The Dragons of Heaven (32 page)

Without my plan to follow Si Wei, I was pretty much floundering. The earnest park clearing was my A-list material at this point, and I didn't have a B-list. The extended solitary time – Templeton didn't count – hadn't worked to my benefit. I'd fretted away any peace I'd found at Fang Shih's table. If pearls weren't so resilient, I would have worn away all the nacre on mine.

I stalked to the edge of the clearing, kicked at a bit of moss. It tore from its moorings, disintegrating it from a lush, green furze into a lump of black dirt and roots. I crossed my arms to keep myself from shredding every leaf from every bush surrounding the clearing.

“Dammit,” I whispered. “Why won't you come? You promised me. You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to keep her safe.” I didn't know whether I was more angry at the
qilin
or myself.
Why
hadn't I listened to my daughter?

I took a deep breath past my guilt and fear. Then another, and another. Each breath came easier. I'd hoped for a back-up, a safety net, but that didn't look like it was going to be an option. I had all the aid I was going to get. If I waited any longer, I'd never screw up my courage. It was time. Untwisting my pearls, I reached up and fastened them around my neck.

“C'mon, Templeton. If she was willing to come, she'd have been here by now. We're as ready as we're going to be. Let's go.” The rat clutched his baubles to his chest and trundled to my side on three paws. I took one last, deep breath and stepped once more into Shadow, leaving nothing in our wake but the shirring chirp of crickets.

N
ow

“I see you've found each other,” Song Yulan drawled from a stone bench as Mei Shen helped me limp into the temple. My daughter had hushed my sputtered
how… what… whys
with a wary glance at the sky and a shake of her head. David Tsung might have helped her support my battered body, but I scared him off with a glare.

I wasn't much happier with Song Yulan. “You could have said Mei Shen was here.”

“I could have.” She uncrossed her legs and rose from the bench. “She asked me not to.”

“I wanted to surprise you,” Mei Shen said. She couldn't stop bouncing, and I couldn't stop hugging her. She'd cut her hair into a bob similar to Song Yulan's. So modern. A typical Shanghai girl, if you ignored the dragon thing.

“Your father must be worried sick,” I grumbled, smoothing her hair. “Is he… here?” I wasn't sure which answer I dreaded more. A yes, or a no.

“No…” Her gaze drifted from mine. She pushed my hands away.

“What aren't you telling me?” Fear slammed my stomach into the floor. I swayed on my feet. “He's not one of the trapped guardians?”

It had to be one of them, and Jian Huo made the most sense, but I'd hoped…

I don't know what I'd hoped.

Mei Shen caught me. “No! It's not that. Mian Zi…”

Worse. I exhaled and couldn't breathe again. A tremble started deep in my bones. He'd taken my daughter, and now he'd taken my son.

I turned to march right back out that door. Fuck them all. I would go to the People's Heroes and make them let me through into Lung Di's sanctum.

“Mother, wait–”

Before she could pull me back, light flashed through the windows, golden as a summer afternoon and green as a bamboo forest. The temple doors blew open. I shielded my eyes against the bright assault. The flames passed, leaving a lean figure in silhouette against the afterburn.

I blinked. Stumbled forward. The young man caught me before I could fall.

“Hello, Mother.”

He was safe. I smoothed his hair like I had Mei Shen's. Still long, like his father's. Mian Zi frowned and squirmed, just as his sister had, which made me sniffle some more. Some adventure hero I was. “She said you'd been taken.”

Mian Zi stiffened, his head jerked up so he could glare at his sister. “So he's got you lying now, too?”

Mei Shen huffed. “I didn't say that. She misunderstood.”

“Who's got what lying now?” I pulled back to look between them. Mian Zi stood stiff and cool and distant in a suit that bore a little too much resemblance to a Mao suit for my taste. Mei Shen leaned forward, fists clenching and unclenching, chin thrust up. Begging for him to throw the first strike.

Mian Zi never went physical when a cerebral attack would do. “Mei Shen didn't bother to mention that she's taken over leadership of the Shadow Dragon Triad?”

I glanced at Song Yulan. She shrugged. I probably should have put it together earlier, but I'd never expected… Mei Shen.

Mei Shen took a step toward her brother. “Well, somebody had to do something besides sitting on their ass pushing papers all day.”

Mian Zi met her halfway, his posture a mirror of hers. “I'm protecting China–”

“You're playing
wei-qi
with people's lives.”

“And you're infatuated with a collection of murderers and thieves.”

“The Outlaws are heroes–”

“You mean
hanjian
–”

“
Enough!
” They both shut up. Mom voice. I still have it.

I ran my hands over my hair, still braided tight enough to give me a headache. Or maybe that was a combination of the crash and the reunion and my children fighting. This was Lung Di's doing; it had to be. Mian Zi and Mei Shen had been devoted to each other as only twins could be. Only someone as insidious and manipulative as Lung Di could change that.

“What's going on with you two? Do I have to find out where your rooms are so I can send you to them?”

Two sets of Masters-blue eyes wouldn't meet mine. Mei Shen twisted the gold foil hem of her blouse. “No.”

Mian Zi stretched his neck as though his collar was too tight. “That will be unnecessary, Mother.”

“OK then.” Not a resolution. Just a truce. Whatever had come between them dug deep. I shouldn't have left, shouldn't have stayed away for so long, no matter how much it hurt.

“I want to know what's going on. Why did you take over the Shadow Dragons?” I asked Mei Shen, then turned to her brother. “And why aren't you helping her since she did? Who does Lung Di have hostage, if not one of you or your father?”

I held up my hand when they would have both spoken at once. “One at a time. You first.” I pointed at Mei Shen, since she'd explode with impatience if she didn't go first. Mian Zi wouldn't mind; he preferred taking the rebuttal.

“You were right,” Tsung whispered in aside to Song Yulan. “She's good.”

The Guardian sighed. “Perhaps we might finally get a reasonable conversation between them.”

Mei Shen planted her fists on her hips. “Mian Zi realized the Guardians were in trouble when Feng Huang stopped visiting. I knew it had to be uncle, so I came to Shanghai. I met David, and he confirmed everything.”

“Just like that?” I cast a glare in Tsung's direction. How convenient.

Mian Zi had waited long enough. “You see? Mother doesn't trust him either. You are the only one he has managed to fool.”

I flinched. No wonder Mei Shen was being obstinate if that was the reception she was getting.

“Has David given us any reason to distrust him? He brought the key. He brought Mother, just as he said he would.”

“It was his suggestion to bring her.”

“It was my idea.”

“At his suggestion.”

“If you would have let him into Lung Di's sanctum, we wouldn't have had to find somebody else you approved of.”

I stepped between them to cut off their squabbling. “Why is it Mian Zi's fault that you can't get to Lung Di?”

“He–”

“I–”

Mei Shen flicked a hand for her brother to explain.

“Because when Tsung helped Mei Shen take over the Shadow Dragons, I had no choice but to take charge of the People's Heroes to stop them.”

I froze. Blinked. He said it like it was no big deal.

“You took over the People's Heroes.”

“Of course.”

I sputtered as I tried to make sense of that. My son, who had lived his entire life reading and playing
wei-qi
in a valley in Sichuan, was the head of one of the world's most powerful private armies. A dragon was the Commander of China's shining example of the modern secular state. I gave up trying to come up with a coherent response to that. “Of course,” Mian Zi had said, and who were any of us to argue with such clarity of purpose?

My kids scared me sometimes.

“You.” David Tsung tensed when I turned to him, his expression closing off. “Where's Skyrocket?”

“Safe. Jiu Wei is tending to him.”

I wasn't sure if leaving the boy with a
huxian
constituted “safe”, but it was safer than being left in the Shadow Realms. “What happened?”

“He was out when I found him. No injuries I could see, but the Conclave knights were approaching. I assumed you could take care of yourself, so I got us out of there.”

So the rescue on the bridge hadn't been a fluke. He knew the Shadow Realms well enough to fear the knights, and he'd saved Skyrocket when he could have left the Ace behind.

I dropped my head into my hands. I needed a shower and an aspirin and possibly a shotgun to the head. I pressed fingers hard against my browbone. “If you're Lung Di's blood, his protégé, why help us? Why betray him?”

“Because some things are more important than power.”

I raised my head to catch him looking at Mei Shen in a way that made me wish for that shotgun even more.

“She's your
cousin
.”

“Mother!” Mei Shen wailed.

“Distant.” Tsung took my daughter's hand.

“She's underage!”

“Is she?”

Mei Shen threw up her hands. “I can't believe you. You're as bad as Mian Zi.”

And then it clicked. All this squabbling and sniping and sibling rivalry. David Tsung was the wedge that had come between Mei Shen and Mian Zi. The question was, had he done so of his own choice, or at Lung Di's behest? I hoped for his continued health and well-being that it was the former.

I looked to Song Yulan for help. “What do you think of all of this?”

“I think that it distracts from the larger issue, which is perhaps exactly what Lung Di intended.” She raised a brow at Mei Shen, who thrust her chin up and stepped closer to Tsung. Mian Zi shifted to stand at my shoulder.

Lovely. A face-off. I stepped away so that I stood between them. An arbiter rather than an ally. We still had a common foe. “Have either of you bothered to sit down and talk?”

“I do not see the point–”

“He won't listen.”

“
I
will listen.” I turned to Mei Shen, who presented me with the same mulish chin she'd been giving Mian Zi. “I am not wild about the idea of confronting your uncle again, especially since that seems to be what he wants; however,” I included Mian Zi in my glare when he snorted. “Nor am I so quick to trust Mr Tsung's motives. So we will sit down and I will listen to your arguments about how we should take down the barrier, and whatever I decide is what we'll do. Agreed?”

Neither of them seemed inclined to agree, but Mei Shen nodded under my glare. Mian Zi remained stiff.

“My people are already on their way here,” he said.

“The more the merrier.”

The knowledge that he would not be alone on his side of the table seemed to relax Mian Zi. He held out my hat to me. “Then perhaps you will need this? I recovered it from the crash. They are expecting Mr Mystic.”

I took the hat and groaned. Mitchell Masters seemed as far away as a dream at the moment. Song Yulan saved me, taking my arm.

“Come along. We'll see if we can get you a shower at least, and perhaps you'll want to check in on your flying fellow?” I thought it was just a delaying tactic, but Song Yulan was wilier than that. “David, why don't you go and let Jiu Wei know that we'll be needing somewhere to hold our little war council?”

Neither of my kids looked pleased when they realized this would leave them alone with the other, but David Tsung slunk away under the commanding gaze of the Guardian of Shanghai.

I followed Song Yulan out of the room. “You're good.”

She sighed. “I'm passable. If I were good, I would never have allowed things to come to this pass. Come along. Let's see if we can give you a moment to breathe.”

T
he space to
think was a little less welcome when it turned out to be the same prison of misery I'd stayed in the last time I'd been to Shanghai. The decor had changed, and Jiu Wei had added the modern amenity of a bathroom, but I'd stared at these walls for too long to mistake them.

Was I seriously considering bearding the dragon in his lair? Again? With less of a plan than last time?

I avoided answering that question by staying in the shower until my fingers were pruny, only leaving when the hot water gave out.

Song Yulan was waiting for me. With a fresh suit, so I was less inclined to tell her to get lost.

She remained silent as I dressed. I could only take it for so long. “Any advice on how to get them to see reason?” I asked as I settled before the cheval mirror. I hated braiding my hair when it was wet, but it did make for a tighter braid. I winced a few times when the wet strands clung to my fingers. Someday, I was just going to cut it all off and have done.

“You assume that they aren't seeing reason. Perhaps it was unreasonable for you to expect that they would always remain devoted to each other. They are Yin and Yang. Conflict was inevitable. Here, let me do that. Watching you makes my scalp hurt.”

I lowered my arms and tilted my head to give her better access. She was right, but that didn't solve anything. I was going to have to convince them to do things my way with something stronger than a “
because I said so
”.

“You think this is silly, don't you? Mr Mystic, I mean.”

“I wonder why you think it is necessary.” She grabbed a hairband from the pile of pins I'd removed before my shower. She was too good at this. I suspected she'd done time as a boy during her long tenure as Guardian.

I took my wig from her when she would have pulled it on. She sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs, leaning forward to watch my transformation with avid interest.

I didn't even let Shimizu watch this. I turned my back on Song Yulan and tried to ignore the discomfort that came with such intimacy. “It made sense at the time. I'd just gotten back. Nobody was taking me seriously. It drove me mad. Everything that I'd gone through, everything I'd learned, it started to feel like a dream. I joked to a friend that I felt so old, more like my grandfather than myself. She said that at least my grandfather commanded respect. And she was right. From that conversation, Mr Mystic was reborn.”

As I spoke, I deepened my voice, lengthened my vowels, let my Rs recede and my consonants become crisp to the point of being clipped. Mr Mystic's voice, coming from deeper in my chest and sitting richer and fuller in my mouth. A voice made for drawling and considered words.

“It is an impressive transformation,” Song Yulan said. Quite a compliment, given that she had a front seat for the process.

I paused in the act of tying a half-windsor. “How well did you know him?” I asked her reflection.

Her nails clacked together. “Hardly at all. I'm afraid I have no secrets to share, if that's what you're after.”