She stuck her head under the couch again, searching for the gun barrel, when a flash—like a blast of lightning—illuminated the room. She looked up to find the young man’s arm outstretched toward the intruder, and a sparkle of what looked like electrical energy on his fingertips. The blades of the intruder’s daggers were sparking with power, too.
“The blades of the Snake can diffuse your Shen power, boy!” the intruder snapped, but Chin lunged at him again.
Anne had no idea what was happening, but she knew whatever it was, she’d feel better with her gun reassembled. She reached under the couch again to look for the barrel, but a movement to her left caught her eye and she saw someone else. Someone she recognized from class. Maggie Anderson stood quietly in the doorway with her eyes closed, as if concentrating hard on something. Then, she opened her eyes and looked at Anne’s china cabinet. It jerked and skittered a couple of inches—and then it lifted slowly off the floor, hovering about three feet in the air before it flew across the room, straight toward the man. He dodged out of the way and it crashed to the floor. Maggie raised her arms and pointed both hands at the man and a ripple of pink fire shot out of her fingertips, blasting him backward, into the wall, as one of his knives skittered away. When he slid to the floor, he left a cracked indentation in the shape of his body in the plaster.
And there goes my security deposit, Anne thought.
The young man turned toward Maggie, his eyes wide. “Did you do that?” he demanded.
She seemed just as stunned as he was, but she nodded and gave him a little smile. “I told you, Raphael,” she said. “I can do lots of things.”
But there was no time for her to gloat. The man was on his feet again, his look of pleasure now turned to rage. He glared at the girl for a moment and adjusted his hat.
“Okay,” he said, his tone menacing as he spun his remaining knife. “No more fun.”
Raphael rushed him and was immediately brought down with a brutal kick. Chin must’ve snatched up the intruder’s other knife because he charged forward with it now. The two blades spun and clashed against one another in a blur of sparking silver, so fast Anne couldn’t follow their movements; all she knew was that one of them was bound to end up dead. She glanced over at the doorway. Maggie was leaning against the wall now, looking a little pale. Whatever crazy power she’d used to levitate the china cabinet and shoot the pink lightning bolts had drained her.
There was a final clatter and flourish of steel, and one of the long knives skittered to a rest next to Anne.
She looked up in time to see Chin spin his knife upward to leave a long slash on the side of the intruder’s face and knock his hat off. The man backed away from Chin, snarling in fury.
“You got lucky today, old man. But your luck will run out.”
Chin had him backed up nearly to the wall now, but just as he lunged in for the final strike, the intruder hurled himself through the window in an explosion of shattering glass. Anne hurried to the window in time to see him sprinting down Main Street amid the stares of baffled pedestrians.
Chin stepped up next to her and threw the derby out the window.
“You forgot your hat,” he shouted. He pressed a button on the handle of the knife to retract the blade, and then he spun it with a satisfied flourish. After he turned and surveyed Anne’s ruined apartment, he called out, “Everyone okay?”
The young man—Raphael—was on his feet now, cracking his neck.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
Maggie was no longer leaning against the wall and a little color had come back into her face. “Better,” she said. “Miss Pembrook?”
The teacher was still a little dazed. “The three of you just saved my life,” she said. “I think it would be okay if you call me Anne.”
Chin nodded, satisfied. He was slipping the brown belt back into the loops on his sagging pants; it looked pretty knicked up. “Nice work, both of you. Not many people can say they faced down a Black Snake and lived.” He turned back to Anne and offered his hand. “I’m Chin,” he said.
Bewildered, she was still thinking about the belt. “That guy had two knives—and you fought him with a belt?”
“We use what we have,” he said simply. “We need to get out of here quickly, Anne, before more of them come. Bring the scroll. You will be safe at my house.”
She was about to protest that she didn’t know anything about a scroll, before she realized it was foolish to lie. Whoever this man was, he’d saved her life—and if he wanted to take the scroll from her, he’d have done it already. Besides, he was right. She couldn’t very well sit around and wait for the man who’d assaulted her to come back. She had no choice but to trust Chin, whoever he was.
Someone else stepped into the doorway now. He was tall, with a shaved head, and wore a T-shirt that had Little Geno’s emblazoned across the chest. “Somebody order a pizza?” he asked, with an accent that sounded straight out of Italy. He looked, with childlike curiosity, around the demolished apartment.
Suddenly, Anne laughed. The whole thing was just so unbelievably absurd. Raphael laughed, too and then Maggie joined in.
“Yeah,” Anne told the giant holding the pizza box. “The pizza is mine.”
Chin was the only one who remained serious. “All right,” he said. “But we’re taking it to go.”
The snow had almost stopped by the time Jack pulled up in front of Spinnacle. “Go ahead,” he told Aimee. “I’ll park and be right in. If Orias is here already we don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Absolutely not, she thought. Heaven forbid. She opened the door and started to get out—it would do no good to argue with her father, or protest—but he caught her hand and stopped her. She looked back at him.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed the change in you since you started seeing Orias,” he said pleasantly—more pleasantly than he’d spoken to her in a long time.
“Really?” She hadn’t thought it showed—in fact, she thought she had been covering it pretty well. “What do you mean?”
“You’re like the sweet, cooperative little girl I used to know,” he said indulgently. “You’re making your old man pretty happy.”
“Oh . . . good,” she replied vaguely, thinking as she went inside how he’d always been too busy to notice that little girl hadn’t been around since she was about eight.
Orias was waiting, already seated, but he rose as the maitre’d led her to the table—and she smiled up at him. She would never get used to his old-fashioned, old-world manners, she thought.
No, she wouldn’t—of course she wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to know him that long, certainly not long enough to care about his manners. All she needed from him was a little more information on how to use that teleporting thing so she could go back to 1877 and find her mother. If she could teleport into the future, she reasoned, then she should be able to travel into the past—not that she was ready to admit that she had teleported to a future that had Orias’s red tent in it. A wave of unexpected euphoria washed over her briefly as she remembered those few blissful moments with him, when she thought he was her husband.
Spinnacle was crowded and several heads turned when he bent to kiss her cheek and then held her chair as she sat. Fortunately, there was no one in the place who would be likely to tell Raphael.
Raphael. She struggled often now to remember his face, when she thought about him at all.
As other customers turned their attention back to their own tables, it dawned on her that her father wanted people to see her with Orias. That’s why he’d suggested going out to eat when Orias had called to reciprocate for (as he put it) the enchanting dinner at the Banfield home.
Jack came in then and announced that he was just going to have a quick drink and be on his way. “You young people don’t need an old dude like me hanging around,” he quipped, and patted Aime
e’s hand. But Orias, ever the gracious host, insisted that he stay.
The two men discussed business throughout the meal—business in general and some specifics about Orias’s plans for Middleburg and Jack’s desire to be involved—although Jack still insisted he was not at liberty to discuss the real estate deal in the Flats.
“But I will tell you this,” he admitted. “Cheung Shao mentioned the other day that the project he’s working on in the Flats will be wrapping up soon, and he’s going to give me free reign to spearhead new development there when he’s finished. Times are changing, and Middleburg has to change with them. So much of the Flats is just wasted space, what with all the abandoned buildings and half-empty tenements. I say purge the place—tear it all down and start over. That’s what I say.”
You would, Aimee thought bitterly. You would toss people out like trash to get whatever you’re looking for, and again she had the strange sensation that she was forgetting something—something about the Flats, and about doing something to help Raphael find . . . something. But as she struggled to bring it up from her subconscious, Orias looked across the table at her and smiled into her eyes. Her dad droned on and on about percentage profit points and bottom lines and she forgot what she’d been thinking about.
After the men had coffee and dessert, Jack thanked Orias for a pleasant evening and said to Aimee, “Shall we, honey?”
“I’d like Aimee to take a short walk with me, around town,” Orias said smoothly. “With your permission, Jack, naturally. I haven’t had a chance to see much of Middleburg yet, and it’s such a charming old place. I want her show it to me.”
“Well . . .” Jack hesitated. “If she wants to go and you’ll have her home early—”
“Within the hour,” Orias promised. “Aimee?”
I don’t want to go, she thought. At least, I don’t want to want to go.
But she did. She wanted to be alone with him. She wanted (craved was more like it) the forbidden thrill that took over when his eyes . . . and lips . . . met hers. Thinking about his lips, she looked up at him, her gaze steady. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said.
When her father had gone, she asked Orias frankly, “What do you really want?”
Delighted, he gave her a broad grin. “I love it—that you can stay a step ahead of me, most of the time,” he said and signaled the waiter for the check. “You’re quick, Aimee. Indeed, you are.” She thought it interesting that he only signed the check but provided neither cash nor credit card. “The fact is,” he continued, “I want to see Middleburg through your eyes. I told you. I want to know everything about you.” When they stood to leave, he brushed a stray curl away from her face and lightly traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. “But we won’t be doing much walking,” he finished as he steered her out into the crisp, cold air.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Raphael, Maggie and Anne Pembrook were at Chin’s kitchen table, eating pizza and watching Master Chin work. He sat upright in his chair, with the scroll laid out at his left hand and a legal pad on his right. Every minute or so, his gaze would shift from the scroll to the legal pad and he’d write a word or two. Often he crossed out what he’d just scribbled and turned back to the scroll. At last, when he had filled a page, he put his pen down, sat wearily back in his chair, and rubbed his eyes. He looked exhausted.
“It is done,” he said, and gently pushed the pad toward the teacher.
She dropped her pizza crust onto her plate and grabbed it eagerly, scanning the lines.
“Well,” Maggie asked. “What does it say?”
Raphael hadn’t gotten a chance to ask his sifu how he’d come to be riding in Maggie Anderson’s car, and he hadn’t asked Maggie how she’d been able to blast the Snake with a shot of pink fire, either. But neither event really surprised him. The more crazy stuff happened, the easier it became to accept it. He was more curious about what the scroll said.
“I’ll just read the last section of what Donovan translated, so we can get the context for Chin’s new translation,” she said, and began:
“. . . This is the treasure wise men have sought,
Since the day that the earth came to be,
With this treasure alone are you rich beyond words.
With this treasure alone are you free . . .”
Then she flipped the page and, her eyes scanning Chin’s meticulous writing, she read aloud:
“. . . In depths of the earth, beneath sentries of stone,
In an impregnable tomb it sleeps,
The power of ages protects its rest
Only one may disturb its long peace,
A princess who ne’er has lain with a man,
From exile she shall return,
Like the great queen before her
She walks with the winds,
Transcending the bonds of the earth,
As a diver through water she will pass through the stone,
For no matter or magic may bind her.
The heart of the Wheel she shall pierce with her steps
To retrieve its celestial fire.
But woe to those who grasp for the sun,
The brazen and selfish shall fall.
Live by the sword, by the sword you shall die,
These are the words of the All.”
As Anne’s voice fell silent, everyone looked up at Chin, who sat back in his chair now, thoughtfully drumming his fingers on the table.
“What does it mean?” Raphael asked.
Master Chin looked at him, a lifetime of compassion and worry brimming in his eyes, but he didn’t answer.
“How were you able to translate this?” Anne asked. “Donovan said that form of Cantonese is ancient—so rare hardly anyone knows it now.”
Chin smiled at her. “I first learned to speak and write in this dialect,” he told her. “The man who wrote this scroll was my great-grandfather.”
Anne, Raphael noted, seemed stunned by the revelation. He would have been, too, if he hadn’t known his sifu for so long.
“Who was he?” she asked soberly.
Chin stared at the table in front of him for a moment, deep in thought. “He was a prophet. A seer,” he said. “And a martial arts master. Like most prophets, he was revered by a few and hated by many. He angered the Qing Dynasty. They claimed that theirs was the greatest kingdom on earth and that the emperor was the greatest man, but my great-grandfather taught his followers about a greater kingdom—the celestial kingdom of the All.”
“Did the emperor have him killed?” Raphael asked. That was how those situations generally played out, he knew, but Chin only shrugged.
“Some said he died when the famous Shaolin Temple was burned—but at least one survivor wrote that he climbed an invisible staircase and disappeared into the clouds, never to be seen again. Still others claim he wasn’t at the temple at all. In any case, his followers kept up the traditions he taught them for many years after he was gone. His teachings gave his initiates special abilities, so he was always very selective about who he allowed into the Order. When my great-grandfather was gone, my grandfather made a mistake. He allowed a man named Feng Xu to join.
“Members were required to live simple lives. They could not use their abilities to accumulate wealth or seek political power. Feng Xu was a good student and a gifted martial artist who possessed a powerful spirit. But he was ambitious and greedy. He began using his abilities to accumulate power and riches and persuaded other members to do the same. Feng Xu was also jealous of my grandfather’s spiritual gifts, and his jealousy grew into hate. By the time my grandfather realized how dangerous he was, it was too late. Feng poisoned him. My father was still young, and no match for Feng, so my grandmother helped him get away before Feng could kill him, too.
“With them out of the way, Feng remade the Order as he saw fit. He changed its name from the
‘Order of the All’ to the ‘Order of the Black Snake.’ He communed with demons and became a skilled sorcerer. Anyone who opposed him, he murdered. Soon, he was one of richest, most powerful men in Southern China, and feared by all. Only one thing evaded his grasp—the Heart of the Eagle—and he was obsessed with my grandfather’s prophecy about the city where it would be found.”
“Middleburg,” Anne said.
Chin nodded. “The center of the contiguous United States, in the heart of the nation whose symbol is the bald eagle.”
“And they’re here for the treasure,” Raphael said.
“Treasure?” Maggie asked, her eyes wide.
Chin nodded again.
“But why?” Raphael asked. “Is it really worth so much that they’d come all the way from China to look for it?”
“The treasure is not money,” Chin said.
Raphael drew a breath, prepared to tell Master Chin about his mission with Nass earlier in the day, when they had found the spot where the treasure was supposedly buried. But then he remembered the corral behind Master Chin’s house, and the four beautiful horses Zhai had given him after their last adventure. Zhai was always out-doing Raphael when it came to honoring their sifu, but if Raphael could surprise him by capturing the treasure, Master Chin would really be proud of him. Even if the treasure wasn’t money, it had to be worth something. He had the chance to save the Flats and bring honor to his sifu, all in one night. It was settled—he and his crew would retrieve the treasure tomorrow, secretly.
“If the treasure isn’t money, what is it then?” asked Maggie.
Chin didn’t answer immediately. He merely took a bite of cold sausage and mushroom pizza and closed his eyes as he chewed. When he’d finally swallowed, he said, “We’ll never know what it is. It’s locked away where no one can reach it. If the treasure is safe, the world is safe. That’s all you need to know.”
The snow had abated by the time they got outside, and the air was fresh and cold. Aimee liked the familiar crunching sound their boots made on the ice-crusted sidewalk. “So where do you want to go?” she asked Orias.
GHOST CROWN: THE TRACKS TRILOGY - Book Two Page 38
