Bride of the Rat God (42 page)

“What about Frank Brown?” Norah asked late that afternoon. She and Alec were sitting in the kitchen, their voices low so as not to waken Christine, who slept like the dead on the living room couch. One of Shang Ko’s numerous grandsons had appeared a short while before in a Model T even more elderly and broken-down than Alec’s to remove the old man to the dark safety of the tunnels beneath Chinatown.

“You mean, will he still have the police out after Shang?” Alec shrugged. “I doubt it. I’d be surprised if they ran down the false name we gave at St. Catherine’s. My guess is, if Brown doesn’t push things with Hsu Kwan, they’ll let him go in a couple of days.”

“But Brown may very well have known, or guessed, that if he obeyed his dream and had Shang arrested, Christine was going to die.” Norah pushed aside her plate. She’d made French toast, of all things, there being little in Alec’s icebox besides milk and eggs, and had surprised herself by devouring it ravenously.
Lost bread,
Alec said they called it in the South. “He certainly knew Jesperson was going to die. And he gets off scot-free.”

“Producers do.” Alec shrugged and stirred his coffee. “That’s Hollywood. My guess is that Chris won’t even quit sleeping with him—not until she’s fulfilled her contract and has Conklin well and truly sewed up. But she’ll take old Frank for everything he’s got in the meantime and drop him like a hot potato when she’s done. With the offer Charlie just got from Lassky, that’ll be comeuppance enough for Brown, especially if he goes ahead and tries to buy out Enterprise on the assumption that he’s going to have a star for the next couple of years. Not to mention the assumption that he’s going to have a cameraman or a scenarist.”

Norah yawned hugely and worked her shoulders. Both the rush of adrenaline and the shock of the aftermath were wearing off. In addition to her multiple aches and pains, she found herself profoundly sleepy. Late golden sunlight streamed comfortingly through the kitchen windows, and she wondered how well she’d sleep that night.

Not well, she thought. Not until she had seen the trap brought up and the Moon of Rats—which now resided in the center of a chalked protective circle in a corner of the workroom floor—sealed into its own small compartment, and the whole thing taken far out to sea and dropped.

“By the way...” She looked up from her tea. “I think I stopped saying thank you a long time ago, and I’m not sure I should have. None of this was your fight at all, you know. And without you we would have been lost.”

He grinned at her and pushed up his glasses with one stubby forefinger. “Well, there were times, walking out onto that pier this morning, when I did think about that. It’s funny, when that... that thing came out of the darkness, a part of my mind was still thinking,
There’s got to be a rational explanation for this
.”

He shrugged again. “For the life of me I couldn’t come up with one. But what Shang said was right, you know.”

“What?”

His hands turned the coffee cup on the table before him, neat quarter turns, as he had at Enyart’s, keeping the handle pointed precisely, as if the matter absorbed all his attention. Norah noticed as if for the first time, that his hands had been burned and then had been bandaged neatly by the emergency room staff at St. Catherine’s. Scrapes and abrasions marked one side of his face, surrounded with the red stains of Mercurochrome, and his hair was crumpled and filthy with soot.

“That not to use whatever power you’ve been given is not a neutral act. It’s a blow struck for evil. No, I’m not a wizard like Shang, but... when it came down to it, that didn’t matter. I have my own power, for whatever that’s worth: knowledge and... self, I guess. Just the willingness to be there. Besides...” He shrugged, at a loss for words.

After a time he reached out with one bandaged hand and touched the half-fallen swag of her hair that she had not thought to do more with than pin carelessly out of the way. “One day I’ll take you out to the hills behind Moorpark, up in the valley where they film the Westerns. In September the grass turns exactly the color of your hair.”

Five or ten minutes later Norah drew back a little from the circle of his arms, yawned again, and said, “This sounds like the most unromantic thing in the world, but I’m absolutely torn between carrying on and falling asleep. I love you, Alec—” She realized obliquely that it was the first time she’d said so, but somehow it felt like something they’d both known for a long time, “—but if I don’t get to bed, I think I’m going to go facedown in the syrup.”

He yawned and picked up his glasses where he’d set them aside during the sudden frenzy of that first embrace. “I didn’t want to spoil things by saying so, but I think you’re right.” At some point in the past few minutes she’d transferred from her own chair to his lap; sunlight made a confusion of bright patterns over the blue plaid of his shirtsleeve, the white cotton of her blouse, the trailing river of her untangling hair. “You can have my bed.”

“You take half of it,” Norah said as they tiptoed softly through the living room where Christine lay sleeping, surrounded by the folded-up towels upon which slumbered her tiny guardians. “I’m certainly not going to turn you out of your own bed after last night, and I’m too exhausted to deal with the proprieties now. And I think,” she added as she took off her sensible shoes, “that we’re both
far
too tired to be in danger of disgracing ourselves.”

As it happened, she was wrong about that.

On Tuesday night, by the misty light of the waxing moon, the
Whatshername
put out from Santa Monica Harbor for Catalina Island. From the end of the Santa Monica pier Norah could see the lights of the boat, riding some distance out on the dark sea. Below her in the darkness she heard Captain Oleson saying, “Naw, it’s no trouble, Ackey me boy. Next shipment isn’t due from Canada for a week or more, and what the hell have I got to do around here?”

“So you just thought you’d do a little diving with me and every salvager and scrounge in Santa Monica yesterday, is that it?” asked Alec’s voice.

“Look, you arrogant little shutterbug, if I have my own idea of what’s fun...”

“You don’t think the police got him after all, do you?” Christine walked back to Norah through the clammy darkness. She carried Black Jasmine cuddled against her beneath the gray chinchilla of her coat, the diamonds on his collar twinkling, even as Norah held Buttercreme cradled in her arms, the long, singed cascade of her ivory-colored tail trailing down. Chang Ming, who was getting around quite well on a splinted leg, looked up from where he sat at Norah’s side, and his tail swept back and forth across his back. “He should have been here before this.”

Norah wondered if the dogs remembered anything about the fight, anything about their transformation into the fu-dogs of legend, anything about the blazing horror of bones and fire. They seemed not to. Beyond the clinginess of injured animals and stiffness when they moved, they seemed to be their usual lively, happy selves.

Perhaps they see no difference,
she thought.
Perhaps, in their hearts, they are always fu-dogs, ready to take on any number of animate saber-tooth skeletons and evil demons for the sake of those they love.

“More than the police,” she said quietly, “I’m worried that he was hurt worse than he let on. Alec said he refused to remain at the hospital longer than it took them to bandage his back and his arm. He might have had other injuries.”

I was hurt inside,
Shang Ko had said. She remembered the torrent of fire and lightning striking the old man, remembered his cry of pain.

He had been young when he had met Da Shu Ken the first time. Now, when he was old and brittle and frightened, how badly had the Rat-God hurt him when it had swept aside not only his body but all the magic he could summon up? She wondered how she could even inquire if he did not make an appearance tonight.

In Christine’s arms, Black Jasmine turned his head and let out a gruff little yak. Chang Ming’s ears lifted, and he trotted a few clumsy steps down the pier, tail vibrating furiously. A moment later, in the thin moonlight among the rocking shadows of the fishing boat masts, Norah caught movement, the pale blur of faces, the gleam of moonlight on white hair.

The Shining Crane—or perhaps one of his grandsons—had somehow retrieved his staff, stained with smoke but still intact, from the wreck of the pier. If he moved a little more slowly and stiffly than before and leaned a little more heavily, it was hardly to be noticed. With his other arm he supported a very small and very ancient Chinese woman who swayed a little on her deformed feet but moved with surprising sureness for one so old. The hair piled on top of her head, held in place with a couple of chopsticks thrust through it, was as white as the moonlight, and her eyes were as bright and black as a hen’s.

“Miss Christine, Miss Norah,” said Shang Ko, a note of joy in his voice that told Norah exactly who this woman was even before the old man spoke, “permit me to make known unto you my most honored colleague Ni Kuei Nu, the Mud Tortoise, the lady of the Bayan Har Shan, the greatest of the sorceresses of the Middle Kingdom.”

And other things as well, thought Norah, looking at them together, the tall old man and the fragile and beautiful woman on his arm. Other things as well.

“
Buen’ noches
,” the Mud Tortoise said, holding out one brown-burned peasant hand. “Twenty years am I looking for this old
brujo
,” she went on in a strong Spanish accent. “Waiting and listening and reading the water and the fire, and does he use his power so I can find him? Does he work one single spell big enough to let me hear down in Ciudad Mexico? Pff!”

“You came here from
Mexico
!” Christine stared at her with wide eyes. “I didn’t know they
had
Chinese in Mexico!”

The Mud Tortoise’s eyes twinkled. “Everywhere there is a little money to be made, you find Chinese.”

“And everywhere there are Jews,” added Alec, climbing up the ladder from the boat and stretching out his hand. “If it weren’t for Chinese restaurants, the Jews would starve to death. My lady.” He bowed awkwardly over her hand and turned to Shang Ko, who was regarding his colleague with a combination of pride and happiness, as if, even though he lived another fifty years, he could never get enough of looking at her.

More quietly, Alec said to her, “You should have seen him the other night. Without him we’d all be dead—dead a dozen times, really.”

“And without you,” Shang Ko said quietly, “I would also have been dead. Alive-dead in hiding and in fear. I was a fool.”

“You were a fool not to have tried to reach me,” the Mud Tortoise said briskly. She stroked Black Jasmine’s head, nestled in Christine’s furs, and the little dog nibbled on her outstretched fingers.

Norah shook her head. “You can’t call a man who breaks his leg a fool for not being able to walk,” she said. “Some wounds go deep.”

The old wizard looked gravely across into her eyes, then at Alec by her side. “I am pleased to see,” he said softly, “that even the deepest wounds heal in time.”

They dropped the demon trap in the deep water on the far side of Catalina Island, a dry and rugged scarp of rock a few miles in circumference. Shang Ko and the Mud Tortoise marked the black box, on every strap and seal of lead, with spells of holding and power, signs that the Rat-God could never pass, power that would act with the power of the ocean to hold him forever prisoner. The Moon of Rats, sealed in another compartment of the trap, would always be his. No one else would use it to summon him.

“This is the place,” said Shang Ko, holding out his hands palm-down over the yacht’s rail while the Mud Tortoise knelt, drawing invisible signs on the box and now and then tossing her own three bronze coins or consulting her ivory
luopan
to fine-tune the magic and tie it to stars and tides and the currents of moving fate.

“Wind over Water,” she said quietly, jingling the coins in her hands. “The sign of flowing water that shall cover the Rat-God forever. Earth over Wind—ascendance and the triumph of steadfast work. The signs are good to hold the demon here for eternity. Thunder over Lake...” She smiled in secret delight “Not a sign for the demon, that one...” Her eyes twinkled, and she straightened up. “
Asi.
It is accomplished.”

Norah, Alec, and Shang Ko lifted the box to the rail. Shang Ko said softly, “Da Shu Ken, demon of the north, I consign you to lie between the farthest west and the farthest east. Spirit of fire and earth, I consign you to the deeps of the ocean forever. Come not forth ever again. Sleep quietly, knowing nothing, in the darkness of the deep.” They tipped the box over, and it was gone.

“That’s Avalon.” The bandages on Alec’s hands were a white blur in the shadows of the deckhouse as he pointed to the lone sequin of light. “I’ll take you out there some day.”

Norah turned her head slightly against his shoulder, the phrase catching at her:
I’ll take you...

Jim had said that.
I’ll take you to New York. I’ll take you to Paris...
Never saying,
When the war is over.
Never saying,
If I live.
She hadn’t let herself think about it, either. But neither had she entirely believed.

For the first time she felt that she would in fact be taken, that circumstance would not conspire to strike the future from her hands. Her arm tightened around his waist, but she found that she could not speak.

“Alec, don’t you
dare
drag poor Norah to that
dreadful
dull island.” A soft bulk of fur appeared around the corner of the deckhouse, punctuated by the occasional glitter of a diamond in the watery light of the moon. “The only thing out there is one casino and a dance hall, and they have only this sort of Hawaiian band with ukuleles, and they’re all positively
ancient.
We filmed
Wolf of the Spanish Main
in the bay around the other side of the island,” Christine added, “where all the bootleggers pick up their cargoes, and unless you like scenery and buffalo droppings, it’s the most howlingly boring place on earth. But I did get to wear this wonderful purple silk thing with a million petticoats, only I don’t see how women walked around in those days, and getting in and out of those silly rowboats was awful. No wonder they didn’t allow women on ships.”