by Alyc Helms
The Conclave of Shadow
Alyc Helms
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Mystic in the City
2. Argent for the Ages
3. Science!
4. The Morning After
5. Light and Shadow
6. The Road to Hell
7. To Catch a Thief
8. Balancing Act
9. The Rock
10. The Hard Place
11. Worst Laid Plans
12. Short for Stormtroopers
13. Escape from Alcatraz
14. Seven and the Ragged Tiger
15. Land’s End
16. Argent Ace
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Legals
For my mom, Conna. Thank you for always telling me to take a chance.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
WB Yeats, “The Second Coming”
One
Mystic in the City
“I’ve come for Mr Mystic.”
I stopped halfway up the steps of the old Russian Hill Victorian, canvas bags filled with farmers’ market produce slung over my shoulders, sunflowers cradled in one arm, the other arm thrust through the frame of my collapsible shopping cart. All of it because I was too lazy to make a second trip up the stairs. Humans are funny creatures. The lengths we’ll go to just to avoid retreading old ground.
My cart banged against my knee when I stopped. I squinted, peering into the shadows of the landing. The late spring day was San Francisco cool, but the sun still shone bright enough to be unforgiving, even for me, and I have a knack for seeing into shadow.
I forced some of that brightness into my tone. “He doesn’t live here. Hasn’t for years.” We got visitors sometimes – fans, tourists, the occasional low-powered creep with delusions of grandeur, looking to throw down with San Francisco’s resident Ace. Westboro had picketed us once. That had been a treat. We kept police non-emergency on speed-dial and chalked it up to the price you had to pay for affordable city digs.
Even so, I leaned my cart against the railing, let my bags slide to the steps, and prepared to dish sunflower death. “Mystic Manor is a non-profit service co-op now. Nobody here but us social justice types.”
“That line really work on people?” The figure stepped toward me, into the sunlight, revealing a woman about my age with a cloud of witchy hair half-contained by a plait and the sort of loose-limbed confidence of an Eleanor Roosevelt or Kat Hepburn – the African Queen years.
“Abby.” I sagged out of my defensive stance. The sunflower heads banged against the steps. They could hack it. They were sturdy, like the woman on the stoop. “Jesus, did you have to be so dramatic about that?”
“I wanted to see what you’d do. Interesting that you went with the flowers as your weapon of choice. I’d have gone with the cart.”
“Stems. Long and fibrous. Make an effective garrote.” I struggled to collect all my bags and the cart. Abby’s appearance had unbalanced me. In more ways than one.
“Need a hand?”
I hesitated. I hated mixing lives, but if Abby was here, it was too late to prevent that. Better to move this inside where there’d be fewer witnesses. “Yeah, thanks.”
I let her take the cart and a few of the bags and led the way through the house into the communal kitchen.
Mystic Manor – don’t blame me, I didn’t name it – seemed like a fairytale castle to me when I was growing up, albeit in the Gothic vein. It had all the eccentric charm you’d expect from an original structure – pokey hallways, creaky stairways, wood moldings and crannies for collecting dust, and high ceilings for the cobwebs. The rooms were small and dark, with the exception of the huge solarium at the back of the house and the illegal bottom floor in-law I shared with my best friend, Shimizu. And the kitchen, where I’d sunk all the renovation funds not earmarked for upkeep.
“Anyone home?” I called up the center stairwell, and held my breath until I could be fairly sure the lack of answer was deliberate. It was Sunday. The Maker Fair was going on down on the Peninsula, and anyone who wasn’t there would be doing a drunk-run across the city with Bay-to-Breakers. Shimizu knew about my double identity as Mr Mystic, so I didn’t have to worry about her wondering why an Argent Ace was standing in our kitchen, and Patrick kept grad student hours. Even if he was home, he wouldn’t be stumbling downstairs until early afternoon.
“You want these anywhere specific?” Abby asked, opening the fridge with a bag of Japanese eggplant in hand.
“Hold off. I have to log them first.” I pulled down the communal grocery sheet and started marking down what I’d bought and spent. Abby put away the perishables as I noted them. I could feel her gaze on me, her growing smirk. I ignored them in favor of collecting myself via mundanity.
“You weren’t kidding about the co-op thing,” she muttered when the silence had stretched on too long.
“Mitchell Masters left his house in trust. I’d have had to come forward to claim it. Didn’t want to expose myself like that. But the executor was able make it available for non-profit use. I had him set up the residency fellowship, and then I applied. This way I get to live in the house I grew up in without anyone knowing it’s the house I grew up in.”
“Nice digs if you can afford them,” Abby said, knocking on the well-oiled walnut of the vintage cabinetry.
“The eight other fellows think so. Lets them do their work without worrying about rent. And I figured it was better than leaving a huge place like this empty.” And it meant I didn’t have to live alone. I’d walked away from my life and family in China. Having people around was better for my mental health. I set the pen down across the food ledger and folded my hands.
“Why are you here, Professor Trent?” I asked, a bit of Mitchell’s distant cool slipping into my tone.
Abby leaned against the counter, crossing one ankle over the other. Her loose khakis and worn blue work shirt were the closest she’d ever come to a costume, but her swagger was pure Argent Ace. “Ah. There’s the limey bastard everyone’s scrambling for a piece of. Would you really have choked me out with sunflowers?”
“I use the weapons at hand,” I murmured.
“Sunflowers.” She rubbed her brow, chuckling, and tucked away a few frazzled curls. “And what would you have done if someone had come looking for me after you dumped the body?”
“Are you saying that anyone else knows I’m here?” I couldn’t share her amusement.
“Oh, don’t worry, Old Man. All I told Dame Chillybritches was that I knew how to get in touch with you. If you’d answered her calls, it wouldn’t have been necessary.”
Dame Chillybritches. I bit my cheek to contain a smile. Sylvia Dunbarton, Lady Basingstoke, had been using every method in her not-insignificant arsenal to try to contact me – or rather, Mr Mystic – since his disappearance after taking down the New Wall in China. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to stop World War III. People wanted you to stick around so they could thank you for it. And Lady Basingstoke, grande dame of the Argent Aces, wanted to make sure she was standing next to you so that the Argent Corporation could claim credit.
So far, my lawyer and the lack of connection between Mr Mystic and his secret granddaughter had been enough to keep Argent off my back. But Abby knew me from my early heroing days, back when I ran around in cobbled-together ninja garb as Mistra, fighting petty street crime with my inherited shadow powers. Back before I hid myself under my grandfa
ther’s mantle of Mr Mystic. And while I trusted Abby not to blab my secret to just anyone, Professor Abigail Trent was an Argent Ace – The Antiquarian – and who could say what she might tell her bosses, the very people I most wanted to stay hidden from.
Twitchy from her continued scrutiny, I snatched up the food log and poked through the cupboards. “If I wanted to speak with her, I’d have answered her calls. You could have told her to piss off.”
“You’re the only person with enough balls to tell Sylvia Dunbarton to piss off.”
“And yet, it seems to have little effect.” I opened a cabinet to assess our grains and nearly got beaned by a bottle of zaatar. Several of the other spices had toppled. I scowled and righted them. We were going to have to have another house meeting about keeping the kitchen neat after cooking.
Abby must have misinterpreted my glare. She stopped laughing at me. “Look. She did you a solid. Argent did you a solid. We got you to China. We got you out of China. All she wants from you is a report and a photo-op. You can’t give her that?”
“Skyrocket was there. His report covers everything I’d share.” And probably a bit more than I’d want shared. “And I can’t seem to turn on the telly without seeing him smiling at me from all the morning shows. He looks better in photos than Mr Mystic ever would.”
“Tom is doing what he can, but everyone knows Mystic was at the center of what went down with the New Wall.” Abby grabbed a chair and turned it around to sit, resting her arms across the back. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but relations with China are still a mess. The People’s Heroes got a broad mandate to deal with the New Wall crisis, and they’re riding that along with a new wave of nationalism. That kid in charge of them – sorry, don’t mean to be ageist, but he looks younger than my undergrads – everyone there is hailing him as the hero of the day. And it would be really helpful if Argent could produce Mr Mystic to counter that narrative.”
“Lung Mian Zi Mien is his name.” I abandoned my diversionary puttering and sat, swallowing to contain the churning in my gut that rose up every time I heard mention of China’s new hero. Mian Zi. My son. We hadn’t spoken since he raced off to fight his sister in the skies above Shanghai. Since I’d freed the Guardians of China from their prisons by swearing myself in service to the asshole who’d imprisoned them. Which had been Lung Di’s plan from the start.
“Right. Well, this Lung Mian Zi Mien is coming to New York next week to meet with some members of the UN Security Council–”
I grabbed her arm. “I hadn’t heard that.” True, I’d been avoiding the news, but I would have heard if Mian Zi was coming to the States. Somebody who knew how much he mattered to me would have told me.
Abby looked down at my hand. I released her and tucked it under my butt. “It’s not official, so they’re keeping it quiet. He’s going to be stopping in San Francisco to attend the opening of the Argent Age installation at the California Academy of Sciences. All Dunbarton wants is for you – Mr Mystic – to be in attendance as Argent’s guest. Doesn’t have to be official. But Mitchell Masters was involved in Argent’s early days. This is his city. Hell, he’s got a display in the exhibit. It’ll be weird if he’s not there.”
Bait, bait, and more bait. I’d heard about the exhibit. My lawyer, Jack, had forwarded me several increasingly pleading invitations from the event coordinator and increasingly insistent ones from Sylvia. But none of the invitations had mentioned that Mian Zi would be there.
Missy Masters didn’t have any way of getting a call through to China’s new political darling. Mr Mystic wasn’t in much better a position. Sylvia couldn’t know how effective this bait was. Did Abby? “What do you think?”
Her smile curved. She knew she’d hooked me, even if she didn’t know why. She stood, flipping the chair back into place at the table. “I think some sort of new status quo has been unavoidable since you came out of retirement, Old Man. I don’t know what happened to your grandfather. Maybe he’s hiding. Maybe he’s dead. But you’re Mr Mystic now, and the longer you try to pretend that Argent isn’t an issue you have to deal with, the more harm you do to all of us. You can force a confrontation or you can accept a reconciliation. And I don’t think you like confrontation.”
“I do try to avoid it,” I murmured, following her out.
She paused in the doorway. “So, I’ll see you Thursday night?”
“You’ll be there?”
“You’re kidding, right? I helped curate the damned thing. Besides, I’m an archaeologist. We never turn down free museum booze.”
I don’t know what devil made me do it, save that I didn’t want to walk into Sylvia’s clutches without at least one ally, even if that ally was one of her own Aces. “Need a date?”
* * *
In San Francisco, the fog is a living thing. His name is Karl. He has a Twitter feed.
Saturday night must have been a hard one for old Karl. Sunday morning found him slumped across the Pacific like a hungover tech bro, leading edge rolling away from the bright, late-morning sun streaming from the East Bay.
I squinted against it and wished I’d thought to bring sunglasses.
“Did you know your brother was coming into town this week?” I asked Mei Shen as we strolled along the eastern walk of the Golden Gate Bridge. My daughter had moved to the city in the aftermath of the New Wall debacle, though she’d ignored my offer to come live with me at the house on Russian Hill. She refused most of my overtures these days, claiming to be “busy” with “things”. I wished I could chalk it up to being the mother to an eternally seventeen year-old girl, but Mei Shen and I had barely spoken more than Mian Zi and I had. Her excitement at being reunited in Shanghai had curdled into fake smiles and a quick change of topic any time we got too close to anything serious. She blamed me for usurping her plan in Shanghai. If she’d had her way, David Tsung would have been Lung Di’s new champion instead of me. My kids wouldn’t have to take me out to take their uncle down.
I countered Mei Shen’s forced cheer by being deliberately obtuse, and I finally roped her into giving me Sunday afternoons. We spent them doing all the touristy things natives never do: Fisherman’s Wharf, Sutro Baths, the zoo. It made talking about anything serious impossible, which might have been why Mei Shen caved so easily.
Today was ice cream and walking the bridge to the Marin Headlands, except there was no ice cream to be had on the far side of the bridge, and the wind had us both eating our hair instead.
“Pah!” Mei Shen made a face and dragged a few strands of her bob from her mouth, carefully cleaning off the cherry-red lipstick so she wouldn’t end up with a streaked face. “Yes… his fault… Argent Corporation… to me or… I don’t… he told them–”
“Wait.” The wind had also whipped away half her words. We were coming up on one of the towers. I pulled her into the half-moon observation bay skirting the tower, letting the red-painted steel cut the wind. Faster-paced walkers – mostly old Chinese couples with matching visors and Fitbits – glared at us as they diverted around us. “What’s this about you and Argent?”
Mei Shen leaned over the railing, watching a freighter pass under us, cutting the sun’s glare with her hand. The bay waters sparkled blue rather than the sullen steel color they sported when it was foggy. The Marin headlands were California gold. Even Alcatraz was a pale, picturesque accent in a sailboat-filled bay.
“You know I’ve been consolidating the Shadow Dragon Triad, yes? Retiring some of the old guard to honored advisory positions, putting a stop to the human and drug trade.”
I took a moment to gather up my hair to cover my surprise that she was talking to me about something of substance. “I’m surprised your uncle is letting you, now that he’s back on the scene,” I said. Mei Shen had usurped her uncle’s place while he was caught in the New Wall trap. In order to free the other Guardians – Lao Hu the Tiger, Gui Dai the Tortoise, and Feng Huang the Phoenix – I’d had to swear myself as Lung Di’s champion. And I’d had
to free Lung Di in the bargain. He was aeons older and more manipulative than my daughter, so why did he let her continue to run things now that he was free?
Because power corrupts. And because it puts her at odds with Mian Zi.
“My uncle has bigger worries right now, what with Lao Hu hunting him. If Lao Hu can’t find him, he can’t challenge him, and you don’t have to act as his champion, which keeps you alive.” She flicked a seagull feather off the railing and watched it catch the wind. “Yay, everyone wins.”
It could have just been the effort of talking over the wind that gave her words that sharp, overly bright intonation, but no. I heard my voice echoed in my daughter’s, the sort of thing I might say when I was pissed off and didn’t care who knew it.
“Mei Shen…” I touched her shoulder.
She shrugged me off. “You know what, it’s fine. You didn’t trust me or David, and you ended up playing right into my uncle’s plan.”
I winced. She was playing dirty. “Can we just enjoy the day without fighting?”
Mei Shen laughed. “Certainly, mother. You want to dance while Rome burns. Let us dance.”
“I think that’s fiddle,” I muttered, but Mei Shen was already striding away. I hurried to catch up. “What’s burning?”
“Perhaps I should say shaking instead of burning. Did you feel the earthquake yesterday?”
I thought back to the fallen spice bottles in the kitchen. Felt the surge of smug condescension that marked me as a native Californian. I was only surprised that I hadn’t had to talk Shimizu down from fleeing back to Iowa. She must not have felt the tremor. “Barely a three-pointer. Earthquakes happen. Doesn’t mean–”
“Do you have any idea what’s going on in my uncle’s absence?” Mei Shen snapped. “The things that he maintained that are now falling apart?”
I hadn’t the foggiest, nor did I have any clue how best to answer her. I nearly collided with her when she stopped again and pressed back against the rail, looking across several lanes of traffic to the fogged-over expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “Do you even know what’s out there? Do you ever look?”
