Jade Tiger

by Reese, Jenn

"Okay," said Buckley. He ducked under a goon's fist and thrust upward into the man's groin. "But you'd better take us the hell with you, then."

  Shan leaped backward, narrowly avoiding another one of Ponytail's lightning kicks. She countered by spinning around and whipping out her foot, heel first, at the last minute. Ponytail ducked just in time and shoved upward, upsetting Shan's balance. Shan used her leg's sudden change in direction to flip over backward to get out of Ponytail's range.

  "If you've got a brilliant plan, Buckley, let's see it," said Shan. "The police will be here before we can finish this."

  The next sound Shan heard was a gun being cocked. Such a small sound, and, at the same time, so deafening. The room fell silent instantly.

  "Okay, back off," said Buckley, his voice low and steady.

  Shan turned and saw some sort of gun held solidly in Buckley's hands. He seemed calm as he pointed it first at one goon, then the next. Wisely, the goons backed up.

  "Don't suppose you have a permit to carry a concealed weapon?" Ian asked quietly.

  "Not exactly," said Buckley.

  "Brilliant."

  "Come on, boys," Shan said. "We'll have time to point fingers later." She backed toward the rear of the bar and motioned for Ian to follow. She needn't have bothered. Ian was already moving, clutching the messenger bag to his side. Buckley came last, the look in his eyes cold as he stared at their opponents.

  "You will die," said One-eye in Mandarin.

  "But not before you do," Shan answered. And then they were off, running for Buckley's car. Shan's rental was still parked in front. Buckley tucked the gun back in his waistband.

  "We'll have to ditch the gun," Shan said.

  "This gun just saved our lives." Buckley pulled keys out of his pocket and pressed the key fob. A huge Explorer beeped and blinked a few feet away.

  Shan let Buckley slip past her before opening the rear passenger door. "Even so," she said, "we're not going to make it through the airport with that thing."

  "The airport?" Buckley got into the driver's seat and slammed the door shut. Shan looked at Ian, who was now buckling himself into the front passenger seat.

  "The airport," Ian said. "We're all going to France."

  Buckley shifted into reverse and took them out of the parking lot at a disturbing speed. "France," he said. "That's one hell of a road trip."

  "We'll need to stop by your houses and get your passports," Shan said. "If I create a distraction, can you..."

  In the front seat, the men were looking at each other and grinning. Almost as one, they each reached into their back pockets and pulled out little blue books.

  "Archaeologists," Ian said. "Remember?"

  "Sterner stuff," said Buckley, as if that explained it all.

  And in the backseat, Shan rolled down her window and laughed.

  "Coffee or tea?" asked the flight attendant.

  "No, thank you," said Shan. Ian sat beside her, asleep. He'd insisted on stopping at a pay phone to call his teaching assistant before they left. Shan didn't want to risk it--didn't want to stop for anything. But her mission was about duty. She didn't want to be the kind of hypocrite that would deny Ian the right to fulfill his.

  Buckley was back five rows and on the other side of the plane, also asleep, if he knew what was good for him. Shan held the crane on her lap, covered by a thin blue airline blanket. She ran her hands over the crane's wings and age-dulled beak. More than fifteen years had passed since she'd seen or touched it.

  Fifteen years since she'd watched her mother's early morning martial arts rituals, brought her mother tea, or even hugged her. It was strange, but even after all this time, Shan could remember every detail. Her mother's black eyes that breathed red dragon flames when she was angry. The pink silk dress she wore all the time, embroidered with butterflies and hummingbirds. Shan hated that dress. Pink looked terrible on her mother. But her mother laughed when Shan complained. "Many things which appear to be opposites are actually perfect for each other," she would say. "A sword and a scabbard exist for very different purposes, yet wouldn't you say they were meant to be together?" Shan remembered pouting, not wanting to think about yet another one of her mother's riddles.

  "Those look like pleasant memories."

  Shan covered the crane at the sound of the voice, but it was just Ian.

  "You should be asleep," she said quietly. "You need your rest."

  "Oh, and you don't? Even superheroes need to sleep."

  In the quiet light of the nighttime airplane, Ian's eyes seemed impossibly dark. His hair stuck up in a variety of all-new directions. Maybe that was the style he was going for, after all, she mused. It certainly captured his carefree charm well enough.

  "I'm not a superhero," she said, still rubbing the crane. But my mother certainly was, she added silently.

  Ian leaned his head closer to hers when he talked, probably so they wouldn't disturb the elderly lady sleeping to his right. His shoulder pressed against hers, his left arm touching the length of hers along the armrest. Shan felt suddenly aware of her own breathing and the tremendous effort it seemed to be taking.

  "You're not going to give me some crap about being just an ordinary woman, are you?" Ian said.

  Shan turned her face toward his. They were remarkably close now in the darkness. More intimate than a candlelight dinner at some fancy restaurant, with the white noise of the airplane creating a cushion of sound all around them.

  "There's nothing ordinary about being a woman," Shan countered. "A few of my skills just happen to be a bit more exotic than most. But you should see me try to make scrambled eggs," she said, smiling. "I'd trade all my flying kicks for a decent scrambled egg skill any day."

  Ian laughed softly. "Eggs, it turns out, are one of my specialties. Eggs and every form of potato you can cook over a campfire."

  "Another archaeologist skill?"

  "You bet," he said. "It's not all monkey brains and live snakes like Indiana Jones would have you believe."

  "I don't know," Shan said, "monkey brains don't sound so bad after that so-called meal they served us an hour ago. I think the ham sandwich is trying to pick a fight with my stomach."

  "What? You don't know stomach-fu? That's a shame." Ian's arm rubbed against hers, probably accidentally. Shan leaned in, casually increasing the pressure. And the heat. She felt the skin on the back of her neck tingle. Ian smiled. "Being defeated by a ham sandwich is pretty pathetic. Worse even than saying 'greeb,' I'd wager."

  "Oh, now you're pushing your luck," Shan said. Or did she just mean to say that? She found herself staring into the playful shadows of Ian's face, fascinated by the way his lips curled at the ends when he smiled.

  These sensations came with little red warning flags. At this point, Ian was practically covered in the damn things. So many men say they aren't threatened by your strength, Shan thought. They say it more to convince themselves than to convince you. Trouble is, you end up believing them just when they figure out the truth.

  "Something's wrong," Ian said.

  "No," said Shan, too quickly. She took a deep breath and smiled. "Tell me about your life since you graduated."

  Ian raised an eyebrow. "You mean since I got the crane?"

  "Busted," Shan admitted.

  Ian leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  "When I was in college--no, even before that. From the first time I went with my father to a museum--I was all of eight--I've been fascinated with the past." Ian's voice was more than wistful, thought Shan. It sounded almost euphoric. "I read voraciously, I traveled with my parents and made them drag me to castle ruins, museums, and even lectures. I studied languages."

  "A man with a mission," Shan said. Maybe Ian would be able to understand her mission and how important it was to her. How it was her.

  "Everything was great up through grad school," Ian continued. "I went on digs, I worked on my thesis, I made contacts. Everyone thought I was really going places."

  "And somewhere in there you
met Rachel?" Shan asked.

  Ian blushed. Or was it just another shadow appearing on his face? Hard to tell. "Yes, on a dig. We both thought it was love, but we were both too ambitious. Neither one of us wanted to move or change areas of study or make sacrifices of any kind. So I guess it wasn't."

  "So what happened after grad school?" Shan asked.

  Ian gave a quiet snort. "Well, now, that's the real question, isn't it?" He shook his head, as if in disbelief. "Everything just sort of slowed down. I got my job at the university and I just started doing it. I got a respectable and thoroughly unexciting archeology project lined up in Ireland, and I've been making slow, unexciting progress on it for the last ten years." Ian shrugged. "What happened after college? The hell if I know."

  But Shan did. She held the reason in her hands, hidden beneath a thin piece of synthetic fabric. The crane represented balance and grace. Shan had been foolish to think those virtues alone would have solved her problems. Balance, by itself, was just stasis.

  "I'm...I'm feeling a little tired," Shan said. "I'm going to try to catch some sleep."

  "Sounds like a good plan," Ian said, but he had that same look of concerned suspicion he'd worn earlier in the conversation.

  She didn't want to explain. Her muscles ached. She felt grimy from all the traveling and fighting. She was afraid their current trip to France, which was testing the limits of her last credit card, would be for nothing. Or worse, would get one of them killed.

  Her brain simply couldn't handle the idea that she'd somehow failed Ian as well as her mother. She should have found the five Jade Circle animals years ago. If she added the guilt of Ian's ruined life to her shoulders, she was afraid she just might collapse from the weight.

  One thing was certain, however. Shan would happily let Ian carry the crane for the rest of this trip. She couldn't afford to be swayed by its power, to lose her focus. Not when the pieces--ancient and powerful--were finally starting to fall into place.

  "I look like a raspberry muffin," said Shan, regarding herself critically in the mirror of a small tourist shop at the airport. She wore a puffy pink jacket, a striped knit hat, and matching gloves. Price tags dangled as she twisted and turned before her reflection.

  "I'll give you strawberry muffin," Ian said diplomatically, "or even watermelon, if they made such a thing. But you're simply too pink to be raspberry."

  "Gee, thanks," said Shan. "Are you sure this is the only one in my size?"

  "Let me get this straight," said Buckley, leaning against the shop wall near a stack of stuffed animals dressed in skiing outfits, "you have no problem with Ian and me dressed like friggin' Pillsbury doughboys, but you've got a problem with pink?"

  Shan looked at Ian, resplendent in a white jacket with orange lightning bolts along his sleeves, and then Buckley, who was trying to look cool in a light-blue jacket with the words "SKI GOD" written on the back.

  Shan sighed. "We're going to get attacked before we even find the bad guys in these things."

  "C'est la vie," said Ian, with an accent that made Shan melt. "Let's pay and hit the road."

  "Ooh, look who's mister French all of a sudden," said Buckley.

  Ian held up his hands defensively. "Hey, I'm not the one who decided to study Swahili because a certain 'golden-skinned goddess' was in the class. You made your bed, now lie in it."

  "And so I did," chuckled Buckley. Then he said something that somehow managed to sound lewd in what Shan could only assume was Swahili.

  She couldn't complain, though, because Buckley pulled out a credit card and paid for all their clothes without a word. Then again, this whole stop had been his idea, once Ian had said they were headed for the Alps. Shan probably would have trudged ahead without thinking about the cold. It was that damn tiger mentality again. Maybe being around Ian and Buckley was a good thing, as long as she could keep them both safe.

  It felt like five hours before they were finally zooming along the road in their little green Renault 14. Realistically, it had only taken an hour and a half for them to deal with money conversions and arrange for the rental. And, luckily for Shan, both Ian and Buckley possessed international driver's licenses. She would have had to take a train or a bus if she'd come here alone.

  As it was, Shan curled herself up in the claustrophobic backseat and tried to catch some more sleep. Ian, with his goofy hair and playful eyes, drove like a speed demon along the already darkening highways toward the tourist city of Chamonix in the French Alps. At first, Ian's roadway daring surprised her. In her mind, the mild-mannered professor stereotype drove a respectable Volvo at the speed limit or just above it. But here they were in France, less than a day after they'd met, following the trail of an ancient jade dragon.

  It made an odd sort of sense, considering the dragon's powers. While all the other animals were normally associated with concrete aspects, such as the tiger's speed and tenacity, the dragon represented mutability. "Ride the wind," her mother always said. Chinese dragons, unlike their Western counterparts, were long, sinuous things twisting in the sky as they rode the invisible currents of wind. And, also unlike Western dragons, they were wise and often benevolent. Certainly not the types to eat virgins and hoard gold. They took opportunities where they found them, acted swiftly and with great confidence. What sort of man would Ian's friend be, after living with the statue for so long?

  Shan dozed, calmed by the drone of the car's engine and the quiet rumble of conversation from the front seat. They stopped and stretched every few hours, giving Shan a chance to soak in the landscape. She'd never been to France. In fact, she'd never been anywhere except China and the United States, though she'd traveled extensively in the latter researching leads on the jade animals.

  But France felt different from America, even though the geography was technically similar. The hills just seemed greener, the sky bluer. And their little car would be drowned in an ocean of SUVs like Buckley's Explorer back in the States. The architecture, too, felt different. Shan saw cottages, rustic vineyards, and Roman ruins scattered along their way. The whole place just felt old. It reminded her of her childhood, when she had routinely sipped tea from cups that had been hand made centuries earlier. China's great history breathed in every fiber of silk and every move of her mother's hand.

  Shan's chest tightened. It did her no good to think of these things. Her mother was gone, along with the entire secret order of the Jade Circle. And if Shan didn't stay focused and recover all the animals, it would stay dead forever.

  The air grew steadily colder as they ascended into the Alps. They had only a few hours of fading sun to admire the frosted peaks of the mountains, but Shan plastered her nose to the window in the backseat to reap every last minute of the view.

  "Put the Rockies to shame, don't they?" said Buckley, grinning. His hair was too short to be mussed from the long day of travel, but the redness in his eyes betrayed his fatigue. Ian was driving again. Or was he still driving from his last shift? The day had collapsed into sleep-fogged memories of roads and gas stations and an endless display of scenery.

  "Yes," Shan said. "They're not even in the same league."

  "Maybe we'll have time for a little skiing while we're here," Ian said, far too cheerily for Shan's mood. "I used to ski quite a bit in my youth."

  "I was always more for the lodges than the actual slopes," countered Buckley. The two seemed tireless in their ability and desire to banter. "You get to meet more snow bunnies that way."

  The sun disappeared behind the mountaintops, but still lit up the countryside behind them, land that wasn't shrouded in the shadow of the great Alps.

  "I've never been skiing," said Shan. "I'll put it on the list."

  "Which list is that?" asked Ian.

  Shan sighed and leaned back against her seat. She massaged the muscles in her shoulder. "The list of things I'm going to do when I get my life back. Wait, that implies I once had a life. I should've said when I get a life, period." But she'd had a life once. In China.

>   "You'll get that chance soon enough," said Ian. "With me and Bucks helping, of course." Ian kept his eyes on the road and his tone light, but Shan felt more conviction than levity in his statement.

  "Right," said Buckley, grinning. "We're your passport to success."

  "Right now, I'd just like you to be my passport to Chamonix. How close are we?" Shan asked.

  "Almost there, despite Buckley's two wrong turns," said Ian. "But I'll have to stop and ask someone for directions to Charles's lodge. The street isn't listed on our map."

  "I vote we stop somewhere with a bathroom," said Buckley. "I shouldn't have had that seventh cup of coffee."

  The traffic picked up as they neared Chamonix. Most of the other cars had skis attached to their roofs or hanging out their rear windows. Snowboards were almost as plentiful. Occasionally, a snowmobile skated up beside them on the snow-packed roads, or raced over the embankments.

  When Ian finally pulled the car into the lot of a small gas station and inn, Shan jumped out to pump the gas just as Buckley bolted for the bathrooms. Ian got out of the car more slowly, careful not to bump his badly-bruised head, and stretched near Shan.

  "You've put up with Buckley longer than most women," Ian said. He reached back into the car and grabbed the maps.

  "Probably because I'm not attracted to him," Shan said. "And his faults are easy to overlook in light of our current situation. Not everyone would be up for a late-night trip to another continent."

  "So you're not attracted to him?" Ian said. Shan got the distinct feeling that he hadn't even heard the second part of her statement. She smiled.

  "No, I'm not. Does that surprise you?"

  Ian shrugged, obviously trying to recover some of his nonchalance. "A little bit, yes," he said. "I've often been told that women like assholes."

  Shan laughed. "It probably looks like that since we date so many of them, but I assure you, it's not on purpose in my case. The macho thing never did much for me."

  "What does? Do much for you, that is..." Ian looked down at his maps and folded one of them into a tight, thick square.