Heart and Soul (16 page)

Instead, he heard only the furious pounding of his heart, felt the dryness in his mouth, the maddening rush of blood through his veins. “Go away,” he yelled as he pounded at the creature.

And suddenly, the dragon did. It yelped and dropped backwards—not so much as though it had flown or jumped back, but more as though it had been pulled or had fallen.

The room was suddenly a lot more spacious without the giant head in it—and a lot brighter, since the Perigords’ lace curtain was still attached to the creature’s head.

Sweating and trembling, Nigel felt his illness fall upon him again like a heavy weight, constricting his throat and robbing him of strength. He would have crawled to the window had he not had the cane in his hand, which enabled him to support himself better than his weakened legs allowed.

The sight that greeted him, out there in the blazing morning sky of Cape Town, ranging from quite near the house to the distant blackness of Table Mountain, was unbelievable.

There were two dragons—one blue and one red—engaged in a fierce battle. Part of the battle was easily visible: the bodies twisting, the teeth biting, the bright blood—or was it ichor?—sprinkling the trees in the orchards, the roses in the gardens, marring the whitewash on the walls. And part of it seemed to be invisible. The dragons separated and jumped in answer to nothing the naked eye could discern.

From the streets, cries and screams echoed, and Nigel was aware that people had gathered to watch. He knew that Cape Town abided by Commonwealth rules, so weres would be outlawed, under a sentence of death if discovered. He wondered if there would be a Gold Coat detachment about. If they would march in and fire their powersticks at the dragons. And he wished they would.

The dragons fought with fire, too, singeing the tops of trees, and setting off a howling from the streets below. And now the sound of a fire engine’s bells was heard, and then the hooves of the horses, hastening—Nigel presumed—to put out any trees that caught fire. In the suffocating heat of the day, fires would be a real danger.

Nigel had enough magical power to suspect that the dragons were also fighting with magic. Oh, it wouldn’t be magic like his—not English magic. No. It would be foreign-dragon magic. He could almost feel it, though not see it. He could sense the fields of power extending from the creatures as the red dragon surmounted the blue and dug silvery claws into its underbelly, sending a torrent of red blood onto the street below like unholy rain.

The blue dragon turned and tried to grab at the red, but there was something in its way, something invisible that prevented it from quite closing its teeth on the red neck. And the red dragon, shimmering gold with the suddenness of—her? Nigel was almost sure that dragon was a female—turning, grasped the blue by the neck and threw it…

The blue dragon tumbled, head over tail, leaving behind the impression of a purple aura, which might have been an aftereffect of magic, or simply the trail of its passage slashing through the paler blue of the sky.

And now there was the sound of feet in marching formation from the street below, and Nigel could just catch a glimpse of a golden uniform. Gold Coats. Her Majesty’s Royal Were-Hunters. They were in Cape Town, after all. They were coming to put an end to this.

He looked up from the street to the sky. The red dragon was quite gone, and the blue dragon merely a streak of color and shimmer in the distance. Voices from the street called instructions. “It went that way.” “No, that.” “East.” “West.”

Nigel guessed that when everyone turned to look at the Gold Coats, the red dragon had disappeared. Which made sense. It could either have flown away very fast, or assumed—her?—human form, and vanished somewhere. Though where a naked woman, and a naked Chinese woman at that, could hide in this neighborhood was a mystery.

Nigel stepped back on trembling legs until he fell heavily on his mattress and hid his face in his hands.

He heard heavy steps on the stairs—Joe Perigord’s steps, he would bet on it. Nigel had come to know them. And then the door opened, and Joe said, “Thank God, you are well.”

Nigel uncovered his face briefly and looked at his host who, trembling and pale, leaned against the door frame. Nigel gave him a wan smile. “I attacked the dragon with the cane, I’m afraid.”

“Afraid? No. Don’t be. If you…if it worked…”

“I was more afraid he would set fire to the house,” Nigel said. “He would have, if the red dragon hadn’t come and battled him. Not that I’m sure the red dragon doesn’t want the same thing and means to…” He shook his head. “It is too dangerous for me to remain here, Joe. Your entire family could have been killed today because of me.”

“Nonsense.”

“Only because of the red dragon…”

“Well, that and the silver-handled cane,” Joe said, seeming to be repressing laughter with his last shred of willpower.

“I don’t think—” Nigel started, and was about to confess he didn’t trust the efficaciousness of such a weapon, when hurried steps outside made them pause, just in time to hear a light knock on the door.

Nigel checked his dressing gown, and Joe said, “Yes?”

The door opened to reveal Mrs. Perigord in the doorway. She was a middle-aged woman, whose dark hair and bright blue eyes still revealed a hint of the beauty she had, undeniably, possessed. Even if her mouth was set in a severe line and her hands were twisting at her apron, she managed to look more worried than angry. “Joe,” she said, and swallowed. “Mr. Jones…There’s a lady downstairs. She says she must speak to Mr. Jones.”

“A lady?” Joe asked, and Nigel echoed him closely.

“Well, at least she’s a Chinese woman and completely…without clothes…but she speaks like a lady. And she says she must speak to the man with the luminous hair.”

“She speaks English, then?” Nigel asked, blinking, and suddenly he was absolutely convinced this was the girl from the carpetship, and that she’d also been the red dragon.

“Oh, yes. She speaks English like a lady.”

Nigel thought of asking if she was armed, or else if she looked like she intended him harm, but he realized that would be churlish. He had been weak and at her mercy in the carpetship. And what had she done? She’d stopped his bleeding and saved his life.

He looked up at the excellent Charlotte Perigord. “Show her up, please, Mrs. Perigord.”

She nodded. “She’s putting on a gown. One of Hettie’s.” She seemed to expect them to argue, and when they didn’t, she nodded once sagely, as though her wisdom had been confirmed. She left, and returned moments later. Or rather, two sets of steps sounded on the stairs, one soft, the other heavy.

And then Nigel’s angel appeared in the doorway. Dressed in Hettie’s gown, she managed to look as Hettie never did. Though the gown was modest muslin and cut in such a way that it befit a girl not yet out—hiding everything to the neck and down to the wrists, covering this woman—it seemed to have acquired a sensual quality of its own, as though its folds, and the way the simple fabric draped, were designed to show the voluptuousness of the body beneath. And it was voluptuous, as Hettie’s would probably never be—full breasts, and a small waist, and the suggestion of long, slim legs. Her neck, too, was long and graceful, acting as a pedestal to display her oval face.

She curtseyed to him—not the polite curtsey of a maiden in a ballroom, but a full curtsey, dropping to one knee, her gown a froth around her, exactly like someone being presented to the queen, and Nigel blinked at her in confusion—a confusion that turned to awe as she tilted her face up to look at him.

In his fevered dreams, he’d thought that he’d imagined the slight blue shine in her eyes, but he had not. Those eyes, wholly Chinese, with their heavy lids, looked completely black until she tilted her face up. And then—Nigel had only seen this once before, in a crystalline rock whose name he’d never found out. He’d discovered it in a cave in the depths of his parents’ garden, on one of the rare occasions in childhood when he’d been well enough to tramp about exploring. It had looked like coal, only hard and vitreous. And when he’d broken it to see what it contained—having been raised on stories of diamonds found in lumps of coal—and exposed it to the light, the broken surface had glowed such a deep blue as he’d never seen. He’d kept the rock for a long time before losing it, and when he closed his eyes, he could still see that intense, shimmering blue.

He realized he was gaping at the girl and closed his mouth, but she didn’t seem to see anything amiss. In fact, she inclined her head, and spoke with her head lowered: “Oh, bearer of the jewels at the heart of the universe, I know you have reason to doubt me, but I beg you to hear me.”

Her accent was completely British and—as Mrs. Perigord, who stood by twisting her apron like someone who is not absolutely sure she has done right, had said—upper class. But her words were so incredibly Chinese that for a moment Nigel was not at all sure what she’d said—much less what she’d meant—and so he waited for her to say something more. When nothing came, he realized she had been asking his permission to continue and said, almost curtly, “Speak. And call me Mr. Jones.” He hesitated only a moment, because somehow it seemed wrong to lie to angels, but he could not think any good would come of telling her his real name. Either she already knew it and was avoiding saying it for her own reasons, or she didn’t know it at all, in which case giving it to her would be a danger. “Enoch Jones is my name.”

She looked up, as though to gauge how she should proceed, and swallowed, the movement visible in her elegant neck. “Mr. Jones,” she said, “I don’t know how to explain my errand to you. When you last saw me, if indeed you remember when you last saw me—”

“Of course,” he said. “You were with the Chinese pirates.” It was all he could do not to tell her that he’d thought her an angel, but even he was not so stupid as to imagine that would make sense.

“Yes,” she said. “Only…” She couldn’t seem to find her way to the next word.

“You also saved my life,” he said, feeling sorry for her and wishing to rescue her from her difficulties. “For which I have wished to thank you.”

Again the pretty blush, a delicate pink tone on her soft cheeks. “I…” She shrugged. “I saw you were holding on to the entire carpetship and keeping it from falling and I…How could I not save that many people?”

“If I understand—and please forgive me, I haven’t spent much time with your people, only had that sort of glancing contact one has when piloting carpetships into the cities where foreigners are allowed—but if I understand, your people do not care much who dies, if those who die are foreign devils.”

“My mother…” she said. And she lowered her head, effectively hiding her face from him as she spoke. “My mother was English. She was taken from a raided carpetship. Her name, she told me, was Miss Augusta Bentworth. She was on a trip to join her fiancé, who was a building magician in Macao, when—”

“Gussie?” Nigel said. He could no more have kept silent than he could have grown wings. “Mama’s Gussie? But Mama still speaks of her!”

“I beg your pardon?” the girl said, looking up, suddenly all British and missish.

He felt himself blush as if he’d committed some impropriety. And he was aware of something that sounded very much like Joe hastily swallowing a chuckle from where he stood in the doorway. The unspoken play between the two of them would not have evaded any English lord, no matter how long removed from proper society.

“It is only,” Nigel said, with pained exactness, “that Mama was a great friend of Miss Augusta Bentworth. Her disappearance, as Mama thought, in a carpetship crash blighted Mama’s first year of marriage, and she always meant to name a daughter Augusta, should…should she have had a daughter.”

“Oh,” the girl said, looking up, and for just a moment let a smile peek through her too-grave expression. “I don’t remember a Miss Jones amid those my mother spoke of, but—” She stopped. “But that would be her married name, would it not?”

Nigel nodded. “Indeed. Her maiden name was Amelia Roston.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “But…but that makes us almost relatives!”

Nigel grinned. As strange as it seemed coming from this very unusual girl, the comment amused him as much as it pleased him. And he couldn’t even tell why it pleased him, except for feeling that it was good that Mama’s Gussie was not wholly gone. “Is she well, your mother?” he asked.

The girl shook her head. “Oh, no. Mama died ten years ago. She…My little brother died with her.”

Nigel felt a momentary pang, but all the same, he thought that his mama would prefer that Gussie had left a daughter than not at all. Even if the daughter was a Chinese pirate. Though he was not sure he’d tell the pirate part to his mama. He extended his hand to her. “Please get up, Miss…er…”

“Lung,” she said. “My name is Red Jade Lung.” She grasped his hand with hers which seemed very little and soft in his, and, standing up, smiled shyly at him before lowering her eyes. “I am called…Lady Jade.”

“But you did not know our mothers knew each other,” Nigel said. “So you could not have been intent on…”

“Helping you because of that?” Lady Jade said, and nodded, as if understanding his difficulty. “No. It was just that…I never knew when anyone on a ship might be my relative, so I thought, perhaps I should avoid killing, as much as possible.”

“Why do you attack carpetships at all?” Nigel asked, confused.

“Oh, that’s…That’s not easy to explain,” Lady Jade said.