The Dragons of Heaven (15 page)

P
issed I might be
, but I took Jian Huo's advice and dressed in layers – enough to keep me snug, but not so much that I looked like the kid from
A Christmas Story
. After all, I might need to move and fight. I had only the one experience with calling these kinds of monsters from shadow, and none at all with sending them back. Templeton didn't count. As shadows went, he was a fluffy-bunny.

Jian Huo waited for me at the gate.

“Come to kiss me goodbye?” My irritation made me daring and snarky.

“I regret I must forgo the pleasure. I am coming with you.”

“You are?” In all my months here, he'd never left his mountaintop sanctuary.

He stepped to one side and gestured for me to precede him down the path. “I would be a poor teacher if I did not.”

“In other words, somebody has to haul my sorry ass home when it gets handed to me?”

“Oh no. I will expect you to make the climb yourself.”

I couldn't tell if he was serious, or if my snark was rubbing off on him. Worse, what if it had been there all along, and I was only now getting glimpses of it?

No, that just wouldn't be fair. Fascination I could deal with, but if I started
liking
him, I was doomed.

You're not your grandfather,
I promised myself as I stepped through the gates.

The path at the gates was clean of snow, but the drifts piled up not far down the mountain. After a few minutes, I wished I'd stacked on more layers.
Fuck
, it was cold. I tensed against the wind that cut through my clothes. I'd forgotten that it would still be winter beyond the protections of Lung Huang's pocket sanctuary.

“C-couldn't you just f-fly us d-down?” I asked Jian Huo as I led the way down the path. At least, I thought it was the path. The snow was piled up knee-high here, where it hadn't drifted deeper. For all I knew, I was about to lead us over an unstable edge.

He'd stop me before I did that. Wouldn't he?

“I could. I will not.”

I shot a glance back at him before I realized he was replying to my words and not my thoughts. He had a knack for that. “I am so going to sneeze on you when I catch cold,” I muttered.

“Colder temperatures do not cause viral infections,” he said. I tamped down on the temptation to lob a snowball at him. The last thing I wanted was him retaliating. Trudging through the drifts was just starting to warm me up, and a serving of slush down the back of my neck would undo all my hard work.

“I am so going to catch a cold so I can sneeze on you.”

He chuckled, a rumble like a thunderstorm. I didn't have a chance to savor my victory. I stumbled to a halt as my shadow-sensitive eyes caught a flash of movement ahead.

“Is that…” I whispered, then trailed off as the glimmer of darkness responded. Not to my words. Couldn't be that, because we'd been bantering loud enough to be heard over the wind. No, it responded to my
notice
, constricting upon itself and slinking crossways over the path at not much faster than a crawling pace, as though it could creep away unnoticed.

No chance. Now that I'd spotted it, I realized I could feel it in other ways: the twitch at the back of my shoulders that I thought was a reaction to the temperature, the flutter in my stomach that I'd assumed was due to Jian Huo demonstrating a sense of humor.

“Do you see now what I mean when I say ‘demon'?”

I didn't, but I'd let that lack of perception unnerve me later when I had time to think about it. Sure, the shadow felt unnatural, the metaphysical equivalent of milk gone off, but it was mostly harmless: a cold, starving thing trapped away from home and terrified of the pale sunlight. It might have stayed huddled behind that drift all day if we hadn't come along and spooked it.

“Poor thing,” I said, holding out my hand and taking a few steps off the path.

That's when it attacked.

Darkness slammed into me, pushing me back on my ass. I yelped as snow slid under my collar, and the shadow took that opportunity to wrap around my face and fill my mouth. The world went dark and quiet. I fought back, tried to grab hold of something to give myself leverage against it, but my mittened grasp passed right through the shadow, and I ended up giving myself a face full of snow.

The shadow constricted tighter as I sputtered and choked for air. It clung like a plastic liner laid over a swimming pool. I staggered to my feet, trying to tear myself free. I remembered the
yaoguai's
fading screams when the shadows had smothered the life from her. She couldn't fight them, and neither could I. The thing choking me was insubstantial, just air and darkness that got stronger the more I struggled.

Think. I didn't need to fight this. I was its master. I'd called it from the darkness, and I could send it back.

I reached out for my connection to the Shadow Realms. As though it sensed the opening, the creature convulsed tighter, wrenching me off my own axis. I stumbled a few more steps, spun about, and shunted the shadow into the darkness with such force that I fell back.

And back. And then down, as gravity came into play. I flailed against the air, as insubstantial as shadow, eyes watering at the sudden brightness and disorientation that came with flipping end-over-end in free-fall. The mountainside whizzed past me, swapping places with the sky and the ground and then the sky again.

Something large and sinuous caught me. My stomach continued to drop for several moments, though the mountain and the sky returned to their natural positions. Everything still rushed past, but my vector had changed.

I dangled from golden claws. Something red, green, and gold flashed at the periphery of my vision, but I didn't dare twist around to look at the creature that carried me. Not in mid-air. Not when the grip of those claws felt so loose and the ground whizzed past far below. We crested the ridge, breaking through the cloud cover that blanketed the valley and nudged up against the peaks in a thick, stratus layer.

Jian Huo set me down on the broad lawn in the center of the gardens. I collapsed to my knees, gulping deep breaths and fighting the urge to puke.

“Th-thanks,” I managed to stutter when my heartbeat had calmed to merely racing. My mittened hands clutched at the grass as if that could save me from what had already happened. I couldn't make myself look around, look up. All I wanted to see in that moment was the ground solidly beneath me.

“Of course,” Jian Huo said, coming around me and stooping into view. He was man-shaped again. The long tail of his hair snaked behind him, little wisps of storm and cloud drifting up from the dark strands to be blown away by a breeze. “Pancakes make for terrible students, so I'm told.”

I managed a smile, tried to chuckle. It came out more like a hiccup. “Yeah, well… you should see the other guy.”

Jian Huo smiled. An actual, honest-to-goodness smile. My belly did another of those flippy things, and I told myself it was just an after-effect of my aborted attempt at base-jumping.

“Even so.” His smile twitched and he made a sound somewhere between a cough and a snort. Two or three more of those, and he was laughing.

At me, I was pretty sure. “What?” I said, less charmed than I'd been a moment before.

“Poor thing?” he gasped, which set him to laughing harder. He rose, arms wrapped around his middle in a vain attempt to hold it in.

“Poor thing!” he repeated, “and then…” He jigged about in a pantomime mockery of the shadow's attack and my life-and-death struggle, before falling off an invisible cliff with a look of comical horror. He landed safely on the grass, laughing even harder. “P-poor… thing…”

I responded the only way I could. I stripped off my wet mittens and lobbed them at his head.

Dragons were assholes.

“
T
hat's ten
,” I said, dusting my hands off as though they'd gotten dirty. They hadn't, but it was what you did when you completed an important task, and it wasn't like anyone else was going to congratulate me. “We have to be whittling them down. I was pretty out of it, but I can't imagine I summoned more than a dozen shadows. Unless they're breeding.”

In contrast to the excitement of my first try, my subsequent forays down into the valley had verged on boring. Track a shadow, spook it from hiding, chuck it back into the Shadow Realms. Glare at Jian Huo if I managed to catch him smirking and murmuring “poor thing”.

He'd managed to contain himself this time. In fact, he seemed less inclined towards humor today. He scanned the shadows more closely than I did and gave the clumps of bracken a wide berth. “These demons are not bound as mortals are. They can shred themselves into legion, or come together in one monstrous gestalt.”

“So, kinda like breeding. Great. How will I know when they're all gone?”

That got his attention. “Are you so ready to leave? Have you found the answers to the questions that brought you here?”

He sounded almost as though he wanted me to stay. Well, maybe he did. Except for Feng Huang, he didn't get a lot of recreational company. Maybe he was lonely.

“No,” I reassured him. “But, you know, a running tally would be nice.”

“I will tell you when you have defeated the last,” he said, but it was an absent-minded promise. Something beyond my shoulder had caught his attention. His eyes narrowed.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “You're a real… pal…” I drifted off as my attention was caught by the same something. I don't know how it felt to him, but for me it was a familiar twitch crawling up the back of my neck, a queasiness in my belly.

“We should return home,” Jian Huo said, taking a step back the way we'd come.

I held out a stalling hand. “Hold on. I can take this one.”

“Missy…”

I ignored him, taking a few cautious steps around a copse of evergreens and brambles grown too thick to walk through. I'd learned my lesson from the first one; I wasn't going to get jumped.

The shadow awaited me on the other side. This one was more than just a few wisps of darkness. It hulked like a linebacker, and it took me a few seconds to realize that the shadow had formed itself into a parody of the
yaoguai's
demon.

An inky pseudopod in the shape of a fist swung out at me. I ducked low and swept out a leg, wondering if it would even work, or if this shadow was as insubstantial as the others.

My foot hooked something, and the shadow fell back into the brambles, little wisps bleeding off it as the thorns tore into whatever passed for flesh.

Practicality warred with my desire to finally square off against something I could pummel. Practicality won. I didn't need to beat this thing into the ground; I just needed to send it back from whence it came.

I kicked the creature in the chest-area, knocking it further into the thicket at the same time I opened my connection to the Shadow Realms.

It should have worked. It
did
work, but the damn thing caught my ankle and pulled me off balance, dragging me in after it. I flipped over and grabbed for anything of substance to hold me in the real world, but the shadow had dragged me too far across.

The clearing turned dark and colorless, like a film negative. The root I grabbed for slipped through my fingers. The tidal pull of the Shadow Realms took hold of me, and as I slipped further in, the forest twisted into a nightmare caricature. The demon scrabbled up my body, back toward the light.

“Jian Huo!” I screamed, because he had to be there still. He'd saved me from falling. He would save me from this.

But there was nothing. No response. I couldn't see him, couldn't sense him. There was just darkness that even my eyes had trouble penetrating, and trees howling laughter at me, and claws raking down my back as the shadow I'd been fighting pulled me down further in its attempt to reach the light.

Right. Deal with that thing first, preferably before more arrived. I rolled over and planted both feet square in the creature's midsection. If it made a sound, I couldn't hear it over the gibbering trees, but it did stop clawing at me. I did a backward roll up to my knees, then rose to a crouch, not pressing my attack in favor of getting my bearings.

The world had gone cock-eyed – Shadow geographies never quite match the mortal terrain – but I spied a stripe of lighter darkness just beyond the shadow creature that coincided with a break in the trees back in the real world. That was my best chance for a way out, assuming I could wrench myself free. The deeper you sank into the Shadow Realms, the harder it was to break away from the gravity of the place. You needed light, and that thin strip was all I had.

The creature lunged for me. I danced around it, crying out when its claws ripped through my sleeve and across my left shoulder. I slammed my elbow back into its face, hearing a crunching noise where there shouldn't have been anything to crunch. It echoed my cry of pain, and I repeated the elbow strike twice more for good measure. I couldn't let it get ahold of me and piggyback out into the real world.

The creature stumbled, and I took my chance, charging at that strip of not-quite-as-dark and grabbing for it like a rope.

The forest flashed back into being around me, so bright that it blinded me. I hit something that had enough give to send us both tumbling to the ground. Jian Huo. He caught me in a painfully tight embrace, painful mostly because of the damage the shadow creature had done.

“Shoulder. Shoulder!” I protested, cringing away in an attempt to make the pain not hurt. First I get shot, and now this. My shoulder was not having a good year.

Jian Huo sat up, still holding me, but only loosely so he could examine the gashes through the shredded silk of my robe. I craned my neck to see them and was disappointed. They burned like they were bone deep, but all I could see was four long, red scrapes, like I'd been attacked by a kitten.