Beneath a Rose

The roses were starting their second bloom, which was something resembling a good omen for this chat.  At least they’d be granted some secrecy.  However, Aoi being so insistent was a bad sign.  Helena looked forward to self reflection about as much as she looked forward to drinking hemlock.

Aoi walked through the garden to a bench away from the more traveled routes.  Helena flopped down on it, while Aoi carefully arranged her dress before sitting.  Helena sighed, “I suppose you have to act like my mother before we can talk about important matters, so go ahead.”

“Helena….”  Aoi looked down at her.  “I’m not trying to be your mother.  For one thing you are older than me.  I’m trying to be your friend.”  Aoi held up a finger as Helena started to protest.  “Helena, your other friends are worried as well.  Lyudmila and Kseniya both asked me to look after you.  And they’ve known you since you were a kid.”

“Lyudmila turned into a worrywart when I moved here,” Helena said as she rolled her eyes.  “And Kseniya thinks I should have more friends.  They’ve been like that ever since we were kids at Walpurgisnacht.  I love them both, but they’re country girls.  They just don’t understand how things work in the city.  It’s nothing unusual.”

Aoi shook her head.  “Is that so?”

The silence that followed grated on Helena.  Aoi was trying to get her to open up. To change.  And Helena loathed that.  She hated picking at the old scars in her past.  Most of all she hated problems she couldn’t solve.

Worst of all she knew if she pushed Aoi would walk away.  But that would be admitting defeat.

Aoi heaved a sigh.  “Well, perhaps we could look over your work first.  You said you needed my help?”

Helena blinked at the other woman in confusion.  After all that Aoi was just letting her off the hook?  The priestess had to be plotting something.  It was like a sack of coins sitting in the middle of an abandoned street.  But she couldn’t escape the trap.  The reward was too good.

She took a deep breath and tried to remember everything she wanted to cover.  “Well first, apparently Gold Rat Hsu is the Triad’s lead magician.”

“I had heard we worked with the Triads, but I thought he just had no scruples about his clients.”  Aoi frowned at that.  “That worries me.  He has a title like you Helena, and he’s much older.  How’d you find out about that?”

Helena shook her head.  “Actually let me go back to the start of this mess.”

She explained the situation in full, starting with the crime scene and continuing on to her findings in the morgue.  Aoi nodded along as she went over various points, but didn’t interrupt.  When Helena got to the meeting with Ling Wei Hsu, Aoi started smoothing out her ponytail.  That usually meant the woman was thinking about something, but Aoi let Helena continue. 

When Helena finished Aoi shook her head.  “Exactly what I was worried about.”

“I thought we were going to solve my work problems first,” Helena said.  “I could use some help there, you know.”

“You could use a lot of help.”  Aoi flipped her hair back behind her back.  “Helena, why are you rushing off to another death duel?”

Helena narrowed her eyes.  “Because that’s the job.  Find the murderer and stop them.  And I like solving problems permanently.”

Aoi folded her arms.  “No Helena.  That isn’t the job you took.  You were hired to find who the murderer was.  You’ve done that Helena.  You can use Ling Wei Hsu’s information as proof, get your money and walk away.  You don’t have to fight anyone.”

Helena felt uneasy at Aoi’s suggestion.  “I don’t have definitive proof yet.”

“Oh?”  Aoi stared at Helena.  “So tell me, are you going to walk away when you have proof?”

Helena hesitated.  The answer was obvious.  She had no reason to go after the jiang-shi or its master.  She wasn’t part of the police.  She wasn’t even a citizen, legally.  There was no reason to risk her life to beat Long Zhou Di.  She didn’t even know the man.

“No.”  Her heart smoldered in anticipation of the battle as she admitted the truth.  “I won’t.  I’m going to find him, and I’m going to beat him.”

Aoi rubbed her forehead.  “That’s what I thought.”

The sound of people passing by the other side of the roses filled the air between them.  Helena let the murmur of the city wrap around her like a blanket.  But she couldn’t find comfort in anonymity now.  It was a painful relief when Aoi spoke again.  “Can you tell me why, Helena?”

Helena stared at her hands.  “I can’t.”  Words tumbled around her mind, trying to form thoughts, but nothing sounded like what she wanted to say.  It was pride, but it wasn’t all pride.  It was her need to finish the job, but that wasn’t all.  And it was something strange.  Something she just didn’t fully understand.  But the need to fight pulsed through her the more she considered walking away.

Aoi leaned back against the bench.  “Helena.  Do you remember the first time we met?”

The question knocked Helena out of her reverie.  Why ask that?  She dug into her memories, trying to recall which meeting was first.  “That was… the moon festival at the shrine outside the village, back in the Realm of Illusion.  It was the first year they let you work at a shrine where youkai could visit.”  A smile came to Helena’s face at the memory.  “You asked us all about our home realms, and every other place we’d visited.  Your parents should have taken that as a warning.  You running here was a huge scandal.  Loads of fun.”

Aoi smiled and shook her head.  “Yes.  They probably should have kept an eye on me.  But no Helena.  That wasn’t the first time we met.  Do you remember when that badger youkai slipped into the village school and mauled one of the students?”

Helena blinked in surprise.  “Yes.”  That had been a terrible incident.  One that had pretty much ruined the first week of summer training.

“I was in the crowd when you dropped the culprit’s body in the town square,” Aoi said.  “I doubt you remember, but it was quite the first impression for me.  You’d only arrived the day before the incident, but while the usual hunters were gathering information, you chased the culprit into the woods, then fought him yourself.  A magician who wasn’t even from our realm, much less our village.  Someone who asked for nothing in return.”

Aoi rested her hand on Helena’s shoulder.  “Helena, the truth is you believe in justice.  You want reality to be fair.  For good people to be rewarded, and evil to be punished.  That’s why you hunted down that killer then, and why you’re seeking justice now.  Yes your pride has something to do with it as well I’m sure, but that’s the heart of the matter.”

Helena ‘s jaw dropped.  Then she started laughing.  Justice?  It was too absurd.  Aoi’s placid face scrunched into confusion and Helena doubled over with mirth.  She desperately tried to keep from bursting into full hysterics.  She started hiccupping in between laughs from the exertion, but even the pain couldn’t stop her.

Finally the last giggle escaped and she managed to take in enough air to speak.  “Aoi.  I didn’t kill that badger.”

“What?!”  Aoi’s mouth fell open.  “But-!”

Helena wiped her eyes to clear them.  “Think about it Aoi.  How could a child escape a full grown youkai?  Especially an animal youkai with decades of hunting experience?  The only reason the child survived the attack at school was because there was a fox youkai hiding on the grounds.  The kitsune killed the badger youkai then fled with the corpse before anyone else showed up.”

“There’s a kitsune hiding in the school?!”  Aoi’s eyes practically bulged out of their sockets.  “How?  I mean, foxes are more reasonable than the other youkai races, but any youkai is a danger to the children and-“

“The fox was a child too.  She’d just gotten her second tail, and she was trying to learn writing and arithmetic.” Helena shrugged at Aoi’s dumbfounded expression.  “But of course if anyone found out she’d be killed on the spot.  You’re friends with youkai and you still panicked.  What would happen if some of the more conservative hunters learned the truth?  Especially after an attack on a student?”

Helena looked back out over the rose gardens.  “The kitsune was smart enough to realize that.  Or maybe her wounds were just bad enough that she retreated to her lair instinctively.  It was a close fight.  But she was gone, the culprit was dead, and the student she’d saved didn’t remember what happened.  If a hunter were to claim the kill, no one in the village would be the wiser.”

“The foxes and I have history, so they called in a favor,” Helena said while tapping her bell.  “I had a reputation for killing annoying animal youkai after all.  Drop a body in the town square, get a bit of praise, a few complaints from my tutors about stealing all the fun.  And the fox girl wouldn’t lose everything for saving her friend’s life.”

The city again surrounded them with background noise as Aoi stared at her feet.  Then the shrine maiden began to laugh.  The woman’s giggles were contagious, and this time Helena didn’t try to hold back.  They laughed together until their sides began to sting.

“Amazing,” Aoi said as she wiped her eyes.  “I was right about you for all the wrong reasons.”

Helena sniffed as she rubbed her own tears away.  “Can you really call that justice?  I broke all the village’s rules.”

Aoi’s smile softened.  “And now we’re back to our problem.”  She took a moment to steady herself.  “You believe in justice, but you don’t have a clue what that means.  You just follow your emotions and get in fights.”

“Is that so?”  Helena slowly shook her head.  “Aoi, do you know why you’re giving me this speech and not Lyudmila?”

“Because I live in the same realm as you?” Aoi replied.

Helena plucked a rose from a nearby bush.  “Because Lyudmila knows it’s not justice.  It’s revenge.”  She twirled the flower, the soft caress of the petals swapping with the prick of the thorns.  “I hate some people, Aoi.  Really really hate some people.  That’s the heart of creating curses, and curses are my best magic.  Yes I saved a girl from being chased out of your village.  But this morning I cursed a man to live the rest of his life poorer than his slaves for annoying me.”

“Did that make you happy?” Aoi asked.

“It was the most satisfying thing I did this week,” Helena said.  “And I feel that it shouldn’t be.”

She felt Aoi’s hand fall on her shoulder.  “If you didn’t like it, why don’t you change?”

Helena tossed the rose aside.  “Because the part I don’t like is the same as the part I do like.  And because that’s the one part of me I can’t change anymore.”

Aoi squeezed her shoulder.  “Is it… related to how you stopped your aging?  How you became immortal?”

She froze.  “How do you know that, Aoi?”  Magicians hid the secret of immortality as much as they could.  Letting people know how you transcended a normal lifespan was dangerous.

“Helena.”  Aoi folded her arms.  “Do you really think a priestess like me wouldn’t notice when a god acts in my own shrine?”

The tension bled away.  “Of course not.  That was foolish of me.”  She sighed.  “I guess I’m still getting used to what my transformation means.  Even after nearly thirty years.  Everyone makes a big deal about ‘not being human anymore,’ but not much changes.  It’s subtle, and I’m not used to subtle tales.”

“I feel you are still getting used to a lot of things.  But I’ve bothered you enough for one day,” Aoi said as she stood again.  “At least consider what I’ve said.”

“Right.”  Helena stood as well and brushed off her clothes.  “I’m not sure whether I should thank you.”

“It’s fine,” Aoi said.  “After all, the longer it takes for you to realize everything I said is right, the more I get to tease you about it later.”

“You should consider immortality if you’re going to make long term investments like that,” Helena responded.  After a moment she frowned.  “Wait, that’s right.  I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about the jiang-shi.”

Aoi blinked in surprise.  “No.  Haven’t heard anything about one from anyone other than you.  They’re rare after all.  And my shrine mostly gets people from the Realms of Illusion or Westerners like you.  Not visitors from the Middle Kingdoms.”

Helena nodded.  “It was worth asking.”  She smiled at Aoi.  “So now that you’ve dredged through my hangups, why don’t you buy me lunch?”

“Hey.”  Aoi pointed at her.  “This chat was because you owed me.  Besides didn’t you just get a huge job?”

“They haven’t paid me yet,” Helena replied.  “Besides if I’m paying that means you have to go back to your shrine and wait for me to bring the food.”

Aoi shrugged in defeat.  “Fine.  You win this one.  But after this job of yours is over you’ll have to buy me dinner.”

“It’s a deal,” Helena said as they walked off together.