Wild Hunt Read Free Page A

“—within this jar. When I am dead, I will want you to confirm that it is gone. Do you understand?”
    “I do,” I said. Never mind that I didn’t understand why; asking why in the undercurrent often leads to more answers than you’d ever want. And, when it came down to it, I did trust Yuen not to deliberately harm me. “And if it’s not gone?”
    “Then my daughter will know what to do.” She didn’t even blink as she translated. “You will not have to wait long.”
    I stepped back a pace. “That’s okay. Really. I can come back—”
    “Please. Have a seat.” He spread his hands and smiled, then turned to speak to his daughter. She handed him the jar and listened, ignoring me entirely. I backed up to give Yuen’s daughter room to move, then tried to stay out of her way.
    I’d been in the same position as Yuen’s daughter once before, waiting for my own mother to die. But I’d never been a witness to the same event from outside the family. Remembering how badly I’d taken it—for a number of reasons—I wanted to do what I could for Yuen’s daughter, even if all I could do right now was to give her space.
    Space didn’t seem to be what she needed, though. She affixed several carved wands, each as long as my forearm, to the bed, then joined her father in repeating several phrases. They didn’t sound Chinese, but they also didn’t sound like any language I knew. This was a small-scale ritual, I realized, the last step of some magic already almost complete. That was what I’d scented on my way in; they’d gotten the big stuff taken care of first and left the last step until I could get there. The moment of that magic had drawn out tight on the brink of completion, and it occurred to me that Yuen’s wife was right to be mourning her husband already.
    I glanced behind me, at the place from which Yuen’s daughter had taken the jar. It hadn’t been in a safe, only a niche in the plaster, lined with thin gold foil. That meant Yuen wasn’t too worried about keeping it safe, at least from mundane burglars. The photo that had hidden it lay on a nearby table. It was an old sepia-toned photograph, one I’d seen on previous visits and remembered only because it didn’t seem to match the aesthetic of the rest of the room. In fact, I had my doubts about whether it was real; it looked more like one of those photos you could get at an amusement park of you and your friends in cowboy costumes: six men in front of a building that could have been a saloon flat in any Sergio Leone film set. Their faces were all a little too serious for fake old-time fun: to a man, they squinted into the sun as if assessing its weaknesses. Every one of them wore a belt with a sixgun, even the weedy greenhorn guy in the middle, who looked like he belonged in a sanatorium rather than a saloon. I know, technically you could say the samething about Doc Holliday, but for my money Doc Holliday could have killed this guy by breathing on him. The photo had faded over the years, obscuring many of the other faces, though the man on the far left had a handlebar mustache big enough to lose a cat in.
    “There are some things,” Yuen said behind me, “that you hold on to. Even when you know you shouldn’t. Even when holding on costs you everything.”
    I nodded, then realized Yuen had spoken in English, without the protective formality of a translator. “Yuen?” I said, turning.
    “Papa?” his daughter said with me, her voice barely above a whisper.
    He clasped her hand. “Bring me the photograph. Not you, Elizabeth,” he added as she started to move. “Hound. You bring it.”
    I did. He took it by the frame and, with a grunt, turned it around so it faced him. “Not that I’ve held on,” he continued, seemingly oblivious to our shock. “But we don’t like to think that our parents were fallible. It reflects badly on us. So if we cannot ignore those mistakes, and the worst of them we can never ignore, then sometimes the best