by Alyc Helms
“Hello, Asha.” The newcomer’s voice breaking the quiet made me flinch. I crept up the last few steps and peeked over the balustrade. The Indian woman stood in front of an open display case from the Chinese exhibition, a slender tube of dark wood held in one hand. The newcomer stood a few paces ahead of me, stance wide as she leveled the muzzle of a small firearm at the other woman.
“Just put the Sutra on the floor and kick it over,” said the lady with the gun. So, not conspirators. Competitors.
The Indian woman cocked her head and arched one of those perfect brows. “Really, Abby? Do you really want me to treat such a prize so poorly? I could just as easily walk it over. You have the gun, after all. You’re in control.” Something in the rolling cadence of her accent made the words mocking.
Gun-Lady – Abby – tightened her grip and firmed her stance. “I’m not letting you anywhere near me. Not after last time.”
“Last time… was that Prague?”
“Warsaw.”
“Of course. I get those East European cities confused. So cold and comfortless.”
“I’m not going to be drawn into your banter, either. You’re trapped. There isn’t any unalloyed metal up here; I checked. Now hand over the Sutra.”
“That leads us to a small conflict. You see, my employers want it badly.”
“You’ll just have to disappoint them.”
“Ah, but I hate to disappoint such – persuasive – gentlemen.” Asha took a step to the side. And another.
“The Sutra.” Ka-click went some part of the gun that I assumed was the hammer. “Now.”
Asha stopped sidling at the sound. Her searching glance flicked in my direction. Her shoulders relaxed as she spotted me, and a slow smile lifted one corner of her mouth.
“I am sorry, but I can’t bring myself to treat such a treasure so poorly. Why not have your little friend come forward to take it.”
“My wha–?” Abby might not have fallen for the ploy, but I jerked back in surprise at being pulled into the confrontation. Abby caught my movement at the edge of her vision and turned, the gun’s muzzle training on me. Reacting on instinct to the threat of that ugly shape, I vaulted the balustrade. I ducked under her guard and came up between her outstretched arms, thrusting them open with the momentum of rising. The gun flew out of her grasp, hitting the wall behind me and tumbling down the stairs in a series of thunks.
Abby grabbed for me. I wrapped my arms around hers. She was bigger and stronger than me, but she was more the barroom brawling type. We ended up face-to-face, grappling for the upper hand.
“A ninja? Is that what you’re supposed to be?” Abby went for an arm-lock, and then another when I relaxed and flowed through her first attempt.
“I’m Mistra, and I’m not letting either of you walk off with that... uh... scroll case thingy.”
“Kid, back down. You have no idea what you’ve gotten into.”
Aikido wasn’t my main form, but Abby seemed a lot less scary without her gun. I could redirect her attempted holds all night. “Looks pretty clear to me: a couple of thieves squabbling over a bit of shiny.”
The shadows behind me shifted. Not toward me. Away. Asha was using our distraction to sneak off.
“Templeton, stop her!”
Claws scrabbled on carpet, followed by a piercing shriek. Abby looked up to see what had frightened the other woman. I swept her legs out from under her, sending her down with a shove to the sternum, then vaulted back over the balustrade to the main staircase below. Asha cowered against the banister, the scroll case clutched to her chest.
“Just hand it over, lady, and no one gets hurt,” I said in my best threaten-the-villain voice. It needed some work. Templeton advanced a pace, which was much more effective. I’d have to ask him how he perfected that rabid look. Shadow foam dripped from his muzzle.
“Keep your asura away from me,” Asha said, a hitch of terror in her voice. With one hand, she reached for, missed, then grabbed the banister. She clutched it to her back, as if the anchor could somehow save her from our combined threat.
“Hand it over, and I’ll call him off.” I held out my hand and tried to look like the more reasonable and comforting of her two options.
She backed up another step. Her hand found the copper fixture that held the banister to the wall. Her posture relaxed. She twirled the scroll case in her hand. “I don’t think I will.”
“No! Don’t let her escape!” Abby dove down the stairs for her fallen gun. Asha rippled as though she were reflected through a shimmer of desert heat, and her form blurred into cobalt blue smoke. A gun fired, deafening in the confines of the theater. The wall behind where Asha had stood exploded in a spray of plaster chips. The pillar of smoke had already dissipated, sucked into the copper fixture. I thought I saw a reflection of Asha’s laughing face reversed in the curve of the copper, but then she was gone.
Something twinged in my left shoulder. Thinking one of the plaster chips had nicked me, I lifted a hand to it. It came away covered in blood. A lot of blood. I sat down.
Templeton nuzzled my hip. “Missy, are you all right? You’re leaking.” I tried to answer, but I was having difficulty staying upright.
“Oh my god.” A wad of fabric was pressed to my shoulder. “Kid? Kid, speak to me.”
“Huh?” I looked at her. The lines of her features were sharp, each stroke clean and bold. She was too strong for pretty. Handsome. Striking. Those were the right words. She looked like an amazon – like an Ace.
“I messed up, didn’t I?” I asked her, looking at the blood covering my hand so I wouldn’t have to face her.
“You’re going into shock. What’s your name?”
I shook my head, or tried to. It might have been more of a wobble.
“Your name, kid. Name,” she insisted.
“Can’t,” I managed. “Secret identity.”
“Oh, for the love of – you! Rat-thing. Your mistress has been hurt. I need to get her help. Can you tell me her name, where she lives, anything?”
“Missy isn’t my mistress; she’s my friend. I serve the Conclave of Shadow.”
Their exchange helped to bring me back a bit. I’d been hurt, she said. I’d been–
“You shot me.” I’d been shot. I opened and closed my hand. The blood was bright red. Sticky. And there seemed to be a lot of it.
Like an anvil in a Wile E Coyote cartoon, the pain came crashing down on me. A high whine lodged in the back of my throat, a sound that scared me even more than the blood because I couldn’t seem to staunch it.
Abby pressed her makeshift compress harder, which didn’t help the pain or the keening. “I just grazed… the bullet must have… Shit. Can you get up? I need to get you to a hospital.”
That broke through. I swallowed the whine and shook my head. “No. No hospitals.”
“Look, kid. Uh, Missy.” She grimaced; I sympathized. My name didn’t make me sound any older. “You’re hurt. You’re losing blood, and I’m not that kind of doctor. I respect you trying to do the whole Argent Ace thing, but–”
“No hospitals. No insurance.” I fumbled for my backpack and handed her a card, getting blood all over both. “Free clinic. Twenty-four hour trauma clinic. On Post.” A field of cotton had sprouted inside my head. It clogged my ears, mouth, and thought processes, but it seemed to be absorbing the pain.
“Well, at least it’s close.” She hefted me up. Templeton pressed against my knees, which did nothing for my balance.
“Templeton.” My voice sounded faint and far away. I cleared my throat. “Go home. I’ll be fine. Go home.”
With a hangdog expression, he snuffled once more at the ground, then stepped into the shadows of the stairwell and was gone.
“Right. Let’s get you to this clinic. I hope they can handle walk-in bullet wounds.”
I hoped so too. Poor Shimizu. This would teach her to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger.
* * *
There’s nothing like medi
cal-grade painkillers to give you vivid dreams.
I knew my grandfather was Mr Mystic, but he’d retired by the time I came along. The tales of his hero days were no more or less real than the ones he read to me about Narnia or Prydain, and I would play at being an Argent Ace the same way I would play at being Inigo Montoya or Jack Burton.
I was wearing my grandfather’s hat, which meant I was either Mr Mystic or Indiana Jones. Given the maze of couch cushions I was crawling through and the ancient pearl necklace dangling from my belt, my money was on Indy.
A monster of shadow leapt out at me and I ran, with it fast on my heels, jumping from cushion to cushion as the floor turned to lava, then to a river full of ice floes, then to the only solid footholds in an avalanche. I made the final, impossible leap to the cushion that marked the peak of the mountain. The shadow wasn’t as agile. It tumbled into a bottomless abyss, caterwauling all the way down. My grandfather dragged my dangling body to safety, taking my hat and settling it on his head.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I thought you were leading this expedition.”
“You have the hat.”
“Then it must be bedtime.” He tucked me in, and I didn’t complain. Bedtime was story time.
“Tell me about the dragon maiden,” I begged, rubbing the strand of pearls along my lips. I loved their smoothness, how they warmed to my touch and gleamed like Lady Amalthea’s star.
“Wouldn’t you rather hear about how your grandmother and I fell in love?” he asked. That was the story he preferred to tell.
I shook my head. “No. That’s boring ‘cause it really happened. I want to hear the dragon story.”
“Are you saying that one is more interesting because it didn’t happen?”
“Well, duh,” I countered with all the rhetorical skill at my disposal.
“What if I said it was real, Miss Missy? What then?”
“Don’t be silly. Dragons don’t exist. Now tell the story and tell it right.”
“As you wish,” he said. “Once upon a time, a young and foolish man journeyed to the roof of the world because he wanted to be a hero. He climbed all day and all night. For three days he climbed, and on the third evening, near collapsing from the cold, he came to the gates of Shambhala.”
We sat on my bed as it floated above the clouds, watching a younger version of my grandfather climbing to the roof of the world. “That’s heaven, right?”
“Heaven has many names. Now, the dragons who lived there were upset by his presumption. They only allowed him to find the gates so that they might send him on his way.”
“Except for Lung Huang, right?” I knew this story so well, it was almost like I was telling it to myself.
“Except for Lung Huang. She admired the young man, and she agreed to train him against the wishes of her siblings. She left heaven and took her champion to a remote valley, knowing that she would never be allowed to return.”
“Poor Lung Huang. She gave up everything…”
The story scattered again, like a pearl necklace breaking. An older and more experienced Mitchell Masters received a farewell gift of a string of pearls from his dragon-lover at the same time that a young and brash Mitchell Masters clashed with his teacher, fighting his attraction. My grandmother beamed out from a wedding photo wearing the same pearls, while beside her my grandfather kissed a tall, slender girl whose dark hair coiled around them both like a living thing.
The beads of the story rolled every which way. I chased them across my bed, using my grandfather’s hat to keep them from spilling over the edges and into the abyss. They clacked against each other in the hat, all out of order like my grandfather’s story. What came after was reinscribed and gave new meaning to what came before – an oral palimpsest. How many times had I heard him tell that story but never heard the truth in it?
“Grandfather, what’s happening?” I curled up in the center of the bed, my eyes shut tight. I floated on a sea of shadow, waves rising up to grab at me. Something awful was being held at bay by the light shining off the pearls, and all I had to guide me was the story.
“Shh. It’s all right. It’s only magic.” He reached for me, and I thought he was going to pull a quarter from my ear, an old trick that never failed to charm me. Instead, he pulled a never-ending crimson scarf from my shoulder. He pulled and pulled until I feared I’d go with it.
“Grandfather, it hurts,” I whimpered.
“It’s all right, Missy. I’ve nearly got all of it.”
* * *
“Kid? Hey, Missy?”
I groaned as light blossomed behind my eyelids, illuminating my darkened inner landscape to a pre-dawn umber. I cracked one lid at the sensory intrusion.
“Hey.” A woman bleared into view. I knew that strong-featured face. I blinked open both eyes, hoping that would help my recollection. She didn’t look all that pleased to see me.
“Abby?” I guessed.
“That’s right.”
I broke away from the intensity of her gaze. I’ve never dealt well with people being angry at me.
Somebody had tucked me in nice and snug under a wine-purple velvet duvet. The bed sported a high canopy of black netting, and the rest of the room was decorated in a mixture of arsenic and old lace.
“Not to sound cliché, but where am I?”
“My apartment,” said a voice from the doorway. Shimizu stood there, wearing a set of scrubs with little black and blue anime cats scampering over them.
“Cool scrubs,” was all I could think to say.
“Thanks. My mom makes them for me.”
“Cool mom,” I murmured, distracted by my attempts to figure out what was going on. I felt like I should know, but the old brain engine wasn’t firing on all cylinders. “Why am I here?”
Abby crossed her arms, frowning at me like this was all my fault. “You caught a stray round in the shoulder. The bullet went through the meat, but there was a lot of debris in there. Shimizu here cleaned you out and patched you up.”
“I was worried there might be lead in the paint,” Shimizu explained with a grimace. “That theater is so old, and they’re not always careful about that kind of thing when they renovate.”
It took a moment to figure out what they were talking about. I tensed as I remembered, but I only felt the slightest twinge from my shoulder.
“I feel OK,” I said in wonder. I risked flexing my shoulder and found only a distant, pervasive ache. “Shouldn’t it hurt more?”
Shimizu grinned. “Oh, it will. Tomorrow.”
Abby was still glaring, her lips set into a flat line. “We didn’t want to leave you at the clinic, and we didn’t know where you lived, so we brought you here.” Her eyes narrowed as she leaned forward. “So, does Mr Mystic know that you’re stealing his shtick?”
I darted a warning glance in Shimizu’s direction. She just grinned and plopped down on the end of the bed. “You’re Mistra. Abby told me, but I think I might have figured it out on my own if she hadn’t. The shadows were getting pretty hinky while I was cleaning your wound.”
“I had to beat several of them down,” Abby added. She was not smiling.
I ducked my head. “I’m still having some control issues.”
“You’re having a few more issues than that.” Abby slammed both hands down on the bed, trapping me. “What the hell were you thinking, butting into my business? Because of you, Asha got away, the Sutra is gone, and I have to get Argent’s legal department to step in and soothe things with the local blues.”
“So… you are an Ace.”
“Of course I am. What did you think I was?”
“I thought you were one of the bad guys. I saw you break into the theater.”
Abby’s mouth worked. There might even have been a throbbing vein or two. Shimizu’s eyes darted back and forth between us, but she kept silent.
“Look, kid–”
“Missy,” I corrected. Yes, I’d fucked up, but I didn’t deserve to be talked dow
n to like an erring child.
“Kid.” She frowned. “You’ve obviously got some unusual talents, and I respect that you want to use them for the greater good, but being an Ace is about more than just putting on a fancy outfit and fighting crime. It requires care and planning and having a fucking clue about what you’re doing. Most folks don’t get into this gig unless they have either serious psychological issues or a deep-seated vendetta.”
“Which is it for you?” I asked.
“The vendetta. And you just let my nemesis get away, so I’d be more careful about pissing me off, if I were you.”
I nodded.
“Now, I’ll have legal fix things without bringing you into it. In return I want you to consider two pieces of advice. First, get out now. You don’t have what it takes to be an Ace, and believe me, you don’t want to have it. You got me?”
I nodded again, but that wasn’t advice I intended to take. “And the second?” I asked.
Abby pushed off the bed, huffing in exasperation. I guess my intentions were pretty transparent. “Get your own shtick. Mystic’s part of the old guard, but I met him a few times before he retired. He comes across as a dapper British gentleman, but that old Limey can be a mean fucking bastard. You do not want him to come out of hiding to beat you down.” She shouldered a small brown satchel. Nodding once to Shimizu, she strode out of the room. Shimizu and I both flinched as the front door slammed.
“I think I pissed her off.” I said into the silence.
Shimizu burst out laughing. “You think?”
* * *
Three days later found me dragging my feet as I approached a row of restored Victorian townhouses in North Beach. Shimizu had insisted that I stay so she could make sure I didn’t drop dead of lead poisoning. I think she also may have been a bit lonely. I was OK with that. The three day convalescence turned into an extended slumber party, which helped my shaken confidence.
I knew what I needed to do. Now, I just needed to convince Jack. He was the only person who knew about my connection to Mr Mystic, and as executor of my grandfather’s estate, he held the purse strings.