THE NINE-TAILED FOX bounded forward like a puppy greeting its favorite person. Its final leap took it into the lap of a woman, middle-aged and full-bodied, seated in a chair, ornately carved and lacquered in black and gold. Cooing, the woman gathered the animal close, scratching its ears, rubbing its flanks, bringing her face close so the fox could lick her chin and nose, which it did joyfully, and the woman laughed.
The woman—she must have been of average height, of normal size. But she seemed to fill the space. Her face was kind and beautiful, though what must have been smooth porcelain features when she was young had softened to make her more approachable, more motherly. Her thick hair, black and shining, was twisted into a knot and held in place by sticks carved from a milky green stone—jade, maybe. The robe she wore over a multilayered gown was silk and shining, royal blue, with dense images embroidered in gold and silver, belted around her waist with a braided gold cord. She smelled like incense and peaches.
Her chair’s arm on the right-hand side was carved in the shape of an angry, bulging-eyed tiger, its stripes painted like daggers. The left-hand arm was shaped like a dragon, body twisted around on itself, slender whiskers trailing from a mouth full of teeth. On the back of her chair stood a large black bird, a crow. It hopped back and forth, snapping its beak and shaking its feathers at us. It had three legs, three sets of claws to scrabble at the wood.
The chair sat on a wooden porch overlooking a nighttime garden, however impossible that should have been. We were in a room, in a tunnel system under downtown San Francisco. And yet, a pond spread out from the porch, its surface dark and glasslike, reflecting back the image of a blossoming tree that grew from the shore nearby. From the branches hung red paper lanterns that gave off a peaceful light. Across the pond I thought I could make out buildings, carved railings around more porches, lit windows, tiled pagoda roofs that didn’t seem out of place here—an entire palace complex.
I smelled fresh air and the scent of peach blossoms. My mouth watered.
Grace knelt, her hands pressed flat together and touching her nose, her eyes tightly shut—praying hard, keenly devout. She may not even have been breathing.
Anastasia stared, and her expression altered, slack wonder pulling into grief, lips pursed, brow furrowed, eyes narrowing until I thought she might cry. Finally, she covered her face with her hands and sagged.
Behind us, Sun quietly closed the door.
We waited. No one could hurry this woman or make demands. She could ignore the tableau before her forever, and that would be fine. And what a tableau—two Chinese women who obviously knew who and what she was and were awed into immobility; and three white-bread American tourists, rude and ignorant, cowboys in a china shop, as it were. If we didn’t move, maybe we wouldn’t break anything.
Then there was Sun Wukong, who looked on her as a friend. That look made me relax a little.
Finally, she kissed the fox on the top of its head and urged it away, stroking the length of its body, including the batch of tails, as it hopped off her lap and took up the position of a sentinel under a pedestal table next to the chair. It wrapped all its tails around its feet like a big fur stole.
She straightened, regarded us all, then focused that regal gaze on Sun. “Well. Sun Wukong, I gave you a simple task and look what happens. Always trouble with you!”
“And yet you keep trusting me. Look, I had everything under control—”
She raised a hand, and he stopped. She turned her gaze on the rest of us. I suddenly wanted to apologize. This felt like I’d been brought to the principal’s office.
“Grace Chen,” the woman on the throne said, her voice gentle. Grace, her nut-brown skin flushed with emotion, bowed even lower.
The woman began speaking to her in what I assumed was Chinese. I didn’t understand, but the tone was kind, not at all accusing like it had been a moment before.
I glanced at Anastasia, hoping for a translation, but her eyes were tightly shut.
Sun saw my look and translated. “Xiwangmu is telling her that her family has done well, guarding the Dragon’s Pearl for these centuries, but the task is finished now. She’s releasing the family from its vow.”
Grace was looking up at her now, smiling.
“Xiwangmu?” I whispered.
“She is the Queen Mother of the West.” Sun raised a hand to silence my next question and watched.
Anastasia stepped forward, shocked and appalled, her hands closed into angry fists, and spoke a sharp sentence in Chinese. Sun jumped to stand between her and Xiwangmu, blocking the vampire’s way with his staff. Anastasia hissed at him, and he laughed, at which she snarled and turned away.
The woman on the throne regarded her a moment, then spoke. I didn’t understand the words, but the tone was reproachful. Anastasia didn’t turn around, but as the lecture went on, her back bowed, her shoulders slumped, and she seemed like a child being punished for something horrible that she’d done.
Maybe this wasn’t my world and maybe I didn’t belong here, but I had to find out what was happening.
“Um, I’m sorry, excuse me…” My voice sounded wrong and startling. I inched forward. The fox sitting under the table flattened its ears and bared its teeth, and the woman on the throne, Xiwangmu, flashed her dark gaze at me. If the door behind us was still open, I’d have been tempted to flee. “I know Anastasia’s kind of obsessed, but she’s my friend, sort of, and … I want to help.” I didn’t know how I could help when I was in so far over my head. But that was why I asked. If that elegant woman told me to leave, to forget about all this, what would I do then?
She studied me, and in my belly Wolf curled into defensive huddle, cowering at the scrutiny. Ben was standing behind me; I could feel his warmth, and that settled me. But this so wasn’t our territory.
When the woman smiled—a slight, amused curl of her lips—my knees went wobbly with relief.
“This is not your battle, child,” Xiwangmu said.
Encouraged, I said, “Anastasia asked me to help, so it is. Her enemy—the one who has the pearl now, and Henry—is my enemy, too.” And your enemy, as well. None of us alone could stop him. Well, maybe she could stop him by herself. I got the feeling she could do anything she wanted.
Everyone else was watching me with the air of witnessing a wreck. Quiet and respectful, Grace had ordered. Hey, I’d tried …
The woman leaned back in her throne. “Do you know why she hates Gaius Albinus, the one called Dux Bellorum?”
Anastasia flinched at the name; I glanced at her, trying to read her, but she was trapped in her storm of emotion.
“Not exactly, no,” I said.
Xiwangmu turned to Anastasia. “You’ve not told anyone your story, have you?”
“No one,” Anastasia said, stifled and hoarse. “Not even you.”
“And yet I know it, for you were mine before he made you his.”
I looked at Anastasia, trying to parse what Xiwangmu had said, considering the implications. It changed the meaning of everything Anastasia had ever said to me. I’d never guessed. Maybe I should have.
“Anastasia? Roman made you a vampire?” I said. She didn’t answer.
I tried to imagine the scene, eight hundred years ago, Anastasia—except she wouldn’t have been Anastasia then, she would have had a different name, a different life—standing in sunlight, in some farm or town or village in the middle of China. Roman had started as a soldier, part of an occupying army on the eastern Mediterranean. How had he traveled thousands of miles east across deserts and mountains to find her? What could possibly have happened?
Xiwangmu spoke with the slow cadence of telling a story, full of depth and consequence. Her tone held both kindness and pity. “Li Hua was the young daughter of a prosperous merchant in the city of Changzhou. Then the barbarian raiders came—Mongols from the north. The city resisted the invasion, and so the Mongols slaughtered everyone. Only a few survived. When they came to Li Hua, they said, ‘Look, this girl does not cry. How strange.’ But she could not cry—everyone was dead, with no one left to bury them, no children left to light incense at the altars for the ancestors, whose ghosts were wailing. What good was crying in the face of that? They took her prisoner, made her a slave, and brought her to Kublai Khan. They made her a concubine, a prize of the great empire of China—the girl, the beautiful flower who never wept. That was the end of the Song Dynasty.
“Our two worlds, East and West, were beginning to discover one another. The Silk Road, the trade routes across Asia, were strong. This was the time of Marco Polo. That was how Dux Bellorum came to China, seeking power, magic, and allies. The mysterious trader who traveled only at night and who never feared bandits fascinated all who met him. In the court of Kublai Khan he found a slave, a strange young woman who barely spoke and who troubled many with her cold gaze. Who knows what Dux Bellorum thought when he saw her, except that he believed he had some use for her, so he bought her from the Khan for an ingot of gold and a pair of Arabian horses.
“She served him for years, learned what he was, learned of his plans—and began making plans of her own. The General needed lieutenants. Sure of her loyalty, he turned her, made her one of his army. But she was always stronger than any of her captors knew. When she’d gained that part of his power, she escaped. Broke the bonds between them, smashed his token, and fled. That was how Li Hua came to the West and became, eventually, Anastasia.”
She had probably looked a lot like this, standing before Mongol invaders, her city burning around her, her anger and sadness buried deep, showing only a hard mask to the outside world. Xiwangmu had revealed the story to us all, and she might as well have stripped Anastasia bare, the way the vampire bore it. Her air of elegance and poise was suddenly a pretty, decorated facade disguising an edifice of tragedy. I wanted to weep, and I wanted to murder Roman for doing this to her.
From a pocket in her trouser, Anastasia drew out what looked like a pendant on a chain and held it out to Xiwangmu. Whatever design had once been on it, it was now smashed, flattened, and crossed with a dozen hatch marks carved into the bronze. I still had the one we’d flattened earlier; this one was hers.
Xiwangmu took it from her and clasped her hand. “I have watched you all this time, child,” she continued. “The spirits of your ancestors begged me to watch over you, and so I have, as much as I could.”
Anastasia whispered, “I remember holding my mother’s hand when we went to your temple to light offerings and pray to you. I have tried to remember her, to honor her—”
“She knows.”
“Is her spirit safe? Contented?”
“She is,” Xiwangmu said.
Anastasia bowed her head and finally, after all this time, tears fell. “My spirit will never join with my ancestors. No one will ever light offerings at my grave.”
“You have a different path,” Xiwangmu said. Anastasia—Li Hua—nodded. She had probably known that from the beginning.
Grace stood and tentatively went to the vampire and touched her arm, a brief offering of comfort. I held my breath, waiting for Anastasia to turn her back, isolate herself. But she took Grace’s hand and squeezed it before letting it go.
Xiwangmu straightened, shifting moods, tones—no longer a matron telling a story, she became a queen making a pronouncement.
“The Dragon’s Pearl is gone. Now, we must decide how to build defenses against the one who has taken it. How to oppose one with so much power.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and I could see Grace and Anastasia both flinch. “That’s it? What about trying to get it back? What about getting Henry back?”
“Do we know that Roman is just going to leave town now that he has it?” Cormac said. “Not come back and try to finish you off?” He nodded at me and Anastasia. Finishing us off—it was what Cormac would have done.
“Be quiet,” Grace hissed. “Let Queen Mother speak!”
Xiwangmu had cocked her head, listening, turning her gaze to me. “How would you oppose the Roman?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat at the sudden, intent scrutiny. I hadn’t thought about the how of it, just that it needed to be done.
“There has to be a way to find him,” I said finally. “Trace him, track him, something. Grace said he has to have a guide in the tunnels, someone who’s been helping him. Maybe we find who that is, and from there find Henry and the pearl.”
“Henry is gone, Kitty,” Anastasia said softly.
“I don’t want to have to tell Boss that,” I countered.
“I’ll tell him,” she said.
Xiwangmu raised a hand, and Anastasia settled. “This guide, the one who is helping Gaius Albinus. I think you are right, and that we should discover who this is. For our own protection, if nothing else.” She folded her hands before her and narrowed her eyes in thought. After a moment, she glanced at Sun, who was leaning on his staff, looking back.
“Do you have any ideas?” she asked.
“I do. You won’t like it, though,” he said.
“Yes, indeed.” Sighing, she said, “To oppose us, it would have to be one of us.”
“One of you?” I said. “What does that even mean? You’re not vampires, you’re not demons or spirits. What are you?”
Sun laughed. “What, is this so you can go home and look us up in your encyclopedia? Check another category off in your supernatural guidebook?”
I flushed. I was usually the one taking the piss out of everything. “I just want to know.”
“Of course you do—you’re a nosy American.”
I rolled my eyes.
Behind me, Ben said close to my ear, “You’re never going to get a straight answer.”
I never did.
Sun came over to me, planted his staff in front of me, leaned heavily on it, and grinned. “Surely you can guess what we are, can’t you? You must have some idea.”
If I did, my conscious mind was shying away from the knowledge, because it was impossible. It couldn’t possibly be right.
Xiwangmu leaned an elbow on the arm of her throne. The look in her eyes was part amused, part impatient. The look a teacher would give a slow student. She said, “Katherine Norville called Kitty—we’re gods.”