WE FOLLOWED THE stairs up to a doorway, wood with rusted hinges, that opened into a narrow alley between tall brick buildings. Lights shone through shaded windows, the sound of a TV carried. This should have been a mundane scene, evening in a city neighborhood, but the voices were in Chinese and I felt a sense of incongruity, as if I had entered another country, another world. Pagoda rooftops across the street gave the skyline a foreign air.
Leaving the alley, we walked for a time, rounding a couple of corners. The streets were arranged on a grid; even so, I didn’t know whether I’d be able to find my way back. The place seemed narrow and mazelike. I stayed close to Anastasia. Ben and Cormac trailed, keeping watch behind us. My nose worked overtime, taking in scents. At one point, we must have passed a restaurant—the air became warm, heavy with the odors of spices, vegetables, and cooking meat. It tickled my nose, then my stomach. We continued on and the smell faded.
Finally, we turned down a small, quiet street and stopped before a door—the back of a shop, maybe. A handwritten sign, laminated and taped to the door, announced the name of a shop and its hours in both English and Chinese: Great Wall Video. This wasn’t what I was expecting of Anastasia’s secret contact. We should have been meeting someplace truly clandestine and mysterious. Gambling parlor, opium den …
Anastasia knocked, and a moment later a young woman opened the door. She was in her midtwenties, Asian features, dark eyes, pink plastic-rimmed glasses. Her short dark hair was dyed in magenta streaks. She wore a black baby-doll T-shirt, faded jeans, and big black shit-kicking boots. Techno music played in the shop behind her. The back room walls were covered with movie posters.
Her arms were braced across the doorway, and she wore a serious frown. “Yeah?”
“May we come in?” Anastasia said in her most suave, amenable voice.
“Why? Who are you?” She glanced over Anastasia’s shoulder to the rest of us, who were watchful and bristling.
“My name is Anastasia. I need to speak with you.”
“Why not come to the front like everyone else?”
“Because I need to speak with you quietly, Grace Chen.”
The woman’s eyes widened. Her lips pressed together, as if determined not to ask the next obvious question—she clearly didn’t know Anastasia, so how did the vampire know her?
“I can’t let you in. Tell me what you want right here,” Grace Chen said, nodding at the threshold.
Anastasia said something in a language I presumed was Chinese and handed over a rolled slip of heavy paper that she’d drawn from her trouser pocket. Still glaring, the woman unrolled it and studied the text written on it for a long moment.
In the alley, I fidgeted, feeling cornered. I kept looking one direction and the other, but the far corners of the street were hidden in shadows. Ben was right there with me, and brushing his arm only comforted me a little. Cormac didn’t seem bothered.
Chen rolled up the slip of paper and pointed it at Anastasia. “Where did you get this?”
“From the man who wrote it.”
“This is five hundred years old,” she said, and I gaped.
“Yes.”
With a sigh, the woman stepped aside. “Fine. Come in.”
We followed Anastasia inside as Chen looked us over. The back room was tiny, barely managing to hold a workroom sink and cleaning supplies in one corner, and a few rows of shelves stuffed with cardboard boxes and dusty merchandise. Visible through the back doorway, the front of the store—a video rental place specializing in imports—wasn’t much bigger than the back room. Narrow, dim, closetlike, the place was crammed as if it had been collecting items for decades. Shelves, racks, and piles of DVDs and CDs pressed together. You could analyze the accumulation; discover the layers of Bruce Lee under the Chow Yun-Fat movies. On the dark walls were more posters for Chinese movies—some of them recognizable, films like Titanic and Spider-Man with the titles and credits listed in Chinese. Something epic, full of costumes and kung-fu moves, played on a tiny, twelve-inch TV screen shelved in the corner behind the counter.
Since Anastasia didn’t seem to be paying any attention to us, I introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Kitty. These are my friends, Ben and Cormac.” Ben smiled thinly; Cormac didn’t seem to be paying attention, studying his surroundings instead.
“Grace,” she said. “What’s your deal?”
I glanced at Anastasia. “I’m not sure I exactly know.”
“Kitty, you and the others can keep a lookout,” Anastasia said.
“I guess we’re the hired muscle,” I said, donning a wry grin. “I’d actually rather stay and watch. Five hundred years old you said?”
Anastasia set her jaw and refused to be baited, but Grace seemed intrigued, as if annoying the vampire gave me a point in my favor. Grace offered me the scroll.
It didn’t seem like five-hundred-year-old paper. It should have been dusty, crumbling at the least touch, but it had been very well preserved and felt smooth and strong. Which meant, if it really was that old, it had to be magic. A column of Chinese characters was inked on it. Cormac stepped over, and I offered it to him. He ran a finger over the surface, then shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said, handing it back to Grace.
“What would you expect to know about this?” Anastasia said.
He hitched his thumbs on the pockets of his jacket and looked away, smiling wryly. I knew what people saw when they looked at Cormac: tough guy, man of few words, maybe not too bright. He cultivated the image.
Anastasia said to Grace, “You have the Dragon’s Pearl, yes?”
“If you get the Dragon’s Pearl, what are you going to do with it?” Grace answered.
“If I get it? Does that promise mean nothing to you?”
“I have to ask, it’s part of the deal,” she said.
Combat sound effects echoed from the TV at the front of the store.
“I don’t want it for myself,” Anastasia said. “I want to protect it. A very dark power is looking for it.”
“I thought I was protecting it.”
“This is bigger than you are.”
Grace laughed. “That’s what you say to someone you want to help you?”
I stepped in. “It’s a vampire thing. They have this innate sense of superiority. Just ignore it.”
“Vampire?” Grace said, skeptical. “You don’t look dead.”
“I’m not jiang shi,” Anastasia said with forced patience. “I’m much more than an animated corpse.”
I had to admire Grace for seeming confused rather than frightened. As if five-hundred-year-old messages showed up on her doorstep all the time. “So we’re talking Dracula here?”
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Anastasia said. “But yes. And I’ll get what I came for.”
Looking tough with her punk hair and punk glasses, Grace stood with her arms crossed. She was solid as a wall, and not afraid of the vampire.
“Anastasia,” I said. “You need to stop acting like everyone’s a bad guy. We’re all on the same side here.”
“I thought hired muscle wasn’t supposed to talk much,” Grace said.
“They aren’t,” Anastasia said stiffly.
“Hey, you knew what you were getting when you asked me for help,” I said. Love me, love my big fat mouth.
Anastasia took a settling breath. “Grace Chen, I need to know that the pearl is safe. I need your help.”
She gave a curt nod. “The pearl’s not here. I’ll have to take you to it. Wait here while I close up the store.”
Anastasia’s lips pressed together as if she held back a retort. But all she said was, “Thank you.”
Grace went to the front. I followed, after glancing at Ben and catching his eye. Nodding, he stayed behind, pacing a couple of steps back and forth.
I could have browsed in the store for an hour, picking through the crowded bargain CD bin, ogling DVD packages stacked two deep along the wall. My gaze skimmed the posters and signs—it was sensory overload, especially not being able to read the language that three quarters of everything was written in. Grace was at the front door, locking up. I was about to say something friendly and ice-breaking, but she beat me to it.
Glancing at me over her shoulder, she said, “Your friend there, the quiet one.” She nodded toward the back room. “You know he’s got two spirits?”
“Really?” I blinked, not entirely surprised but fascinated all the same. “What does that even look like?”
“It’s weird. Everybody’s got their energy and it usually tells me something about the person. Like you and him”—she pointed at Ben—“are wild, lots of animal in you. So you’re what, werewolves? Her—she’s dark. Stuck, in a way. She’s got energy, but it’s frozen. Strange to look at. But him—he’s like yin and yang, but there’s no harmony to it.”
“Yin and yang, that’s like male and female, right?”
“There’s a lot more to it than that. You know what’s going on with him?”
“It’s not really my story to tell,” I said.
“I’m not sure I have the nerve to ask him myself,” she said, moving to the counter where she locked the drawer on an old-fashioned cash register. There was a safe under the counter, and she locked that, too.
“He has that effect on people,” I said. “What’s your story?”
“What’s there to tell? One of my ancestors made that chick a promise and I have to make good on it.”
“But you’re, what: Magician? Psychic?”
“I don’t even know what you’d call it. But yeah, something like that. So what about you? You really working for her? Is that how it usually happens, werewolves working for vampires?”
“I don’t know how it normally works,” I said. “I thought I was doing her a favor, but she doesn’t much act like that’s how it’s working. I think you threw her off her stride as well. She’s used to people being a little more intimidated.”
“Vampires aren’t the scariest thing out there.” She pulled a green canvas courier bag over her shoulder, across her chest, and went to the back room, turning off the lights as she reached the doorway. I didn’t have a chance to ask her what was the scariest thing out there.
“Ready?” Grace said to the others.
“As long as it doesn’t take all night,” Anastasia said, a wry arc to her brow.
We set off down the alley in the opposite direction we’d come from. Full night now, the city seemed strange, foreboding. Skyscrapers beyond the edges of Chinatown suggested forest outside this island of a neighborhood. The sky was overcast, stars and moon invisible, but city lights gave the air a yellowish glow. The narrow streets, the fire escapes, the dark brick buildings made me claustrophobic. This was not our territory, and those enemy wolves were still out there. We had to keep moving.
“How far is it?” Anastasia asked after we’d rounded our fifth corner.
“It’s a ways yet,” Grace said.
“We could drive,” Ben said.
She shook her head. “No, we have to go on foot.”
That sounded ominous.
Ben, Cormac, and I walked like soldiers in a hostile jungle, pacing softly, hyper aware, looking everywhere. My back tingled, as if my Wolf’s fur was standing on end. If Anastasia had any qualms, she masked them, walking with her usual poise. She would hear the heartbeat of anyone approaching. Anyone mortal, anyway. Heck, why should she worry? If we were attacked she’d just throw us in the way while she continued on her quest.
Finally we turned into another narrow alley. This one had clothes left drying on one of the fire escapes, and further on a doorway was framed by a dozen red paper lanterns. The ordinary and exotic bumping up against each other again. The door Grace stopped at felt particularly old, made of wood, planed smooth. The handle had an old-fashioned keyhole below it, the kind with a circle on top of a tall triangle. Grace had the key for it.
She turned the key, the lock clunked over, and the door slipped open. Dust puffed into the gap. I smelled age—old wood, damp earth, and cold stone. The back of my neck prickled.
From her bag, Grace pulled a small, brass candle lantern—square, with scratched glass windows—and a lighter to light the candle inside. The soft, yellow glow it cast seemed weak against the darkness around us.
“Why not just bring a flashlight?” Ben said.
“For the same reason we didn’t drive,” Grace answered. She pushed the door wide.
I wasn’t psychic, but an ominous sense of wrongness pressed at me. I touched Ben; his hand reached for mine and grabbed hold.
“It’s in here?” Anastasia said and walked through the door, undaunted by the lack of light.
Squinting against the candlelight, my own vision was adjusting—the door opened into a long, brick-lined hallway. The vampire’s dark form was already invisible.
Grace sighed, as if she dreaded following. We all hesitated. This felt like walking into the maw of some leviathan.
“What kind of magic is this?” Cormac asked.
“Which one of your souls is asking?” she said.
Ben looked sharply at her, then me. “How does she know about that?” I squeezed his hand, quieting him.
Cormac pursed his lips. “It’s not important. I was just curious.”
“We’ve all got our crazy, huh?” she said, smirking at him. “Me, I don’t know where the magic comes from. My grandma taught me. She came over from China right after World War II. I’ve got a brother and sister, but she picked me to teach, and it didn’t matter how much I argued, I knew she was right. Just like she was right about leaving China, because I’m not sure she or the pearl or anything she knew would have survived the Cultural Revolution. When the vampire handed me that slip of paper, I just knew. I don’t know what kinds of magic you’re used to. This is just my family’s magic and it’s been around for a long time.”
“The Chinese practice ancestor worship,” Cormac said. But I was pretty sure it was Amelia this time. Her words, her phrasing.
“No—we honor our ancestors. That’s different. Just who the hell are you?”
Cormac nodded into the darkness. “What’s in there?”
Glaring at him, Grace said, “This thing she wants, you can’t just put it in a safe or a bank deposit box. So you make a door to someplace else. That’s what this is.”
“That’s not encouraging,” I said.
“At least we probably won’t get attacked by mercenary werewolves here,” Ben said.
Grace looked at us. “She wasn’t kidding. There really is someone after the pearl.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Night’s not getting any younger,” Cormac said, and walked through the doorway.
The rest of us finally followed, and Grace closed the door behind us. On the back side of the door hung a length of paper showing several Chinese characters painted in broad ink strokes.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
“It’s a blessing,” Grace said. “To protect whoever passes through the doorway.”
“‘Abandon every hope, ye that enter…’” Ben murmured. I elbowed him.
I couldn’t see much, even with a werewolf’s eyes, so I tried to scent danger. But I didn’t know what I was smelling for. The air here didn’t smell exactly wrong. But it didn’t smell quite right. Decades of incense saturated the brick walls. The place was still, but it didn’t seem empty.
A set of wooden stairs, worn shiny by years of traffic, led down. Anastasia waited about ten steps along.
“You decided to join me?” she said. Her face emerged, illuminated by Grace’s candle, pale and shadowed.
“We have to keep moving,” Grace said. “Come on.”
“How far is it?” Anastasia said, letting the young woman into the lead.
“It’s still a ways.” Grace went on, holding up her lantern, a sphere of light.
Ben, Cormac, and I, the pack of three, stuck together behind the others. About twenty steps further, the stairs finally reached a packed dirt floor.
Ben said to Cormac in a low voice, “When she said ‘a door to someplace else,’ what exactly did she mean?”
“Like Odysseus Grant’s box,” I said. Odysseus Grant was a Las Vegas stage magician. Except that he was also really a magician, and he had a box of vanishing that was actually a doorway. I’d caught a glimpse of where it led to—a dank, musty swamp full of strange smells and things that slithered. I had no interest in exploring that place further.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Ben muttered.
This wasn’t that place, but the principle seemed the same, which was enough to make me nervous. I felt eyes staring at me, but couldn’t guess from where.
I had to fill the silence. “Grace, these tunnels— I thought they were just an urban legend.”
Ahead, her voice muffled by the brick walls surrounding us, she said, “It’s just that not many people know how to find them.”
We came to an intersection. Grace turned left, and we followed. Then came another set of stairs down, only four steps this time, and another intersection. We turned right. I wondered if I ought to be leaving bread crumbs.
Grace stopped at another wooden doorway, gray and weathered even though by all appearances it had always been indoors. This door had another scroll nailed to it, a yellowed length of paper with more Chinese characters painted in a column. Another blessing for protection? Or a warning? Grace set the lantern on the floor, took another key out of her courier bag, and unlocked the lock.
Pushing the door open, she held the lantern up and looked inside. This room was mostly a closet, too small for us all to crowd in after her. Looking over her shoulder, I saw an old-fashioned iron safe, two feet on each side, with a combination lock and a big steel handle, sitting against the far wall. It seemed awfully mundane after all the talk of magic.
Anastasia was looking over her other shoulder, tapping her hand against her thigh.
Grace put the lantern on the safe and worked the combination. The air was still—nobody even breathed for several heartbeats.
I spun to face a noise—I’d heard something pattering in the darkness, I’d have sworn it. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Grace said, not looking away from the safe.
“Nothing? Nothing what?”
“Stray spirits. Nothing.”
The safe’s door creaked open.
“Crap,” Grace said, peering into the safe over her glasses.
“What?” Anastasia said. “What is it?”
“It’s not here.”
“What do you mean it’s not here?”
“I mean it’s supposed to be here, and it’s not here.” Grace turned on Anastasia and glared.
“Then where is it?” The vampire’s voice was quiet, cold, and her arms hung loose at her sides, her hands open and ready.
“I don’t know,” Grace said, shrugging wide.
Anastasia closed her eyes and looked up, as if beseeching a higher power. “Then it’s too late,” she whispered.
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “It doesn’t look like the safe was broken into. Can we figure out what happened? Track it somehow? Did anyone else know this was here and know the combination?”
“I didn’t think so,” Grace said. “But I don’t know that for sure. If someone knew what to look for they might have been able to find it.”
“But you know what this is—you ought to be able to track it, right?”
She winced. “I don’t know.”
“Cormac?” I asked.
“I have some tracking spells, but I’m not the one who knows what to look for,” he said, looking down the hallway. He and Ben were keeping watch in both directions.
Ben had been pacing, a few steps in each direction. Then he stopped, his head cocked to listen, his nose flaring to take in scent. He smelled wolfish. I focused on what had caught his attention. A sound echoed ahead, at the end of the corridor and around the next corner. Trying to make the noise out, I crept forward. The sound was uneven, high pitched, alive and upset—
It was a crying baby, sounding neglected at the very least, but more likely it was hurt.
I ran.
“Kitty, wait!” Anastasia and Grace both called. They took off after me.
I charged around the corner. A faint light came through an open doorway. Another small room, lit by an old-fashioned oil lamp sitting on a box in the corner. This might have been a storage closet for yet another shop, this one cluttered with more boxes and shelves, buckets and brooms. I paused at the doorway, letting my nose take in a picture of what lay before me. A spicy, musty scent filled the space; I’d never smelled anything like it. It didn’t smell at all like a baby.
There, on the floor in the corner, was a bamboo cage as tall as my hip. Inside was a foxlike creature with thick ruddy fur, a narrow snout, and a mouth open to reveal needle-sharp teeth. I would have called it a fox, except it had a thick bouquet of tails flickering off its backside. Disconcertingly, it was making the crying noise, as if it had swallowed a baby whole and alive.
I approached cautiously, trying to reconcile the contradictions of sight, sound, and scent before me. The creature was trapped, anxious, circling in the cage, pressing against the bars. The cage was sturdy; the bars didn’t budge. The creature looked as if it barked, a lost puppy drawing attention to itself. But the sounds that emerged were those all-too-human cries. The tails, thick and covered with fur, slapped against the bamboo bars.
When the creature saw me, it stopped moving to stare up at me with amber eyes, large and shining. Wrinkling its nose, it let out a couple of warning yips.
“What is that thing?” Ben said. The others had stopped at the doorway.
“I’ve heard of this,” I said. It was the multiple tails—I couldn’t count them all, because the creature kept flicking them, agitated. But there were a lot. “In Japanese folklore, there are these fox spirits, kitsune. The more tails they have the more powerful—”
“Kitty, get away from it!” Anastasia said. The vampire lunged for me, grabbing my arm with both hands and shoving me back until we were both pressed against the far wall. Her speed and force knocked the wind from me. She was so easy to underestimate physically, with her slim, small frame, designer clothes, and fragile features. My arm hurt where she held me.
With a short growl, I yanked away. “What is your problem?”
Ben and Cormac braced in the middle of defensive actions, pausing in the moment of a breath between realizing that something was wrong and moving to attack. She had moved too quickly for them, and they seemed stunned to realize it. Cormac held a long, narrow length of sharpened wood in one hand, tucked away.
Grace had slipped into the room and stood, lantern raised, staring at the creature in the cage. “The kitsune is Japanese,” Grace said. “You’re in Chinatown. This is completely different.”
Anastasia pressed herself against the wall, arms spread, as if she could fall through it. All elegance vanished, her eyes wide, she stared at the thing in the cage with a slack-faced intensity.
“What is it?” I said, backing away from her. If she had an all-out panic attack I didn’t want to be anywhere near her.
“The huli jing. Nine-tailed fox,” she said.
Well, that answered that question.
The creature, the nine-tailed fox, sat on its haunches, tails fanned behind it, looked us over, and yawned, showing off its mouthful of teeth.
“And?” I said.
“It lures people in with the sound of crying, then devours them.”
Ben was scratching his head, skeptical. “That’s actually pretty clever.”
I said, “However scary it is, it’s in a cage. What’s the problem?”
“It’s also a companion of the gods,” Anastasia said, with the devoted certainty of a true believer. “So who caged it?”
The answer, of course: something even scarier than the carnivorous nine-tailed fox. And the gods.
“What, whoa. Gods? What?” I said.
“The gods are under assault,” she said, still staring at the thing, her eyes wide and glassy.
“I thought this was about Roman.”
“It is!” she said.
I couldn’t come up with a snappy comeback to that.
“I think we should get out of here,” Grace said.
The nine-tailed fox opened its mouth and wailed like a baby who’d been dropped. Then the wild, angry scent of human sweat and animal fur washed into the room—werewolves.
“Kitty—” Ben said, warning.
“Everybody get back,” I ordered. The room didn’t have any other doors. No escape route. I lunged back to the corridor with Ben and saw them. The three werewolves who’d attacked us earlier, and this time two of them had shifted to wolf form, flanking their leader—the one in the T-shirt, tall and muscular, toned rather than bulked, suggesting powerful agility. But I already knew that about him.
They approached us down the corridor, blocking our only way out.