Dragon’s Claw

by Karen Chance

  But this . . . how the hell could I just leave this?

  There had to be something we could do, but I didn’t know what. Ray was right; we were just two people. To do anything here, we’d need an army, and where we were supposed to get—

  And then, out of nowhere, somebody rammed us.

  Or maybe not exactly out of nowhere, I thought, as a furious master vampire jumped me as our two rickshaws slung out from the protection of the building and went spinning together through the night, sending the city lights slinging around us.

  Goddamnit! Not again!

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was Cheung again, and I’d been wrong. He wasn’t furious. He was freaking enraged.

  Enraged, I thought, trying to focus, which is a little hard when somebody is beating your head against the side of the car.

  Enraged, I thought, as Ray jumped on Cheung’s back, and got a knife in his eye.

  Enraged, I thought, as Dorina finally decided that maybe I did need some help, after all, and got our left hand up—since our right had just been pinned to the bench by a knife—made a fist and punched it through the front of Cheung’s face.

  “Die! Die! Die!” Ray was screeching and stabbing, and I was cursing, because one of Cheung’s fangs had broken off in my hand, and—

  And then it hit me, along with the bastard’s fist.

  Cheung was enraged, but he shouldn’t have been. He hadn’t been a little while ago, when he’d been cool as a cucumber while trying to eviscerate me. And while I might have assumed that that was just his normal way of fighting, I knew better. He’d been a cursing maniac in every fight right up until he hit the city, got enthralled, and his emotions went on vacation. But he wasn’t enthralled now because he was enraged.

  And if he wasn’t enthralled, then his people weren’t, either.

  We had an army.

  Or maybe not, since the person Cheung was enraged at was me.

  And Ray, who Cheung grabbed off his back a second later and held in front of my face by the neck.

  “You’re going to watch him die,” he snarled, his fingers eating into Ray’s flesh. “Afterwards, I’m going to kill you—slowly. But I’m going to call your father first, so he can hear your final words, so he can know—YOU DON’T FUCK WITH MY FAMILY! I don’t care who you are!”

  “I’m not. I haven’t been—”

  “Liar!”

  “—but you’re going to let Ray go, or I’m going to make you wish you had. Right now.”

  I levelled the notgun at him.

  He looked at it for a startled second, and then actually burst out laughing. “Do you even know what that is?” he demanded scornfully.

  “No, but I’m about to find out.”

  “Feel free,” he said, and tossed Ray aside. “Look. I’m giving you a clean shot.”

  “I’m serious,” I warned him. “You think I’m not?”

  “Dory—” Ray said, sounding strangled.

  Cheung sneered. “I think you’re an idiot.”

  “Yet you’re the one wearing a stake,” I pointed out.

  And he was, because the damned man hadn’t bothered to yank it out. Maybe because that could sometimes be more debilitating than not, especially in battle, since you’d bleed like a stuck pig. And while a vamp didn’t actually need his heart to beat, he did need his blood to stay in his body.

  But it was a crap shoot, because all I needed was a good decapitation, and Cheung—first level master or not—was gone. And while I didn’t really want to kill the guy, I wasn’t going to die for him, either. And neither was Ray.

  “What are you waiting for?” Cheung asked, baring his throat. “Just one step away from your goal, aren’t you?”

  “Damn it, man! I’m serious!”

  “So am I,” he snarled. “If you think—”

  Dorina shot him.

  I stared for a moment, but not at Cheung, because the shot had just blown him entirely out of the cab. And then I screeched: “What the hell?”

  “You said to help you,” she reminded me.

  “I wasn’t done yet!”

  “Dory?” Ray said.

  “We have to work on our communication,” she said blandly.

  “This isn’t funny!” I raged. “He was a member of the goddamned vampire senate—”

  “And we care about this?”

  “When we’re on it! And at war! You can’t just—”

  “Dory!” Ray yelled.

  “What?”

  “Come and see.”

  I would have ignored him—I was kind of busy—but there was something in his voice. Something that wasn’t fear or pain or any of the things I’d have expected under the circumstances. More like wonder.

  “What?” I asked again, and leaned over the edge of the cab.

  And then just stayed there for a moment, blinking.

  Because Cheung . . . wasn’t dead.

  “That goddamned mage,” Ray whispered. “There’s something really weird about that goddamned mage.”

  No shit.

  I looked at the notgun. “What does this do again?” I asked Ray, my voice a little high.

  “They, uh, they use it when they got a really tall wall. It’s just easier.”

  “Easier than what?”

  He shook himself, and refocused. “Climbing up to do the graffiti yourself. See?” he showed me a little screen under a flip up cover. “You just draw whatever you want there, make sure there’s plenty of paint balls in the ink reserve, tell it what you want it to do, and pull the trigger. It’ll put anything you want anywhere—or it will until the power runs out.”

  The power had not run out. Because it looked like the mage had been generous. Meaning that Cheung had just gotten hit with a souped-up version of a magical graffiti gun.

  Which I guessed explained why he was clutched in the fist of a five-story tall old man with a kindly face, long white beard and traditional robe and hat. He had a scroll in his other hand, and appeared to be lecturing the furious master vamp on the weekly specials. Or, at least, he was trying to, while batting irritably at all the little vehicles zooming around him.

  Huh.

  I steered our craft over to our captive.

  The ad man’s hat had a wide brim that made a decent umbrella, keeping off the worst of the wind and rain. I parked underneath and angled the cab on a level with the man’s fist. Leaving me and Cheung all of about three feet apart.

  He looked at me with hate, but considering that only his head was sticking out of the creature’s fist, he couldn’t do much else. I picked his fang out of my palm with the knife I’d pulled out of my other one and gave him a moment. It was satisfying that, as much of a wreck as I probably looked, he was worse.

  “What are you waiting for?” he spat.

  “You to come to your senses.”

  I waited some more. I couldn’t really afford it, and neither could the city, but there wasn’t a lot I could do without help. And Cheung could help—if he wanted.

  He wasn’t looking much like he wanted.

  “Comfy?” Ray said viciously, before I could stop him.

  “Traitorous dog,” Cheung hissed. And then a bunch of Cantonese I didn’t know, but that had Ray lunging for him until I pulled him back.

  “We’re going to talk,” I told Ray.

  “You can’t talk to that bastard!” Ray spat. “He’s a faithless, ruthless, conniving son of a whore—”

  “That’s rich, coming from you,” Cheung said, and Ray turned puce.

  “We’re not going to take jabs at anyone’s mothers,” I told Cheung, while holding my Child back. “And,” I added, looking at Ray, “weren’t you just telling me that your old master has a sense of honor?”

  “When the fuck did I tell you that?”

  “You said he had a code, back in the day, that saved the lives of innocents. You said,” I raised my voice, because Ray was trying to cut in, “that people loved him and would protect him, even from the Imperial Navy, because
he treated them right. You said he couldn’t be mixed up in all this, because it wasn’t his style. Does that not equate to honor?”

  Cheung looked at him. “You said that?”

  “That . . . is not exactly what I said,” Ray groused.

  Which was true. I had embellished a little. “But that was the main gist, wasn’t it?”

  Ray looked at me furiously. “He just tried to kill you and decapitate me!”

  “Because he thinks we’re hurting his family. We’re not, but he thinks we are, and he’s a good master. He’s trying to protect his own. You can’t blame him for that.”

  “Watch me!”

  “Can you sit down for a minute?” I asked, and he grumbled but plopped his ass on the bench. I turned to Cheung.

  “Okay, full disclosure,” I told him. “The senate was less than thrilled at having you and Zheng-zi on board. I mean, they put me in a seat, in a desperate bid to keep the votes balanced, and we all know how much they love me.”

  “More than me, it would seem.” It was bitter.

  “No, they just trust Mircea to keep me in line, so I’ll vote the way they want. They don’t know what you and Zheng will do—or who you’re working for.”

  That took him a minute, I guess because it had been a rough day. But then he blinked, and the most incredulous expression came over his face. “You think—you believe—I’m not working for that—” and a rapid bunch of Cantonese followed, which I didn’t know the meaning of, but apparently Ray did because his eyes got big.

  “If you mean Ming-de, then yeah,” I told him. “That’s—”

  “Ming-de,” he snarled. “Oh, yes, Princess Illustrious Virtue. That’s the name she took, once she became royalty. Do you know what they called her when she first arrived at court? A penniless nobody with nothing but a pretty face and a willingness to screw anything that would give her an advantage! Do you know what they called her then?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Big Foot! And Freckle Nose—because she came from peasant stock and labored in the fields when she was young! And Fat Ass, because she didn’t have the sylph like figure popular in those days. Well, popular with everyone except the prince, who liked curves just fine, it seemed—”

  “Uh, yeah—”

  “But mostly, it was Big Foot, since hers weren’t bound. They still aren’t! Did you know

  that? She has burly boys cart her around on a sedan chair like some kind of hothouse flower, as if her dainty three-inch feet couldn’t possibly carry her weight, when it’s all a glamourie. Her damned feet are as big as mine!”

  “God, not this again,” Ray groaned, from behind me.

  “She’s a goddamned peasant!” Cheung raged. “That’s all she is, all she ever was until a prince decided to bed her, but how does she treat me? As though I’m dirt beneath her hugely oversized feet when I came from the same damned place she did!”

  “You gotta let it go,” Ray advised him. “You been harping on the same shit for how long? It was over centuries ago—”

  “It was not over! It is not over!”

  And, okay, we’d reached spittle-induced levels of fury here, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  “It’s over!” Ray snapped. “My God, do you have any idea how tired everyone is of hearing this shit? Hour after hour, shut up in the hold of some leaky old ship, and here we go again! If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: she don’t trust me ‘cause she thinks I’m just like her: a brown nosing, secretly vicious, social climbing asshole who’ll stab her in the back first chance he gets. When you are a brown nosing, secretly vicious, social climbing asshole—”

  “Who would have served her well if I’d ever gotten a chance!”

  “Bullshit!”

  “She was intimidated by me—”

  “You’re insane!”

  “That’s what it was, you know it’s true—”

  “I know I’m done. I’m fucking done with this, and you should be, too, if you ever wanna get anywhere—”

  “I can’t get anywhere!” Cheung all but screeched. “She won’t let me! I got away from her; I risked my life for a senate seat on the other side of the planet, and what happens? They don’t trust me because of her. They’re trying to destroy me because of her!”

  “We are not trying to destroy you!” I put in, but nobody was listening. So, I reached over and belted Cheung across the mouth, because I don’t have daddy’s gift of persuasion.

  Strangely, it seemed to work.

  “Look,” I told him, as he stared at me. “Maybe when we get back, we can clear up a few things for the senate, okay? But right now, we’re running out of time, in case you hadn’t noticed!” I gestured around at the chaos, and for the first time, Cheung seemed to actually see it instead of me.

  He blinked, as if throwing off the last of the enthrallment, which I guess a stake through the heart had started. The creature had had him focused solely on me and on the people with me—probably an easy sell since he’d already been doing that anyway. But now he blinked about at the state of the city—his city—and his brows came together.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  I sighed gratefully, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The city’s main pier looked like it had been frozen in time in whatever year they’d done the phase. That had been sometime when colorful junks and pirate ships plied the seas and crowded the port. I knew that because they still did, sitting cheek to jowl with seedy looking taverns and rooming houses with painted cuties beckoning seductively from dirty wooden walls.

  The ships were mostly taverns now, too, since there wasn’t anywhere for them to go. The ocean was only phased in for about a mile out, providing a watery highway for small craft around the edge of the city, after which it just . . . ended. There was nothing past the abbreviated horizon except for some aurora borealis type sky effects in reverse, which from what I understood was the edge of the phase.

  It drew the eye: a field of hot pink striations spearing up from the turbulent, dark gray ocean, and stretching glowing fingers toward green-tinted, lighting-laced clouds. The strangely optimistic hue matched the abbreviated cheongsam on one of the animated cuties, and the bright neon sign over a bar down the street. It did not match my mood.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Ray said, from beside me. At least, I think that’s what he said. He’d raided a nearby shop—not difficult since the whole pier was deserted—and had on an oversized rain slicker with a hood that kept flapping in his face.

  I didn’t know why he’d bothered. The typhoon was howling overhead, and the wind was pushing angry waves up and over the wooden pier, drenching us every few minutes, slicker or no. And we’d already been soaked to the skin from the rain, which despite the mass of ships clustered around, and the bridges built between the ships, and the houses built on the bridges, was still managing to dowse us.

  Not that I cared.

  The rain wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was that, by the time we’d rounded up Cheung’s boys, explained the situation, made it over here and did a few basic preparations, we’d lost another pillar. That left exactly two, the one across town where the battle was currently raging, and us. Or, to be more precise, what was directly behind us.

  Across the pebble strewn beach, a small spit of land jutted out into the water, so low that it was almost covered by the choppy waves. But it was there, and led to a rocky promontory not big enough to deserve the name of island, more like an overlarge rock sticking out of the sea. Where once, long ago, a captain had erected a small pagoda in gratitude for his safe return from a dangerous voyage.

  It was called—ironically—the Pagoda of the Tranquil Seas and was a beautiful little thing with a white body and five dainty stories with blue roofs. Despite the location, which was subject to a lot of spray and weathering, it was lovingly maintained, without a single crack in the paint or fleck
of mold on the smiling Buddha inside. I knew that because I’d just been out there with Cheung.

  He was still there, along with ten of his strongest men, arrayed in front of the Buddha. Fifty more were spaced, two by two, every few yards along the wave swept causeway. And, like Ray, they’d done some raiding, too.

  They were wearing a motley collection of armor and antique weaponry, some of it ripped off tavern walls or busted out of glass display cases in nearby shops, because it was hundreds of years old. Apparently, it was a popular décor item around here, but it wasn’t just for appearances tonight. I watched it mimic the lightning bursts overhead, with all the little sparks and flashes arcing between pauldrons, tiny brass plates and helmets.

  But not the breastplates.

  Those, I’d learned, had been deliberately left empty, so that the armor could bind to a particular wearer through the magic in his clan symbol. But in this case, Cheung’s clan symbols hadn’t stayed put. They were prowling the spaces between his soldiers, making the causeway look like a moving carpet of rippling muscle, orange fur and saber tooth tiger sized teeth.

  Even I had to admit it was impressive.

  It wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Hey,” Ray said, a hand on my arm. “We got this.”

  Again, I didn’t reply. We did not have this. Not even close.

  I knew that because I knew what we were up against. Cheung, once he’d come the rest of the way around, had been able to remember things. Not everything, not even most things, because enthrallment doesn’t require anybody reading you in. But what he had recalled . . .

  Was horrifying.

  There was a reason why some of the vampires chasing us had shields and some did not. The ones without were people like Cheung’s men, and those of a few other local big shots, who’d been enthralled. They were cannon fodder, just there to absorb whatever damage our side could deal out, and nobody cared if they survived or not.

  The ones with shields, on the other hand, belonged to a leading member of Ming-de’s court, part of the Nèigé, or Grand Secretariat, that functioned the same way as our Senate. In other words, a senator had allied with whoever was behind this, which was one thing Cheung didn’t know. What he did know was that the senator in question, Marquis Zhu, was Ming-de’s leading general.