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She wants to be nuts, though. Long and the short of it. Just like, on some level, Jen wanted to die.

But hell, what was Franz going to do about it, one way or another? Shun me?

I took a fresh bite of noodle while the ancient Chinese spectre I’d come to think of as Grandmother’s right-hand ghost flitted by, pausing to murmur in her ear for a moment before fading away through the nearest lacquer screen. And when she looked at me, she had something I’d never seen before lurking in the corners of her impenetrable gaze. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I might even have said it looked a lot like—well—

—surprise.

“Someone,” she said, at last, “is at the Maitre D’s station. Asking for you, Jude-ah.”

Glancing sidelong, so I’d be forced to follow the path of her gaze over to where . . . he waited: He, it. Me.

My shadow.

My shadow, highlighted against the Empress’ Noodle’s thick, red velvet drapes like a sliver of lambent bronze—head down, shyly, with its hair in its eyes and its hands in its pockets. My shadow, come at last after all my fruitless seeking, just waiting for its better half to take control, wrap it tight, gather it in and make it—finally—whole again.

Waiting, patiently. Quiet and acquiescent. Waiting, waiting . . .

. . . for me.

I met Grandmother Yau’s gaze again, and found her normally impassive face gone somehow far more rigid than usual: Green-veined porcelain, a funerary mask trimmed in milky jade.

“The Yin mirror reflects only one way, Chiu-wai-ah,” she said, at last. “It is a dark path, always. And slippery.”

I nodded, suddenly possessed by a weird spurt of glee. Replying, off-hand: “Mei shi, big sister; not to worry, never mind. Do you think I don’t know enough to be careful?”

To which she merely bowed her head, slightly. Asking—

“What will you do, then?”

And I—couldn’t stop myself from smiling, as the answer came sliding synapse-fast to the very tip of my tongue, kept restrained only by a lifetime’s residual weight of “social graces.” Thinking: Oh, I? Go home, naturally. Go home, dim the lights, light some incense—

—and fuck myself.

* * *

So soft in my arms, not that I’d ever thought of myself as soft. I pushed it back against the apartment door with its wrists pinned above its head, nuzzling and nipping, quizzing it in Cantonese, Mandarin, ineffectual Vietnamese—only to have it offer exactly nothing in reply, while simultaneously maintaining an unbroken stare of pure, dumb adoration from beneath its artfully lowered lashes.

Which was okay by me; more than okay, really. Seeing I’d already had it pretty much up to here with guys who talked.

Feeling the shadow’s proximity, its very presence, prickle the hairs on the back of my neck like a presentiment of oncoming sheet-lightning against empty black sky: All plus to my mostly minus, yang to my yin, nice guy to my toxic shit. And wanting it back, right here and now; feeling the core-deep urge to penetrate, to own, to repossess those long-missing parts of me in one hard push, come what fucking might.

Groin to groin and breath to breath, two half-hearts beating as one, two severances sealing fast. Unbreakable.

Down on the bed, then, with its heels on my shoulders: Key sliding home, lock springing open. Rearing erect, burning bright with flickering purple flame, allll over. And seeing myself abruptly outlined in black against the wall above my headboard at that ecstatic moment of (re)joining, like some Polaroid flash’s bruisy after-image: My inverse reflection. My missing shadow, slipping inside me as I slipped inside it, enshadowing me once more.

Ten years’ worth of trauma deferred, all crashing down on me at once. Showing me first-hand, explicitly, how nature abhors a—moral, human, walking—vacuum.

* * *

And now it’s later, oh so much, with rain all over my bedroom floor and beads of wood already rising like sodden cicatrices everywhere I dare to look. Rain on my hair, rain in my eyes—only natural, given that the window’s still open. But I can’t stand up, can’t force a step, not even to shut it. I just squat here and listen to my heart, eyes glued to that ectoplasmic husk the shadow left devolving on my bed: A shed skinfull of musk and lies, rotting. All that’s left of my lovely double, my literal self-infatuation.

I’ve done the protective circle around myself five times now, at least—in magic marker, in chalk, in my own shit. Tomorrow I think I’ll re-do it in blood, just to get it over with; can’t keep on picking at these ideas forever, without something starting to fester. And we don’t want that, do we?

(Really.)

Because the sad truth is this: My wards hold, like they always hold; the circle works, like all my magic works. But what it doesn’t do, even after all my years of sheer, hard, devoted work—all my Craft and study, not to mention practice—

—is help.