Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  “—I won’t have a way to communicate with you, except for a phone you never answer!” Marlowe finished for him.

  “Wait,” Ray didn’t move, except to raise an accusatory finger at the other vamp. “That was you. You’re a goddamned trumpet!”

  Oscar didn’t say anything. He probably couldn’t since Marlowe was currently taking up most of the room inside his head. But at least it explained why the chief spy had sent him along.

  Most masters could see through the eyes of their servants, although how well varied by a lot. A few could even hear using their servant’s ears. But it was a rarity to find one who could take over a servant’s mind so completely as to actually speak through his voice.

  I guess having an empty head was good for something.

  “No wonder Marlowe wanted him to come,” Ray said, echoing my thoughts. “He’s spying on us!”

  “I can’t spy on my own investigation!” Marlowe snapped. “And you’ve found something. What have you found?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I gritted out, inching my way forward.

  There were glints in the ash, golden sparks that disintegrated as soon as I breathed on them, or even when I didn’t. Whatever they’d been was too badly damaged now to yield up any secrets. I needed someplace protected, someplace not too damaged by the fire, someplace—

  Like that.

  “You wanted to come along, but the senate wouldn’t let you, so you saddled us with dumbass here?” Ray continued, because bitching was something he could do all day. “No wonder Dory thinks you’re a—”

  “Ray!” I interrupted. “Come here. Slowly.”

  “What is it?” Marlowe demanded, and it was creepy. Oscar even sounded like him, all of

  a sudden, although the thin face, dishwater blond shag and slightly bulging blue eyes looked nothing like Marlowe’s sleek swarthiness.

  “Give me a minute and maybe I can tell you,” I said, as Ray picked his way across the shop and bent down beside where I was kneeling.

  “You got something, boss?”

  “Stop calling me that—”

  “You don’t like master and you don’t like boss. You wanna tell me what you would like?”

  “Yeah, help with this beam.” It only weighed about half a ton.

  “Hey, no, hold up. You don’t wanna do that.”

  “I have to do that. It’s trapping the table top.”

  “What table top?”

  “That one!” I pointed at what was clearly the large, square top of a table.

  The beam had only fallen on one side, swinging down like a huge bat and smashing into what looked like an old pool table. It went with the gentleman’s club vibe the place had going, but wasn’t properly balanced since it had been demoted to display unit. The blow had flipped it over, with the beam solidly wedged on top, holding it in place and allowing the bottom to be charred and covered with ash.

  But not consumed.

  Which meant that the floor below might be intact.

  I explained this to Ray, but it didn’t seem to help.

  “We can’t move it,” he insisted.

  “Why not? It’s not like we can hurt it!”

  “But it can hurt us. The other end of the beam is supporting what’s left of the ceiling.”

  And, damn it, he was right.

  “Oscar!”

  “Uh. Yes?” I looked up, because that had sounded kind of far away. Maybe because Oscar had left the shop entirely and taken up a safer stance in the street.

  “What are you doing out there?”

  “Um. Watching for the police?”

  Ray snorted. “Try again.”

  “What?”

  “This is Hung Hom. The triads run this whole area. There’s not gonna be any police.”

  “I—I should keep watch for the triads, then.”

  “Why? They’re probably the ones burnt this place down. Guess somebody didn’t make his protection payments.”

  “Just get over here and help us,” I told him.

  Oscar eyed the precarious ceiling unhappily. “You know, I really think I should stay out here and—aghhh!”

  I swear, it looked exactly like somebody had grabbed him by the back of the neck, and bum rushed him over to us. Only nobody was there. It was freaky.

  “Well?” Marlowe demanded. “Are we doing this?”

  Apparently so, I thought, blinking.

  Because x-ray vision was back—in a big way.

  It showed me that Ray was still wearing a back brace, due to a recent spinal injury of epic proportions; that several of the shop clerks hadn’t gotten out fast enough, leaving burnt skeletons littered about under the ash; and that the pool table was concealing a bigger secret than I’d ever imagined.

  Okay, I thought, staring down at the now-transparent wood.

  Shit just got real.

  And then the ceiling fell down.

  Ray shoved me out of the way, sending me stumbling backwards. And when I looked up again, he had Oscar by the collar. “Damn it! I said don’t move it yet!”

  “I didn’t move it!” Marlowe yelled back. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “I was talking to Oscar!”

  “Yeah,” Ray yelled. “’Cause that’s not weird at all!”

  “Would you let go of my servant?”

  “When you get him under control. He almost killed Dory!”

  “You underestimate her,” Marlowe said, but he didn’t break Ray’s hold, probably because he couldn’t. The body he was using was currently supporting an enormous hunk of charred wood, bigger than the pool table—the remains of the ceiling, I guessed. What parts hadn’t hit down where I’d just been sitting, that is.

  I’d escaped with a few bruises, but it looked like the slab might have hit Oscar on the head, because he looked a little dazed.

  Of course, he always looked like that.

  “I just bumped it,” he said defensively.

  Ray let go of him with a disgusted sound, and turned to help me up, only I was already up. And gazing around breathlessly. Part of that was due to a lungful of ash, but not all.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Ray demanded, as I grabbed my duffle bag and took off, jumping over piles of roof tiles and dodging ropes of fallen electrical lines.

  Following a line of glowing, golden footprints heading out the door.

  Chapter Nine

  I burst out of the ruined shop, looking wildly up and down the street. It was more than a little dizzying, because Dorina hadn’t fixed the x-ray thing yet. So instead of looking at dirty bricks and faded graffiti, I was staring at a noodle shop with standing room only; at a mamasan cuffing a boy in a club; at a butcher shop with a line of blood running across the floor to pour into the alley outside; and at a dizzying view of the busy street beyond it all, which got closer and clearer the longer I looked at it.

  “What is it?” Marlowe asked, grabbing my arm. “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t have time. Thunder boomed overhead, telling me what I already knew: any minute now, rain was going to flood these streets and the delicate trail would be lost.

  “Dory!” I heard Ray call out as I broke away, but didn’t have time to wait for him, either.

  I could hear my heartbeat slamming in my ears as I pounded down the street, screaming hurry, hurry, hurry. I could taste the rain in the air, above the smell of egg pancakes and garbage and urine. I could see what looked like half the city at once, including the sewers underneath my feet, because the cracked asphalt was transparent, too.

  It felt like running on air; it felt like running on nothing. I stumbled into the side of a building I could barely even see, apologized to the guy on the other side of the wall adjusting his TV, staggered into a pile of empty crates, and almost turned my ankle.

  “Dory!”

  I shook my head. There was a ghost in my way, yelling at me. Ray.

  “No time,” I told him, and pushed past, staring
around for—

  There!

  A line of golden tracks headed down the alley, solid and real in the way nothing else was, and they seemed to be staggering, too. Or maybe that was me. But when Dorina switched our vision back to normal suddenly, I couldn’t see the them anymore.

  “No! Switch it back! Switch it back!”

  She switched it back. Which left me having to navigate a see-through city I didn’t know, but there were worse things. Like losing that trail.

  The last time I’d followed a bunch of golden footprints, they’d come from a little girl belonging to an angelic-type race, who’d been scared and injured and alone. But these markings weren’t from a child. They were full-sized, adult, and far enough apart that whoever I was chasing was considerably taller than average. But the golden power oozing into the cracks in the road and glowing like a beacon, was the same.

  Just like in that basement in New York.

  And, finally, I understood one thing, at least.

  The bullet that had struck but not destroyed Kitty had done so because it had been slowed down—by hitting somebody else first. Somebody who had been meeting those men in that basement, or who had followed them there, only to get caught in the crossfire. Somebody who got out when they did not, because he had abilities they couldn’t match.

  Somebody who had recently stumbled down this street, still bleeding power, and going . . . where?

  “All right, what is it?” Marlowe’s voice demanded, as Oscar’s body caught up with me.

  “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t give me that! You’re running about like a mad woman—even more than usual!”

  “—but if you’ll shut up, I’ll fill you in.” Which I did, while ducking under gutters and jumping over mountains of shiny plastic trash bags, before bursting out—

  Into an insanely busy cross street.

  I stopped dead, my brain suddenly feeling like it was fritzing out in my skull.

  The back alley had been bad enough, but all of a sudden, it was like standing in the middle of an Escher painting, with people speeding by in front of me, in cars I had to squint at to see; with thousands more rising on all sides, populating tall buildings and whizzing about in elevators; and even more flying by underneath, as a subway train rumbled under my feet, making me lose my balance as my eyes followed what I shouldn’t have been able to see.

  And, worst of all, I’d lost the trail.

  Because the footsteps were just footsteps. Dripping with power that Dorina could somehow detect, but nothing special otherwise. They could be scattered, as the catastrophe back in the shop had shown, or blown away by the wind or overwritten by a thousand others.

  And there were at least that many people on the sidewalk alone.

  Goddamnit!

  And then I saw it—part of a single golden print in the middle of the road, visible only occasionally in between speeding cars.

  “Wait. You’re saying the Irin are involved?” Marlowe demanded.

  He sounded pissed, which was nothing new, but in this case, he had cause. I’d tried to find out a little about the Irin after my run in with the girl—and with the much larger, much more intimidating version of her kind who’d been trying to retrieve her. But all I’d learned was that they scared the living daylights out of everybody, which I guessed made sense.

  Demons are bad enough; what the hell are you supposed to do with fallen angels?

  Avoid them, seemed to be the consensus, and so I had, not that I’d had much time to track them down anyway. But now, I didn’t have a choice. If the Irin were involved, this little problem had just gotten oh, so much bigger, because they didn’t mess about with picayune stuff like human wars and minor apocalypses. I’d gotten the impression that the Irin didn’t get their hands dirty until the world was basically fucked anyway, and wasn’t that a comforting thought?

  “Dory!”

  “I’m saying one is.” I saw an opening in traffic and started for it, only to find that I couldn’t move.

  “Wait,” Oscar said, and then looked down at his hand on my arm, appearing surprised that he’d just grabbed me.

  I guess being in charge of the brain means being in charge of the body, too, huh? But I had better things to do than play games with Marlowe. Thunder clapped overhead and I shook him off.

  “You wait!” I crossed the street in what would have been a highly illegal manner if anybody followed traffic rules around here, got honked at by a couple cars and almost run down by a bicycle filled with bamboo crates filled with live chickens. I stopped on a dime, close enough to get bocked at curiously by several of the birds, before darting ahead.

  And losing the trail again.

  No.

  No!

  I stared around, but it just ended, with the few little bits of glowing power that the cars had spared running straight into a busy sidewalk, where hundreds of dirty boot and shoe prints had utterly obliterated whatever was left.

  Hong Kong didn’t need the rain.

  Hong Kong had people, a working mass of them, but not the one I’d been tracking. It was as if he’d simply disappeared—or taken flight, I thought, looking up, with a certain vivid memory flashing across my eyes. And if that was the case here, he was long gone by now.

  Damn it!

  Oscar grabbed my arm again, and Marlowe must have sent him some extra strength, because he almost crushed my bicep. The next moment, I found myself being jerked into another alley and slammed against the very hard side of a building. Which would have really pissed me off except—

  “Son of a bitch,” I said in wonder, staring at a truck spewing black smoke and rumbling down the little street in front of us.

  A truck with a glowing, golden handprint on the side.

  I looked up again and murmured a heartfelt “thank you.” Because, if I’d ever seen a sign, that was it. I shoved Oscar off, ran to catch up with the truck, which was just turning into traffic, grabbed the side and swung into a back full of . . .

  Pigs?

  Hong Kong really needed to work on its livestock transport, I thought, right before somebody tried to jerk me back out again.

  It wasn’t the driver, who appeared oblivious, what I could see of him through a small, dirty window. It was in the back of a metal plate separating what passed for a cab from what passed for a cargo area. Only both were makeshift, rattletrap, and looked like they were about to fall apart in the road.

  But at least the pigs were dead, so I guessed that was something.

  And there was plenty of evidence that I was in the right place. I’d been afraid that, whoever I was chasing had just grabbed onto the truck for a second, and that it hadn’t meant much at all. But no. Because under the fat stacks of dead porkers there were more glints of gold, only not prints this time. It was as if someone had sat here for a while, leaving traces that were then smeared around when the last group of delicious corpses was removed.

  The only problem was that I didn’t know when that had been, or where the mystery man had gone next, or—

  Or who the hell was still pulling at me!

  “Get in or get out!” I told the all but transparent body being dragged along the street behind the truck.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t invisible to the following cars, who had started honking, trying to alert the driver, and wasn’t that all I needed?

  “I can’t!” Oscar said, sounding freaked out—even more so than usual. “I—I’m gonna fall!”

  That wouldn’t have been a problem for me, because I’d frankly had enough of Marlowe’s pathetic excuse for a Child. But then mine turned up, and whatever Ray was, pathetic wasn’t the right word. Ray knew how to get shit done.

  As he demonstrated by picking Oscar up and throwing him beside me.

  That would have been okay, too, only he landed on some of the pigs. And even dead bodies can squeal when a hundred and fifty pounds of vampire suddenly crushes all the air out of their lungs. Leaving me trapped with a bunch of shrieking, thrashing, dead
bodies because Oscar had freaked out and managed to pull the nearest pile of pork onto himself.

  I decided I was going to kill Marlowe when I got back.

  “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?” It was Marlowe’s voice, but I didn’t answer because I wasn’t doing anything. I guess he was querying his vamp.

  Oscar didn’t answer, either, possibly because he had a pig sitting on his face.

  Ray hopped over the short tail gate of the truck, and we watched Oscar versus the pig anus for a while. Marlowe versus Cheung had been more fun. And speak of the devil, I thought, suddenly twisting around and staring out at a familiar sight.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Ray muttered, crawling over to peer through the metal slats on the side of the truck.

  I didn’t say anything. Because vampire master Cheung, looking suave and perfect again in a natty, summer weight suit, had just gotten out of a sleek black BMW. Or, rather, he’d gotten halfway out, then paused, his head cocked curiously to one side. Ray’s voice had been barely a whisper, but with someone as powerful as a senator, that can be enough.

  Shit, Ray mouthed, the almost transparent face managing to look chagrined. His hand tightened over mine, where I was gripping one of the truck’s slats, and for a long moment, we just stayed like that, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The truck had stopped in traffic, leaving us entirely too close to Cheung’s vehicle for comfort, but moving might attract attention, too.

  And it looked like we’d made the right decision, probably because Cheung wasn’t used to checking out the livestock wagons. He got the rest of the way out of the car and glanced around, but his eyes never even paused on us. I looked at Ray, and felt my shoulders slump in relief.

  About time we had some luck!

  But we’d forgotten about our resident jinx.

  Suddenly, we had Cheung’s full attention, as well as that of everyone else within eyesight, when Oscar threw a whole, pink, very dead pig off his face and out the back of the truck.

  And onto the roof of Cheung’s beautiful BMW.

  “Oh, holy shit!” Ray said, because it didn’t matter anymore.

  The BMW’s horn started blaring, the lights started flashing, and for half a second, Cheung stared at the fat carcass now oozing down his lovingly waxed hood.