it burn straight up into the dusk despite the breeze. “Mama,” she whispered. She was standing where her mother had collapsed. She saw it again, smelled it again. Felt it again? A haze of light and need. She’d run. Why? She couldn’t explain anything about that night. But she was back here now, needing something again.
The instinct guided her to the ruined door hanging half off itshinge, to a black indent in the wood in the faint shape of a handprint. It was just shallow enough—and implausible enough—that investigators might have overlooked it, but in Adeline’s firelight the shape of her mother’s fingers was unmistakable. Her mother hadn’t just beenonfire. She’d been pouring out fire as well. Adeline’s fingers fit the scorch exactly. She breathed and could feel fury, desperation, pain. The door fell open and her mother stood there, hands alight, looking like an angel. She heard the sounds: the shattering, the breaking apart, the rustling licking of flame turning into roaring. It was only when she found herself kneeling on the ground, fingers digging into the sludge of ash and mud, that she realized she wasn’t sure if they had been her memories or her mother’s. Adeline searched the specter of her mother’s agony, trying to find anything more concrete, but the magic only gave her senses, no faces.
Inside the house, the air mingled with burnt wood. It was an uncertain, suspended place, hung in the shape of something that stirred memory. Fire had twisted her mother’s living room, left behind a dark and heady perfume. Adeline recognized its touches. It recognized her. She followed her mother’s echo through the living room and up the stairs, miraculously intact enough to hold her weight. The phantom was easy to follow now that she’d locked on to it, familiar in a way none of the others she’d encountered had been, as though it were merely an extension of herself.
There was something else familiar, too, though, baked into every mote of the air. Fire lingered here. Hers, theirs. For the first time since she’d accused Tian of it, Adeline revisited the possibility that a Butterfly had killed her mother. A Butterfly, perhaps, who was strangely resistant to finding answers for her patron’s death. Who insisted it was an accident at every junction. Who seemed bitter that any of them were still here at all.
She would kill Red Butterfly if you let her. Where had that come from, earlier? Why had she said it with so much conviction?
The conviction was here, now. In the blackened boards. HadPek Mun killed her mother? What was she to do with that? Tian would never accept it. Then again, why did she need Tian to accept anything?
Upstairs she found her mother’s echo again, pointing in a direction she hadn’t expected: toward her own room, which momentarily confused her. Why had her mother made a detour here to the end of the corridor, wasting precious seconds?
It came to her a moment later, of course. Her mother had been looking for her. And she’d been in a bar looking for her mother, in a way. She’d met Tian there instead. Learned about Red Butterfly hours before her mother’s dying symbol connected the dots for her. In a way, this had started not with the fire but at the White Orchid. No—before that, with the phone call she’d overheard in Jenny’s. She’d forgotten all about it. Her mother had told the person at the end of the line to go to the White Orchid, then to come to the house the following day when Adeline was at school. At least one of the Butterflies had known this address. And Tian had been at the White Orchid.
It couldn’t be. But Adeline had no one to ask.
Fire still held aloft, she entered her old bedroom. Despite knowing, she hadn’t really been prepared for the sight. It was blackened and broken, shelves toppled, the posters turned to ash. She hadn’t come back for souvenirs, but she found herself looking anyway, wondering if anything had survived, and wondering why it mattered. Some little trinkets had, but she realized when picking them up that she didn’t want to keep them anyway.
She went to her mother’s bedroom next, which hurt her more than her own had. She’d been born sharing her mother’s bed. Later, older, when they’d moved to the high-rise, she’d gotten her own cot behind a folding screen, through which she could still hear her mother’s motions and see her silhouette. The upgrade to this house had been the tangible evidence of her mother’s achievement. She’d been excited to give Adeline her own room, her own walls to decorate. But with each successive move, Adelinehad also lost more of her ability to understand her mother, who had left more and more familiar things behind each time: old furniture, contentment, the altar, the fire. Perhaps even the tattoos. What would happen if you took the power of a goddess and then stripped the tethers away?
A flicker of light out of the corner of her eye snapped Adeline’s attention to the door, and the footsteps growing louder beyond it. She leapt to her feet as Tian appeared in the doorway, two fingertips lit. Adeline was momentarily stricken by her face half-bathed in fire, her features sharpened by shadow.
“Are youfollowingme?”
“I had a guess.” Tian took a few cautious steps into the room. “I should have told you. I’m sorry. I owed you that.”
