NINE

Albert showed them. He showed them all.

I’m sorry, Albert, you’re nice and all, but—you’re just too heavy for me. I just can’t handle all that intensity, you dig? Call me when you lighten up....

“Lighten up?” Pfagh.

He was destined for great things. He just knew it.

If only all these people wouldn’t keep getting in his way.

I don’t want liars on my payroll, nor half-breeds. Remove yourself from my establishment before I throw you out.

Before she died, his mother used to tell him stories of her ancestor, the legendary Heart of the Dragon: a ronin who had traveled the countryside of feudal Japan righting wrongs and punishing the guilty, until he was condemned by a mob of ignorant peasants.

I saw you talking to that girl. We don’t like that kind of behavior around here, mister. Consider yourself fired.

People liked to think that ignorant peasants didn’t exist in this day and age. After all, a man had walked on the moon, which meant mankind had evolved, right?

Wrong.

It took different forms these days, but it was the same old song.

After that bastard at the supermarket fired him, he fell into a deep state of depression. All he could imagine, all he could see, all he could dream about were the people who kept him down.

Stupid half-breed! You don’t belong in Chinatown with the real people!

It had started when he was a child, with the other Chinatown kids taunting him because his mother was Japanese. His parents both told him they were just ignorant, that they were kids who didn’t know any better, and things would improve when he grew up.

But things didn’t improve. Everywhere he turned he was met with rejection, disgust, and revulsion.

But always he remembered his mother’s stories about the Heart of the Dragon.

Once he was unemployed, he had plenty of time on his hands. So he took a trip to the library, tried to see if there was anything in their collection of Japanese texts.

And he found more than he had bargained for.

The stories told of a demon who had imprisoned Doragon Kokoro’s soul. Yet according to the texts, the power of blood could supersede the power of the demon’s incantation.

A descendant of the Heart of the Dragon could summon his demon-tainted ancestor back to the land of the living, where it would wield great power.

The problem was that the texts were incomplete, so he wasn’t sure of the entirety of the spell, nor its ultimate effect. Still, he was certain that it would tether the Heart of the Dragon to him, thus granting him the ability to right all wrongs, and remove the petty people from his life.

There was another spell—this one complete—that would banish the spirit again for eighty seasons, but what use had he for that? Why would he wield great power, only to surrender it?

At first he hadn’t entirely believed everything he read. But what did he have to lose?

He had no girl.

No family, no job, no friends.

Nothing.

But he had a destiny. He was a descendant of the Heart of the Dragon. He deserved better—and he would have it.

Someone in a bar he frequented told him about Moondoggy Verlander, a burned-out hippie who was good at tracking down the arcane, and Albert hired him. Moondoggy became his first test subject, and he had felt a bit of remorse about that, but the results were exactly what he had hoped for. Guilt quickly gave way to euphoria.

Then Albert was finally able to avenge himself on those who had wronged him, who had kept him from his destiny.

Now they were gone, he found himself at a crossroads. What was next for him and his very own ancestral ronin?

It had caught him off guard, when that idiot supermarket manager had punched him. But, though startled, Albert had only felt a brief sensation of pain. And even though he was pretty sure he’d heard the crack of his nose breaking, when he had wiped away the blood, he had found no injury.

It seemed as if he was indestructible as long as he had the Heart of the Dragon bound to him. That hadn’t been in the texts, and he wondered what other unknown facets existed in this great union between him and his ancestor. What else had been contained in that lost text?

Looking around now, he knew there had to be more that he could do.

Enough dwelling on the past, he mused. He needed to think about his future.

The apartment in which he lived was, charitably speaking, a dump. The “pad,” as the landlord had referred to it, was tiny, with warped wood floors in the living room, a frayed and stained carpet in the bedroom, and cracked linoleum in the kitchen. He could barely afford a hammock to sleep on, and macaroni in the cabinet. The only reason he had a chair was that he’d found it on the street.

He needed to move up in the world.

And the Heart of the Dragon would accomplish that for him.

With a small smile at the thought of what he might be able to achieve, he once again started to chant the spell. Perhaps spending more time with the ronin would allow him to take what was rightfully his from society.

The fires of the netherworld burned bright, and the form of the ronin appeared within the flames that licked toward the ceiling. Just as fire had consumed Yoshio Nakadai in his death, so did flames continue to follow him across the centuries. Albert felt the warmth of the fire dance on his face, driving out the chill of the inadequately heated apartment.

Yet it wasn’t just heat he felt. No, it was power. He had in his possession a creature who could kill anyone. It was time he used his ancestor for something other than petty revenge.

The Heart of the Dragon had been a great hero, renowned throughout Japan. Albert Chao was determined to be at least as famous.

He hadn’t had the money to pay Moondoggy, but now he could get all the money he wanted.

A loud noise from behind him prompted him to spin around, only to find a bald man standing in the doorway. He had apparently kicked the door in, splintering the lock, which irritated Albert. Not so much that he’d kicked in the door, but that his apartment was so awful that its door could so easily be kicked in.

The man had a handgun, but he didn’t look like a robber.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“My name doesn’t matter,” the bald man said. “But I know yours. You’re Albert Chao, you’ve killed six people in cold blood—and I’m here to stop you.”

Albert broke into a large smile.

“I doubt that.”

And wordlessly he willed the Heart of the Dragon to kill the bald man. Surrounded by the eternal fires, the spirit married Albert’s thoughts to immediate action. The ronin raised the katana over his head at an angle, ready for an immediate downward sokutso slice at the bald man’s collarbone. As he did so, Albert spoke again.

“I control the Heart of the Dragon, gaijin. He is mine to command for as long as I live.”

“Fine,” the bald man said. He raised his gun and shot Albert.

Samuel had to admit to enjoying the look of utter shock on Albert Chao’s face as the Smith & Wesson Model 60 revolver’s .38 calibre bullet slammed into Chao’s knee, blood blooming into a stain on his pants leg as the young man fell to the warped wood floor.

Chao’s head collided with the wall on the way down, slicing open a nasty gash on his forehead.

Unfortunately, while it put Chao down for the count, the man with the sword was still moving toward him, wreathed in flames that flickered cruelly in the dimly lit apartment.

Samuel pointed his revolver at the spirit.

“That’s not going to do any good, Samuel,” Deanna said from behind him. She and Mary had waited in the hallway, preparing the counter spell that they’d found in the library, helpfully translated by Bartow’s professor friend at Berkeley.

“Yeah, I know,” Samuel snapped over his shoulder as he hastily backed away from the spirit as it bore down on him. “I was just hoping it might flinch a bit. Handguns weren’t all that common in feudal Japan.”

The extensive notes Bartow had provided told of a masterless samurai named Yoshio Nakadai who had lived in nineteenth-century Japan and who had been given the nickname of Doragon Kokoro, which translated to “heart of the dragon.”

Bingo.

They chronicled his death, allegedly at the hands of a demon, and revealed that his spirit could be resurrected by a descendant possessing the proper incantation, a portion of which was included amidst the papers at the library.

Since Chao was half-Japanese, they realized he may well have been kin to Nakadai.

The demon’s role in Nakadai’s death explained the sulfuric residue. Bartow hadn’t found any other omens that indicated demonic activity—which was pretty rare, in any case—so he and the Campbells chalked it up to the spirit’s origins, rather than any specific demonic intent.

Also amidst the texts was a spell that could send the spirit back—and this one was complete. It didn’t banish the spirit permanently, but it beat the alternative....

The most valuable piece of information gleaned from their research, however, had been an SFPL call slip that was stuck between two pages. Bartow had pocketed it immediately, because the slip had revealed the name and address of the last person who had taken the book out.

Albert Chao.

Once they had transcribed the counterspell, and gathered the materials they’d need to cast it, they headed to Chao’s apartment, hoping to stop him before he instructed the Heart of the Dragon to kill anyone else. Just now that next victim looked likely to be Samuel himself, as he barely dodged a powerful slice from the spirit’s katana.

Samuel put a hand to his cheek, which was hot from the proximity of the flames. Strangely enough, though he could feel the heat, the fire hadn’t set the apartment alight.

“How’s that spell coming, Little Miss?” Samuel called to Mary.

“Don’t call me that!” she shouted from the hallway.

Then she came into view in the doorway. In her right hand she held a piece of notepaper with the phonetic spelling of the words to the spell. In her left she had a pinch of pulverized kihada root, which they had purchased from a small drugstore in San Francisco’s tiny Japantown.

The Heart of the Dragon swung his sword once again.

Samuel tripped over a battered chair, which was all that saved him as the fiery blade of the katana singed his bald scalp. The apartment was very sparsely furnished, but it was also very small, and very soon Samuel was going to run out of places to dodge.

“Where’s the damn Claymore?” he asked Deanna, who was keeping herself between the spirit and Mary.

“Are you out of your mind? That’s a katana! It’d slice the Claymore in two!”

The spirit reared above him wielding its flaming weapon, without realizing it, Samuel suddenly found himself literally backed into a corner.

He heard a voice. Mary was speaking the incantation slowly, making sure to get the pronunciation right. He knew she had to do it right in order for it to work, but if she didn’t hurry up, he was going to be skewered and burned to a crisp.

Samuel thought quickly: there was a window nearby, but a quick glance revealed that it wasn’t the one with the fire escape. Albert lived on a fifth-story walk-up, so jumping out wasn’t an option.

In the moments before the creature struck, he really wished that shooting Albert had broken the man’s hold on the spirit.

Dammit.

The warrior raised his katana. Heat from the demonic flames licked across Samuel’s face. He’d been half tempted to fire his revolver, just to see what would happen, but knew that he’d only be wasting a bullet.

Now, though, he’d take whatever he could, because there was nowhere to dodge, nowhere to run....

He raised the pistol.

Mary finished the incantation and threw the pulverized root into the flames that surrounded the ronin.

Though the katana remained raised, the spirit threw its head back and screamed. The flames grew hotter, and Samuel had to put his hands in front of his face to try to ward off the pounding heat.

A flash of light.

Then nothing.

Mary was grinning.

“Guess it worked,” she said triumphantly.

“For the time being,” Deanna said. “Remember what the professor’s notes said: all this spell does is banish it for twenty years.”

Mary shrugged.

“So we come back in twenty years and stop it again. We can come down in a shuttle from our house on the moon.”

Samuel rolled his eyes.

“Moon shuttle. Right. If we’re on the moon, we’ll be too busy fighting the monsters up there, I’ll bet.”

Even as he spoke, the sound of sirens pierced the quiet of the evening. Glancing out of the window, he saw both fire trucks and police vehicles approaching the building.

“We need to scram,” he said urgently. Chao was harmless now—or, rather, for the next twenty years—and he needed medical attention. But the police could handle that. The Campbells needed to beat feet out of there.

As they dashed down the back stairs toward the back-alley exit that would, with luck, keep them away from the police, Deanna spoke in a terse whisper.

“When we get back to the hotel, I’ll call Marty and arrange for a flight home.”

Feeling magnanimous after the successful hunt, Samuel added his own two cents.

“And then you can call Jack, Little Miss. Maybe the two of you can have dinner together.”

Deanna shot him a look that expressed surprise, but Mary shook her head.

“That’s okay, Dad. I mean, we could all have dinner with him, as a thank you, I guess.”

They ran out of the back door, heading toward the street that ran behind the building.

“I thought you liked the boy.”

“He’s nice,” Mary said, “and it was good to see him. But, like you always say, Dad, romance and hunting don’t mix.” She grinned. “Except for you two.”

Deanna chuckled as they headed toward a bus stop.

“Let’s go home.”

Albert inhaled sharply, then sat up quickly.

His knee felt fine.

Putting a hand to his head, he found that the gash had closed over, and he wiped the blood away.

Unlike the simple punch from the previous night, this was a pair of wounds, and it took a bit longer for them to heal back up. First the knee injury, which sent paroxysms of pain throughout his entire body. When he hit the wall, he did pass out for a few seconds—but he heard bits of conversation among those three gaijin, including the girl speaking—with an awful accent—the words to the other spell he’d found in the library.

But by the time they’d finished casting the spell and left, he was whole again. Whatever link he had with the Heart of the Dragon, it still existed.

He could not be hurt—at least not permanently.

He yanked up his bloodstained pant leg, exposing the bare flesh. There was blood on his knee, but the skin itself was unbroken and unscarred.

He grinned. It was like magic.

In fact it was magic—very good magic.

While Albert had no idea who those three gaijin had been, he knew that they thought the battle was over—at least for the next two decades.

But by the time twenty years rolled around again, Albert intended to be ready.

Three police officers appeared at his broken door.

“Don’t move!”

“What’s going on, officers?” he asked innocently.

“We got a report of gunshots being fired,” one of them said.

“No, sir, officer,” Albert responded in as deferential a voice as he could manage. The last thing he wanted right now was trouble with the police.

Another officer inspected the shattered lock.

“Your door looks like it’s been kicked in.”

“Yeah, I’ve been trying to get the landlord to fix that for weeks,” he replied.

The officer snorted. “I’ll bet.” Then he looked down. “What happened to your leg?”

“Got the pants from Goodwill. Can’t afford to be picky these days, you know?”

The police had a few more questions, but other than the door, there was no evidence of a crime, and they didn’t seem eager to pursue it.

As soon as they left, Albert smiled.

That taken care of, he now had two decades to figure out the best way to put the power of his ancestor to his use.