Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Paranormal; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

San Francisco has a Monkey King - and she's kinda freaked out.

Barista, activist, and were-monkey Maya McQueen was well on her way to figuring herself out. Well, part of the way. 25% of the way. If you squint.

But now the Bay Area is being shaken up. Occupy Wall Street has come home to roost; and on the supernatural side there's disappearances, shapeshifter murders, and the city's spirit trying to find its guardian.

Maya doesn't have a lot of time before chaos turns up at her door, and she needs to solve all of her problems. Well, most of them. The urgent ones, anyhow.

But who says the solutions have to be neat? Because Monkey is always out for mischief.

© Jadie Jang (P) Penguin Audio and Rebellion Publishing 2021

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: Solaris

Print pages: 400

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Chinatown Rooftop, San Francisco

The guard looked entirely human.

He wore designer jeans, knockoff Gucci loafers, a sheeny buttoned shirt, and too much hair gel. He smelled, even at a distance, of strong cologne. His skin was a taut medium brown, with faint wrinkle lines starting between his groomed eyebrows and around his cheeks. He held his cigarette between his thumb and first two fingers and blew crooked smoke rings.

He looked entirely human. That was my first clue that he wasn’t.

I know, I know, if everyone who looked human wasn’t, then nobody would be human (interesting thought, that …) but that’s not what I mean. There was a … brightness to his appearance, like he was in HD while the rest of the world was a cell phone video. He was too perfectly what he appeared to be: an inevitable side effect of wearing a bought glamor. Other people’s magic just doesn’t sit naturally on you, and only an amateur would take that sparkling, sharp visage at face value.

This guy, if Ayo’s info was correct, was a bajang: a shapeshifter that had a human-like form, and a weasel-like form. The human-like form, however, wasn’t entirely human. He should have had clawed hands and taloned feet. And he was entirely too tall for a bajang, being around my average human height. And bajang, apparently, don’t have higher deceptive magic. Not that he’d have gotten away with it if he had. I have my own magic detector, when common sense fails, and my eyes were burning away merrily.

The only thing I couldn’t tell you is why a rooftop guard would need to go to such trouble to hide who he was. I mean, he was on the roof.

I was at that moment in the form of a shadow at the base of the air conditioning vent. The guard had come out almost immediately after I got there to have a smoke, and gave the place I was shadowing a few hard looks. Probably saw that something was wrong with my spot (there wasn’t supposed to be a shadow here) but couldn’t put his finger on it. I waited.

He seemed nervous, for some reason.

Halfway through his cigarette, he decided he was done. He gave me a last hard look and flicked his cigarette into me, turning to go back through the door before it landed. The butt flew through me, bounced off the air conditioning vent, and landed, just outside my square of darkness. I gave it another minute to see if he was coming back, then transformed from a shadow into a rhesus macaque monkey. Monkey was my default animal form, and the best form from which to do what I was about to do.

I pulled a hair from my chest, set it on the bare skin of my elongated palm, and focused on it. The tip of the hair turned into something resembling a microphone, and the shaft began to lengthen. The microphone nosed its way into the vent like a snake, and the hair continued elongating behind it as it slithered down the airway. The root end of the hair shaped itself into an ear bud and I put it into my right ear, even as my left hand continued feeding the shaft of the hair—now a flexible cable—into the vent.

It didn’t look like any technology you’ve ever seen. I started out in high school trying to make real machines out of my hairs, but I didn’t really understand their mechanisms, so they never worked. But when I got it through my skull that it was magic, not engineering, I just made the things look like what I wanted them to do, and then they started working like whoa.

The microphone head slid past several rooms featuring sounds appropriate to a “massage” parlor (I’ll spare you any elaboration.) Without looking I reached around the vent chimney for the black patent leather crossbody purse I’d brought with me (fashionable and water resistant!) I pulled out the stone Ayo had magicked for me and cupped it over my left ear, and the conversations became understandable. I couldn’t suddenly speak Chinese, mind you, despite four years of college classes. But the gist of the conversation filtered into my brain, even as I listened to words I couldn’t understand. I was listening for a particular female voice—one that sounded like a warped metal door being scraped open across a rough cement floor—or for snatches of conversation about the owner of that voice. I got nothing.

I was on the hunt for Dalisay, the head of the Bay Area aswang contingent, who’d disappeared without a trace two days before. It was a fairly serious matter: leaderless aswangs would be no joke, especially when their leader was Catholic AF, kept them all living near the cemeteries of Colma, and organized raids on said cemeteries to keep her flock from stealing live babies. This was the third building belonging to the Hung For Tong I’d checked tonight, and the only one I’d found any people—or critters—in.

I pulled my cell phone out of the purse. Like the magicked stone, it didn’t—couldn’t—change shape with me, so I had to deal with it—irritatingly—whenever I went on an assignment like this; hence the purse, which was real, not made out of my hairs, like the rest of my clothes. One of these days I’d figure out how to make a phone from a hair, and then we’d be cooking with dynamite.

- NOTHING SO FAR. GO FOR PLAN B., I typed and sent, then returned the phone to its baggie, in its hidden corner.

A minute later, I heard a phone ring through the mic. A brusque male voice answered, and I heard Ayo’s tiny, tinny voice coming through his cell phone. She sounded angry and demand-y. The brusque male voice told her, apparently for the second time, that he knew nothing, and hung up. Ayo didn’t call back, like she would’ve if this had been a real demand.

Then a softer male voice asked the brusque one the obvious question. The brusque voice said, “That woman asking about Dalisay,” and the other one grunted. After some desultory talk, they turned to tale-telling that would put X-Tube to the blush. Either they didn’t have Dalisay, or they were all talked out about it for the night. Without shifting its position, I changed the mic into a micro camera, and repeated the room-by-room search (I could do sight and sound at the same time, but it took a lot more focus.) This turned up nothing on Dalisay again, just stuff I would never, ever unsee. I pulled the hair camera up, turned it back into a hair, and stuck it back on my chest.

- NOTHING. I texted to Ayo.

- ???  She texted back. This was Ayo asking for next steps.

- TALK TOMORROW. She could ask for details at work tomorrow if she wanted to. I turned off my phone and put it away.

I turned to go, and kicked something by accident. It clattered away across the rooftop—a beer can. It hadn’t been there before. I would have known; I had been the shadow it was sitting in. I looked for the half-smoked cigarette, didn’t find it, and knew that I wouldn’t. I should’ve known: the cigarette hadn’t sizzled out when it hit the wet rooftop. The bajang had thrown a basic enchantment over the beer can to set it up as an alarm.  Whoops.

I had just enough time to admire his crude, but effective, tactic before he yanked the rooftop door open and tumbled out. He was shorter by a lot, and his Gucci loafers had been replaced by taloned feet. A look of focused rage now marred his handsome face and his eyes glowed orange.

My rational brain was telling me to flee. But I also have a monkey brain, and Monkey loved to fight. And Monkey currently had the upper paw.

I slid into human form, expecting to gain a moment of surprise. My human form is, I’m too often told, rather young and sweet-looking: a pale-skinned girl anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five years with Asian features and long hair just this side of the blonde/brown divide. About half the folks I’d fought screeched to a complete halt at the sight of her. Me.

But this guy was good. He didn’t pause, just closed on me with a fury of lighting-fast punches and kicks that left me breathless … and delighted. I shoulda just put him down, but: 1) I’d never fought a bajang before, 2) I’d been getting bored with life, and 3) this guy was good. He was so fast I couldn’t see his hands and feet moving. Wow. Okay, then, buddy, Okay! Let’s see whatcha got!

I backed us up along the short length of the roof, opening up a bit to keep up with him. I even let him land a few, just to see how he’d handle it. Oooh, he was pretty. Look at that form! And that speed! Maybe my sweet little face was relaxing in admiration, because he took advantage, leaping forward, sinking his claws into my shoulders, and smashing the bony crown of his head into the bridge of my nose.

… Or, at least, trying to. I turned briefly into a dragon egg, the sudden hardness of my shell thrusting his claws out of my flesh, just in time for him to smash the hard part of his skull against the hard part of my everything. I switched back to monkey, the claw-holes behind my shoulders gone as if they’d never been. He staggered away from me, pressing his paw to his crown.

I didn’t think it would stop him for long; I was told bajang have hard heads. So I swung up on my knuckles to kick him in the throat, the gut, and the … did bajang have balls? I noted that none of this had a particularly strong effect, although his throat seemed marginally more vulnerable than the other two. Fair enough: I stuck four monkey toes into his throat again for good measure. He choked, recovered … and then it was really on.

He feinted a swipe from my right, then swept my legs. Or tried to. I turned to mist for a moment, then rocked back on my knucks and shoved him on the side with my feet, using his excess momentum against him. Instead of stumbling, he executed a controlled fall, which he turned into a sideways roll back up into a side kick. Damn, this guy was good. Moreover, I’d seen that move before. Come to think of it, I’d seen a lot of his moves before.

I switched back to human so I could speak.

“Where have I seen you?” I asked, as much to find out as to see if he was distractible. He wasn’t. I had to block a 1-2 … then a 3, even as his face opened with surprise and … was that …? Guess he was pissed off.

“MMA,” he mumbled, as if coerced, then followed the concession with a vicious claw-swipe that would’ve taken out my eye, if I’d had an eye just then.

… Oooooh, MMA! Right! This guy was Budi “Bu Bu” Budiman, Indonesia’s golden boy for a few seasons—until he took some time off to recover from an injury and never came back. I could almost see what had happened to him play before my eyes like a soap opera recap: his treatments paid for by a mob boss, his recovery not as quick and complete as the business required, his debt suddenly unpayable. And now this contender was a leg-breaker. Sad, but common. The question was: why did they put what was undoubtedly their best guard on the roof? They couldn’t have known I was coming.

As if reading my thoughts, Bu Bu’s rictus of fury cracked open at the mouth and he asked me in a voice that sounded … shaken, “What are you?”

Ugh. I hated that question.

I did wonder, for a second, if I’d hate it nearly as much if I knew the answer.

And there it was: I was distractible. He sensed it and took advantage of the moment to break the rhythm we’d created together. In a move I hadn’t thought he’d try again, fool that I am, he feinted left, jabbed left, then swept my legs. I went straight down and he threw himself over me, using his claws and talons to encourage me into a hold.

Okay, fun and games over. He was poetry in motion, but nobody puts me in a hold. The monkey part of my mind shrieked at me to kill him, but was easily overruled. I grasped his wrists and prised them away. I’d been holding back, and he didn’t think I could prevail in a strength contest, so he pushed back. Not very respectful.

I yanked his wrists outward with about 50% force and felt something in the soft tissue give. He didn’t cry out, but his strength fell away. I suddenly hoped I hadn’t broken those golden wrists. This guy was too much of a gem to injure permanently.

I shoved him off and snapped to my feet. He rolled away and up and paused for a moment to think, his whole body projecting wary defiance. To be fair, I’d been giving him the impression that he had various split seconds here and there to think things out, but the truth was, he didn’t. I simply reached in with both hands, grabbed his injured wrists above the joint (didn’t wanna hurt ‘im!) and used them as leverage to run up his body. At the top, I backflipped and, still holding his wrists, threw him over my head backward toward the rooftop door.

This was Monkey’s favorite move: you never knew where they might land! It was like I was a bride at a wedding where I was marrying kickassery, and the opponent was my bouquet.

Oh … where is Bu Bu? I thought to myself deliciously. Where could Bu Bu be?

I whipped around, but he was already rising out of his crumpled position. What the hell? Didn’t he know when he was beaten?

“What are you?” he asked again, in a wavering voice, and I looked more closely at his expression. Suddenly, I realized that he wasn’t furious—he was terrified. Had been, the whole time. What? Of li’l ol’ me? Weak.

I paused to consider responses. Your Daddy? The iron something in the velvet … hm. How about: The Long Dark Night Of Your Soul, Motherfucker? Yeah, that was good. I turned back into a shadow, for effect, thinking it probably wouldn’t faze him, but would be funny.

But my punchline was preempted by a bloodcurdling scream … from Bu Bu. I focused on him. All at once he’d gone from injured-but-defiant to cringing and abject.

“You just like him!” he cried in a high-pitched voice. “You same … thing. What are you people? What you want?”

My brain froze. What the— what? What “him”? What“thing”? What the fuck?

The slippery little fucker took advantage, and turned to run. My monkey brain kicked the rest of me back into action. I turned into a giant frog, leapt, and gravitationally encouraged him by the shoulders into the ground. Then I turned back to human, rose, and grabbed him by the throat.

I shook him a little. “Did you see another one like me? Where? When? Did you see one like me? Did you?” I shook him with every question. Really, it was more monkey brain than me. Monkey didn’t think a little injury should come between friends.

But Bu Bu was completely overcome. He cringed before me, holding up his injured wrists in a pathetic attempt to protect himself.

“Get ahold of yourself, Bu Bu,” I commanded.

At the sound of his name, he burst into terrified sobs.

“Don’t!” he cried. “Don’t eat my soul! Please!” And he dissolved into blubbering.

I heaved him to his feet and shook him a few more times, but no more info fell out. Monkey would have been happy to keep shaking him until I was exhausted, but cooler parts of my mind recognized that I’d have to give him time to calm down … and maybe find a little leverage too.

I crabbed sideways, still holding him up with one hand, grabbed the bamboo tube Ayo’d given me out of my purse, and flipped the cap off with my thumb. With a “swop!” sound, the cringing Bu Bu disappeared inside. I put the cap back on.

He could just sit there for a while, until he was ready to talk. I wasn’t letting this go. I’d been waiting my entire twenty-five years for some little clue about what I was, and this MMA goon was the very first one. 

 

CHAPTER TWO

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

SOMA District, San Francisco

I stood at the top of Portsmouth Square Park, balanced on the spine of its pagoda-roofed pavilion, and breathed the city in. At 2 am the park was empty of chess players, gossips, and smokers; the intermittent aroma of restaurant garbage alternated with fishy breaths from the Bay six blocks away. I was mostly socked in by the giant bodies of financial district skyscrapers, but in between them I could see the sparkling eyes of more distant windows, and the vague black ribbon of the water—or of a void sketched out where the heart of our region ebbed and flowed.

Since I’d moved here, whenever I stood in a high place (and being a monkey, that was more often than your average human,) I’d look out at the cityscape and feel almost like it was looking back at me: a friend, a witness, almost as if it had its own spirit … as if it could speak—although I believed without question that this was a product of my own imagination.

And these days, I thought I knew what that spirit would be saying. I’d spent high school and college under the heavy public apathy of the Bush years, and experienced how difficult it was to motivate my cohorts to any kind of action. So that fall, when word of the Occupy Wall Street protest tore through the air like lightning, and Oakland (and even San Francisco) rose up in response, I felt like something was waking up: some better angel of our nature, something militant in the spirit of the Bay. I felt like I, like we, were on the threshold of a new era, a new mass movement, one where life would take a huge leap forward.

The peace of late-night Chinatown overlay that excitement. I breathed them both in.

Then I texted a contact at St. James Infirmary—a local clinic for sex workers—to send their outreach team to this massage parlor. I didn’t know if the “girls” were there by choice, but the St. James team would make sure they got what they needed.

Due diligence done, I headed for the wide-open sky and massive, blocky warehouses of SOMA. Jazzed by the weight of Bu Bu’s bamboo container against my hip, I decided to run off some nervous energy down Folsom past Kearny Street Workshop’s new location (no longer on Kearny Street—people, don’t name your art gallery after its location; not in San Francisco) and stick my head in the window to see what their new exhibition looked like.

I’d done an internship at the venerable Asian American arts nonprofit while in college, hoping to connect to my non-existent roots, and it became my home away from home. The organization was also the fiscal sponsor for the magazine I helped to run, and we often held meetings there. They’d had an event tonight—a stand-up comedy showcase—which I’d wanted to go to, but had to miss for tonight’s emergency search. I knew everyone would have gone home long before, but still felt like checking in. I’m a monkey; I’m social like that.

I passed a homeless person sleeping in a strange little patio area before a storefront next door, but when I reached the gallery itself, a curtain was drawn and I couldn’t really see inside. While I stuck my nose to the dirty glass and tried to see through a crack in the curtain, my monkey brain noticed something else. The smell of homeless, unwashed body, which tended to hit me a little harder than humans, had come wafting to me from next door, but it smelled … off. More of my attention followed the smell back from the curtained gallery window to the strange little enclosed patio next door. The smell wasn’t, in fact, of unwashed body at all. No, I’d smelled it a time or two before. It was of decomposing body. The body was dead.

Now it had my complete attention. That’s why I smelled it at all. My nose isn’t that good: slightly better than a human’s, but nothing like the carnivore-shifters’ noses. I walked back a few yards to where I could see clearly and I could now see that it was all wrong. The body wasn’t huddled up, but rather splayed uncomfortably, half on his back, half on his side, his arms and legs thrown out in awkward positions. I’d thought he was covered by a blanket, but it turned out he had a sports jacket all rucked up over his head, like he had been clutching it around his face. His clothes were new, there was no cardboard lining the ground, and no bags of belongings or bedding.

Jesus, was this a body dump? I couldn’t see any blood or signs of a struggle, so presumably the person hadn’t been killed here. What a strange place to dump a body! Folsom is fairly busy during the day, and—I glanced up—this storefront belonged to a catering company that did its own baking. There’d be someone here in a couple of hours.

That was enough to send me to my cell phone, but another useful habit stopped me from dialing 911 right away: Maya, my rational brain said, get your story straight! Although I hadn’t done anything wrong, I could see right away that “I smelled the dead on ‘im, officer” wasn’t going to fly. I needed to check his pulse properly, and leave evidence that I had, before I called in a dead body.

I crouched and pulled the jacket away from his head and upper body, revealing … what must’ve previously been a human face with pale olive skin, but was now sprouting light-colored fur around his temples and cheeks, with his mouth distorted by elongated teeth and a snarl, his fingernails halfway grown into claws, and the barrel of his chest bowing strange and angular. His corner-folded eyes were staring amber.

I was immediately glad that I hadn’t called the cops. This guy wasn’t human. He was a shapeshifter.

*     *     *

“A weretiger, to be exact,” Ayo said, 20 minutes later when she arrived. I didn’t see any stripes, though the poor dude was stuck forever (or until he rotted) in the moment of transformation. I was holding out for a were-beaver (not that I’d ever heard of such a thing, but a girl can hope) but almost convinced it was just a run-of-the-mill werewolf.

“How do you know it’s a weretiger?”

“I’ve met this guy before,” she said. “His name’s Wayland. He’s a harimau jadian from Singapore. He runs an import/export company that—among other things—supplies a lot of the Chinese tchotchke stores on Grant. Very successful.”

“Aiya! Wayland Soh?” I shrieked. My gut suddenly felt like lead.

“Yes,” Ayo looked at me, puzzled. “Do you know him?”

“Shit shit shit …” was all I could say for a moment. I’d only met him once and I couldn’t have recognized him anyway with his face all distorted. “Fuck, Ayo, we were courting him for sponsorships!”

“We” was shorthand for one of the Asian American nonprofits I was involved with: the magazine, Inscrutable, as well as Kearny Street Workshop. There was a lot of crossover in the personnel between the two orgs (Asian America can get kinda incestuous, especially in San Francisco.) One of the magazine’s staff members, who was also a KSW board member, and I had met Wayland last week and he (Wayland) had been impressed with our youthful joie de vivre, or something, and wanted to see what kinda stuff we did. Shit, he’d probably been here for the comedy night!

Both our orgs were laboring under the funding crunch that had resulted from the economic crash of 2008. Both orgs were direly in need of new funding streams, and local sponsorships seemed the best way to go. I wasn’t in charge of fundraising, but I did know that Wayland had been our first solid sponsorship prospect in a long time.

“Well, that sucks,” Ayo said, sucking on her teeth and pulling out her phone. I could tell by her tone that her mind had already wandered away from the plight of San Francisco’s nonprofits. I felt immediately chastened. Here was a man—okay, a … sentient creature—dead, and I was worried about funding streams!

Ayo leaned against the side of her car, holding her phone to her ear and looking like someone on hold. I looked past her and jumped a little when I realized that there was a man sitting inside her car, staring at me. He looked—as far as I could tell through the streetlight glare on the windshield—brown and classic, with a nose that belonged on either an Egyptian or Aztec god. He also looked middle-aged, Ayo’s age or older, and tired. Had I interrupted a date when I called her? Was Ayo dating a man this time? It had been a while.

“Are you calling his family?”

 She shook her head. “The Asian cats have a sort of benevolent society they all pay into. He heads it up and uses that position to influence the Chinatown machine. They’ll want to investigate this death and handle his remains.”

Inside my head, Monkey insisted that I was perfectly capable of investigating this myself, but my rational brain answered, faintly, that this wasn’t my problem.

“I didn’t even know he was a supernat!” I said out loud, as if knowing would have changed anything.  “We met at a mixer at the Asian Art Museum… there were performances and, and artists everywhere!” That would’ve neutralized my ability to see deceit. But even if I’d seen it… I wouldn’t have done anything differently tonight. Of course I wouldn’t’ve. So… why did I feel responsible?

Someone answered Ayo’s phone and she, ignoring my outburst, spoke some language into it. An irritating thing about Ayo: she speaks at least nine living languages, and reads at least five dead ones. People are always surprised when they finally meet her, because petite African-looking women aren’t supposed to speak [Russian/Arabic/ Spanish/fill-in-your-own-annoyingly-useful-language-here] like a native. She can learn a new language in three weeks, damn her eyes. She learned Chinese after she met me—during a vacation, mind you—while I’m still completely hopeless at the language after four solid years of college classes, plus a summer intensive. She beeped the phone off and returned to examining the body.

“It’s not where he comes from that we should be concerned about,” she said. “It’s where he went.” She took a few snaps of him with her phone and checked them out.

“What do you mean, where he went? Like to Hell, or over the Rainbow Bridge?”

Ayo flashed me a narrow-eyed look. “I mean, where did his essence go?”

“His essence? Doesn’t that disappear when you die?”

She sighed the sigh of the multiply martyred. “No, Maya. Not right away.” She studied the body for a moment more. “By ‘essence’ I don’t mean ‘soul.’ If there is an individual soul—an ori, the spiritual seat of personality that adds an ancestor to the spirits—if there is one, it has a metaphysical reality that’s beyond my perception. What I can perceive is the essence of a person—something you might call his emi or qi, his living energy. It’s what returns to the natural world’s energy at death. It maintains a certain … personality or echo of the person, while still combining with all the other energy and …” Here’s where I started tuning her out. Once she got into lecture mode she grew increasingly obscure until only one of her ancestors could understand her. But she got irate if interrupted.

She flew outward into the cosmos, ordering it for her fellow, less knowledgeable mortals, before finally returning to the subject of: “… essence retains some of its character for a time, but mostly it just returns to the world. It’s exactly like what happens to a dead body.

It lingers in its form for a while, but deteriorates until there’s only a skeleton—a structure that suggests the person that was but isn’t the person that was. Over time, even the bones can wear away, and all that’s left is the converted mass of the body. Well, it’s the same with the essence. It lingers in and around the body, holding its shape much as the body does, but deteriorating and dissipating. It can linger for weeks or months, or even years, and is where the notion of ghosts and evil dead comes from. People who are sensitive to it can ‘see’ it; that is, sense it, and then their brains transform that presence into an image.”

“And this guy has only been dead for, what? A few hours?” His body wasn’t too cold yet, although it wasn’t much warm, either.

“Right. So there should be a lot of relatively inert essence lingering around his body.”

“But there’s not?”

“Not a shred. Not a scosh."