Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  Let’s repeat that, shall we? The vampire supposed to deal with the problems in the city was the very one causing them! The only thing Cheung wasn’t sure of was whether Zhu was acting on orders from his mistress or if he’d struck out on his own.

  But Cheung had been able to confirm one thing for certain. Zheng and the war mage had been right: there were a ton of enthralled Silver Circle members backing up Zhu’s forces. Or maybe heading up was a better phrase, since the vampires might have trouble getting past the wards guarding the pillars, but the Circle wouldn’t.

  And, arrayed against all that impressiveness, what was on our side?

  Well, that would be the local criminal gangs who ran the various sections of the city like the Triads ran parts of human Hong Kong. It reminded me of Jean LaFitte, the pirate king, defending New Orleans in the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t so much that he sympathized with the colonists as that he wasn’t letting the damned British screw with his home base.

  Unfortunately, the local mafia was more used to shaking down shop owners and kicking deadbeats out of their clubs than to waging war. They were decent fighters, but they weren’t trained soldiers, yet that’s exactly who they were up against. There was also a smattering of cops, or their equivalents, although plenty of them had already legged it, deciding that this was above their pay scale.

  And then there was us: Cheung and Ray and me.

  That was it; that was all.

  It wasn’t going to be enough.

  “The senate will be here,” Ray said, because that’s what he was betting on. We’d gotten a message off screaming for backup, but I wasn’t expecting the cavalry to come over the hill anytime soon. Ley line travel took two hours to get here, and that was assuming you had enough shields to cover everyone you planned to bring along.

  “We’ll hold out,” Ray told me staunchly. “You know what Cheung said: the wards around each pillar get stronger whenever another falls. The whole system’s power is being channeled into only two shields. They’ll never get through—

  You mean like they got through the last four times, I didn’t say. Because Ray’s optimism was soothing, even if I suspected that he was only trying to buck me up. But the plain fact was, we had exactly one ace in the hole: that goddamned mage.

  And wasn’t that just a comforting thought?

  “Hey, look!” Ray said, grabbing my sleeve and pointing at something through the rain. “Hye-Jin!”

  “What?”

  “Not what, who. She’s head of the local Korean mafia,” Ray said, as a column of men and women who looked a lot like pirates came running our way.

  They were dressed in soaked silks and leathers, had brightly colored bandanas around their heads and were bristling with weapons. The dark-haired woman in front, a tall, slender figure in a red shirt that a leaking blue head scarf was fast turning purple, had two huge scimitars crossed over her back. She also had a fierce expression, which did not change when she saw Ray, but he greeted her with obvious relief.

  “Hye-Jin! Where you been?”

  “Where you think?” she snarled, while ordering her men into formation in front of the pier. “Trying to hold the damned gate!”

  “What gate?” Ray yelled, to be heard over the winds.

  She turned on him, and her expression was savage enough to have me reaching for my purloined sword. “The gate,” she said furiously. “At the station. The one supposed to let my people out of this hell hole! It’s gone!”

  “What do you mean, gone? It’s a fixed portal, tied to another gate on the human side—”

  “Which we’re no longer in synch with! Losing five pillars has shifted us off course. We’re freewheeling through the phase, like a top on its side—”

  “What?”

  “—and can’t connect to anything. The gates don’t work!”

  “What?”

  “If you say that one more time—” she told him, and suddenly, there was a knife at his throat.

  I pushed her hand down. “You’re saying that nobody can get out of here—what about in?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Senator Dorina Basarab. I’ve just sent an SOS to the North American Senate. You’re telling me that, even if they get here in time, they can’t get in?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” she snapped, black eyes flashing. “Portals only work if you have a fixed point to aim at. There’s no fixed points anymore! Nobody is getting in or out of here until we get these pillars back online, and us back where we’re supposed to be!”

  “Then where are all the people going?” Ray demanded.

  “To hell, like the rest of us if we lose this pillar!” She pulled a sword and used the flat side to smack her men into line. “Fight, you bastards! Anybody runs, I’ll cut him down myself!”

  “Wait!” She’d started off, but I grabbed her arm. She looked like she planned to object, possibly violently, but I didn’t let go. “You said five pillars. We’ve only lost four.”

  She didn’t answer—in words. But a second later, the harbor winked out, and I was standing in a hellscape of running men and burning buildings. Including a huge pagoda on top of a hill, sending a tower of flame into the sky.

  “Well?” Hye-Jin’s voice echoed in my head, but I didn’t think she was talking to me.

  Because the image I was seeing wasn’t static. It looked like someone was holding a camera on the run. Or like whoever’s eyes she was seeing through was running—and fighting.

  I saw a sword slash down from the perspective of the one holding it, and then a splatter of blood hit our face. A body crumpled to the ground, a young mage by the look of him, whose shields had failed at a very bad time. And then a flood of what I guessed was Korean hit our ears.

  “English!” Hye-Jin snapped, and the voice changed on a dime.

  “I told you,” a man’s voice said, “We’re not going to hold this!”

  “How long?”

  “See for yourself!”

  His head swiveled, and I blinked in shock and no little awe. On a nearby hill was what could only be called a phalanx of war mages, maybe a few hundred, maybe more, with dark coats flying in the wind and arms raising as one. And the next thing I saw felt like it cooked my eyeballs: a huge spell, thrown in perfect tandem. The collective power of all those mages, all at once, tore through the air in a curtain of orange-red spell light, hitting the pagoda—

  And then our vision went screwy as Hye-Jin’s avatar was picked up by the shock wave and thrown backwards through the air. He landed hard, but was back on his feet a second later, wiping mud out of his eyes and cursing. And when he looked up—

  The pagoda was gone.

  I’d have known it, even if I hadn’t seen it, from the rumbling that immediately started under my feet. Hye-Jin cursed and the vision snapped. “Here it comes!”

  “Keep your men behind the red line,” I told her, nodding at a graffitied line on the stones. “Keep them well behind!”

  She didn’t ask why. She just looked me up and down. “So, you’re the dhampir. Never thought I’d see the day I’d be fighting beside one of you.”

  “Hey!” Ray said.

  Then she surprised me, and clasped my arm, warrior-style. “Die well, dhampir.”

  I held on when she started to pull away. “There’s a mage,” I told her. “One on our side. He’s trying to kill whatever is enthralling all these people. If he succeeds—”

  “A single mage?” She didn’t look impressed.

  “He’s some kind of mutant,” Ray said. “He just might do it!”

  “My point is, we don’t have to win,” I told her. “Just lose slowly. Buy him time!”

  “I’m fighting beside a dhampir and depending on a mage. Fuck my life,” she said savagely. But then she turned to her men. “Change of plans, you bastards!”

  I didn’t hear the change of plans. The whole road suddenly convulsed, as if someone had picked it up and snapped it, like a freshly laundered sheet. It sent Ray to th
e ground and knocked me to one knee, while the city’s death throes played out all around us.

  Huge cracks appeared in a nearby road, a wooden building collapsed in on itself, and the big butt of a huge old sailing ship rose up, up, up, frighteningly high into the air. Before washing back down on a tsunami of a wave that left it propped on the end of the pier, like an overweight guy on a park bench. But we didn’t have long to stare, because either the ship or the earthquake snapped the boards under our feet, sending jagged edges spearing up into the air and us running for the road, while the painted cuties went to huddle behind a barrel.

  Ray looked at me, his eyes huge.

  But, this time, he didn’t say anything. Because what was there to say? Instead, we waited in silence as the city shook around us, as the road kept trying to swallow us, as the air seemed to shiver in our lungs.

  One of Hye-Jin’s people tossed me and Ray scarves in the red color they seemed to prefer, and I wrapped mine around a wrist.

  Welcome to the club, I thought.

  And then, just like before, the earthquake simply stopped. There was some final rumbling and what might have been distant screams, or possibly just the wind. But nothing else.

  Until a wave of magic flooded over my skin, raising goosebumps, and prickling down my spine.

  Here we go.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Suddenly, we were alone.

  Hye-Jin’s forces raised their arms into the air, almost as well synchronized as the mages had been, and shot something out of their sleeves into the network of bridges. I assumed it was small chords or very thin ropes, but with all the rain I couldn’t tell. But the next moment, they were flying, off the cobblestones and into the air as the ropes retracted, pulling them into the labyrinth overhead.

  Where they disappeared.

  So much for camaraderie.

  “Cowards!” Ray yelled, but it was swept away by the wind.

  I’d been scanning the avenue in front of us, which was the other end of the highway I’d seen when we first arrived, and the smaller street intersecting with it that ran along the front of the pier. Despite the rain and dense cloud cover, the cheery, neon-bright graffiti kept everything lit up well enough to see. But I didn’t see anything yet.

  And then I did, and decided that I didn’t blame Hye-Jin. I’d assumed the vampires would come at us first, because they were faster, and I doubted the mages would waste power on enhanced speed. They hadn’t.

  Instead, they’d found themselves a load of rickshaws, and were riding them like an ancient army’s chariot corps, right down the main thoroughfare. There must have been a couple hundred of them in tight formation, their coats flapping behind them like cloaks, their burly arms wound tight with reins, magic almost visibly boiling off them. For a second, I just stared.

  Then I mentally slapped myself and screamed: “Now!”

  And all hell broke loose. Because the mages weren’t the only ones who could surprise, although ours was a little less impressive and a little more bizarre. Okay, a lot more bizarre, I thought, as the mages’ formation was disrupted by a giant panda dive bombing them from the top of a nearby building.

  I’d known it was going to happen, but even I did a double take. It looked like a Macy’s Day parade float had gone insane and started laying waste. Or maybe that creature out of Ghostbusters—

  “Stay Puft, the Marshmallow Man,” Ray said, sounding dazed.

  Yeah, I thought.

  Like that.

  But it was surprisingly effective. Chariots swerved and smashed into buildings or each other, trying to avoid getting crushed by the giant piece of strangely solid graffiti. Because the crazy mage might be dead, I didn’t know, but his power lived on—

  Pretty much literally.

  And then the whole street erupted in mayhem.

  “I thought you were gonna design something yourself!” Ray said, staring.

  “I did. But I used up most of the ink on that thing,” I hiked a thumb behind us, where a huge purple octopus had just crawled out of the waves and wrapped itself lovingly around the pagoda. It prompted some head turning among Cheung’s men, but to their credit, no one so much as flinched.

  “So, you did what exactly?” Ray asked, staring at it. Because he’d been away on his sword and poncho run at the time.

  “I was out of ink, but the gun had some magic left. So, I decided to see what would happen if I hit an existing piece of art with it, and, well.”

  “Well,” Ray said. And then he didn’t say anything else as we watched the mages deal with a wholly new style of fighting.

  The learning curve appeared to be a little steep.

  The five-story pharmacy dude had grabbed two of the chariots and banged them together, spilling their drivers into the street, where they were set upon by a bunch of anime characters armed with clubs and knives. Pharmacy dude rolled up his scroll and waded through the fray, swiping at flying rickshaws the way anyone else might swat at flies. He sent several smacking into the sides of buildings, set a couple others on a collision course with the road, and kicked one like a football, straight out of sight.

  He wasn’t the only one having a field day. The sinuous dragon that had been undulating through the bridges stopped long enough to breath fire all over a bunch of mages’ shields. They held, protecting the men, but their vehicles weren’t so lucky. A number caught fire and several melted right out from under their drivers, causing them to fall into the path of the panda, which was now rolling around the road, crushing downed vehicles and forcing mages to have to hitch rides with their friends.

  They were pretty good at it.

  I saw several use magic to push against the ground, allowing them to leap almost as high as a vamp. And to catch hold of the sides of speeding chariots, swinging themselves back on board. It let them fire at will at their attackers, while the guy in front did the driving.

  Damn it!

  “They don’t look too hurt,” Ray said, a frown appearing between his eyes.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is? I know they’re war mages, but they’re playing for the other team—”

  “Magic is a finite resource,” I reminded him. “We’re not trying to kill them. We’re trying to weaken them enough that they can’t get that pagoda down.”

  Ray’s look of concern did not change. “They’re war mages,” he repeated. “That makes ‘em magical freaks. They produce a ton more magic than the average mage or they wouldn’t be in the Corps in the first place.”

  “They’ve also been fighting all day,” I reminded him, but to be honest, it didn’t look like it.

  I’d bought a lot of magic from the knights over the years, even battled a few from time to time, to the point that I thought I knew what they could do. But I’d never seen them fighting in force before. I’d never seen anything like that.

  Four of them had stuffed themselves into a tiny, one-person cab and were flying around the pharmacist’s head, staying just in front of his waving hands, before lobbing a combined spell that—

  “Oh, God,” Ray said as the kindly old head exploded in a burst of blue and white dust.

  It must have blinded the mages, who were caught in the middle of it, because they crashed a moment later, scraping along the side of a building until their fan blades bent too much for use, which stranded them—

  For all of a few seconds. Until they jumped onto two more passing rickshaws and joined back up with the rest. Where double and triple occupied vehicles were now regrouping on the fly as they got back on target. And now they knew how to fight us.

  “Shit!” Ray said, as graffiti started poofing away in multicolored dust clouds all over the place, like gaudy fireworks. The mages were halfway down the highway now, and coming on strong, tearing through obstacles that I’d hoped would hold them up for an hour in a matter of minutes.

  But we weren’t done yet.

  A couple things were happening, and one of them I hadn’t even planned for.
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  Thing number one was a bunch of smaller attackers joining the fray. The big stuff packed a punch, but it also made for better targets. While the smaller ads could slip right under the radar and screw up everything—to an amazing degree.

  A bunch of monkeys from a jungle themed club sprang off a wall and into a dozen rickshaws as they flew by. The monkeys couldn’t penetrate the shields the mages immediately snapped into place—except for one guy who was a little slow, and found himself trapped inside his own shield with a very angry furball—but it didn’t matter. The monkeys piled on top of the shields, screaming and pounding and obscuring everyone’s aim, not to mention the drivers’ vision.

  All twelve vehicles went veering off as a result, some into other rickshaws, knocking them out of formation, too, and others into buildings or bridges.

  And they weren’t the only ones.

  One rickshaw was knocked out of service by a group of toucans from that same club, who flocked about, pecking the heck out of the mages inside. Another was brought down by some kabuki players, who hopped off a billboard and onto the same small cab, causing it to drop like a stone. And a third was snared off the side of a bridge by some fishermen with a net, one that stretched for maybe half a block before snapping back into place, sending the rickshaw flying backwards into a group of others, like a bowling ball into a bunch of pins.

  Thing number two was the unexpected bonus we received from all the commotion the fight had caused, which had drawn the attention of virtually every ad on the strip. They weren’t attacking; they were just trying to sell things. But as Ray and I had discovered earlier, it was often hard to tell the difference.

  The big samurai that had hunted me and Ray was now trying to hard sell tickets to the mages, causing several wrecks in the process. A giant pair of chopsticks, meanwhile, had plucked another mage out of his vehicle and stuffed him inside a restaurant, then barred the door so he couldn’t get out until he ate something. Even better, a toy shop had an animated sign, set well above the normal traffic lanes, but the mages weren’t bothering to keep to those.