Year of the Golden Dragon (5 page)

She gripped Baba’s precious possession in one hand and clung to Mama with her other hand. Together, she and Mama watched the oldest looking of the men reach down and gently place his hand on her father’s head. Baba looked up into the monk’s face and nodded. Not a word was spoken.

A moment later her father stood up, smiled weakly at Mama and her, then turned and walked out the door, followed by the dark-robed men. When the last one closed the door after him, Hong Mei felt as if she’d just woken up from a dream. Realizing that her father was gone, she made a movement to go after him, but her mother held her firm. When Hong Mei looked up at her mother’s face, she saw it was wet and glistening.

That night, she and Mama had also left home, never to return. To this day, they seldom talked about it. Hong Mei had asked her mother only once where the monks had taken Baba. Mama said she wasn’t sure, but it would be a peaceful place for him to rest for as long as he needed.

Sometimes, Hong Mei would close her eyes and try to use her own second sight to see if she could see her father or where he was. It never worked.

For as long as she could remember, Hong Mei had seen things in her mind while the outside world seemed to disappear. They were similar to seizures in that she couldn’t stop them. But they were also different, since people around her couldn’t tell what was happening. Of course her father could, since she had inherited this trait from him.

When she was small, her visions usually lasted only a few seconds. They were images of celebrations such as birthdays or the Mid-Autumn Festival, and often contained glimpses of her parents or friends. However, it wasn’t long before her visions began to change, becoming dark and scary. She was barely ten years old when she began seeing scenes of men dying in battle or women and children fleeing from intruders. And there was always fire. Fire and bodies.

Her visions seemed to come when she least wanted them, times when she was stressed or nervous. Her father insisted that they were a gift, and taught her techniques that his own father had shown him for taming his inherited second sight. She learned how to focus and breathe so that she could bring on images just by thinking about them. “By harnessing your visions,” Baba said, “you make them your ally, not your enemy.”

However, there were still plenty of times she could not manage them, and what she saw in her mind’s eye became increasingly more frightening and unrealistic. At the same time, her father changed. From being loving and kind, he became more demanding during Hong Mei’s
gong fu
training and preparation for what he called, “The Return of Black Dragon.”

Now, Hong Mei reached into her pocket and took out the small, flat piece of jade and studied it. Not for the first time did she think it an odd shape for a pendant. Chinese favoured jade pendants that were circular, like flattened doughnuts or those old-fashioned Chinese coins with a hole in the middle. Some people wore a charm shaped like a peach, others a small Buddha or Goddess of Mercy.

Her father’s jade was not like any of these. His had three edges, two straight as if they’d been sliced. The third side was carved with a wavy edge. It looked like a small Chinese fan.

What was even stranger than the shape of the pale green stone was what had been etched on its face: parts of two different animals – a bird and a serpent by the looks of it – but only the lower parts, claws, feathers and a scaly tail. It always made her wonder if this pendant was only one section of a more traditional circular piece of jewellery like her mother wore. But why would her father have kept a broken piece of jade? What had happened to the rest of it?

The whistle on the boiling kettle sounded. She sighed and put the jade back into her pocket. It seemed like she had been longing to see her father and ask him these questions for ages.

Hong Mei grinned to herself. It was lucky she’d kept them hidden in her heart for when she saw him again. As soon as they were reunited, she’d let them tumble out. He would understand immediately how much his daughter had thought about him.

Chapter 4

Sardine Class

Alex didn’t have to follow Uncle Peter’s advice
about the toilet on the plane. He’d been using the one in business class for the whole trip. That stewardess was so nice. Not only had she let him use the washroom up front, but she must have given him ten cans of Coke during the flight. With all that sugar, he wondered if he’d be able to sleep when they went to his grandparents’ after dinner.

Ugh! Dinner in Hong Kong: it was bound to be horrible.

Real Chinese food was something he tried to stay clear of. At a family reunion like tonight, there would be plenty of weird dishes. There was always at least one whole fish with head, tail and bulging eyes. For sure there’d be a roast duck complete with
its
head. And no doubt they’d have sautéed eel or squid or some other squirmy thing. Oh, and tofu. There was always tofu for Uncle Peter and Ryan. They loved that stuff.

Alex knew it was going to be bad, bad, bad.

At least Aunt Grace was normal. Alex couldn’t imagine his aunt eating Chinese food more often than she absolutely had to. Tonight, she’d probably say she was tired and they’d get to go to Nana and Yeye’s. But what if he got jet lag, like that time in Egypt? Uncle Peter had been pretty mad about that.

They’d been given all kinds of sweets and sodas on the flight to Cairo and had stayed awake the whole time. But once he and Ryan had got into the taxi, they’d crashed. Both of them had slept the whole way into the city and to their hotel. Alex had felt like a zombie as he stumbled through the corridors to their room. Through his sleep-induced fog, he heard Uncle Peter on the phone canceling the morning’s camel trek.

After he hung up he said, “The whole point of flying business class is to sleep. Not to play video games for fourteen hours straight.”

“Can’t we just reschedule it?” asked Aunt Grace. “The Sphinx hasn’t moved in over four thousand years. It’ll still be there tomorrow.”

“You know I have to be on-site for the rest of the week. If I miss the actual opening of the tomb, there’s no point in my being here. Or on any other important dig, for that matter. Your inheritance won’t last long if I lose my job.”

That was the last thing Alex remembered before waking up later that afternoon.

Uncle Peter got over it, but he was still angry enough that he vowed that Aunt Grace wasn’t going to “waste any more money buying Ryan and Alex business class seats.” They would go back to flying what he and Ryan called “sardine class.”

There was no use in begging Uncle Peter to change his mind. He’d only say, “When you’re a parent you can make decisions about your own family. Until you and Ryan are old enough to leave my house, you’ll live by my rules.”

Alex laughed a little now and loosened his seat belt. Uncle Peter was always saying things like that, but he was actually a real softy. He’d taken Ryan and him in, hadn’t he? Everyone told his brother and him how lucky they were to have such great “parents.” It was true, he guessed. He liked living with Uncle Peter and Aunt Grace.

Their house was in West Vancouver, at the foot of the mountains on the North Shore. When he wasn’t at school, Alex was at nearby Westwood Riding Academy working with Rubicon. Technically speaking, the ebony mare belonged to Aunt Grace. But after buying Ruby with the first of her inheritance, Aunt Grace had only taken a few lessons before she – as she said – “got busy with the boys.” That was just after he and Ryan had come to live with them.

He remembered Aunt Grace letting him sit on Rubicon as the instructor led the horse around the arena. Alex cried when he got off after a few laps. He must have known already that he and Ruby were meant for each other. Ever since then, Rubicon did exactly what he asked her to. Whether it was by using the reins or whispering in her ear, Alex and his mare were on the same wavelength. Someday, he hoped to race with her, but he’d have to wait until he was older for that.

Yeah. Life was good with Uncle Peter and Aunt Grace.

If he was to tell the truth, he never really thought about Mama and Papa. Unlike Ryan, he didn’t remember that much about them, or about the fire.

He glanced over at Ryan looking out of the plane window. As usual, he was in his own world. Alex felt a stab of shame. He wondered why he didn’t miss their parents as much as Ryan did.

“Hey, Alex,” he heard Aunt Grace say softly from across the aisle.

He grinned over at her. “How’d you sleep?”

“Horribly,” she yawned. “And you?”

“I didn’t.”

“Alex!” Aunt Grace said, watching her husband walking back toward them from the toilet. “Your uncle is going to kill you if you fall asleep during the reunion dinner.”

Uncle Peter reached his seat, sat down and immediately did the seat belt back up. He looked at them and then narrowed his eyes. “What? Did I miss something?”

“No. Nothing,” Alex and Aunt Grace said simultaneously.

Alex liked being on Aunt Grace’s side. Even when he was really young, he’d felt like they had something special. He thought back to when their adoption went through. That was also the day Uncle Peter had given Ryan and him their jade.

His uncle still wore glasses back then, and when he had held out the two pendants toward the boys and began to explain the legend behind them, his uncle’s eyes had looked sad, Alex thought.

Alex remembered, too, how he had snuggled up to Aunt Grace and asked what a legend was.

“It’s a very old folk tale,” she whispered.

The Wong family legend was that the jade pendants were two parts of a whole. With a third part, the jade formed one complete disc – but that piece had been lost long ago.

What had stuck in Alex’s young mind most from the tale was that the original, whole piece of jade once belonged to one of China’s first emperors. Nobody knew how the jade had ended up in their family. Uncle Peter said the boys’ father had a theory, but all the proof had been destroyed in the fire.

Alex would never forget how Ryan had glared at him then. Alex had immediately started crying while Uncle Peter explained, not for the first time, that the fire was an accident and that Alex had nothing to do with it.

Over the years, Uncle Peter added information to the legend – for example, that their father had gone back to their grandfather’s village in China where he was given an old scroll. The poem written on it was in a very old style, but he’d had it translated into both modern Chinese and English, especially for his sons. He had often recited the English version to them. Ryan loved it and had memorized the entire poem. At the time that Papa and Mama died, Alex knew only a few lines:

A man stood ashore, watching the sight

Of mighty Black Dragon in the moonlight.

The man was drawn by the pale green stone,

And vowed at once to make it his own.

After the fire, Ryan refused to recite any part of the poem, and wouldn’t even stay in the room if Uncle Peter mentioned it. Alex ended up learning it by himself from a copy Uncle Peter had.

Looking over at Ryan as he stared out the window, Alex hoped this trip would make his brother feel a bit better about losing their parents. Alex thought that if he could have just one wish, he would ask for that – something to make Ryan forgive him for something he’d never even done.

Chapter 5

The Poisoned Apple

Hong Mei stood on a sidewalk in Beijing,
the capital city, where emperors and empresses once ruled. Instead of the rickshaws and sedan chairs of days gone by, there were cars, taxicabs and crammed buses clogging the busy road behind her.