Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  Then our eyes locked.

  “Oops,” I said, and waved, I have no idea why.

  And then Ray pulled out a gun and shot him.

  “Ray!” I yelled, because half of Cheung’s head was currently missing. “What the fuck?”

  “It’ll grow back,” Ray said, hopping out of the truck and running around the side, to wave the gun in the driver’s face. “Too bad we don’t have any of those new bullets, huh?”

  “Oh, my God,” Oscar shrieked.

  “Calm down,” I told him, as Ray completed the pig truck heist by pulling the driver into the street. “Give me a second.”

  “Oh, my God, he shot him in the face!”

  “Marlowe?” I said grimly, because one more word and Cheung wouldn’t be the only one missing a mouth.

  “On it.”

  And, abruptly, Oscar’s hyperventilating cut off.

  “How long can you hold him?” I demanded, as the truck lurched forward.

  “You know, I really don’t think that’s your main problem right now,” Marlowe said, nodding behind us.

  To where Cheung had disappeared, likely back behind the dark tinted windows of his car. The one that was currently screeching away from the curb and doing a highly illegal U-turn across traffic. Along with no fewer than three others, all black, all expensive, and all hell bent for leather on fucking us up.

  Death, or possibly something worse, was literally seconds away, and all I could think was that I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t know what the Mystery Man had been doing on the damned pig truck. I didn’t know if he’d taken it because he wanted to go to its destination, or if he was merely snagging a short ride. And I didn’t know where he got off.

  “What the—are you going to help me?” Marlowe demanded, as a strafe of bullets caused the pigs to jerk and jive.

  “No. Cheung’s your business,” I told him, grabbing a meat shield and staring around.

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Keep a look out.”

  For once, Marlowe didn’t bother asking what I meant. Maybe because, while Ray had just jumped the curb to get around traffic, Cheung’s guys had followed suit. Which was bad news for a street sign, some parked bicycles, a store with a wall of tropical fish in little baggies, and a curb side kitchen, although at least the latter got some free pork when a pig bounced off the truck.

  Marlowe stared at it for a second, looking like a man who’d just had an idea. And the next thing I knew, fat pink bodies were hurling and spinning and splatting everywhere. Because he was chucking pigs at the pursuing cars.

  And, as it turns out, flying pig carcasses with master level strength behind them quickly become fleshy bombs. The kind that explode all over driver’s windscreens, the ones they don’t smash to pieces, that is, and seriously screw up an engine when they land in the middle of it. I heard the screams and curses, smelled the scent of spilled motor oil and sizzling pork, saw when one of the cars was hit just right and suddenly went airborne, before flipping over.

  But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was desperately scanning the passing buildings for any signs of a golden glow. And I was getting better at it, despite the mayhem. Dorina’s vision seemed to be intuitive; the more it understood what I wanted, the more focused it became, and the better it filtered out extraneous details.

  Or maybe that was her, helping a gal out.

  Because my eyes suddenly latched onto a tiny golden flicker, hardly anything, barely more than a gleam of sunlight. But there was no sunlight today, not with the heavens looking like they were about to crack open at any moment. Which meant I had to move.

  “Oh, not this shite again!” I heard Marlowe say, as I jumped off the truck.

  I heard it screech to a halt behind me, but didn’t turn around. Marlowe was going to have to deal with whichever of Cheung’s boys had made it this far. I was racing the rain, dodging through a busy marketplace with stalls so close together they practically met in the middle, and there were people, people everywhere.

  But so were the little golden gleams. Here on vendor’s tray filled with counterfeit Ray Bans; there on a pole beside a candy seller, the glow almost hidden by a bunch of sugared up kids; here on a flap of canvass next to a guy selling genuine plastic jade; there on the road beside a seafood stall, glistening at the bottom of a puddle of water. One in which a droplet of rain splashed as I paused for an instant, looking at it.

  I was out of time.

  In more ways than one, I thought, as Marlowe grabbed me.

  “Fuck off!” I told him, shoving him away and heading for another glister at the end of the road. I was almost out of the market now, in an area of shops and bars, restaurants with dangling raw meat in the windows, seedy looking massage parlors, and a forest of neon signs.

  That was all right; most of the signs were still dark, waiting for evening and their time to shine, and Dorina’s vision would have grayed them out, anyway. What wasn’t fine was that the road split here, branching off in four different directions. And I didn’t know how I was supposed to search them all in the time that I—

  WHOMMMPP.

  I stopped dead.

  “Curse me all you like,” Marlowe snapped, coming up behind me. “But you are going to tell me what—”

  I pawed at him slightly.

  “—the hell is going on, and right now, or I swear—”

  I clutched his shoulder and pointed.

  “—that, consul or no, I will be there myself in two hours and then we’ll—”

  He cut off when I gave up, grabbed Oscar’s head and turned it in the direction I was already looking. It was the direction a lot of people were looking, because that . . . shouldn’t there. Right?

  Oscar blinked.

  “What the fuck is that?” Marlowe demanded, sounding outraged.

  “Oh, shit,” Ray said, skidding to a halt beside me. “Oh fuck.”

  Yeah, I thought, staring.

  Yeah.

  Chapter Ten

  Dorina switched my vision back to normal, abruptly enough to make me dizzy, but it didn’t help. Or, rather, it did, since the object I was looking at was now solid and full color, but still very, very wrong. Or very, very right, just in the wrong damned place.

  Most of the surrounding area was modern, in a run down, this-isn’t-the-right-part-of-town kind of way. Blocky apartment buildings of smog-stained concrete, rusted window air conditioners, and tiny balconies full of drying clothes towered over streets of small, fluorescent-lit storefronts and a crowd of neon signs. And then there was that.

  Whatever the hell that was.

  “What is that?” Marlowe repeated, and I guess part of his outrage was crossing over, because Oscar’s face had turned bright red.

  “A pagoda,” Ray said, looking grim.

  It was undeniably a pagoda. A very pretty pagoda with eight increasingly smaller stories as it went up, each with louvered shutters, arched windows and ornate carvings, and all in beautiful dark hardwood. The upturned roofs were painted red underneath, and bright, cheerful looking red lanterns swung from the corners and framed the doorway. It went well with the decorative stone walkways winding outward from the foundation, interspersed with lush grass, a small brook, and a bridge carved and colored like the building.

  It did not go well in the middle of an intersection in Hong Kong.

  Exactly in the middle. Even if I hadn’t just seen it appear out of literally nowhere, the street markings indicated that, a short time ago, this had been the center of local traffic. And now there was a pagoda sitting in it.

  I’d have thought I was seeing things, even with Marlowe and Ray’s confirmation, except that the little lanterns were dancing on their silken ropes, as if they’d just had a jolt, and a metal road divider was now just some mangled bits of modern art on either side of the temple.

  There was a mangled bus, too, which had my heart in my throat before I noticed the bilingual out of service sign in the window. Somebody had done an illegal
parking job, and now they had half a bus. I glanced around, but there didn’t seem to be any other casualties, although there were a lot of pissed off drivers.

  Some of whom were now honking at the pagoda.

  Because Hong Kong.

  The whole thing was more than a touch surreal, not to mention seriously worrying. And I guess I wasn’t the only one to think so. Because sirens could be heard in the distance—guess the cops did make it down here sometimes, huh—even as the crowd of onlookers started edging closer.

  “Oh crap,” Ray said, and took off.

  Some of the curious were pausing to examine the point where grass and cobblestone met stained asphalt. Others were pointing and taking pics of the brook, which was flowing out from under the bridge and spilling into the road, causing a minor flood in one part of the stalled traffic. Still others, either more courageous or more foolhardy, were heading for the entrance, and why didn’t I think that was a good idea?

  Ray certainly didn’t, judging by the fact that he’d taken off after them, yelling something in Cantonese and waving his gun. When that didn’t work, he fired off a couple warning shots, burying the bullets in the grass but nonetheless scaring the locals half to death. And, frankly, not doing me much good, either, because what the hell?

  I turned to Marlowe, but he was no use. Oscar had his eyes rolled up into his head which would have made me think he was about to faint, only his lips were going a mile a minute. But he wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t talking to anybody I could see, probably because Marlowe was having a breakneck convo back in New York, but had forgotten to sever the connection to his trumpet first.

  Leaving me with a stumbling idiot that I half carried, half dragged toward Ray, who had scared everybody else off the greenery by waving the gun and yelling like a madman.

  Then the whole scene flickered like a TV on the fritz, and I thought Dorina was playing with my eyesight again.

  Until I heard the screams.

  And this time, they weren’t coming from Ray.

  “Ray! What the—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, nodding fiercely. “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t tell you about it when I don’t know what’s going on!”

  “Trust me; you don’t wanna know,” he said, as the screams abruptly cut out, along with the reddish hellscape I’d glimpsed around us for a couple seconds.

  “I think I want to know,” I said, clutching Oscar, who kept trying to faceplant onto the grass.

  Ray started to say something, but then the cops arrived. And I guess they thought if they were coming down here, they were coming in force, because no fewer than a dozen cars converged on us from all sides. They screeched to a halt and armed officers jumped out, using their doors as shields while they trained their guns on us.

  “Shit!” Ray said, looking around. He said something in Cantonese I didn’t know, because I know all of twenty words, then thrust the gun at me and ran inside the pagoda. Leaving me armed, facing a couple dozen cops, and holding a drooling idiot.

  “Um,” I said creatively, and hiked Oscar up a little more.

  The scene flickered again, and the screams were back, hair raising and blood curdling, but the cops . . .

  Were suddenly gone. Along with the cars and the shops and the marketplace and everything else. Well, everything I understood, anyway.

  What the ever loving fu—

  “Inside!” Ray screamed, sticking his head out of the pagoda, right before some kind of spell hit the little bridge, a few yards off.

  Suddenly, there was no more little bridge.

  At least, I guessed not. I was already running, as well as I could with a hundred and fifty pounds of useless stumbling along beside me, when a hail of wood started flying everywhere. Fortunately, the pagoda’s steps were a lot shorter than the consul’s, and the roof hung over a small porch, putting us under cover pretty quick.

  That didn’t help my thigh, which took a shard I hadn’t been fast enough to dodge. Or Oscar’s ass, which had protruded as he bent over, and now looked like a porcupine had gotten to him. But a second later, I was hauling us through the doors, and Ray was slamming them shut behind us.

  “Aughhh!” I told him, because it was the only coherent sound I could make right then.

  “I know, I know.” He put up his hands. “But we should be okay in—shit! Get down!”

  I was already on the way, because Oscar had just collapsed face first.

  “What. The. Hell?” I breathed at Ray, as something exploded outside close enough to rock the building.

  “Hey assholes!” Ray yelled at the door. “This is a temple! Show some respect!”

  It didn’t look like they were showing any respect—whoever they were. “Ray,” I said ominously.

  “All right,” he told me hurriedly. “You gotta know three things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thing one: we ain’t in Kansas anymore—or Hong Kong, either.”

  “Then where the hell are we?”

  “The other Hong Kong. The supernatural Hong Kong.” He crawled past me to peer out through the louvered door, and I guess we weren’t in immediate danger, because he turned back around. “You know this used to be a pirate haven, right? In the bad old days?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, what worked for the pirates worked for the local supe community, too. Everybody started using this as a place to meet up, do deals, negotiate truces if they were in the middle of a thing, and they were always in the middle of a thing—”

  “Ray!”

  “—basically, just do business without stepping on anybody’s toes. There’s no territories here, well, except for the sections each group carved out for themselves. You know, like Chinatown, only in reverse.”

  “What?”

  He made an exasperated sound. “Like if Hong Kong had a tiny New York in it, someplace with delis and hot dog vendors and really tacky souvenirs—well, they got those anyway—”

  “Ray!”

  “Sorry. I just meant, everybody carved out their own areas, okay? Little Japan and Little Korea and Little Singapore—”

  “I get the idea.”

  “—and it just got bigger and bigger. It’s huge now—”

  “How? When Hong Kong wanted a new airport, they had to reclaim land from the sea to build it on. There’s no space—”

  “Yeah, well. That’s the second thing you gotta know. This whole area is phased.”

  It took me a second, mainly because it sounded like the battle outside was heating up and I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. And then the implication hit. “What?”

  Ray nodded. “Like how your boyfriend goes out of synch with reality a little, so he can go invisible and walk through doors and shit? Well, they did that. To the whole area.”

  “That’s not—you’re not telling me—you can’t phase a whole city—”

  “Oh, you can,” Ray said. “It just takes a ton of power. But Hong Kong sits on a ley line sink. They got power to spare.”

  He was talking about the wells of magical energy that popped up here and there around the globe wherever a lot of ley lines crossed. The senates and other groups used them like massive batteries, to power everything from spells to wards to weapons. Their one drawback was that they weren’t portable, but I guess the supes in Hong Kong had gotten around that by just not moving—much.

  “It’s just a little phase, but it’s enough,” Ray confirmed. “Or, you know, it’s supposed to be.”

  “Supposed to be?” I decided Ray was right. I didn’t want to know. But it was too late now.

  He nodded. “That’s thing #3. There’s a spell that keeps our city out of synch with the human one, ‘cept for a few entry points. It makes sure they both can occupy the same space at the same time, but never touch, see?”

  I stared at him. “And if it fails?”

  “What you saw a minute ago.” He glanced around as some plaster sifted down from the rafters when another spell crashed into something
outside. “Only instead of a temple suddenly appearing in the middle of a road—”

  “Ray!” I grabbed his shoulders. “You’re not telling me there could be two cities suddenly trying to occupy the same space!”

  He licked his lips. “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “Ray!”

  “Look, we’re safe, all right? The pagoda is one of the pillars of the spell, and it’s holding up fine. They put it in here ‘cause of that,” he gestured at the huge golden Buddha sitting placidly at the far end of the room. “People don’t usually have shoot outs in a holy place.”

  “Why have a shoot-out at all?” I asked, peering through the louvers at a reddish hellscape, a bunch of burning buildings, drifting clouds of smoke and darting dark figures. “I thought you said people built this place to solve problems, not cause them!”

  “Yeah, only sometimes the triads—or the yakuza, or the jo-pok—get stupid. They don’t do it often, ‘cause this is Ming-de’s territory and she don’t play. But every once in a while—”

  “They threaten to destroy the city?”

  “No, no. Like I told you, nobody fights in here. And this is just one pillar. You’d have to take down all six to destroy the spell, and ain’t nobody that kind of crazy. One of the spells they’re throwing out there probably just got a little too close and jolted the connection to the ley line sink. I came in here to try to fix it, but it was already fixing itself. That’s all.”

  Yeah, I thought. That’s all. Only it wasn’t.

  Dorina’s x-ray vision had clicked back on while Ray spoke, showing me a golden scuffle in the middle of the floor. There was a mass of footprints and handprints, some normal dirty ones, others that glowed like a beacon, along with some sliding falls and an outline of a large body in gold. As if someone had hit the floor hard enough to shed power all over it, like a life-sized Tinker Bell.

  That didn’t worry me so much, since Tink had obviously gotten up again, but there were also some brownish smears that I was pretty sure had started out another color.

  I’d been in enough fights through the years to know the aftermath of one when I saw it, and that had been no holds barred. It looked like somebody had come here to attack the pillar and somebody else had stopped them. But who were the good guys, and who the bad?