Li Heng swept his eyes over the teacup-strewn table and nodded. “Is it a true haunting?”
Li Jinglong hadn’t expected the crown prince to be so direct. “The investigation is ongoing,” he replied.
“Marquis,” Li Heng said grimly. His expression underwent a subtle shift. “My father placed you under my command. I gave you money when you requested funding, made you a marquis when you asked for a title, and I have continued to defend you in the imperial court. Why, then, are you so parsimonious with information? Have I offended you in some way?”
Li Jinglong frowned. “Your Highness, it is a long-held habit of mine to avoid making any public statements on open cases. No matter who is doing the asking or how they pose their questions, I cannot give a conclusive answer. It would be the same even if His Majesty himself asked. That said, if you have any orders to give, I am at your command, and will do my best to execute them.”
Evidently, Li Heng was still resentful over what had transpired the day Li Jinglong and Hongjun returned to Chang’an. He knew that although Li Jinglong was usually affable, he was also extremely stubborn. Nothing could move him when he decided to dig in his heels.
Li Heng regarded Li Jinglong in silence, as if trying to ascertain his intentions. Likewise, Li Jinglong made no sound, his mind roiling with countless thoughts.
This was the second extremely powerful person to visit the Department of Exorcism in recent days. What would move Li Heng to come in the middle of the night, unaccompanied by any of his attendants? An inkling of a problem—a particularly thorny one—unfurled in Li Jinglong’s mind.
Li Heng’s next statement confirmed his suspicions: “Regardless of whether you believe in gods and ghosts, I do. There are certain topics that are forbidden to a court official or an imperial scion, but may be broached by an ancestor speaking from beyond the grave—is this not so, Li Jinglong?”
Startled, Li Jinglong lowered his voice. “Your Highness, what makes you say this?”
In the brightly lit study, everyone was busy flipping through case files.
“What could possibly be hidden inside the imperial mausoleums?” Mergen wondered aloud.
“It must be some sort of burial good present in all of the imperial mausoleums,” Qiu Yongsi said thoughtfully. “Probably not a spiritual device, but something the yaoguai need.”
Hongjun considered this briefly. “Do the burial chambers contain anything else besides the coffin?”
Ashina Adarvan shook his head. “The burial goods are all arranged outside; there’s nothing else in the burial chamber.”
“Did they open any of the coffins?” Lu Xu asked abruptly.
Ashina Adarvan and A-Tai had tailed the yaoguai out of the Qiao Mausoleum, but had soon lost the creature in the pitch-dark night. They hadn’t gone back to the mausoleum after.
“We ought to go back and take a look,” Mergen said. “The chief thinks so too.”
As they spoke, they heard Li Jinglong escorting Li Heng out to the courtyard. Hongjun and the gang watched the pair from across the winding corridor. Li Heng’s visit had been brief, but from his and Li Jinglong’s expressions, it seemed their conversation had ended poorly.
“You are standing guard over the empire of Great Tang,” Li Heng said firmly.
“The results of the investigation are what they are,” Li Jinglong responded. “All things must bow to the truth. If these incidents are really as Your Highness believes, I swear I will do my utmost to avoid disturbing the spirits of our nation’s former rulers.”
Li Heng scoffed, striding out the gate with a cool flick of his sleeves.
Li Jinglong, however, remained agitated in the extreme. He glanced at the others. “Thank you all for your hard work. Everyone, please accompany me to the Zhao Mausoleum one last time. Lu… Hongjun, you and Mergen stay here and keep an eye on things.”
These orders were within everyone’s expectations. Although they had been busy all night, they weren’t tired in the least. They mounted their horses and set out, leaving Hongjun and Mergen alone at headquarters.
Completely spent, Mergen sat in the courtyard with his head bowed, sorting through his arrows in silence as Hongjun watched. After a time, Mergen glanced up at him with a tightly furrowed brow.
“Look, Chang’an’s so beautiful tonight,” Hongjun said.
“Like hell it’s beautiful!” Mergen hurled the arrows to the ground. His face twisted as Hongjun began to laugh. “I’m going to go dig up all these trees I planted,” he declared.
“Wait!” Hongjun protested. “Are you really that mad? Ay, you know, Lu Xu’s actually pretty easy to please.”
“Well, I don’t want to please him anymore.” Mergen recovered his arrows, paced a few circles around the courtyard, then sat back down in a huff. “After these past few days, I’ve had enough. No matter what I do, the little bastard doesn’t care. If it’s not a grunt of acknowledgment, it’s a tepid ‘thanks’—you know what I mean? This feeling is just…”
Settling down beneath the eaves of the open-air corridor, Hongjun looked at Mergen in confusion. After stewing a few more minutes, Mergen said, “I gave him my heart on a silver platter, and he threw it back in my face!”
Hongjun burst into uproarious laughter as Mergen muttered sullenly, “You tell me then, what have I done wrong?”
Hongjun took out his balled-up underpants, then, as an afterthought, fetched Li Jinglong’s as well. He settled down beside the well to wash the soiled clothing. “I think he likes you, but you don’t really like him. If anything, I actually find Lu Xu quite pitiful.”
Mergen stared at him in surprise.
After scrubbing for a while with his head bent, Hongjun looked up. “Am I wrong?”
Mergen sank into a deep silence. When he spoke again, he sounded lost. “I don’t know. I…I have no idea what I’d do if Lu Xu and I were together. I can’t imagine what our future would be like. What about you? How do you feel about the chief?”
Hongjun said without thinking, “I just…want to be with him all the time. I want to hug him and stay by his side and talk to him.”
He’d always felt Mergen’s feelings for Lu Xu were more obligation than anything else—wanting to be together merely for the sake of it. When he had asked Li Jinglong about it, Li Jinglong had cautioned him not to interfere. These things, he said, couldn’t be forced.
“Even if you can’t become lovers, you can still be friends,” Hongjun pointed out. “Mergen, you’ve been acting weird ever since you met Lu Xu.”
“How can I not act weird?” Mergen asked, morose. “You all just brush my questions aside. I have no idea what to do!”
As a young man well past marriageable age, and who had quite evidently never shared anything more intimate than a hug with anyone—man or woman—before, the appearance of Lu Xu had come as a complete shock to him. This revelation had turned Mergen’s world upside down. He had finally lost his cool tonight.
“I asked Ashina Adarvan about it, but all he did was teach me a bunch of stupid stuff… Do you know what he told me?”
Hongjun watched Mergen as he washed Li Jinglong’s underpants, which still smelled faintly musky from the other night. Once started, Mergen seemed unable to stop, and continued his vivid oversharing.
“He told me to stop worrying about what Lu Xu might say and just fuck him first.”
“That’s awful!” Hongjun exclaimed.
Mergen sighed. “That’s not even the awful part…”
What’s that supposed to mean? Hongjun wondered grumpily, but Mergen continued, “The problem is, I can’t get hard!”
Hongjun immediately felt awkward. Indeed, when he thought of Li Jinglong, he did seem to just naturally react. “But with girls, can you…you know?”
“I can when they’re close to me.”
Hongjun suddenly realized there existed a very serious problem: Mergen truly wasn’t attracted to men. The whole time they’d been talking, it had never occurred to him that this could be an issue in relationships between men and men, or men and women. But if Mergen said he felt no desire for Lu Xu, then it must be true.
“So I said, ‘What if I can’t get it up?’ and Ashina Adarvan told me to strip naked, put on a blindfold and tie myself up, kneel on the bed, and—allow Lu Xu to have his way with me. He said I would definitely get it up then…”
As soon as Mergen said it, Hongjun’s mind filled with images of Li Jinglong in a similar state, and he couldn’t help but get hard himself. “Let’s stop here for today,” he said. “I’m sleepy—I’m going to bed.”
Mergen had no choice but to drop the subject. After struggling with himself for a moment, he said, “You’re right. We should start by being friends.”
He sighed, staring back down at his arrows in a daze.