“So,” I said as we climbed the steps to our first target, a listing structure that had probably been an incredibly charming Gothic cottage once but now looked more like a haunted house. “How much more magic do you think you’ll need before you’re back on your feet?”
My father thought about that for a moment, his smoke form almost impossible to see in the dark as we stepped through the building’s sagging doorway. “Hard to say,” he replied at last. “I don’t feel as though I have any fire at all right now.”
“The Spirit of Dragons warned us it was small,” I said, swinging my light around the house’s fire-damaged interior. “But you’ve clearly got something burning in there or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m not trying to fire-shame you. I just want to know how big a tank I’m trying to fill up.”
My father’s smoke face pulled into a scowl. “You mean, ‘how much longer until I’m no longer dependent and you can ship me back to Korea?’”
When I didn’t dispute that, his scowl deepened. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I’m not leaving you here, Opal.”
“That’s not your call,” I said, shining my light in his face. “We’re done, Dad. I paid my debt. I saved your life! You don’t get to control me anymore.”
“I wouldn’t have had to control you if you’d been reasonable,” he argued, which was exactly the wrong thing to say.
“Reasonable?” I cried. “You’re one to talk about reasonable!” I stabbed my finger into his smoke body. “You’re not like this because of anything White Snake did. This happened because you used up all your fire trying to control me. All I wanted was to live my life dragon-free, but you couldn’t let me have one day where I wasn’t under your claws! In what world does that make you the reasonable one?”
“I admit things got out of hand at the end,” my father said in a strained voice. “But my actions were well-intentioned. I am the Dragon of Korea, and you are my child. That position makes you an obvious target for everyone who wishes me harm. What was I supposed to do? Let you run free?”
“Yes! Because I’m a person, not a weakness.”
“It wasn’t as if I ruined anything important,” he argued. “You were living in squalor, working as a subcontracted manual laborer.”
“I was living my life! And if it wasn’t up to your standards, that’s because of you. I was doing fine until you buried me in bad luck!”
I was screaming by the time I finished, my body clenched so tight with rage that every muscle hurt, which was not how I wanted to spend my afternoon. Dammit, how did my dad always manage to get under my skin? Even when he was nothing but a smoke ghost, just hearing him talk made me feel like I was sixteen again, and I hated it. I hated everything about this.
“You know what? Forget about helping. I’ll do this faster myself. Just shut up and stay out of my way. The sooner I meet my quota, the sooner I can go home, go to bed, and get the sleep I need to give you enough fire to get out of my life.”
My father tried to say something, but I’d already stomped away, keeping a mental hand on the curse that connected us to make sure he couldn’t get too close. We fell into a long, angry silence after that. I stalked through the crumbling house, too mad to see more than the most obvious details. I knew that put me in danger of missing things, but I was having trouble caring. My dad’s questions had reminded me that the DFZ wasn’t actually doing anything with the stuff I found, so what was the loss? All I wanted was to get my work done to the minimum acceptable standard and get this forced daddy-daughter time over with.
Fortunately for me, the house I’d chosen to start with turned out to be a pretty easy call. There was some nice brickwork on the front facade, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. That didn’t mean it wasn’t amazing. All old Detroit houses from this period were amazing. Back in the glory days of the auto factories when they’d actually paid line workers good money, immigrants had flocked here from all over the world. Eager to put down new roots, they’d built their homes like castles, creating beautiful structures of stone and brick made to last for generations. I would have saved every last one of them if I could, but even the DFZ didn’t have unlimited room, and this particular house-castle had a collapsing roof and a cracked foundation. Sighing at the loss, I pulled out my tiny can of spray paint and drew an X on the front door, marking the building for demolition.
The moment I was done, the whole building started to shake. I barely had time to scramble off the porch before the listing house sank into the ground, sucked down by the city to be digested into materials for new buildings. Sad to see it go but happy to have an item off my list, I moved down the street to my next target, a cement office building from the nineteen seventies with some very unusual design elements.
And so it went. Save, pitch, save, pitch, all the way down the line. But while my bad mood stuck around for the first block, by the second, the work had sucked me in. I couldn’t help it. Even knowing it wasn’t going anywhere except into the DFZ’s warehouses, I was a sucker for a treasure hunt. I’d just started digging into a rotting industrialist
