The Red Heart of Jade (34 page)

“There was too much at stake to leave to chance,” Long Nu said coldly. “And I was trying to protect you. If things had gone according to plan, this mess would never have happened.”

“You mean the mess of all those people dying? All those people who worked for you?” Dean shook his head. “You knew exactly who was killing your men, and you let it stand. You didn’t lift a finger while all those guys were eaten and burned alive. And look at you now. You could care less.”

“Assume what you will,” the woman said, in a voice so brittle, so cold, Dean’s skin puckered up and his mind said
Gotta run, gotta go, gotta get the hell out
.

But he could still see those people dying—feel the heat of the flames—had stood in those flames himself— and he could not abide the idea that anyone with Long Nu’s power had known what Lysander was doing— what he was capable of—and not made one single attempt to kill his ass. When Dean thought about all the problems that could have been solved...

“You’re a coward,” he said.

Long Nu moved. He did not see her move, had no time to shout before she pinned him to the bed. Scales erupted down the length of her throat, gleaming, iridescent. Her back arched, arms extending as muscles flexed long and tight. Dean heard popping sounds— bones cracking—and Long Nu’s waist was suddenly longer than her legs, which were not legs at all, but a tail with feathers sprouting along the curving spine. Her skirt rode up. Dean saw green skin.

He felt very small compared to the old woman, a tiny man whose body groaned under the weight of her. Long Nu’s shoulders and head were still quite human, but the rest of her rattled long with scales and the click of claws. Dean tried not to look at those claws, but they dug into his arms like a vise.

Miri tried to grab Long Nu around the neck, but the old woman shrugged her off and she collapsed back onto the bed with a painful wheeze. Dean wanted to wheeze right along with her—his chest hurt like hell— but he clenched his jaw and stared into Long Nu’s pale wrinkled face, her cheeks flushed with gold, eyes glowing bright as suns, hot as fire. He said, “Stop it. Stop it right now.”

“No,” she said. “I want you to listen to me. I want you to hear every word I have to say. I want you to look into my eyes and understand what these people meant to me, and how I would have done
anything
keep them safe. Given up my life, if I could have. But I made a promise, Dean Campbell, a very long time ago,
and there are
some things I am not allowed to break. “

He listened. He looked into her blazing inhuman eyes as she spoke, and he believed her. He could not help himself. But he thought,
It still doesn’t make it right
.

And as her gaze faltered he felt something move within his heart, a twist, a gathering of golden energy like a spring loosed. Long Nu’s hands flew off his body and she fell back with a low cry, hunched within her coiled tail so that only her shoulders and face were visible. Looking at her body, caught in that half-light between animal and woman, was like seeing an image from a dream—a dream too bizarre to come true, and yet, there. There.

“You fight dirty,” Dean said. His chest hurt; his entire body tingled.

“You make it very difficult to do anything else,” Long Nu said. “Impossible, even.”

She uncurled her body and, within moments, under a cloud of gold, was human again. Her blouse was torn, gaping, as was her skirt. Dragon bodies, not meant for human clothing. Long Nu did not seem to notice her nudity. She stared at Dean and Miri, who clutched at each other’s hands like lifelines. He wanted to ask Miri how she was doing, but he figured he already knew the answer.

“Will you listen to me?” Long Nu asked them. “Will you listen without fighting?”

“Owen,” Miri said. “Tell me about him first.”

“Owen is safe. I have been taking personal care of him, Mirabelle. He is very dear to me.”

“Just as dear as your husband, right?”

Long Nu’s mouth tightened. “I wish things could have been different. And not just for you.”

“Where is Lysander?” Dean asked. “Where is he, and how will he pay for his crimes?”

“What makes you think he has to?” Long Nu said. “He was possessed.”

“That’s too easy,” Dean replied. “Too easy, and you know it.”

“And I know there are too few of us in the world to hand him over to your brand of justice. What would it be, Mr. Campbell? A bullet to his head? In cold blood?”

“He killed. And no matter how... how
guilty
he might feel about that, I know he could have fought back sooner. I saw him try at the lakeshore. I saw him hesitate. If any of his other victims had been given that same hesitation, a chance—”

“Enough,” Long Nu said. “Lysander is my responsibility, and no longer your concern.”

“And Bai Shen?” Miri asked in a hard voice.

Long Nu’s gaze faltered.

“I barely arrived in time to save him. It was foolish of Bai to become involved. I underestimated his resourcefulness.”

Dean grunted. “You underestimated how much he loved his father.”

“Not particularly,” she said. “His father was never very loveable.”

Miri frowned. “I want some real answers. I want to know about the jade, about... About us. “ She glanced at Dean.

“The jade,” Long Nu murmured, and sat back down on the edge of the bed. “Those jade fragments are nothing but aftereffects. They have no real power.”

“You’re shitting us,” Dean said. “I’ve handled those rocks. There’s power in them, Long Nu. And besides, why go to all the trouble of hiding something that does no harm?”

“To draw attention from the real treasure,” Long Nu told him. “The jade artifacts do have some power, but that power rests only in their history. They tell a story, you see. The story of two lives, two very tragic people. Everything those individuals were—all that they suffered—rests in those stones. Which, I might add, are not the only one of their kind. There are other sets, even older, scattered throughout the world.”

“But the lives you spoke of... you’re not referring to the mummies,” Miri said. “Those pieces of jade were surgically placed in their chests.”

“Yes. That man and woman were mere practitioners of a long tradition, a kind of religion devoted to protecting and celebrating what rests so securely in you both.”

“Which is what?”

“A book,” Long Nu said quietly. “A very powerful book.”

“A book,” Dean repeated in a flat voice. “We have books inside of us.”

“One book, broken into two pieces. A book made of flesh, a book made originally for only one purpose.”

“To kill,” Miri murmured, eyes distant. Dean remembered his first vision from the jade artifact, those men speaking of death and dying, of cutting life short for no reason other than just being damned tired. Long Nu glanced at him, a sad smile playing over her mouth.

“Long ago,” she said quietly, “there was a man who could not die. He was not the only individual with that gift, but he was the only one of his kind who did not want it. He wished for death, and so he created a spell that would give it to him, and set that spell into a stone. But that... proved difficult to control, and so he broke the stone—and the spell—into two pieces and placed them into a human man and woman. It had a certain poetry, I suppose. What better way to achieve mortality, except through mortals? And what better way to safeguard a powerful spell, than give it to someone untalented, simple?”

“Not simple enough, apparently,” Miri said. Long Nu shrugged.

“He had another reason for breaking up the spell. By placing it inside humans, he created a buffer, a way of making sure the power did not... get out of hand.

But despite his... somewhat awkward precautions, he never truly understood the full extent of what he created. In devising the spell, he intended only for it to provide a release. The immense power he summoned could strip away immortality and turn a god into... something else. But power is nothing without focus. And the spell’s creator failed to think of what would happen after he died, that by making something that could be used again and again, that it might one day pass into hands with a different vision, another set of priorities. “

“So he was powerful and dumb,” Dean said. “But how does involve us? Shouldn’t the spell have just... died out?”

“Another lack of foresight. By placing the spell inside human beings, the energy was... transformed. Altered by the bodies surrounding it. And that alteration took on a life of its own. The spell...
lived
. The very magic that allowed it to kill also allowed it to create. And it created itself, again and again and again.”

“Like reincarnation,” Miri said slowly. “But we’re not the same people who lived all those years ago.”

“But the magic chose you, and the magic imbued you, and the magic became you,” Long Nu said. “You are both individuals, both yourselves, except for that one thing, that one transformation, which is not just a spell, but also a collection of memories and history, a repository—much like those jade fragments you found— of all who carried the magic before you.”

“Just like a book,” Miri said. “A book of... of life.”

“Yes. And when you die, and when all that is left is a red stone encased in your brittle chests, the magic will, in time, chose other hosts, other lives, and so it will go on, forever and ever, until there is no more energy left to pull from the world.”

Miri sighed. “That’s beautiful.”

“It’s fucked up,” Dean argued. “So we’re stuck with this for the rest of our lives? And then when we die, everything that we experienced will just go pouring into someone new? I don’t know if I like that.”

“I don’t think you have a choice,” Long Nu said. “Nor do I pity you.”

Dean narrowed his eyes. “You might not pity us, but you sure as hell went to a lot of trouble covering all this up. You would have been happier if we had never found this part of ourselves. If we had never found each other.”

“Yes,” Long Nu admitted. “It would have been safer for us all. What you both carry, what you can do together, makes you too dangerous to live.”

“Well, hell,” Dean said. “Just shoot us now.”

“I would if I could,” she said, with such chilling honesty that Dean almost looked for a weapon. Instead, he swallowed hard, and gently squeezed Miri’s hand. Her knuckles were white. She looked angry. All those sighs and talks of beauty had gone
bye-bye
.

“You’re telling us that we can’t be killed,” Miri said in a hard voice.

“The magic protects you until your natural deaths, though one of you could always end it early. Your only weaknesses are each other, and that is the way it has always been. Better to keep you whole and safe for anyone who might wish to... use you.”

Dean did not care for the implications of that statement. Given the sharp way Miri looked at Long Nu, he thought she didn’t like it either. But instead of asking for more, Miri said, “I died once before, Wendy.”

“You obviously came back.”

“I recently had a bullet bounce off my chest,” Dean said. “That didn’t happen when I was a kid.”

Her smile was frigid. “I suppose some things change.”

Some things like fire
, Dean thought darkly.
Some things like a hand wrapped around my heart. Care to explain that
?

But Long Nu, if she could hear his thoughts, gave no indication that she wished to explain anything at all— although what she had already told them was enough to account for certain oddities in Dean’s life. Like, how he had walked away with a gunshot wound to the chest and lived to talk about it. Managed to even go without a doctor, treating himself with nothing more than a bottle of peroxide and a lot of Band-Aids.

“So we’re dangerous,” Dean said, staring from Long Nu to the low wooden ceiling, thinking about all the fights he had been in over his life, how things might have turned out differently if he had known the truth. “I want to know why. Is it just power? Is power all that creature inside Lysander wanted?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Long Nu asked, grim.

Dean met the old woman’s gaze. “Not really, no. And it’s not like we can trust you, either.”

Long Nu hesitated. “I did what I must. And there is a difference between what is easy and what is right, Mr. Campbell. Think of that before you start condemning me.”

Miri shook her head—out of frustration or agreement, Dean could not tell. When she spoke, though, her voice was low and rough. “How long have you known what we are, Wendy? How long have you been manipulating us?”

Again, Long Nu faltered. “Since you were born.”

Dean flinched, but before he could say anything, the old woman held up her hand. “Do you think those stones in your chests were always covered in skin? Do you truly think you were born whole and human?”

“Someone would have said something,” Dean protested. “There would be pictures, medical reports, a goddamn story in
The National Enquired”

“And our families would have told us the truth,” Miri added.

“Mr. Campbell’s family, perhaps.
If
they had known.”

Dean frowned. “What do you mean,
if
?”

“Your mother was the fortunate recipient of an anonymous donation, one that allowed her to give birth in the luxurious setting of a private hospital. My hospital. It was easy to have my people spirit you away just long enough to effect the change in your body. Before your parents could see you. “ Long Nu smiled.