Chapter 72
It was raining the day Yeung Serng Yin got the call from the SSD. She’d had a rocky relationship ever since the department was established, but both sides knew that it was more a holdover from the dragon’s terse dealings with the SSD’s predecessor, The Merlin Club, so there were no real hard feelings.
But even so, she was not that much of a curmudgeon and had... at least one person in the SSD she called a friend. Her hair was mostly black with only a few, bright strands of white gracing her sole plait. That had to count for something, right?
"Wei?" said Yeung Serng Yin, phone receiver pinched with her shoulder against her ear as she wrote a quick note-to-self on a scrap of paper: eggs, yau mak choi, soy milk.
"Yin-Yin! You need to come here!"
Yeung Serng Yin set her pen and paper on the side table and shifted the phone into her hand. "Helen? What’s happened?"
There came some strange crackles and bangs from the other end of the line before there was a response. "He’s going to die!"
Yeung Serng Yin clicked her teeth and moved around the table toward the door where her shoes were while making sure not to yank too hard on the line. "Helen. Take a breath. Explain."
Helen Chu, part taotie but still a decade younger, did as she was told then spoke again. "I’m at Tong-gor’s shop in the Under City. He’s..." There was another deep breath. "He did a sundering of a human soul. The father... he wanted money, so Tong-gor..."
There was a sharp crackling then the distinct sound of someone else taking the phone and putting it to their ear. "Yin-jie! Listen to me, I didn’t know! I really didn’t know! They said he was-"
Some more scuffling, then Helen’s voice came back along the line. "You have to come. You’re the only person I can think of who can save him!"
But she needn’t have said that. As soon as she’d heard the words ’human soul’ and ’sundering’ she’d thrown the phone down and headed out the door.
The typhoon wasn’t forecast to make landfall until the next day yet the city and its residents were already being lashed by the storm. Broken umbrellas lined the side walk by the upturned rubbish bin and the few people that were on the street look practically drowned. A speeding taxi, just a smudge of red in the rain, sloshed past Yeung Serng Yin, spraying up a deluge of half-rain, half-sewage water. The dragon swore and cast a quick spell to get rid of the worst of it.