Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  It would be really nice to know that, before I went chasing down a possibly homicidal angel. But it wasn’t like I had a choice. He wasn’t just the best lead I had, he was the only one.

  And good or bad or somewhere in between, he obviously knew more than I did.

  “Dory?”

  I blinked and my vision went back to normal, only to show me Ray’s face up close and looking concerned. I stood up and the alarmed look increased. “You’re not planning on going anywhere, right?”

  “Why? Were you planning to just stay in here?”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah? I told you, the triads don’t come in here. Even the non-religious ones; they’re superstitious. It’s bad luck to shoot up a temple—or anyone in it!”

  “You sure?” I said, glancing at the invisible battlefield. Now it just looked like some people had forgotten to leave their shoes outside, and had tracked in some dirt. But that wasn’t what had happened.

  “Sure enough.” He grabbed my arm; I was getting really tired of people doing that. “Not to mention Ming-de!”

  “What about her?”

  “Who do you think Marlowe was talking to just now? I told you—this is her turf. People who forget that get reminded—hard. So hard they sometimes don’t need to remember anything ever again!”

  I shook him off. “I’m not planning to get in her way.”

  “You never plan, but it always happens! And it won’t be her. It’ll be her guys, and in force, and they won’t be asking who’s who before serving up some rough justice. We need to stay in here ‘till things calm down and then I’ll get us to one of the gates.”

  Oscar gave a loud groan before I could answer and sat up, holding his head. “W-what’s going on?” he slurred. “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing,” Ray and I said at the same time. Because the only way this got worse was if Oscar decided to have another freak out.

  Only, no. That wasn’t the only way, I thought, looking around as something besides the barrage started pelting down outside. “Ray . . . you said we’re out of phase.”

  “Just a little out of phase—”

  “Then why is it raining?”

  He blinked at me. “Well, you gotta have air, right? I mean, the vamps don’t need it, but there’s tons of other people who come here. And if you let in air, then you let in the stuff that comes with it. People are always complaining about the smog from the—hey. Where are you going?”

  “The same place I was going before, only faster,” I told him, and ran.

  Chapter Eleven

  I didn’t get far.

  My feet stopped of their own volition halfway through the park surrounding the temple. I’d left by the back door, where the tall tower of the pagoda cut a deep shadow, slicing across the dim, reddish glow from the battle raging somewhere behind me. But in front . . .

  I didn’t know what the heck was in front.

  “Hey! You can’t keep taking off like that!” Ray said, running up. “You don’t know this city—”

  Understatement of the year, I thought.

  “—and we haven’t finished our discussion! That’s supposed to be a two-way street, okay? I talk and you listen, then you talk and I—” He finally noticed my slack-jawed amazement. “What?”

  I gestured outward, because I didn’t have words, I really didn’t.

  Ray glanced disinterestedly at the dark, rain-filled street and the brilliant, candy-colored smear up ahead, visible through a gap between some buildings.

  The storm was almost on us now, and the skies were so overcast that it may as well have been night. Black clouds boiled overhead, tinted an angry olive underneath, and laced occasionally with lighting. And the rain I’d heard on the pagoda’s roof was pattering down everywhere, further obscuring the view. But as far as I could tell, the buildings seemed pretty normal.

  They were the only things that were.

  Ray looked back at me. “What?”

  I stared at him. And then at the fish swimming through the air a few yards away. It was half the size of a car and appeared to be made out of steam, if steam was the color of bright blue neon. It made this part of the garden, with its manicured rock beds and tufts of tall grass, look remarkably like the inside of a fish bowl.

  The creature noticed my interest and swam obligingly closer. The rain kept smudging its outline, but a message scrawled across the hazy surface nonetheless managed to shine through. It was inviting us to eat at someplace called Chow’s.

  That really should have been chow down at Chow’s, my brain commented, before I told it to shut the hell up.

  “Yeah,” Ray said, watching me. “This place takes people like that sometimes.”

  I didn’t answer. I was too busy sprinting forward without actually telling myself to, because Dorina’s emotions were echoing through me, loud as a heartbeat, and they felt a lot like girlish excitement. Which coming from an age-old master vampire was a little concerning, although less so than the view up ahead.

  I guess she hadn’t been to alternate Hong Kong, either.

  Her unusual vision occasionally flicked on as we ran, to show me another golden footprint glowing against dark paving stones, although it was hard to pay attention. It was hard to do anything but gaze around, gaping like a tourist. And staring at what emerged when we left the dark streets around the park behind and burst out into—

  I still had no idea.

  “Just take it slow,” Ray advised. “It’ll start to make sense in a minute.”

  You know, I seriously doubted that.

  The buildings lining a busy, four lane highway were the least weird things I saw, so I fixed on them, not that it helped much.

  Some looked relatively new, with the usual concrete stodginess and city grime. Others obviously dated back centuries, with Portuguese or Japanese touches—bell towers, red tile roofs and upturned gables—protruding out here or there. But all of them had rickety looking bridges stretching between them, connecting them to other buildings across the road or sometimes to each other, in a completely haphazard way.

  A few of the bridges were made out of concrete and seemed relatively solid. But most were old wood and rope affairs sagging perilously low, almost down to street level in some cases, and there were tons of them. Some were connected to the anchoring buildings at the second or third story, but most spanned the heights above, crossing and crisscrossing, going up, up, up.

  And to make the whole thing even crazier, while the bridges started on one story, they often ended on a different one across the road, at times three or four levels higher or lower. That caused their buildings—because many of the larger bridges were themselves lined with small buildings—to lean precariously one way or the other. That was okay, though, because the locals had taken to propping them up with whatever was handy.

  Just from where I was standing, I could see a rusted bus, a bunch of metal shipping containers, a pile of old cars, half a forest’s worth of bamboo scaffolding, and three old ship’s prows, all serving as buttresses. Or possibly as extra rooms, since there was a light on in one of the latter, which had been wedged beneath the sagging second story of the house next door. Its bare breasted figurehead was still attached and looked cramped and slightly put out at the lack of room.

  It was insane.

  Although not as much as the street below, which everyone seemed determined to avoid at all costs. Maybe because the speed limit ranged from watch your ass to fuck you. Or maybe because of the could-collapse-at-any-moment bridges. Or maybe . . .

  Because those weren’t cars.

  “What . . . are they?” I asked Ray, who was jogging alongside, looking like he was waiting for my brain to catch up.

  He followed my gaze.

  “Flying rickshaws.”

  Yeah, I guessed they’d have to be, I thought vaguely.

  Most of them didn’t even have wheels.

  They didn’t have drivers, either, at least not most of them. I guessed the reins looped arou
nd the handlebars allowed the passengers to do the steering, giving the small vehicles a weird chariot-like vibe. And the levitation charms somebody had smacked onto their undersides served to keep them off the ground, although many listed a bit one way or the other.

  But it was the outboard motors strapped to their backs, along with the large fans they powered—some caged but some bare bladed in a shred-your-shit-if-you-get-too-close, this is chariot racing and it’s Ben Hur style, baby—that allowed them to zip over and under the lower bridges when they got tired of the road and I was done now.

  I was so freaking done.

  Only I wasn’t. Because all that was just the backdrop for the . . . stuff . . . moving around everywhere, lighting up the crazy. And I do mean everywhere.

  “You wanna sit down?” Ray asked. “Don’t look directly at it; it’ll make you dizzy.”

  Too late.

  But how could you not look?

  A huge Chinese dragon snaked through the bridges overhead, its almost transparent body riddled with raindrops, but still managing to advertise something on its scaly side. You’d think that sort of thing would catch the eye, but it was only one of thousands of animated banners all vying for attention, moving through the chaos or floating above it. Like the trio of anime characters riding a fuzzy-looking hot air balloon just overhead, waving and gesturing at the basket, which flashed words I didn’t know in Japanese.

  Or like the trio of three story geishas that flirted from a nearby wall, and pointed us at a door below with their fans.

  “You don’t wanna go in there,” Ray advised. “That’s Sho’s place. He waters the drinks and loads the dice.”

  “I don’t want to go in there,” I said, feeling strangely furious. “I want to know what those are.” I pointed at the geishas.

  Ray scrunched up his face. “What what are?”

  “The girls. The geishas! The massive chicks with fans?”

  He blinked at me for a minute. “Seriously?”

  I gave up and started forward again, wondering how I was supposed to deal with this latest curveball, when Ray pulled me back. “Haven’t you ever seen magical graffiti before?”

  “Not like that!”

  And for good reason. Tagging buildings in human society might get you a misdemeanor and a mop, but in the magical world, you were looking at hard time. Even the dimmest of norms tended to notice when the chalk or paint on the side of their building freaking moved.

  “Yeah, I forgot New York’s got all these rules.” Ray made the last word sound like an expletive. “What you gotta remember is that Hong Kong—this Hong Kong—is a fully supe city. Nobody gets in here who’s not a supe or working for one. So there’s less restrictions.”

  I’d noticed.

  But that didn’t help my situation. The city looked vast, just the little I could see of it, and there was gaudy, brighter-than-neon light everywhere. And jangling music that much of the stuff was playing, set at ear splitting levels to overcome the sound of all those motors, most of which hadn’t bothered with a muffler. It was sensory overload, and it suddenly made sense that there was a battle being fought a couple blocks back, but nobody seemed to care or even to notice.

  Because who could notice anything through that?

  Or track anyone, I thought, as my vision suddenly went flipping like I had on crazy goggles, but showed me exactly zilch. There was enough graffiti, with enough magic imbued in it, to obscure even the Irin’s golden glow. Even worse, some of the street art wasn’t in paint.

  A shifty-eyed cat on the side of a nearby building, faded and cut through with a line of cracked plaster that showed the brick underneath, nonetheless managed to tell us the time on its fat little tummy. It seemed impervious to the rain that had started to bead and run off its surface, as if it had weathered many storms before. But an animated folding sign, which had been hanging about the area in front of a bar, tripping up tourists and showing off the days’ specials, was now spazzing out. It was running in circles, its once crisp lettering bleeding like wet mascara in the rain, and shedding gold, red and black colors all over the sidewalk.

  The paint had more magic in it, because it was meant to be permanent, I guessed. Or at least fairly long lasting. But the chalk graffiti, which was probably changed on a regular basis, was a different story. And it didn’t like the rain.

  Colors had started to run all around us as the rain beat down harder, spotting and staining the dirty sidewalk and flowing on streams of water around bits of trash, like multicolored rivers. The gutters were flowing with iridescent rainbows, as oil and mud and magical chalk dust all swirled together. The buildings were weeping rainbows. And not even Dorina could see anything through all that.

  The trail had just gone cold.

  “Cut it out!” Ray said suddenly, and for a confused second, I thought he was talking to me.

  Then I noticed the tentacles.

  And that’s how I learned that the geishas were the cut rate version of the local advertising. Sho’s painted cuties had pouted prettily when we continued past, but others were a lot more aggressive. Half the signs weren’t content to just stay on their buildings. They didn’t wait for you to come to them, they came to you, and the closer you got, the more attention you attracted.

  A lot more.

  And some of them had enough magic to have heft and weight—and were willing to use it. As we discovered when we had to fight our way past the pushy octopus trying to drag us into a sushi place. And through a storm of butterflies that almost suffocated us while advertising a brothel of the same name. And outrun an animated noodle bowl as tall as I was that chased us down the street for half a block, brandishing chopsticks menacingly.

  Only to be spotted by a giant samurai, because I guess this was the Japanese section, who jumped off his perch on the side of a bridge, almost causing a wreck in the road below, while trying to talk us into watching some bushido fights.

  We ran into a tiny alley to avoid him, cowering under its cover of ethereal umbrellas. They did nothing to block the rain, but slowly changed color from palest pink to deepest rose, casting slowly moving circles, like scattered rose petals, all over the ground. Which even I had to admit was ridiculously—

  “Dory!”

  I blinked when Ray snapped his fingers in my face.

  “What?”

  “I said, what are we doing here?”

  I narrowed my eyes, because that had sounded angry. “You know what—”

  “I know Cheung’s boys are out there, right now, pissed as all hell!” he gestured at the street. “I know our exit from the human city was memorable enough to tell them exactly where to find us, and the nearest regular entrance to this place isn’t that far. And we don’t have protection out here like at the pagoda.”

  “You really think he’d have cared about that?”

  “Well, he won’t have to now! And Ming-de’s boys are on the way if they aren’t here already, and since we were seen messing about that damned pagoda, they’re probably looking for us, too! This is about to blow up in our faces!”

  “So what would you suggest we do? Go back and cower at the—” I stopped, suddenly realizing something. “Wait a minute. Where’s Oscar?”

  “Back at the pagoda. Probably picking splinters out of his ass.”

  “You didn’t bring him? Why didn’t you bring him?”

  “Because he’s a stumbling wreck? And that was before he got his brain fried by that jerk Marlowe. You’re not supposed to use a trumpet like that. They’re for emergencies only, not for lobbing pigs at gangsters! Guy’ll be lucky if he ever talks again—”

  “Well, he won’t to us, not now,” I pointed out. As much as it pained me to admit, Marlowe had been useful. It looked like we were on our own.

  “—and I didn’t know we were going on a tour of the city!”

  “We wouldn’t have to if I could see!”

  I poked my head back out of the alley, and thankfully, the samurai had gone off to pester someone else. O
r maybe to find shelter. The rain was bucketing down now, wetting the sidewalk and sending the neon colors of the weaker graffiti smearing all over everything.

  I watched them slide together like a tie-dye in progress, and felt a twinge of guilt about Oscar, who I didn’t get the impression was exactly a field op. But I assumed Marlowe was back in control by now and would keep his guy out of trouble. And, anyway, he was a master vampire! He could handle himself.

  What I couldn’t handle was losing the trail when we were so close I could feel it.

  I closed my eyes for a second, to block out the jangling cavalcade, and tried to think. Angel boy had been in that basement, had travelled all the way to Hong Kong, had shown up at that clothing shop. And then what had he done, exactly?

  Gone and hung out in a pig truck, possibly for hours—no make that definitely for hours, because the ashes were already cool when we arrived and his footprints had been under them. So, he’d shown up before the firebug, at least long enough to get out successfully, and then . . . what? Just decided to have a nap with some pigs?

  Or maybe he hadn’t had a choice.

  Those golden splotches I’d been following were power—a lot of it. He was leaking it like blood, probably because of the work of those new, deadlier bullets, and he’d needed a nap where no one in their right minds would think to look for him. He’d chosen the pig truck, because he figured it was on a route and would be back that way eventually, or because that had been as far as he could go.

  So, he rests up and then what? He goes to the pagoda. Had he been attacking it and someone stopped him, or had someone else been at it and the reverse was true? Or had two opposing groups just happened to meet up there, and had such a battle that it threw one of the pillars out of alignment, dumping a temple into an intersection?

  Either way, he’d had to rest up in order to get this far, and had then been in an all-out fight. He’d won, or gotten away at least, because I’d followed his trail into the city. But now . . .