Afterward, once the entire strange tale had been told and—wonder of wonders—digested, Ma apologized to Jin for not telling her Mrs. Po had commissioned her to make Po Ching-hsia a Hell friend to go with her Hell house, because she’d thought Jin would think it was creepy. “I thought it was creepy,” Ma admitted.
“I . . . don’t know how we could have possibly known . . . ” Jin began to say, then trailed away. Everyone nodded; exactly.
“You said his name was Wu Mingshi?” Ba asked, a few minutes later. When Jin nodded: “Ai-yaaah, ah bee, that’s like calling somebody Mister—Nobody No-Name, or something. John Doe.”
“Huh. Weird.”
But no weirder than anything else, really.
***
The next week, Ah-Ma announced she and Ba were selling the shop to the Po family, for a hefty price. Now Ah-Ma would be able to retire the way she’d always wanted—perhaps to Australia, where there were many other “good Chinese”—while Jin, Ba and Ma could move to Vancouver, where Ma’s family ran a computer store.
That Friday, however, Jin found herself once more inside the Empress’ Noodle, sitting across from its owner as the lanterns shone overhead like dim red moons, casting barely enough light to see how little there was to see by.
“Ni hao, Song Jin-Li.”
“Ni hao, Mrs. Yau.”
Mrs. Yau laughed, a throat-sung trill of touched-glass music. “I said you might feel free to call me Grandmother, child,” she reminded Jin, softly.
“Wei, I remember, and thank you, very much. But . . . I don’t. Feel free.”
Again, that one-eyebrow/no-eyebrow twitch, twinned with a delicate quirk of lip. “Ah. So you are finally becoming wise, mei mei—or wiser, at the very least. How it gladdens my heart to see this.”
Jin swallowed. “Did you know? About . . . him?”
“Your little paper husband? Not directly, no. Though I did see some sort of influence trailing behind you when you first passed my window—something foul with too much yin, like a snail’s track, leaving a stain. And seeing how you shone with yang, I thought that if that stain were to be removed from you, you might be better off.”
“That stain.” Jin’s first love. A cold and lonely thing, made only to be burnt, which had reached out blindly, grabbing at the first warm hand it found; a liar and a thief, perfectly happy to get Jin killed as long as he got something out of it, Mr. Nobody No-Name Nothing . . .
But beautiful, nevertheless. More so, Jin feared—late at night, when she had nothing else left to think about—than anyone else she was ever likely to meet for the rest of her boringly normal life.
“Well, anyways,” she said, at last. “Looks like you saved me.”
Mrs. Yau shook her head. “No. Because you trusted in everything you saw, I simply showed you what it really was you trusted—after which you saved yourself, as I’d hoped you might. Very impressive, Song Jin-Li-ah.”
“If you say so.” Jin cracked a small smile. “Definitely lost me my summer job, though.”
“Then for that I am sorry. Would you like another, perhaps?”
“What, work here? For you? I . . . can’t cook, or anything.”
“Ah. Mei shi, little sister—never mind, no matter, not to worry. A restaurant holds many different jobs. Besides which, this is hardly the only business I own.”
Jin nodded. “Uh, um—no offense, but—I don’t know you very well.”
“True enough.” A beat. “Would you like to?”
“ . . . What do you mean?”
Another beat, held longer, like a drawn breath. And: “Hmm,” Mrs. Yau asked, musingly, of no one in particular. “What do I?”
Jin felt herself trembling on some kind of precipice, with no real idea of how she might have gotten up there in the first place—so high, so exposed. So very much in danger.
“Look closer, mei mei,” said Mrs. Yau, her lips barely seeming to move. “Look, and see. See me, now . . . ”
. . . Fully revealed, reigning Empress of all the New World’s hsi-hsue-kuei—suck-blood devils, half-souled Chinese vampires, worse indeed than any ghost who ever lived once (but doesn’t anymore). Enthroned in her antipathic Dragon-boned Lady glory, and terrible as an army with banners; her unbound mass of hair floating up and away like drowning weed, tendrils seeking delicately in every direction for any scent of blood on the air, with her porcelain mask-face the one seed of light still left in