Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  “Where you lose me,” I told him, trying to scrub my back with a tiny cat constantly batting at the bath brush. “Is the whole possession thing. Wanna run that by me again?”

  I couldn’t hear the sigh through the door, but it was there. It so very was. “It is fairly simple, Dory. We have no magic, as you know, and even if we did, it would last no longer than that of the mages in a land that is not our own. Faerie has its own magical system with its own rules, and there is no way around them.”

  “Well, obviously there is,” I pointed out. “Or what the hell did I just see?”

  “A desperate gamble,” Mircea admitted—to my surprise.

  Vamps are no better than the Silver Circle. They both act like they run everything and have it all under control. The only difference is that mages pair that attitude with an in-your-face arrogance, whereas vamps prefer aloof inscrutability. But it amounts to the same thing.

  Only it looked like the war had taught somebody a little humility.

  “A desperate gamble involving stuffing demons into a bunch of cooks?” I asked. Because that was where I got fuzzy.

  “They aren’t all cooks. Some are gardeners—”

  “Mircea!”

  “—and secretaries, functionaries, and a variety of other jobs.”

  “But not soldiers.”

  “The whole point was to find out if this was going to work before we involved any soldiers.”

  “Risked any, you mean.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  “We are at war, Dory, against an old and very canny adversary. We cannot afford to throw away what assets we have.”

  But they could afford to throw away the cook, I thought, remembering the giant’s kindly blue eyes.

  Goddamnit! How the hell did I end up on the senate when I hated most of what they did and half of what they stood for? Some days I didn’t honestly know.

  “If we fall, the world falls with us,” Mircea reminded me.

  Oh, yeah. That was how.

  “Ray said you wanted to see me about something?” I said, because I wanted to get out of here. Senate politics gave me a headache on a good day, and this wasn’t one.

  “For the moment, our gamble seems to be working,” Mircea said. “Demon magic doesn’t work in Faerie any better than the human kind, but it doesn’t have to. The demons aren’t possessing Faerie, they are possessing our vampires, who give them a buffer against Faerie’s deleterious effects.”

  “So the magic works on the vamps, who then fight your battles in Faerie, instead of acting directly on the fey?”

  “Exactly so. But while it has succeeded in making formidable warriors out of our kitchen staff, it does leave us with one rather large vulnerability.”

  And, suddenly, I realized why I was here.

  “I’m not going to Hong Kong,” I said flatly.

  “Oh, is that where you should be going?” Mircea asked, like he hadn’t already been briefed by that rat fink Marlowe.

  “No! I’m going home.” It was flat, because I was technically still on my honeymoon, or what passed for it with vamps.

  I’d recently bit my boyfriend, which sounds kinky but wasn’t. When a vamp bites another with the right sort of intent, it creates a bond, binding them together in something a lot stronger than a human marriage. And it seemed to work the same when a dhampir did it. So, my lover, Louis-Cesare, was now sort of my husband, as crazy as that was to think about.

  And while we hadn’t gone off to Hawaii considering that fun in the sun is considerably less so if your significant other is a bloodsucker, we had been having a rare period of peace among the insanity.

  I’d left him drowsing in bed, worn out from the honeymoon like activities that vamps do engage in—with gusto—and looking forward to a mutual bath whenever we both decided to get up. Followed by an excellent breakfast fixed by my roommate Claire, who was a hell of a chef and was currently trying to make up to Louis-Cesare for hating on him most of our relationship. Which meant eggs Benedict and flaky pastries and home squeezed orange juice and maybe even a juicy breakfast steak if I was lucky.

  After that, I might finish the painting I was making of him or lie in the sun, while Louis-Cesare finished his latest book. He loved trashy novels, everything from action adventure to mushy love stories, and was a voracious reader. I had a whole basket of the things in my room suddenly.

  Yeah, I thought, sinking down into the warm, sudsy water. Then maybe a night out on the town, giving me a chance to wear some of the flashy new outfits my uncle Radu had given me as a wedding present. Followed by some more honeymoon activities until neither of us could see straight, followed by another night curled up in butterscotch scented sheets . . .

  Uh huh.

  It had been a good week.

  And, frankly, I saw no reason for it to end anytime soon.

  Unfortunately, Mircea thought differently.

  “I realize this isn’t a good time,” he began.

  “The timing’s not the point. The point is that this is Marlowe’s investigation. He brought me in to help figure out what happened to all those vamps. I did that—”

  “For which we are suitably grateful,” Mircea murmured. Making me wish he was in the room so I could throw my sponge at him.

  “Don’t try it,” I said instead. Mircea and I had our moments; some of them had even been good. But I hated when he tried that diplomatic crap on me. It was just another form of manipulation, and it was insulting.

  “However—”

  Here it came.

  “—the job isn’t finished. We know someone has made a bullet that can kill our kind.

  What we don’t know—and must, before any invasion occurs—is how they’re doing it and who they’re working for. And if there is any way to counter it.”

  “Oh. Is that all?”

  “Dorina—”

  “It’s Dory, and the answer’s still no.”

  “I need you on this.”

  “And I need a honeymoon! Let Marlowe go if you’re so worried about your little demon-mobiles getting gunned down—”

  “He is far too well known—as are his best men,” Mircea added, before I could bring up another objection. “I need our finest on this, someone most people don’t yet know or easily recognize. The fact that you can pass for human makes it even better.”

  “If you want humans, let the damned mages check it out. The senate’s currently allies with the Silver Circle, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.” It was grim.

  I stopped dangling the washcloth for kitty. “You think this was them?” Because that had been the implication, but it made no sense.

  “No. But this isn’t technology we wish them to have. The war won’t last forever, and a weapon like this could create a significant power imbalance between our peoples. And you know how well that has gone in the past.”

  Yeah, mages and vamps used to battle it out on a regular basis, only to finally reach détente because they were too evenly matched. But both still distrusted the other, and both still claimed to run the world. With a weapon like this at their disposal, the mages might just be able to back that up.

  “What about Cheung?” I asked, getting desperate. “He knows Hong Kong a lot better than I do, and nobody would be surprised to see him show up. Or to be investigating the deaths of his own people!”

  “Yes. Interesting, though, don’t you think, that it is merely his people who have been affected?”

  I’d gotten out of the tub and was in the process of drying myself off. But at that I stopped and narrowed my eyes. “What are you saying? You think Cheung had something to do with this?”

  “I don’t think anything at the moment. I don’t have enough information to think anything. But Lord Cheung’s ties with the smuggling trade are well known, particularly the trade from Faerie. And this is a new weapon, with unknown properties—”

  “You think it might be fey.”

  “Again, I don’t think anything. I am merely speculating. B
ut you can see why we are loath to involve the good senator,” the inflection on ‘good’ was really something, “in any of this.”

  For a moment, I remembered Zheng saying something about the guys in that warehouse that blew up, moving around stuff from Faerie. Had they gotten into something they shouldn’t have, something dangerous, something that—what? Took over their minds and told them to blow themselves up? It seemed crazy.

  Yeah, like a bunch of demon possessed vampires?

  The war was making people do some crazy shit; what if Cheung was one of them? Or what if he was still working for Ming-de, his old mistress, who had steadfastly refused to give him a senate seat—was this the price? He didn’t seem to like it here all that much, and might prefer to go back home, if he had a similarly powerful position waiting for him. And it was an open secret that his old mistress hated the fact that our consul was heading up the war effort, becoming in effect the ruler of the vampire world.

  What if she worried that the consul was planning on making it permanent?

  Vamps weren’t known for giving up power once they had it, and our consul currently ruled it all. A weapon like this would be a good way to make sure that she was forced to give it up some day. Or maybe to take it away from her?

  I threw on a black tank top and jeans, and ran a comb through my short hair, my mood getting blacker by the second. Vamp politics; I hated vamp politics! It made the human version look squeaky clean by comparison.

  And that was the normal stuff.

  I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to be home in my lover’s—no, my husband’s—arms. I wanted to get up tomorrow and forget I ever knew about any of this. But I did know about it. And this problem only had about a thousand horns, each sharper than the last.

  God damn it.

  “It would not be the first time a master sacrificed part of his family to benefit the whole,” Mircea murmured, as if he’d been following my thoughts.

  Which, knowing him, he probably had.

  I slammed the comb down. “All right, but I take my own team.”

  “With one proviso,” he agreed.

  Chapter Eight

  It was actually two provisos. The first: no Louis-Cesare. He was just as high profile as Marlowe, and even worse at not calling attention to himself. Mircea was afraid that sending him along would be tantamount to shining a spotlight on the whole area, telling every other magical authority on the planet: “Look here!” And what if they found something before we did?

  It wasn’t going to work, he told me, looking like a man who expected an argument.

  He didn’t get one.

  Despite the fact that Louis-Cesare failed to act like it most of the time, he was a vampire. We were hunting something that killed vampires. He’d have been absolutely furious at the implication that he didn’t know how to take care of himself, but that was just it: he didn’t.

  Yes, he was a four-hundred-year-old dueling master, and all-around bad ass. Yes, he’d once single handedly kept Anthony, the playboy consul for the European Senate, on his throne, because nobody wanted to challenge his champion. And yes, he had a master power called The Veil that allowed him to go invisible for a short period of time, as well as being pretty much undetectable in every other way.

  So, yes, he could handle almost anything.

  Except for human weapons he’d trained himself over centuries to ignore.

  Instinct is a strange thing and takes over when you least expect it. And it only requires ignoring one guy reaching into his coat to put paid to, well, pretty much everything. I wasn’t likely to ignore it, because bullets—any bullets—had always been a threat to me. But Louis-Cesare . . .

  I could absolutely see him jumping down into the middle of a battle, preparing to lay waste, only to be wasted himself before he even landed. I could see it because it had nearly happened recently—twice—and I never wanted to feel that way again. And if those times had included ammo like the stuff we were dealing with here . . .

  I felt my blood run cold.

  It would be exactly like the universe to give me everything I’d ever wanted and then to snatch him away. So, no, I didn’t want Louis-Cesare anywhere near Hong Kong. I didn’t even want him to know that I’d gone there, which had been my proviso.

  Mircea was making up some BS for when my lover finally figured out that I hadn’t just gone downstairs for ice cream and started asking questions. Or demanding them, because he was the complete opposite of Mircea’s overly smooth facade. And they say all girls marry their fathers.

  Ha!

  “Oh, come the fuck on!” That was Ray, jerking me out of my thoughts and probably bitching at proviso #2, but I couldn’t be sure. Because a wave of ash hit me in the face as soon as I turned around, thick and dark enough to obscure the little shop.

  Not that there was much of it left.

  Wong’s neat storefront on a back alley in Kowloon had been my first stop, mainly just to mark it off the list. I didn’t actually think it mattered that several of the corpses had bought their clothes here. It had been an interesting detail when I didn’t know who they were, but if they worked for Cheung, it only made sense. I’d actually been a little annoyed at myself for wasting time coming all the way over here, because Cheung’s main base of operations was on the other side of the city.

  But then I saw the place.

  The neat stacks of shirts in the front window were now lumps of charcoal. So was the once polished, old world shelving, the scattered Persian rugs, and the tailors’ mannequins, which had scared us half to death when we first arrived, looming out of the burnt-out wreck of a shop like ashen zombies. The cast iron spiral staircase was still intact, but now it went nowhere, unless you counted the thundercloud laden skies.

  “Damn it! I told you not to touch anything!” Ray’s disgusted tones drifted through the gray mist.

  “I didn’t!” the answering voice was shrill enough to make me wince.

  “Oh, so the shelf just fell over on its own?”

  “I don’t know, but I didn’t touch it!”

  Proviso #2 was Marlowe’s contribution to our outing, who had caught up with us at Central, where we were about to take the ley line express to Hong Kong.

  Ley line travel is not my favorite. It involves buying a really expensive shield, then throwing yourself into the churning rivers of metaphysical power that run throughout the planet, surfing currents that could fry you to a crisp in an instant if said shield breaks, before jumping off at what you hope is the right time so you don’t end up miles from where you want to be and stuck on a mountain top staring at goats or something. All things considered, I’d rather take a bus.

  But you can’t bus to Hong Kong, and flights take too long, so ley lines it was.

  The trip had been even more fraught than usual, because it turned out that Oscar—AKA Vamp #1 from the basement—had a wonky tummy. I’ll spare you the details, but Ray had threatened to kill him at least half a dozen times, and I’d promised myself to swim back before I ever shared another ride with Oscar. Who was still dizzy and stumbling about half an hour later, making me seriously wish I’d left him behind.

  “We shoulda left you behind!” Ray said, and then choked on a mouthful of ash.

  “You can’t do that!” Oscar sounded genuinely alarmed. It would have concerned me, but that was how he always sounded, like the world was one big panic button being mashed in poor Oscar’s face. How the hell he’d ended up working with Marlowe, who despite occasional histrionics was pretty damned capable, was anybody’s guess.

  “Watch me!” Ray snarled and started flailing across the ruined shop.

  “Ray!” I yelled, and threw out a hand.

  “What?”

  “Stop moving! Both of you!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just—don’t move.”

  My vision had started doing that thing again, that flip, flip, flip through different ways to see. The last time Dorina had done that, it was because she’d noticed something
I hadn’t. Although I couldn’t imagine what she could see in here.

  The fire must have raged much of the night, and it didn’t look like the local authorities has done much more than drape the place in police tape. There’d been no attempt to clean up, and the field of ash fluttered and scattered at the slightest movement. It had to be a couple feet thick, and it covered everything.

  Even worse, while it was barely 2:00 P.M. Hong Kong time, it was almost dark thanks to an approaching typhoon. Greenish black clouds obscured the light coming through the partially collapsed roof, and from the slit of sky visible from the narrow alley outside. All the floating ash wasn’t helping, either.

  “Dory, I mean senator, I mean—” Oscar began.

  “Shut up!” I told him, as Dorina flipped the script again, going to some kind of sight that was able to pierce the drifting clouds. Suddenly, I was getting glimpses of shattered glass, glinting like diamonds in the beams of a security light down the alley; of a fallen mirror, clouded and obscured, but reflecting back a grotesque version of myself; of a headless dummy, veils of ash swirling around it like a spectral cloak, looking as if it was lurching out of the darkness—

  And gold.

  Dorina changed our vision again, and suddenly, it was everywhere, as if a swarm of fireflies had descended on the wreckage. It glimmered like the bits thrown off a campfire, bright as flame for an instant. And then dead and dark the next, as the wind caught them and blew them away.

  Exactly like, I thought, as I started forward—and had a whole section of trembling little lights go out.

  “Dory—” Oscar tried again.

  “I said shut up! And stop moving!”

  “Then stop threatening my operative,” Marlowe said, causing me to almost jump out of my skin.

  “What the—where did that come from?” Ray yelled, jerking around. I could see him dimly now through the ash, along with Oscar, still standing by the door.

  But nobody else.

  “It . . . it came from me,” Oscar said. He swallowed. “I told you; you can’t leave me behind or—”