by Alyc Helms
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I had to try another route. “We can’t let him use this to tear us apart. Because you know that’s his goal, as much as anything. There were a dozen ways he could have infiltrated that nurse into Jiu Wei’s house, but he chose you because he knew what it would do to you, to me, to all of us. Hell, for all we know, his real intent was to break things up between you and Shui Yin, and kidnapping Mei Shen was just the cherry on that sundae.”
“I think you and I both know this is not the case,” she said, but her amber eyes were beginning to burn with their old warmth.
“You never know. There’re a lot of guys with the hots for you. Maybe Lung Di hopes he can get you to go all retro-tyrannical and help him rule the world.”
She surprised herself with her own chuckle and sagged against me, giggling harder than my joke warranted. Relief. Had to be.
“Oh, Huxian,” I cried in a mock voice that in no way resembled Lung Di’s. “Show me who’s been a bad Dragon. Whip me with your heavenly tails!”
“Shut your mouth, wyrm. Cower before my might!” She pushed me back onto the bed and loomed above me, her cruel frown spoiled every time she snorted or snickered. “Who’s your kitsune? Say my name, bitch!”
I lost it for good then, and Si Wei joined me. Every time the laughter ebbed, one of us would catch the other’s eye, and we’d be off on another round. We were left lying side-by-side, limp as noodles and groaning over our aching bellies.
“I am forgiven, then?” she asked, rolling to her hip and propping up on one elbow.
“Yes. Of course.” I reached up and smudged away the tracks of tears that ran down her cheeks. These were from our hysterical laughter, but they weren’t the only tears she’d shed recently. It was a simple gesture, motherly, like I would have done with Mei Shen or Mian Zi when they cried. There was nothing sexual intended in it, but when I stroked her cheek, Si Wei’s breath caught. She leaned closer.
“Promise?” she whispered against my lips.
Her lips were warm, firm, yet petal soft. Her mouth tasted of spice and chocolate, rich and sweet. She pressed me into the bed, her hand skimming up my side to cup at the base of my neck, the perfect combination of aggression and deference, and I let her because I was busy trying to figure out when we’d gone from joking to serious, and when exactly we had become kissing friends, and why hadn’t we become kissing friends a long time ago? The edges of her robe parted, revealing a line of ivory-pale flesh. She pressed against me, the heat of her body slipping through the thin silk of my robes. My nipples tightened at the feel of her breasts pressed against mine, and I fumbled for something to hold on to. To make sense of this. I dislodged the sticks holding up her hair, and it slid around us in a curtain of russet silk, smelling of ginger. I inhaled deeply. Wrong color. Wrong scent.
My libido stumbled at the thought, and I pushed back from her. I slid up the bed until I could be free of the heat of her body and the lure of her kisses. She crouched over my legs like a vixen over its prey. I gulped a deep breath and was again assailed by the scent of ginger.
“Jian Huo’s on his way, isn’t he?” I already suspected the answer, but the question gave me a moment to get my bearings. “You sent a message that I might be coming here, and he told you to stall me if I did.”
She sat back on her heels, her pretty, oh-so-kissable – stop that! – mouth twisted into a moue. “First I am tricked by you, and now I cannot even seduce you. Perhaps I should forfeit all my tails.” One slender hand trailed up my leg. I scrambled from the bed.
“Trust me,” I panted, trying not to look at my friend with newly-opened eyes, and wishing like anything for a cold shower, “if it weren’t Mei Shen at stake, I don’t think there’s a power on this earth that would stop me from–” I gulped, and inched toward the door. “Uh. Yeah. Well, you know.” That’s me, glib to the end. I got to the door and fumbled it open. Si Wei crouched on the bed. She didn’t seem inclined to chase after me. I suppose she could assure Jian Huo that she’d used all her wiles and still failed.
“Tell Jian Huo I love him, even if he does play dirty. Oh, and tell Shui Yin he’s an idiot if he lets you get away.”
“I will. And Missy? After this is all over?” She cocked her head to one side, and her hair slid across her shoulders with a whisper of silk. The scent of ginger wafted toward me. She slid off the bed and closed the distance between us in a few quick steps, leaning close enough that her lips brushed my ear. “Perhaps we will… talk.”
“Vixen,” I grumbled as I pulled away and jogged down the hallway. Behind me came the sound of her light, teasing laughter.
* * *
My jog became a sprint as I neared Fang Shih’s workshop. Like most spirits, time for him was more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule. He had assured me that it wouldn’t take long – relatively speaking – to make what I’d asked. But that same convenient temporal malleability meant that I didn’t know how long I had before Jian Huo arrived. Why, with all this bendiness of time, did it threaten to take years to get Mei Shen back? Yeah, I didn’t get it either. Zen koans were easy compared to the complex relationship that spirits had with time.
I shot into the cluttered workshop to find Fang Shih polishing his masterpiece with a soft, black cloth. He glanced up when I came in, folding the cloth around my prize and hiding it from view. He teetered over to me, scooped up my knapsack, and slipped the black-wrapped package inside. He handed me the bag with a worried look at the door.
“It is done as well as it can be. It will be up to you to make him want it. Don’t let him look too closely, or all will be revealed. And take care you do not harm yourself on it. There are dark magics woven into it that blood is sure to awaken.”
“I won’t. I won’t. Thank you.” I bent to give him a quick hug, which he tolerated with a grudging humph of breath.
“Templeton?” I called out, looking around. A sack under one of the workbenches rustled, and the rat came tumbling out in a stream of multicolored gems.
“I have found them, Missy. The very best of the lot!” His whiskers twitched with excitement. I eyeballed the pile of stones around him, sparkling with rainbow fire. I doubt he’d ever seen such an array of colors in all his ratty life in the Shadow Realms. He held out trembling paws, which were clasped around three stones. I bent down to inspect his prizes. Slowly, as if worried they would be snatched away, he opened his paws.
The first bauble was a bit of coral, violently pinkish-orange and twisted into an agonized shape of bony knobs and hollows. The second was a misshapen fire opal, the fractured face alight with licks of green, blue, red, and violet flame. The third was a thick chunk of bottle-green glass, edges softened by years of immersion in saltwater, thick bubbles of imperfection frozen forever under its liquid-clear surface.
I glanced again at the pile of cut diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds that surrounded him. A dozen types of lesser stones – topaz, amethyst, aquamarine – winked at me as well. Templeton shook his paws with an exasperated grunt, as if unable to understand how I could tear my gaze away from his treasures to look at the dross beneath him.
“You’re… sure?” I asked.
“Yes. These are the best. The very best.” He tore his earnest gaze from mine to look in wonder at the baubles. “I have never seen anything more beautiful,” he whispered.
“All right then,” I said with a conviction I did not feel. It only mattered that Templeton thought they were. The baubles were just part of the pledge in the bit of sleight-of-hand I was putting together. I turned to our host with a resigned sigh. “Fang Shih?”
While we inspected Templeton’s treasures, the other spirit had cocked his head to one side, as if listening to some distant sound. Now he turned back to me, eyes wide. “Yes. Yes, take them. Only go. Now!”
My response was cut off by a loud, angry roar. It reverberated through the entire workshop, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. I cringed away from it. Templeton squeaked and jumped about five fee
t straight up, nearly losing his death grip on his baubles. Even Fang Shih flinched.
“Go,” the spirit urged.
“Right. Thank you. C’mon Templeton.” I reached down to grasp the rat by his scruff and took two steps toward a shadow cast by a large brazier. My move put me in line-of-sight of the door; without thinking, I glanced down the hallway.
The building shuddered with another roar. Lung Huang – I could not imagine this ancient, angry god as Jian Huo – snaked down the hall in a rush of wind and wet. He filled the entire passage. The scales of his sinuous red, green, and gold form shredded the thin paper walls, digging long furrows into the wood supports. Tiny storm clouds roiled around him, complete with miniature chains of lightning. His eyes burned with rage.
“MISSY!” he roared, closing the distance between us. With an apologetic grimace, I tightened my hold on my rat and my pack and stepped into Shadow.
* * *
“I do not think your monster is coming, Missy,” Templeton said, so quiet, and with so many huffs leading up to it, that I wondered how long he’d been gathering up the courage to tell me what I already knew.
“It’s not a monster, Templeton. It’s a qilin,” I explained through gritted teeth.
“You’ve said it is a creature of shining light?”
“And purity, yeah.”
“Sounds like a monster to me,” he muttered. I guess the shadow rat had a point.
I shoved away from the deadfall log I’d been sitting on. Templeton didn’t deserve my frustration. I’d frittered away the night in a futile attempt to salvage my plan. The sun was coming up, and I hadn’t managed anything more effective than fiddling with my pearls. I could have done that just fine at Jiu Wei’s temple.
“I think you’re right,” I conceded. “I don’t think she’s coming.”
“Then we can leave this place?” Templeton’s paws clenched around his baubles, his whiskers twitching with enthusiasm for this new plan that didn’t involve monsters of light.
“This place” was a clearing in a nature park somewhere in southwest Shanghai, unremarkable and indistinguishable from a thousand other city parks except that it seemed more earnest to me – but that just came from too many viewings of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! on my part. We had passed the night here uninterrupted. Dawn threatened in the east, greeted by the calls of herons and the chirp of crickets.
Without my plan to follow Si Wei, I was pretty much floundering. The earnest park clearing was my A-list material at this point, and I didn’t have a B-list. The extended solitary time – Templeton didn’t count – hadn’t worked to my benefit. I’d fretted away any peace I’d found at Fang Shih’s table. If pearls weren’t so resilient, I would have worn away all the nacre on mine.
I stalked to the edge of the clearing, kicked at a bit of moss. It tore from its moorings, disintegrating it from a lush, green furze into a lump of black dirt and roots. I crossed my arms to keep myself from shredding every leaf from every bush surrounding the clearing.
“Dammit,” I whispered. “Why won’t you come? You promised me. You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to keep her safe.” I didn’t know whether I was more angry at the qilin or myself. Why hadn’t I listened to my daughter?
I took a deep breath past my guilt and fear. Then another, and another. Each breath came easier. I’d hoped for a back-up, a safety net, but that didn’t look like it was going to be an option. I had all the aid I was going to get. If I waited any longer, I’d never screw up my courage. It was time. Untwisting my pearls, I reached up and fastened them around my neck.
“C’mon, Templeton. If she was willing to come, she’d have been here by now. We’re as ready as we’re going to be. Let’s go.” The rat clutched his baubles to his chest and trundled to my side on three paws. I took one last, deep breath and stepped once more into Shadow, leaving nothing in our wake but the shirring chirp of crickets.
ELEVEN
Outlaws
Now
“I see you’ve found each other,” Song Yulan drawled from a stone bench as Mei Shen helped me limp into the temple. My daughter had hushed my sputtered how… what… whys with a wary glance at the sky and a shake of her head. David Tsung might have helped her support my battered body, but I scared him off with a glare.
I wasn’t much happier with Song Yulan. “You could have said Mei Shen was here.”
“I could have.” She uncrossed her legs and rose from the bench. “She asked me not to.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” Mei Shen said. She couldn’t stop bouncing, and I couldn’t stop hugging her. She’d cut her hair into a bob similar to Song Yulan’s. So modern. A typical Shanghai girl, if you ignored the dragon thing.
“Your father must be worried sick,” I grumbled, smoothing her hair. “Is he… here?” I wasn’t sure which answer I dreaded more. A yes, or a no.
“No…” Her gaze drifted from mine. She pushed my hands away.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Fear slammed my stomach into the floor. I swayed on my feet. “He’s not one of the trapped guardians?”
It had to be one of them, and Jian Huo made the most sense, but I’d hoped…
I don’t know what I’d hoped.
Mei Shen caught me. “No! It’s not that. Mian Zi…”
Worse. I exhaled and couldn’t breathe again. A tremble started deep in my bones. He’d taken my daughter, and now he’d taken my son.
I turned to march right back out that door. Fuck them all. I would go to the People’s Heroes and make them let me through into Lung Di’s sanctum.
“Mother, wait–”
Before she could pull me back, light flashed through the windows, golden as a summer afternoon and green as a bamboo forest. The temple doors blew open. I shielded my eyes against the bright assault. The flames passed, leaving a lean figure in silhouette against the afterburn.
I blinked. Stumbled forward. The young man caught me before I could fall.
“Hello, Mother.”
He was safe. I smoothed his hair like I had Mei Shen’s. Still long, like his father’s. Mian Zi frowned and squirmed, just as his sister had, which made me sniffle some more. Some adventure hero I was. “She said you’d been taken.”
Mian Zi stiffened, his head jerked up so he could glare at his sister. “So he’s got you lying now, too?”
Mei Shen huffed. “I didn’t say that. She misunderstood.”
“Who’s got what lying now?” I pulled back to look between them. Mian Zi stood stiff and cool and distant in a suit that bore a little too much resemblance to a Mao suit for my taste. Mei Shen leaned forward, fists clenching and unclenching, chin thrust up. Begging for him to throw the first strike.
Mian Zi never went physical when a cerebral attack would do. “Mei Shen didn’t bother to mention that she’s taken over leadership of the Shadow Dragon Triad?”
I glanced at Song Yulan. She shrugged. I probably should have put it together earlier, but I’d never expected… Mei Shen.
Mei Shen took a step toward her brother. “Well, somebody had to do something besides sitting on their ass pushing papers all day.”
Mian Zi met her halfway, his posture a mirror of hers. “I’m protecting China–”
“You’re playing wei-qi with people’s lives.”
“And you’re infatuated with a collection of murderers and thieves.”
“The Outlaws are heroes–”
“You mean hanjian –”
“Enough!” They both shut up. Mom voice. I still have it.
I ran my hands over my hair, still braided tight enough to give me a headache. Or maybe that was a combination of the crash and the reunion and my children fighting. This was Lung Di’s doing; it had to be. Mian Zi and Mei Shen had been devoted to each other as only twins could be. Only someone as insidious and manipulative as Lung Di could change that.
“What’s going on with you two? Do I have to find out where your rooms are so I can send you to them?”
<
br /> Two sets of Masters-blue eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Mei Shen twisted the gold foil hem of her blouse. “No.”
Mian Zi stretched his neck as though his collar was too tight. “That will be unnecessary, Mother.”
“OK then.” Not a resolution. Just a truce. Whatever had come between them dug deep. I shouldn’t have left, shouldn’t have stayed away for so long, no matter how much it hurt.
“I want to know what’s going on. Why did you take over the Shadow Dragons?” I asked Mei Shen, then turned to her brother. “And why aren’t you helping her since she did? Who does Lung Di have hostage, if not one of you or your father?”
I held up my hand when they would have both spoken at once. “One at a time. You first.” I pointed at Mei Shen, since she’d explode with impatience if she didn’t go first. Mian Zi wouldn’t mind; he preferred taking the rebuttal.
“You were right,” Tsung whispered in aside to Song Yulan. “She’s good.”
The Guardian sighed. “Perhaps we might finally get a reasonable conversation between them.”
Mei Shen planted her fists on her hips. “Mian Zi realized the Guardians were in trouble when Feng Huang stopped visiting. I knew it had to be uncle, so I came to Shanghai. I met David, and he confirmed everything.”
“Just like that?” I cast a glare in Tsung’s direction. How convenient.
Mian Zi had waited long enough. “You see? Mother doesn’t trust him either. You are the only one he has managed to fool.”
I flinched. No wonder Mei Shen was being obstinate if that was the reception she was getting.
“Has David given us any reason to distrust him? He brought the key. He brought Mother, just as he said he would.”
“It was his suggestion to bring her.”
“It was my idea.”
“At his suggestion.”
“If you would have let him into Lung Di’s sanctum, we wouldn’t have had to find somebody else you approved of.”