Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  Where was he now?

  I opened my eyes and stared at the graffiti, which really didn’t seem to take rain well. A nearby gutter was pouring off a building, right above where a large Pikachu was hopping around, or what was left of it. The huge, bright yellow head was half gone, melted away into the street, where it ran in bright streamers across the sidewalk.

  I wasn’t going to get any more help from tell-tale footprints.

  But maybe I didn’t need it.

  I turned to Ray, who as expected, was still bitching.

  “Where’s the nearest pharmacy?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sometimes, detective work is a lot of running around, questioning people, and putting clues together. Sometimes, it’s long, boring stake outs, where you hoped you remembered to bring a sandwich and a cut off milk jug, because there’s no way to take a break. And sometimes . . .

  It’s all about hunches.

  “There’s another place a block over, but they’re a bunch of crooks,” Ray was saying. “Of course, that’s par for the course around here, but—”

  I waved a hand, and he stopped abruptly.

  This is it, I mouthed, nodding ahead, to where a set of footprints he couldn’t see disappeared inside some ornate wooden doors.

  The pharmacy was in one of the older buildings that populated the city—like really old. It was three story, made out of wood, with carved wooden shutters even more ornate than those on the pagoda. It had an entryway with a turned-up, tiled roof that protected the area around the door and was how I’d been able to spot the footprints. The whole thing looked like something out of time.

  It also looked deserted, which gave me an eerie feeling that wasn’t helped by the locale.

  The pharmacy was at the end of one of the winding, tunnel-like alleys that led off the main road. This one was narrow enough to give me claustrophobia, or maybe that was all the crap dangling overhead. It looked like a mad hoarder lived up there, with enough clotheslines, old crates, rusted pieces of machinery and assorted ship parts being sort of supported by a haphazard bamboo lattice to stock a salvage yard.

  Or maybe that shiver up my spine came from being watched.

  I craned my neck to see a couple kids directly above us, kicked back in the cockpit of an old airplane. It appeared to be circa World War II and looked like it had crashed into the crap and just not made it all the way to the ground. But around here, it was just as possible that someone had put it there, dangling precariously over the street from a couple stories up, for . . . reasons?

  I didn’t know.

  But apparently Ray did.

  “Watch ‘em,” he said quietly. “Ten to one, they got a fishing pole up there.”

  “For what?”

  “For that! Little bastards!” he yelled, as one of them hooked his wallet, with a line so fine that it blended in with the rain. I hadn’t even seen it.

  Dorina hadn’t, either, and she laughed delightedly.

  My twin had a weird sense of humor, I thought, as Ray leapt around—unsuccessfully—for the prize the kids were now slinging this way and that, trying to reel it up before—

  “Got it!” he crowed, jumping what had to be a story into the air, and snagging it off the end of the line.

  The kids took the loss with complacency, one of them reeling up their line, while the other shot Ray the bird. There’d be more marks along soon, and they could probably disappear into the rabbit warren of bridges, shacks and junk up there before anybody could blink an eye. There’d be second chances for them, but not for us.

  Which is why I gave up on stealth and sprinted for the door.

  It wasn’t locked much less guarded, and I burst into a room so dark that I immediately went into a crouch beside a counter, to give my eyes time to adjust before anybody shot me.

  Only nobody did.

  Nobody moved or breathed or did anything else, either, except for Ray, coming up behind. And asking me what I was doing down there. I was kind of wondering that, too, because I forgot—seeing wasn’t really Dorina’s problem.

  Sure enough, the next time I blinked, everything snapped into high def. And showed me a large, dim room filled with dust motes turning lazily in the air, some Japanese wood cut prints on the walls, lots of shelves holding blue and white ceramic pots, and several Chinese lanterns elaborate enough to qualify as chandeliers. They had dangling crimson tassels and golden paper sides, but Japanese lacquered bodies. They looked like the city outside: a weird amalgam of different styles, or like a movie set, if the movie took place in a traditional Chinese pharmacy in Japan.

  But if so, the actors were missing, because it looked like nobody was home.

  But somebody had been.

  Ray started forward, but I grabbed his arm. The golden footprints were a lot clearer in here, where nothing had been able to disturb them. They cut across the floor of the big outer room and through a couple of wooden sliding doors that were still partway open.

  And showed me nothing but darkness inside, even with Dorina’s vision.

  I felt a tingle go down my spine. Even worse, I felt Dorina suddenly snap to attention, because there was nothing she couldn’t see. A small growl escaped my lips.

  “Can you not?” Ray whispered nervously.

  “Stay here,” I told him.

  “Like hell—”

  “That wasn’t a request.”

  I got full on pissy vamp face for that one, because although Ray had his issues, he was stupidly loyal. But when I started forward, he stayed put. How long that would last, I didn’t know, so I didn’t waste time.

  The sliding doors let out into a similar room—I guessed. That was from the feel of the same wooden boards under my feet, ones that squeaked way too much for comfort. Especially since the damned inner sanctum was black as pitch. It shouldn’t have been; some light should have filtered through, at least around the door. But all that met my eyes was oily blackness, thick and cloying and faintly—

  Dorina spun us, suddenly enough to rip a small “ah!” from my lips, swept out a leg and sent somebody crashing to the floor. Somebody who was quick as lightning and back on his feet, almost before he landed. And it was a he, judging by the weight of the body when it briefly hit down.

  I wanted control of my own body back, but didn’t have time to ask for it before Dorina was slicing and dancing and ducking and ricocheting—the latter off what I guess was a wall, after we were thrown into it.

  And thrown hard.

  It didn’t knock us out, but only because she knew how to land, and to use the momentum to spring off the wooden boards, which gave slightly, and to vault back though blackness in the direction of a footfall.

  “Dory!” Ray hissed, from somewhere near the door.

  Shit!

  The attacker turned and fired at Ray, and Dorina roared, a sound of pure fury because Ray was ours, and nobody touched what was ours!

  The damned man was fast, and jerked back around, apparently surprised that we were still active. Only to take a pissed off master vamp to the face. Dorina’s fangs were out; I could feel one nick my lower lip as we slid seamlessly into slow-time, the enhanced mental state vamps use when shit is about to hit the fan.

  Or when they are about to rip someone’s throat out.

  I felt our fangs slide across warm flesh—across but not in. Because, despite the advantages of slow-time, despite the fact that I had time to smell the creature’s sweat and the scent of rain he’d brought in with him, despite the fact that he never had a chance to utter a single syllable, magic suddenly flooded the air around us. And then we were being thrown, not by hands but by some kind of spell, across the room and through a wall.

  And this one wasn’t made out of wood.

  Old, crumbling bricks rained down everywhere, my spine declared that it had just received a new dent, and dust billowed into the air. And light—almost blinding after we passed out of that terrible darkness—flooded down from somewhere above in a brilliant cascade. One that al
lowed us to see a man coming through the wall behind us, his eyes widening as we came off the ground with liquid speed, a snarl on our lips and a gun in our hand.

  One that did fuck all, despite us emptying the clip before he could move, because the bullets stopped feet away from his body.

  They hung in air, caught by the wavering blue shield he’d created, and thrown outward what had to be five feet in all directions.

  So, a mage, then.

  Good, Dorina snarled.

  Bad, I thought. And, sure enough, the gun in our hand suddenly burned red hot, like it had just come out of a forge. I was forced to drop it, our skin searing and smoking, even as Dorina flipped us over the bastard’s head. And started clawing our way through his shields from behind, something that shocked me almost as much as it did him.

  I . . . hadn’t actually known you could do that.

  Then Ray screamed, “Bag!” And my duffle, which I’d dropped in the outer room, came flying through the air.

  Dorina caught it with one hand, which she then released to my control, while she kept digging with the other.

  The guy’s shields were impressive; the watery substance that made them up sloshed around, filling the gaps Dorina was making almost as fast as she carved them out. And allowing him to spin under our grasp, since we were actually touching the outer casing of the ward instead of him. For a half second, he just stood there, staring at us.

  As if to say “what is this crazy bitch up to?”

  That, I thought, and slammed something down onto his shield.

  Because, as I said, vamps and dhampirs are magic, but we don’t make magic. But I knew plenty of people who did. And some of them were war mages.

  Thank you, James, I thought, and mentally grabbed Dorina, who was still digging trenches in the guy’s shields.

  Until I pulled her off and sprang back, right before the fireworks started.

  “Huh,” Ray said, picking his way through the rubble-filled gap in the wall. “Where’d you get that?”

  “James—and Rufus,” I panted, because one of my war mage contacts also had a dad in the magical weapons trade, who in some cases was even more of a badass than his son. Rufus liked experimenting, and wasn’t bound by all the rules that govern what war mages are and are not allowed to make for the public.

  And it looked like James might have accidentally slipped me some of his dad’s stash, I thought, as the mage stumbled back into the room, twisting and writhing and fighting and cursing, as the multipronged spell I’d unleashed gave him hell.

  “Is that new?” Ray asked, looking impressed.

  “You know, I think it’s new.”

  “Whelp, that takes care of that—” he said.

  Right before the war mage thrust an arm through the explosions and the acid-like bombs eating through his protection and the chains waiting to wrap him up, and ripped the beleaguered shields off like a cloak.

  And popped out a brand-new set.

  “—or not,” Ray finished, his voice a little higher, as the infuriated mage threw a dozen spells at us.

  One of them wrapped Ray up like a mummy and a flick of the mage’s wrist sent him slamming against the ceiling. Where he stayed in a lump of gooey white, like some huge spider had gotten hold of him. The rest of the spells had been aimed at me, and I didn’t know what they did, because I’d somehow gotten a shield up in time.

  It was good quality—I only buy good quality, because you see the kind of stuff I have to deal with—but it was being lashed at by volley after volley of next level magic, to the point that the ten-minute timer was halfway down and that was after maybe fifteen seconds.

  There went five grand, I thought.

  And, okay, pissed now.

  But not as much as Dorina. She was scrambling around on the floor, looking through the stash spilling out of my duffle as if she’d never seen it before. Which I guessed she hadn’t. Because someone with the power of a first level master doesn’t really need to buy weapons; she is one.

  But she was one behind a rapidly failing shield.

  Make that a failed shield, I thought, as it popped, about nine and a half minutes before it was supposed to, but we weren’t immediately immolated. Because Dorina had shifted to fuck-it mode, and just thrown the whole duffle. Which normally wouldn’t have worked, because you have to activate all those spells.

  Which the mage handily did for us, when his volley hit my magical weapons cache mid-air.

  At least, I assume it did. I didn’t see what happened, because of the explosion, and because Dorina had taken that same second to throw us back through the wall. We hit down in the next room and rolled behind the remaining bricks, our arms over our head and our ears ringing. While what sounded like Armageddon took place next door.

  I’m not even sure what all was in there, I told her, because I’d done Rufus a favor recently, and some of it had been gifts.

  Really powerful gifts, I thought, as the barrage went on and on and on.

  Finally, it stopped, and Dorina and I dared to poke our head up.

  The wall had finished collapsing, much of it on us, so it took a moment to dig our way out. We’d also acquired some cuts and bruises, although no broken bones. The dhampir stat has a lot of drawbacks, but resiliency isn’t one of them.

  Weirdly enough, the mage didn’t look that bad, either.

  We picked our way through to the next room and hauled him out from under the rest of the wall and half the ceiling. Ray was still stuck to the other half, and making unhappy noises, although they sounded more pissed than hurt. So, I took a moment to examine the mage.

  Blond, big nose, bigger muscles, piercing green eyes that suddenly popped open—

  Only to be closed again by Dorina’s fist. Damn, that hurt. I shook it off.

  And then I shook it off again, because the man had a skull like solid steel.

  I relieved him of a potion’s belt full of nasty looking stuff, a couple guns he obviously hadn’t needed but I did since he’d just melted my other one, and an assortment of knives. I was holding one of the latter when Dorina informed me that I should wait to kill him until he woke up; that he made good sport. I mentally stared at her, not sure what to be more concerned about: that she thought I went around stabbing unconscious men or that she wanted to hunt him for fun.

  I decided it was one of those things to be addressed later.

  He also had a set of magical cuffs, so I restrained him with his own stuff, gagged him for good measure because he was a bastard, and went to cut Ray loose.

  I didn’t make it.

  I paused, halfway up a wooden ladder. It led to a narrow balcony that ringed the room, where walls full of tiny wooden drawers held all kinds of pungent stuff. But the reek of herbs and old medicaments wasn’t what had stopped me. No, that would be something lying on the balcony floor. Something huddled in a crumpled mass of gold—the source of all the light, I realized. Something that looked a lot like—

  “Angel boy!” Ray yelled, finally working his mouth free of the wrappings.

  Yeah, I thought.

  That was him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I finished slicing through all the goopy stuff around Ray, and he fell with a thump onto the balcony.

  “Damned dirty mages!” He flailed around, trying to get the sticky wrappings off his clothes. And regaled me with a description of exactly what mages in general, and this one in particular, could do to themselves.

  I barely noticed.

  The fallen angel—literally, in this case—was slumped on the boards, his black hair spilling around a large, muscular body. There were no wings evident at the moment, but I didn’t need them. I’d met this guy before.

  “You know him?” Ray asked, I guess seeing something on my face.

  “He was in New York a while ago. He’s one of the good guys—I think.”

  “So, of course, he’s dying on us. Great.”

  I wanted to argue the point, but couldn’t. The Irin looked like he was
sleeping, with long dark lashes resting on suntanned cheeks and a peaceful expression that made him look, well, like an angel. But there was an entire pool of power under his body, gilding the boards and dripping off the edge of the balcony, like gold paint if paint was made out of light. It glimmered and gleamed, but when I reached out and touched a bit on a nearby board, I felt only wood.

  I was out of my depth here. I had no idea what to do about a dying angel, or whatever he was. Fortunately, I knew somebody who might.

  Unfortunately, I was in a phased city on the other side of the planet in the middle of a typhoon. My reception sucked. “Damn it!” I shoved my useless phone back into my jeans.

  “Here, use mine.” Ray handed me an old flip phone. “I hadda mage do stuff to it, back when I was with Cheung.”

  “It works here?”

  He scowled. “For what that scammer charged me, it better.”

  It did. There was still a lot of crackle on the line, but after a minute, the call went through. The sleepy voice of my roommate, Claire, answered on something like the fifteenth ring.

  “This better be an emergency,” she told me, yawning.

  “It is.”

  “Dory?” I could almost hear her coming awake. “Where are you? Why are you on the phone?”

  This was a fair question, since I was supposed to be in a bedroom down the hall.

  “’Scuse me, coming through,” Ray said, pushing past and sliding down the ladder. I moved over to let him pass.

  “It’s a long story,” I told Claire. “I’ll fill you in later. You know anything about angels?”

  I heard her sit up, and could almost see her shoving frizzy red hair out of her face, and dangling long legs off the side of her bed. “What?”

  “Angels. Well, I guess they aren’t really. They’re called Irin—”

  “Irin?” Okay, she was awake now. “What about the Irin?”

  “Oh, good, then you know them—”

  ‘“No, not good! Dory, what have you got yourself into? And where are you?”

  “Hong Kong—”

  “Hong Kong?”