Thirteen Orphans (45 page)
Brenda found herself hoping that whatever had brought these strangers from their home would be easily resolved and that they would go away—and stay gone.
“There!” said Honey Dream in satisfaction, lifting her brush and holding it to one side lest a stray drop ruin her work. “Done. Now, ‘Foster,’ would you have your memory back? Would you know yourself again as Flying Claw, the Tiger?”
Foster stepped forward eagerly, not bothering with words, and without the slightest glance for Brenda.
“What must I do?”
Riprap tried the door at the top-floor landing.
“Locked, but that’s no surprise. Is it warded?”
Des answered before Pearl could focus on the appropriate charm. “Yes, but the alarm will function on about the same level as a door buzzer. We can silence it easily.”
He moved forward and began sketching characters on the doorframe with a ballpoint pen. Nissa moved close to Pearl, and spoke softly.
“I’m sorry about losing my head. I’m not usually such a—well—such a rabbit.”
Pearl reached over and patted her. “That’s quite all right, dear. I know you’re not. One of the beauties of that spell is that it uses one’s strengths—what one cares about the most—against one. It is the sort of spell a Snake or Dragon loves: twisted and clever. There is one problem with cleverness, though.”
“Oh?” Nissa didn’t sound convinced.
“Yes. The clever forget that there are more direct ways to achieve one’s goals. Look!”
Des had finished his writing. Through spells Pearl had prepared in advance, she saw his spell had countered the other—not neutralized it, simply balanced it. The universe held many paired forces. The “buzzer” would sound, but the opposite of sound is silence, so Des had arranged for that sound to be silenced.
Riprap was dealing with the door’s lock in a much more direct fashion. During his tour in the army, he had learned how to open locked doors for reasons he never quite got around to explaining. Pearl suspected that Riprap had done some work for what was romantically referred to as “covert ops.”
Certainly, there was nothing of the thief about Riprap as he picked the lock. Anyone watching would have seen a man unlocking a door, his big, dark hand concealing the somewhat unorthodox form of his key.
“Directness can often undo the most clever,” Pearl said. “Dogs are marvelous at being direct. So are Tigers. Shall we join the gentlemen?”
Nissa grinned at her, and Pearl could almost see the Rabbit’s ears perk up with renewed confidence.
“I’m set.”
The outside door led into a hallway that separated the two apartments that occupied this floor, as well as connecting to a stairwell going down. No sound drifted up the stairs, making Pearl feel certain that, except for the shop below, the building was likely empty. Even so, they kept their voices low.
“This one,” Riprap said, indicating a door marked 5B. “Des?”
Des studied the door. “Give me a moment. There are more complicated wards here.”
While Des scribbled on the wood of the doorframe, Riprap examined the array of locks set in a metal plate above the knob.
“The locks are a bit more complicated, too. At least one’s a deadbolt, but even the best of those will open to the right master key, and this one isn’t the best.”
“So you have a master?” Nissa asked.
Riprap nodded. “There are things you don’t leave for your roommate to find. Given I knew we were hunting trouble when I left Denver, I packed appropriately.”
Pearl recalled that lock-picking tools were among the less dangerous items Riprap had brought with him. Riprap wasn’t “packing” today. None of them were, although Pearl was a competent shot with a handgun, and Des was actually quite good—although his choice of weapons was often as eccentric as his lifestyle. However, today firearms would serve only to complicate a matter that was already far too complex.
Fleetingly, Pearl wondered how Brenda was doing. The young woman had been very brave, going off on her own like that. The protections they had given her would work only if Brenda remembered to activate them. Still, the risk had to be taken. They needed to draw the Snake off, and the Snake had insisted that Brenda come alone.
What if they had been wrong and the Dragon was working with his daughter on this, rather than the pair being at odds?
Too many guesses,
Pearl thought,
but our other choice was to wait for our enemies to act
—
and I think we would have liked that less.
Pearl thought,
but our other choice was to wait for our enemies to act
—
and I think we would have liked that less.
The door snicked open, sound punctuation to Pearl’s thoughts. Des checked, then nodded.
“We can go in.”
“The place sounds empty,” Nissa said. “Isn’t it strange how an empty apartment sounds different than one where people are home?”
“Maybe to Rabbit ears,” Riprap said. “Let me go first. For some reason, people tend to freeze when they catch sight of me without warning.”
Nissa didn’t protest, now seeming as confident as earlier she had been afraid. Perhaps her Rabbit nature was assisting her. More likely, she was simply attuned to her surroundings, and trusted what her senses told her.
For Nissa was correct. The apartment was empty, not only of residents, but almost entirely of furnishings as well. The area was fairly small, all but the kitchen visible from the front door. To the left side of what might be politely called an entry foyer were three doors, all standing open. To the right was a wall, and where it ended was an open, multipurpose area. Mismatched curtains hung in all the windows, filtering the copious light that seemed to be one of the apartment’s few positive qualities.
The wall to the right of the entry proved to be one side of a galley-style kitchen, its walkway so narrow that two people would have had difficulty passing each other within. A battered Formica table and two chairs with corroded chrome-steel tube frames and vinyl seats—these liberally patched with duct tape—were the sole furnishings in a dining area that began in the multipurpose space off the kitchen.
A battered sofa covered by a clean but utilitarian sheet, and a coffee table made from an old hollow core door set on short stacks of cinder blocks, turned the rest of the room into something of a living room. There was no television, not even a transistor radio.
Since the doors to both bedrooms stood open, their contents were equally visible. Each was furnished with a narrow bed and a trunk that seemed to be doing double duty as nightstand and clothes chest. The bathroom that separated the two rooms was small. The white porcelain fixtures were of the cheapest make, old and chipped besides.
However, despite the poverty of the apartment, the rooms were scrupulously clean. The air smelled of good cooking after the Chinese fashion, underscored with lotus incense and strong soap. Small touches showed that at least one of the residents had an instinct for beauty. Wild flowers displayed in vases made from glass bottles had been carefully placed on the windowsills in both bedrooms, and on the center of the dining-room table.
“Furnished two-bedroom walk-up,” Des said, disgust in his voice. “Private entrance. Rents by the week. Still, it’s clean and dry. I suppose they could have done worse.”
“I wonder,” Pearl said, “why they did not do better. We know they would have wanted privacy, and proving good credit would have been a problem, but still …”
Des grinned sardonically. “Proving good credit would have been more of a problem than you could imagine, Pearl, at least in an establishment with any pretensions to honesty. I don’t think the Dragon would have wished to bring his daughter—who is quite attractive from what you’ve said—to a crack house or a dive that doubled as a house of prostitution. Then, too, with San Francisco so close, San Jose can afford to pick and choose. There are fewer no-tell motels than you would imagine.”
“I suppose,” Pearl said.
She shook off an odd impulse to invite the Dragon and the Snake to come stay with her. After all, they were relatives of a sort, and both her Chinese and Jewish upbringing emphasized responsibility to family. Somehow, until she’d seen those sagging beds, that travesty of a coffee table, it had been easy to think of them as something other than people who would need to eat and drink—people who were exiles, far from home.
Nonsense! These are the people who exiled my father and his friends. They are the enemy. No feud is worse than a blood feud.
Nissa was looking around the living room, sniffing the air, picking up things and setting them down again. “I thought we’d have to spend hours searching, but there isn’t much of anywhere to look. Des? I suppose going through the trunks makes the most sense. Do you see any wards on anything?”
“Not on the chests,” Des said. “Not at a casual inspection, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t search them.”
“The chest in the Snake’s room isn’t even locked,” Nissa said, drifting that way.
Pearl didn’t need to ask how Nissa knew that the rearmost bedroom was the Snake’s or how Nissa knew the trunk wasn’t locked. A bright pink sleeve of something, probably a T-shirt, hanging out the trunk’s side explained both.
“Check out the Snake’s room, Nissa,” Des said. “I’ll take a look at the Dragon’s. Riprap, you have any thoughts about other hiding places?”
“Lots,” Riprap said. “Unless you see some helpful aura that’s going to guide us right where we need to go, I’m going to start in the bathroom. Toilet tanks are classic hiding places, so are dummy pipes. That medicine cabinet looks loose enough that something could be stashed behind it.”
“I’ll take the kitchen,” Pearl said. She set Treaty, still in its carrying case, on the scratched and stained counter.
“Good,” Des said. “Even as thin as I am, I think I’m too tall to bend over in that travesty of a kitchen to inspect the cabinets properly. I’m not sure that Riprap could even fit in there.”
“Sure I could,” Riprap said. “If I held my breath.”
They moved to their various assignments. The apartment was small enough that conversation could continue without anyone needing to raise his or her voice.
“We’re looking for the crystals,” Nissa said, her voice slightly muffled. Probably she was kneeling over the trunk. “Anything else?”
“Any indication that the three we know of have other allies here,” Pearl said, quickly checking the canisters on the counter to make sure they held nothing but rice, flour, and tea, “and who those allies might be. I’m still wondering how they have managed to adapt this well to our world. Spells can help with language, but the Snake called Brenda’s cell phone. That means they understand phones. I’m wondering if they understand cars as well, or if all their travel has been magical. In their pursuit of the other members of the Thirteen, they must have been over a good part of the U.S.”
Pearl opened a kitchen cabinet. Two plates. (Two others were drying in the dish rack along with some handleless teacups.) A few saucers and bowls. Two chipped mugs. A stack of plastic cups. Chopsticks, the cheap kind that splintered, were stuck into yet another plastic cup. She turned her attention to the refrigerator.
“Money,” Riprap said a few moments later to the accompaniment of a clink as he put the top back on the toilet tank. “Credit cards. We still haven’t figured out how they’re paying for what they do buy. That didn’t bother me at first because I thought they were like Foster was when we first saw him, sort of exotic, vanishing and all, wearing robes. Now we know otherwise. They’re living like real people, not like genies. So where’s the money coming from to pay for their food and rent, for their contemporary clothing?”
Pearl snapped open each of the opaque plastic containers arrayed on the wire rack shelves in the refrigerator. Hiding money in a butter tub was an old trick, but a good one. Few thieves wanted to take the time to check every container in a fridge. She found garlic, ginger, various sauces and seasonings. Cooked rice. A box of eggs with five left. Some leftover stir-fry that had lots of eggplant and garlic in it and smelled lightly of vinegar. The remains of a can of bamboo shoots.
“Diaries, journals, spell books,” Des said. “Anything we can use to learn more about them.”
The refrigerator was clean, not only of items of interest, but of mold or must. Wondering whether the Dragon or the Snake was the excellent housekeeper, Pearl moved her attention to a shelf holding dry goods, including several bags of various kinds of rice. These had all been opened, and part poured into canisters for easier use. Moving ten-pound bags every time one wanted to make a cup of rice would be a pain.
Although the rice bags were heavy, Pearl lifted each of these down. Amid the jasmine rice, her fingers encountered something hard and round. Before she could say anything or check further, there came the sound of the front door opening.
A new voice, unmistakable nonetheless, spoke.
“Do you wish to know more about us?” asked Righteous Drum, the Dragon. “Why not ask?”
Pearl lifted the bag of jasmine rice back onto the shelf, and moved to the kitchen doorway.
The Dragon stood in the doorway to the apartment, an apparently ordinary Chinese man, round-faced, somewhat squarely built. Clad in neat slacks of a tan verging on yellow and a button-down sports shirt the color of sunflowers, Righteous Drum looked much less exotic than the figure who had stood on Pearl’s front porch that night some weeks ago, but he was no less commanding.
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