Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  “I know that.”

  “Why do you think we keep bokors?” he demanded, as if I hadn’t spoken. And using the common term for the kind of necromancers who act as physicians for vamps. “They have to call forth a captured bullet from the flesh, if it’s buried too deep for us to expel on our . . .”

  He trailed off, an annoyed and then puzzled expression chasing themselves across his face.

  “Yeah, that one’s buried deep,” I agreed dryly, and started checking a couple more nearby bodies while Marlowe scowled at me.

  “It’s not in there,” he said.

  “I know it’s not in there.”

  “Well, what did you do with it?”

  I glanced up. “I didn’t do anything with it.”

  “Then what the hell happened to it?”

  “How should I know?” I said, exasperated, because he was looking at me like I was a bullet thief. “It’s just gone. Like the ones in those guys,” I gestured at the bodies I’d already checked, because they were also lacking slugs in their wounds—or anywhere else. Not to mention the brass casings said slugs had come in. With so many rounds fired in a contained space, I’d have expected spent brass to be littered all over the place, but there was none.

  “Maybe they weren’t shot, after all, but killed by something else,” Vamp #1 offered, peering over at us. He had plenty to peer with, being a pop-eyed, curly haired blond with love handles ruining the line of his nice blue suit. His companion—darker, sleeker and without a hair out of place—winced slightly.

  Marlowe rounded on him. “What do you smell?” he demanded.

  “Uh.” Vamp #1 blinked at him. “Smell?”

  “Yes, smell! Smell! You are a vampire, are you not?”

  “Yes?” The man sounded like he wasn’t sure suddenly, with his master’s dark gaze on him. His companion closed his eyes.

  “Then. What. Do. You. Smell?”

  “Um.” The poor guy looked around, as if searching for an answer that would get him out of this. He didn’t find it. “Mildew?”

  “Gunpowder,” the Hound said, taking pity on his fellow vamp and cutting in before Marlowe could respond to that bit of idiocy. “It’s everywhere—”

  “Along with a hundred or so bullets holes!” Marlowe added, still glaring at Vamp #1.

  “Holes but no bullets,” I added. Because Marlowe was right, this place looked like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre despite the fact that we were in New York, not Chicago. And that it was a hot, sweaty September, not February. And about a hundred years too late. But the number of scars on the old walls and floor looked like a couple Tommy guns had been at work—or an automatic weapon or three.

  Only somebody had then gone around afterward, with half the neighborhood now awake and the cops on the way, and picked up all the bullets? How was that even possible? Even out of the wounds?

  “—and something else I can’t define.” That was the Hound again, looking at the peppered wall beside him and frowning.

  “If you don’t have anything useful to add to the discussion, then at least—wait, what?” Marlowe broke off reprimanding Vamp #1 to do a double take on his Hound. “What do you mean, can’t define? You’re a Hound!”

  It was a fair comment. Hounds weren’t just vamps with great noses. They also had an encyclopedic knowledge of scents, a catalogue in their heads of every one they’d encountered in their often very prolonged lifetimes. As a result, they were better than a forensic department at telling you what had gone down in a room stretching back days or even weeks, along with identifying anyone who had been there if they’d ever so much as passed them in a hallway. They didn’t just forget things.

  Of course, you can’t forget what you’ve never encountered.

  “Something I’ve never smelled before,” the Hound confirmed, quietly dignified, even when his master transferred the glare to him.

  Marlowe didn’t say anything, because you can’t reprimand a guy just for telling you what you don’t want to hear. Or, rather, you can, but Marlowe wasn’t that kind of asshole. A lot of other kinds, but not that one.

  “Check them!” he snapped at his men, who started forward to obey.

  The mage cleared his throat. “If I may?”

  Marlowe glanced at him, then held up a hand to stop his men. The mage murmured something I couldn’t hear and probably wouldn’t have understood if I had. And the next thing I knew—

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “Sorry.” The man smirked at me while I wrestled with the gun in my boot, which wasn’t in my boot any longer. It had suddenly decided to leap into the air and try to zoom off toward his uplifted hand.

  And then I had to duck as a dozen more, torn out of the hands of dead vamps, did likewise.

  They weren’t the only ones. All around me, corpses were twitching and, in a few cases, being dragged across the floor, smearing blood like paint behind them. Because their guns were trapped in buckled holsters, I realized, still tucked under their arms or on their belts. One guy had a boot holster like mine, but something was preventing the gun from getting out, and he was wedged under a couple other corpses. But his leg wasn’t, and it was shaking wildly in the air in the direction of the mage.

  Until the boot came off and went racing across the room, straight at Vamp #1. He’d been standing beside the mage, staring at the flying weapons being caught in the shield the man had erected in front of him, like a giant catcher’s mitt. One that did not extend across his careless associate.

  Who was kicked square between the pop eyes by the flying boot.

  The mage sighed.

  The other vamps were more coordinated, but they, too, were grabbing their holsters, which were being pulled outward from their bodies by their guns. Or, more likely, given what we were looking for, by the rounds in the guns. Guess I knew how all those bullets were retrieved, I thought.

  Because they had been.

  Despite the mayhem, there were no slugs zinging around, testing the strength of the mage’s shield. They weren’t flying out of divots in the walls, giving off little puffs of ancient plaster. They weren’t sliding around under dead skin, looking for an exit. They weren’t doing anything, because there weren’t any there.

  But the mage didn’t seem to realize this, and just thought his spell wasn’t strong enough. So he upped the power, judging by how the hair on my arms was suddenly standing on end. And by how the old bricks had begun to move in the walls before bursting outward in a hail of shards—

  Along with an ancient water pipe that slammed out at us and began drenching the scene.

  “Turn it off!” Marlowe yelled. “Turn it off!” I wasn’t sure if he meant the water or the spell. But both were quickly dealt with: the mage dropped his arm and the Hound braved the flood to pinch off the ends of the pipe, cutting off the flow. Leaving us standing around, dripping at each other.

  “I don’t understand.” The mage looked genuinely confused, maybe because, even after all that, his hand remained empty.

  “I do,” I said, and judging by Marlowe’s steadily darkening expression, so did he.

  Somebody had developed bullets that could kill vamps and didn’t want anybody to know about it, so they took them with them. And left us a very big problem on our hands.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Marlowe was propped in a corner with a blank look on his face, having a mental convo with somebody—probably his uber creepy boss. The mage and the Hound were going over the bodies I’d already checked out, like they were going to find something I’d missed, and the two guards were standing around, being tits-on-a-bull useless. Of course, I wasn’t feeling much better.

  I sat back on my heels, wiping sweat off my face with an already drenched sleeve, because nobody had bothered to run air conditioning down here. And because I’d just finished stripping the last body. Whose clothes, like all the others, had yielded exactly squat.

  Well, almost.

  The wallets, phones and IDs of the corpses were missing,
although plenty of expensive watches and assorted bling had been left behind. So not a robbery, then, not that I’d really thought so. If you developed a new super weapon, a game changer that turned a regular gun into a vamp killer, you didn’t need to lift a few wallets in order to eat.

  Of course, you also didn’t need to spray said bullets around, in what looked like a classic hit. Or leave the corpses unburnt and littered everywhere, sans slugs but complete with the holes said slugs had caused, which would alert even the most bumbling authorities to what you had. And Marlowe wasn’t bumbling.

  He hadn’t noticed the bullets before I pointed them out because vamps didn’t, as a rule. It would be like a human cop noticing a super soaker or a kid’s slingshot at a crime scene. It might get a line in his notes, in the interest of completeness, but it wouldn’t be a priority; nobody died from a super soaker. And the same was true for vamps and guns.

  Human weapons were barely an annoyance to a master like Marlowe, and even to baby vamps, they were more like rubber bullets or buckshot to a human: irritating, but not lethal.

  At least, they weren’t supposed to be.

  But Marlowe would have figured it out pretty soon, even without me, so why were these bodies here? Vamps burned like kerosene-soaked rags, so why not flick a Bic and leave no evidence behind? It didn’t make sense and it was bothering me.

  Kind of like the clues that had been left behind, if you could call them that.

  The guys were all fashionistas, but not everyone had paid through the nose for it. Three—no, make that four, I thought, checking the latest bit of blood-soaked couture—hadn’t bought their stuff on Saville Row or Rodeo Drive. No, they’d had it hand fitted by master tailors—in Hong Kong.

  The city wasn’t printed on the labels, but I recognized some of the names, one in particular. Mircea’s boys strive to keep up with their master’s sartorial splendor, but don’t always have the cash. So, newbies are clued in by the older vamps to a cheaper, and often better, alternative.

  It’s an open secret in the world of bespoke tailoring that the price of an airline ticket to Asia is more than made up for by the savings on even a few suits. And if you need a whole new wardrobe, well, then you head to Hong Kong’s most famous fashion district. You head to Kowloon.

  But not to the shops with touts out front, ready to rip off the latest group of unsuspecting tourists. Or to the new breed with flashy names and flashier prices, scarcely less than you’d pay anywhere. No, you go old school, down a tiny back alley lined with tinier shops, to a place where three or four master tailors labor under the watchful gaze of an eagle-eyed boss.

  You go to Wong’s.

  I ran my fingers over the silky tag at the back of a very nice shirt—a few hundred bucks in the U.S. or free in Hong Kong if you ponied up for a five-hundred-dollar suit that fit like a glove—and wondered if it meant anything.

  Probably not, the way my night was going.

  I turned my attention to the body.

  This one was a Bruce Lee clone with—oddly enough, considering that he looked and dressed Chinese—what appeared to be a set of Yakuza tats down one side of his chest. The pattern was pretty enough, a bunch of intertwined koi, ironically supposed to symbolize good luck. Although the six or so bullet holes peppering his skin kind of screwed up the design.

  Especially the one that was moving.

  I blinked, and then moved closer for a better look.

  It was still hard to see, because the koi were moving, too. They swam in and out of a field of slowly drifting kelp, their bright orange skins contrasting nicely with the blue gray water and teal colored leaves. One of them flashed me a bright black eye but didn’t look too interested.

  Maybe because this type of magical tat drew its power from the wearer, charging up in down times to allow for an extra burst of strength or speed when needed, and this guy wasn’t going to be powering anything ever again.

  But something in the design didn’t need it.

  I leaned even closer, and the room abruptly went dark. It looked like somebody had pulled a shade that didn’t exist because there were no windows down here. I was about to complain—vociferously—to my other half, because I couldn’t do my job if I couldn’t see!

  But then I did.

  A glister of gold spiraled up into the air in a delicate stream, like gilded pollen. It was so faint that I’d have never noticed it under the harsh lighting of the room, yet in the almost darkness it was brilliant. It cast tiny moving light shadows onto the vamp’s naked chest, illuminating the skin around one of the wounds, where it looked like something was—

  Shit!

  I’d reached out a curious finger and drawn it back full of blood—my own.

  I was still staring at my mauled digit, which had four tiny but deep lines carved in it, when the perp made a break for it. Something shot out of the wound and into the shadows under the guy’s bicep, moving like a bat out of hell. For a split second, I just stared, not sure what the heck I’d seen. Then I was flipping the vamp over, and slamming my bloody hand down on the concrete, and swiping and missing and—

  There was some kind of commotion by the door, but I barely noticed because I was on the chase, one that abruptly left the vamp’s body behind and leapt to a nearby pile of his buddies. Where something glinted and glimmered, taunted and tantalized, flashing in and out of a jumble of limbs and shadows. It sparkled in a fixed, staring eye for a second, then off the surface of a brightly shined shoe, before leaping to the ground and scurrying toward—

  Nothing, because I slammed a foot down on it.

  Just in time. I glanced up to see that the commotion in the doorway had become a full-on fight. A moment later, Marlowe’s boys were thrown backwards by a much larger contingent of high level vamps pushing down the stairs, with scowls on their faces and guns in their hands.

  Chapter Three

  I froze, half bent over, while the crazed little thing I’d captured squirmed and thrashed like a miniature raptor, causing me to have to press down harder. That didn’t seem to make it happy. It didn’t make me happy, either, when what felt like a claw stabbed upwards through the thick sole of my boot and into the ball of my foot.

  But there was no time to do anything about it, since I’d just spotted a familiar face in the crowd of vamps pouring into the basement. The honorable Zheng-zi was a huge, handsome Buddha type if Buddha went on a diet and joined a serious gym. But the benevolent, often smiling face was the same, although it was paired with a weird sense of humor and almost as much love for mayhem as me. He gave me a nod, but didn’t say anything, maybe because he wouldn’t have been heard over the cursing anyway.

  And for once, it wasn’t coming from Marlowe.

  Not that the chief spy didn’t look apoplectic, but he was having trouble getting a word in. I pressed down harder on my captive, trying to trap it between my sole and the floor, while listening to a master class in Chinese invective. Or make that Cantonese invective, since the dressing down Marlowe was getting was in that language, which it didn’t look like he spoke.

  But, judging from his expression, the idea was being conveyed all the same.

  “Goddamnit, man!” Marlowe finally snapped, “Speak a known bloody language or I swear—”

  I didn’t get to find out what Marlowe was willing to swear to. Because, suddenly, the chief spy was no longer standing in the middle of the room, staring down with Lord Cheung, another senate member who was supposed to be his colleague despite current appearances. Instead, he was smack against the wall, arms splayed and eyes wide.

  Guess he hadn’t seen that one coming, either.

  And then he was tearing off the bricks, and Zheng, who had sidled up next to me, and I were being treated to the sight of a couple distinguished senators throwing down.

  “He’s got good form,” Zheng commented, lighting a cigarette. “You gotta give him that.”

  I assumed he was talking about Cheung, because Marlowe had no form. Marlowe was all over the place. B
ut, as I’d discovered a few times to my cost, the dirty street fighting tactics of his youth paired well with vampire strength. It was something Cheung found out a second later, when he was blinded by some dirt Marlowe threw in his eyes and then slammed against the floor. And the wall. And the floor again, before being stomped on a couple dozen times in quick succession.

  Of course, with the little rain boots, I doubted it hurt that much.

  “You, uh, you gonna help him out?” I asked Zheng after a moment, wondering if this was going to become a free for all, and what I was supposed to do with my tiny captive if it did. My foot hurt, but not like I’d have expected. Like the vicious little thing wasn’t attacking anymore so much as doing something weird to my heel that I really hoped didn’t involve eating any of it.

  “Nope. You gonna help Marlowe?” Zheng slid me a glance.

  “Wasn’t planning on it.” I took out a joint, and he donated a light. We smoked and watched some more.

  Cheung was a slippery bastard and appeared not unfamiliar with street fighting himself. He managed to get the upper hand back by punching considerably below the belt, causing Zheng to wince in sympathy and me to wonder what Marlowe had done to deserve this. “What did Marlowe do to Cheung?” I asked, because I didn’t have anything better to do.

  Zheng raised an eyebrow, and then gestured around with his cigarette.

  It took me a second. “Wait. These are his?”

  Zheng inclined his head.

  “All these dead guys?”

  Another nod.

  I blinked, processing that. “Well, Marlowe didn’t kill them.”

  The eyebrow went up again. “You were here when they died?”

  “Well, no.”

  The eyebrow went back down.

  “But he didn’t do it.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because, in that case, he wouldn’t have called me to help him figure out who did!”

  Zheng thought about that.

  “And he hates me!”

  This was true. And well known. And appeared to be the tipping point.