Five Odd Honors (25 page)

Nissa flew
back to Virginia with Lani soon after she and Pearl had settled the matter of their relocation.

“It’ll be easier to explain to my sisters in person why I’m moving,” Nissa said. “For one thing, they won’t have several days to sit around thinking about ways to convince me to come home. For another, they won’t have the sentimental argument—‘but you’ve forgotten how lovely and perfect things are here.’ It’ll also be easier to speak with administrators at my college about transcripts.”

Despite these decisive assertions that Nissa planned to come back, Pearl found staying cheerful very hard as she waved good-bye at the airport security gate.

I wonder how long until I get a call asking if I’d please ship back the things she and Lani left,
Pearl wondered as she drove away from the airport.
Family can be so very persuasive. How will Nissa feel once she sees Lani running around with her cousins, part of a happy, noisy mob?

So absorbed was Pearl in her thoughts that initially she didn’t pay much attention when her town car began first to vibrate, then to shake.

“What the . . .” she said aloud, quickly glancing over the dashboard,checking various gauges. Nothing was running too hot or too cold. The gas gauge showed full and none of the warning lights glowed.

The car continued to shake. Pearl looked around. None of the other cars on this relatively quiet road seemed to be experiencing any difficulty.

Not an earthquake, then.

Pearl pulled off at a strip mall devoted to various professional offices: two lawyers, an insurance agency, a travel agency, and a dentist. All the businesses were closed for the day. Nissa had opted for an evening flight in the hope that Lani would sleep through much of the trip.

After pulling into one of the parking spaces, Pearl shut off the car’s engine. The shaking persisted. Frowning, she reached for her cell phone and was only mildly surprised when she found herself in a dead zone.

Pearl’s pulse quickened as she tried to school her ch’i to shape All Green, a spell that would permit her to see magical workings. Although All Green was considered quite a difficult spell by the three apprentices—since it involved altering one’s own aura, not summoning something already present as in Dragon’s Tail or Dragon’s Breath—Pearl considered All Green a routine working. It was one she had done almost daily when she was a young woman studying under Thundering Heaven.

Today, however, Pearl could not line up the images in her mind. The bamboo twisted, yellowed, and dried. The pair of green dragons—an image of increase, usually almost too ready to form in the company of vegetative bamboo—now refused to take shape.

The town car continued to shake. Pearl fumbled for the door handle. Her fingers were so weak that she could hardly wrap them around the latch. With a colossal effort, she unlatched the door. Leaning against it, she shoved.

The heavy door hardly moved. For once Pearl regretted her fondness for big cars, regretted letting her chauffeur go, regretted not having Nissa take a cab to the airport. Her chest was beginning to ache, pins and needles shooting up her arms, through her blood. Her head throbbed.

Even so, Pearl was a stubborn woman. Moreover, she was quite strong for one of both slight frame and advanced years. She shoved her shoulder and upper body against the door. The town car was well maintained. This time the door swung out. Pearl hauled her feet around and half fell from the car.

Grabbing at the upper edge of the car door, Pearl pulled herself mostly upright. The pressure in her chest was growing more intense, the prickles spreading to her legs, growing to burning intensity in her arms. Her head was pounding so hard that she could barely remember her name, much less something as complex as how to hit the emergency numbers programmed into her cell phone.

If they’d reach anyone.

I’m having a heart attack,
Pearl thought, dragging herself a few steps away from the car.
No great surprise, given how I’ve been pushing myself.

She looked back at the sleek, dark blue bulk of the town car. Perhaps she’d had more success with the All Green than she had thought, for what she saw was a faint double image. One was of the town car sloppily parked over three spaces. The other was of the same car vibrating like a cartoon character that had walked into a wall.

“Boing!” Pearl said, and giggled shrilly. “Boing!”

The shaking had spread to her legs. She managed to sit more or less decorously on the nearest curb, glad in some illogical part of her mind that she’d worn a pants suit, not a dress. She’d hate for the paramedics to find her crumpled over with her underwear showing, her stockings bunched up and full of runs.

Sitting up was proving to be too much of an effort. Breathing hurt. Pearl couldn’t feel her feet or hands. How did she want them to find her? Flat on her back, or curled on her side? Curled would look better, like a sleeping child.

I never got my will rewritten to make sure Nissa benefited. I hope my brothers aren’t too greedy, that they’ll be guided by the letter I wrote my lawyers, even if I didn’t get to sign the revised draft.

An uncountable segment of time passed. Pearl mostly concentrated on normally autonomous actions like breathing in and out. When she had attention to spare, she counted her heartbeats. They seemed rather more frequent than usual, and very erratic.

Not promising
.

A low rumbling sound intruded upon Pearl’s derailing train of thought. The rumbling diminished, then vanished. There was a short, sharp bang. An erratic tapping, staccato and sharp. A shadow came between her and sunlight she hadn’t consciously registered until it was gone.

Pearl opened her eyes and fought to focus. A man’s face swam in and out of her field of vision. A familiar face, a Chinese face, but not one she particularly liked.

It was a meticulously groomed visage, the brows neat, the hair dark, shining black. Only tiny lines around the eyes and mouth gave away that this was a man in his sixties, rather than twenty years younger. It was the face of Franklin Deng.

Franklin Deng, who resented that the Thirteen Orphans possessed a wealth of lore that he felt should be shared—at least with their Chinese associates, most especially with him. Franklin Deng who, while not precisely an enemy, was certainly not a friend.

Deng was talking to her, switching between English and Chinese. His tone, at first imperious and autocratic, softened. Pearl felt a hand on her wrist, then on her chest. She tried to summon the proper indignation at the familiarity and failed. To her horror, she thought she might even weep with gratitude that if she must die, at least she wouldn’t die alone on a strip mall sidewalk.

Pearl heard faint beeping as Deng worked at a cell phone. She heard his faint curse as the phone failed to connect. She heard him speaking to someone.

“. . . and put through a call. Not to 911. She’d hate that. Call . . .”

Pearl didn’t hear who the other was to call.

The rumble of a car engine starting up, pulling away. Soft sing-song chanting, the words Chinese, sung in a high-pitched nasal register. Following the meaning was beyond her. Cantonese was her fourth or fifth language. Right now, the inflections kept getting tangled up with the Chinese languages that were more familiar to her tired, aching brain.

Breathing didn’t seem to be as hard. Was her heartbeat stabilizing? She forced herself to count carefully. Yes! The pain was less. Definitely less.

Pearl didn’t know if this was good—except that hurting less had to be at least somewhat good. Or was it? She’d heard that there came a point in dying where the body began to shut down, the pain began to diminish. That was why some people—those white-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel types—said it was so hard to come back from death into life. You had to fight back into the pain.

Pearl had never run from a fight in her life. She concentrated, forced herself to attend to what Deng was chanting.

Something about metal, about spirits of metal. Calling on fire, fire that melts metal. About melting metal, forcing away that which dwelled in metal, an entity that hid from fire.

Pearl guided herself through the rhythm of the words, aware now of a new presence—or rather of something that had been present, but concealed from her until Deng had driven it from hiding. An elemental spirt, one of those that anchored itself in metal.

Pearl felt a shiver deep within her soul. The element associated with the Tiger was wood. Wood absorbed strength from earth, but was destroyed by metal. If one was hunting a Tiger, sending a hsien, or spirit, that thrived in metal would be a good choice. She recalled how her car—a metal beast, for all that so many parts were plastic these days—had vibrated, then shook, as if possessed by a will of its own.

“Car,” she gasped. “My car.”

Franklin Deng glanced down at her, then nodded crisply. He waved both hands expansively in a gesture of warding, then rose from her side and walkedover to the town car. Pearl turned her head, the motion taking a terrific amount of energy. Deng placed his hands on the hood of her town car and resumed his chanting.

Gone was the high sing-song note. These words were strident, commanding. Deng repeated them. Pearl caught a few. The dialect he was using was an archaic Cantonese, even more unfamiliar to her than the modern version. Even so, she grasped some of his meaning. A spirit had taken root in her car. Deng sought to force it out.

He was succeeding, but at what cost? The pain in Pearl’s head and chest were returning. The hsien was willing to depart, most willing if it could fulfill its mission and take her with it. By urging the spirit to depart as quickly as possible, Deng had inadvertently given it new strength. Unfortunately for Pearl, the quickest way for the spirit to depart would be for it to fulfill its mission, to take its victim. Then the bindings that had brought it to this place would be broken.

Does Franklin Deng know this? Does he seek this indirect way to murder me? He might even be praised for what he had done, condoled for accidentally contributing to the death of the old woman he sought to save.

But then, if my death was what he desired, Deng could simply let the hsien go ahead and finish what it was about.

A ripping sensation coursed through Pearl’s flesh.

Pearl almost screamed in pain and fear, but pride—pride and a deep fear that all she might manage was a pathetic squeak—kept her breath within her tortured lungs. Taking the ch’i she would have expended on a scream, Pearl strove to fight back.

She became aware of the hsien’s hold on her as if it was centered in five hooks set within her flesh. She concentrated, focusing in on releasing the hooks.

One. The first hook was set within Pearl’s right arm, a sharp claw shaped like an octopus’s beak. The hsien was unprepared for resistance from its victim, so Pearl popped the hook free without too much effort.

Two. Left arm. The hsien reset its hooks more deeply, diverting some of its attention from resisting Deng’s banishing spell, but Pearl had a free arm now. She reached over and found the hook by touch. Blood ran hot and wet as she grabbed hold and tore.

Three. Four. Both legs. Not too difficult to remove these hooks—if your definition of “not too difficult” included agony akin to adhesive tape pulled off sun-blistered skin. More blood flowed, ruining her stockings and the trousers of her favorite summer casual outfit.

Franklin Deng’s chanting had taken on a new note. Pearl heard astonishment, but redoubled purpose as well.

Despite Deng’s holding much of the metal hsien’s attention, Pearl trembled as she contemplated the final hook set within her. This one was anchored deep within her heart. If she pulled this one out, she would probably die. Yet to leave it in place also meant death.

Metal is destroyed by fire. Wood creates fire. Wood is the Tiger’s element. Tiger Bright. Tiger burning bright.

Pearl Bright envisioned her heart as something shaped from the hardest, densest wood—from heart wood. Both the Chinese and the American within her chuckled at the pun. Pearl took the time to make her vision perfect: the heart polished smooth, rubbed with fine oils, the grain visible in complex, circular patterns.

Wood burns. So do hearts, as anyone who has ever loved or hated knows with absolute certainty. Hearts burn. Pearl, with a kindling of hatred and a spark of love, set her own heart aflame.

Now Pearl did scream, loud and shrill. Tears streamed down her face, but their dampness did nothing to extinguish the fire within her. A burning heart aches beyond bearing, but despite the pain humans can live with a heart of fire.

Metal, by contrast, cannot survive within that burning heat. Pearl screamed and wept, feeding the fire within her, bearing the increased pain as her heart grew hot enough to melt gold, hot enough to melt silver, hot enough to purify iron into steel, and beyond that to heats that burn steel into a smoking, viscous puddle and then to ash.

As the final hook was burnt away within her, Pearl swallowed a final scream. Franklin Deng was staring at her, his hands raised in invocation.

“It’s gone,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse.

“Yes.”

“And you owe me.”

“Probably.”

Pearl looked down at herself. The wounds in her arms and legs were real, the blood trickling from them in a slowly clotting stream, but when she touched her chest all she detected was a residual heat.