Chapter Six

We’re flying half a mile above Chinatown, Sani on my back, invisible to the people below, when I spot the familiar tea shop. Warm light floods out onto the street through the smeared and dusty windows. My dragon body is curved into an S shape to help make Sani’s ride more comfortable. I manipulate the magnetic fields around me and control our descent into the back alley, where I fly into the truck-sized delivery door and hit the button to close the garage door with a flick of my tail. Curled as I am, I fit easily inside the space. As soon as the last sliver of street and moon light is snuffed out by the door, Sani slides off my back and I snap back to human form.

The few humans who know about us always ask me how I manage to shift back with all the clothes and personal belongings I started with. I give the same answer every time: magic. But I’m dragon enough to admit my answer’s a defense mechanism to cover the fact I have absolutely no freaking clue. Like I don’t know how we break this “conservation of mass” principle the scientists are always going on about. We’re dragons. Simon and some of his egghead friends have a theory that involves quantum mechanics. He thinks we don’t change our bodies so much as store the one we’re not using—and all the stuff it’s holding—in a parallel plane of existence. He claims our bodies, running hot and with two hearts, are something like a quantum generator. It makes sense when he explains it, but it’s not exactly something that’s easy to prove.

“You seem like you know your way around this place. Where are we?” Sani asks. He looks around the storage room, but there’s only the light shining between the door cracks, and even our excellent dragon sight can only make out long, dark shadows.

“Well, you’ve met the great Commander Lung.” I move to the door that leads into the shop.

His eyes grow to the size of plums as he realizes what I mean. “I’m going to meet your father?” He immediately starts straightening out his shirt, which is totally ridiculous considering the permanent creases from being stuffed in the basketball team’s storage bin. He runs his hands over his hair, as if he has enough to be out of place to start with. It’s pretty adorable, if I’m being honest with myself.

He fidgets awkwardly. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him lose his signature cool, and I laugh. And immediately feel guilty when I remember all the dragons imprisoned at DIC and Jacob who-knows-where. I have no right to be having fun while they’re locked up for something I did. Sani notices my rapid shift in mood and it affects his own, so I tilt my head down and look up at him with false mockery in my eyes.

“You’re not nervous, are you?” I say with a wicked grin.

“Chen Lung is a legend,” he says. “Somalia, Korea, Afghanistan, Taiwan—even the Cairo job. Kitty, we study almost every job he ever did in Strategy. The U.S. would be a disaster today if it weren’t for his genius.”

“Yeah. Genius? Legend?” I can’t stop the sadness from entering my eyes and it’s worse because I know Sani will notice. He always notices. “Either way, he’s just a cripple now. An old man peddling tea cures to white tourists who think he’s a mystic.”

My father was injured on the Cairo job in 1997, before I even learned to walk. Sure, he and my mom somehow managed to successfully complete the mission, but the cost was too high. All of his other admittedly horrendous injuries paled in comparison to his heart—ripped out and destroyed by a rogue dragon paid off by some terrorist sect.

Is a weredragon still a dragon if he can’t change anymore? The question was too much for my father, who left DIC, saying he would be better off if the traitor had just killed him instead of cursing him to live out the rest of his life as a mere human. I think he forgets she would have killed him, if it hadn’t been for Mom.

Sani doesn’t seem to know how to respond, so we walk into the shop in silence.

A Chinese man who looks older than he is with a missing eye and deeply scarred face is behind the counter, staring at the back entrance, waiting for me to walk in. “Katherine?”

The world’s oldest cash register still in operation partially hides him from view. Apothecary cabinets made of every kind of wood ever grown cover the fifteen-feet-high walls of the long, narrow shop, and the unmistakable scent of tea and herbs seeps into my skin. A few tiny tiled tables with wrought iron chairs are scattered near the entrance. The shop is about to close so there’s no one else here.

He rolls his wheelchair out from behind the counter and moves slowly toward us, appraising Sani with a critical eye. The air in the shop is cool with the night air so a woven blanket covers his legs, disguising the fact they’re missing from the knees down.

Though I seek my father’s advice often, we don’t exactly have an emotional relationship, so I have no idea why the gravity of the situation decides to drown me at that moment.

“Oh Dad!” I fall to my knees in front of his wheelchair and wrap my arms around his thin, formerly powerful shoulders. I feel the stinging in my eyes that makes me wish for tears. I’ve now cried more in the past two days than I have since I was potty trained. When I finally get a hold of myself and pull away, he holds up one finger, indicating I should wait to speak. He knows something’s wrong.

“African,” he addresses Sani. I’ve almost forgotten he’s here and when I turn around to introduce him, I realize his mouth is hanging slightly open. I motion for him to shut it. He shakes off the surprise of meeting his decrepit hero and offers my father a small smile.

“Bulisani Mathe,” he says. “It’s a true honor to meet you, Commander Lung.”

“Chen, please. I haven’t commanded anything for a long time.” My father shrugs a little as he puts water on the heater to boil. “Do me a favor, son, and lock up the front.”

Sani instantly obeys and my father adds lavender, chamomile, wood betony, and lemon balm—calming ingredients—to his signature tea mixture. I close my eyes and inhale like my life depends on it.

“Sani’s heart is injured,” I say.

My father nods and mixes up a smaller batch of lychee and plum tea.

As he prepares the tea, we tell him about the events of the last twenty-four hours. He listens silently, never interrupting with a question or comment. We finish and he sits there, his eye closed, teacup in his hand, thinking. Planning. It’s what he’s known for, after all.

“Your mother’s at the D.I.C.?” It doesn’t surprise me that this is the first question he asks. Leaving DIC was a complicated decision for him; my mother and I had been pretty much the only things keeping him there. In the end, it wasn’t enough.

I nod. He allows this to soak in for a moment, and I let him.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” my dad says. “If they’re looking for you, it won’t be long before they find out about this place.”

My mouth opens to defend myself, but I hold back whatever knee-jerk response was about to spill out. He’s right, of course.

I hang my head and stare into my lap. “I wasn’t thinking.” Really, I was thinking, but only about how comforting it would be to go somewhere familiar in all this chaos. I wanted my dad, the most effective military strategist of all time, to tell me what I should do. The tea shop has been a safe place for as long as I can remember. Why didn’t it occur to me that was no longer the case? I glance at Sani and find my feelings mirrored in his face. I shake my head at myself as I realize that confronting Gesina at her house had been the same kind of stupid, too. I need to be smarter if I’m going to make it through this mess and keep all of us alive. I need to live up to my family legacy. I need to think like a Lung.

“He’s right, Kitty,” Sani says softly. “We should go.”

I know I’ve put us all in danger by coming here, but I still have questions that need to be answered. For a second, I want to ask my dad to come with us, but I know that’s another stupid, emotional decision. He wouldn’t go, anyway. He’d slow us down, and we all know it.

I try to sound as little like a scared child as possible and more like a commander asking her team for input. “We will. But since we’re here, I’d like my dad’s assessment of the situation.”

My father nods. “You said this girl had a long, white, furry tail?” Though I expect it, there’s not a touch of mockery or doubt in the question.

“That’s what I think I saw.”

“Did you see it?” my father asks Sani. The poor boy hasn’t spoken much since we got here, star struck by my father’s presence.

“No, sir,” he says.

“Lose the ‘sir,’ boy,” my father says. “I have no rank anymore.”

“Yes si… um, okay.” Sani swallows like it’s as hard as bench-pressing his max. “I was shot. Unconscious when Gesina got away.” He lowers his eyes to the swirling herbs in his tea and fiddles with his cup.

“There’s no shame in taking a bullet for the mission, understand?”

“Two,” I say.

“I’m sorry?” my dad asks.

“He took two bullets.”

My father’s gruff voice softens as he addresses Sani. “First mission failure?”

“Yes.”

“It gets easier.”

Those few words seem to have filled the hole inside Sani that his dragon-fast healing left behind. Satisfied, my father moves the conversation back to this afternoon’s events.

“This girl. She was pretty?” he asks.

“Gorgeous,” Sani says. Though I agree with him and I have no real right to feel this way, the word feels like a betrayal.

I feel acid burning my throat as I say, “Prettiest I’ve ever seen.”

“Jacob seemed entranced by her? More than usual?”

A pang of guilt stabs through my gut as I remember him begging me to go with him this afternoon, to make her more comfortable. If I had gone with him, would things have turned out differently?

“I guess so,” I say. “He’s pretty girl-crazy, though, so it’d be hard to tell.”

“And you were confused when she touched you?” he asks.

I cross my arms and narrow my eyes at him. “That’s what I said. What’s going on? You know something, don’t you? Tell me.”

“Kitsune,” he says. The word lingers in the air, ominous and slightly terrifying. Like I’m supposed to know what that means.

“No way.” Sani forgets his reverence and fear of my father. “They’re a myth.”

A sharp sound that I’m pretty sure is a laugh escapes my father’s torn lips. “You’re a dragon.”

“Point taken,” Sani says, slouching his shoulders.

“Um, somebody want to fill me in?” I ask.

“Japanese fox spirits,” Sani says. “I don’t know much about them. I only know the name because Wallace showed me an anime about them.”

“Shapeshifters,” my father says. “Except they’re all female and can take any female shape, including your young Ambassador’s daughter—and they’re always beautiful—heartbreakingly beautiful. They can bewitch people by looking them in the eyes, make them do whatever they want.”

“No,” I say. “If she could do that, why wouldn’t she do it before I tackled her?”

“Sounds like every time she did it to you, she touched you,” Sani says. There’s that eye—and ear—for details.

“Because you’re a dragon, her ability isn’t as strong on you,” my father says.

“Oh, it’s plenty strong,” I say, remembering that ridiculous feeling of being lost in the woods in the middle of a crowd.

“Okay,” Sani says. “Harder to activate, then.” He gives me that don’t-be-contrary look he has to use almost every day at school. Sometimes I think Sani’s real assignment is to keep me in check.

Kitsune. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Wait a minute. Why haven’t I heard anything about these monsters?

“Why do you know so much about them?” I ask my father, accusation dripping from my words. He sighs, and an old sadness floods his scarred face. Tears should be welling up in his eyes, but evolution has spared him that. He motions to his second heart—or where it should be.

“The rogue dragon who betrayed us and would have killed me if your mother hadn’t disobeyed orders and come back for me—” He stops and actually smiles. It’s a sad, regretful smile, but it’s the first true smile I’ve seen from him in years. “She was magnificent, Kitty. Fierce, powerful, like an avenging angel.”

“Dad,” I gently say to bring him back to the issue at hand. It breaks my heart to disturb his reverie, but I need to know. “You’re saying the woman who did this to you wasn’t a dragon?”

“She was kitsune, a mercenary we paid to help us out with the mission.”

“How could she betray you like that?” Sani says. The disgust is written plainly on his face, and I know he can’t imagine turning on DIC after all we’ve done for him.

“Kitsune value many things and none of them are loyalty,” my father says. “Someone offered her more money and a chance to cause chaos, so she went for it. She was the one who ended up paying, though, thanks to your mother.”

This fox woman I never knew about almost blew the biggest mission DIC has ever attempted, maimed my father, and was killed by my mother. Anger wells up in me and burns my stomach until I want to spit fire. “You’re saying DIC knew these things existed and they never bothered to tell us? My mom never told me? You—” and my voice cracks like a traitorous bastard. “You never told me.”

“They’re so secretive and slippery. We thought she was the last one,” my father says. It’s hard to read the emotions on his ruined face, but he sounds defensive. Still defending DIC and my mother.

“And the director was probably ashamed to admit he trusted one of these creatures,” Sani says.

My father nods. There’s one thing that still confuses me. “Why could I see her tail in the helicopter? The rest of her was human.”

“Kitsune can’t maintain complete control of the shift when they’re flustered,” my father says. “If they’re injured or stressed, their tails will show. It’s like when the dragon tries to take over when you’re angry, but even harder to control. But with smaller consequences.”

As long as you don’t mind being outed as a mythological creature.

“Wait,” Sani says. He would never do anything as undignified as a facepalm, but he looks like he wants to. “Fuchs.”

“Huh?” I ask.

“It’s German for ‘fox.’ We were trying to figure out why Gesina’s last name was wrong.” Realization crawls across his face. “She did it on purpose.”

Sighing, my father says, “Kitsune like to play games with their prey. It’s very possible she meant for you to figure it out.”

I slap a hand on the table, rattling the teacups. “She was messing with us!”

My mind decides of its own accord to move past the pain of being lied to and manipulated and toward the plan on how to kick this fox’s tail. How do I fight someone who can practically send me into a coma as soon as she touches me? That’s an easy one, Kitty: don’t touch her. “Weapons,” I say. “I need weapons.”

“For what?” my father says. He knows I’m not a fan of guns. On this subject, I’m more old-fashioned than he is.

“To get Jacob back.” Duh.

“Katherine,” my father says, his voice breaking. “I heard the news. The president is holding the dragons prisoner.”

“And?”

“Your responsibility to him is breached,” my father says. His tone is harsh and quiet, like polished steel. “Even if you rescue him—and I don’t know how you will without any idea where he is—they’ll only repay you by tossing you in with the others.”

“Oh, good point,” I say. I’d been on mission autopilot and hadn’t even stopped to consider how one affected the other. Why rescue the son of the man who represents the country that’s holding my mother and friends hostage?

Then, my conscience speaks up. His name is Sani. “Can you really abandon Jacob to that woman? Who knows what she wants with him? Right is still right, no matter how you’re repaid.”

After spending three years with that kind of honor, it’s no wonder I lov—um, like him. I like him. A freaking lot.

“You don’t owe them anything,” my father says, his face reddening. “Your mother, your friends, they’re all being held by—” He stops and tilts his head to the side like a dog listening to the wind. My father’s special gift is amazing sensory perception, and he still accesses some of it, even in human form. His hearing and eyesight were once even better than the best African dragon.

“Someone’s coming. Paramilitary. Armed,” he says. He looks at me with a wide eye.

Chen Lung doesn’t get scared. Everyone knows that. But he looks terrified right now.

“Hide,” he whispers fiercely.

Sani grabs my arm and starts pulling me behind the counter.

“No,” my father says. “Hide.”

“Right.” I move to the most open part of the shop and allow my dragon self to completely take over. Even pulling my coils in as tightly as I can, I miscalculate, and the sudden increase in size knocks a teacup off the table. The cup falls to the cement floor and my enhanced dragon senses give me the distinct displeasure of hearing every crack form and break. Maybe the expression should be “dragon in a china shop.”

Sani climbs on to my back and whispers, “Up.”

Concentrating on not breaking anything else, I slowly increase my altitude until we hover just below the ceiling. Sani presses flat against me, wrapping his arms around my neck, and we disappear just as six serious-looking, seriously jacked men with coats that bulge in all the dangerous places walk in the front door. The door that had been locked. The hanging bell resonates into the sudden silence. Before the door slams shut, I see no fewer than four black government-issued SUVs and accompanying CIA thugs waiting out on the street.

“Mr. Chen?” the man in front asks. He’s the oldest of them, with a cleft chin, splashes of gray in his dark, cropped hair, and the hint of an aging body hanging over his belt.

“Know anyone else who looks like this?” my father asks, some of the old fire still making him defiant. He sits tall and proud, not giving away a single thing.

“Do you know where your daughter is?” Cleft Chin gets straight to the point. He stares into my father’s good eye unflinchingly—something very few people on the planet can accomplish—like he’s going to read the answer there.

“Haven’t seen her in months.” If there’s one thing all DIC operatives excel at, it’s lying. I—the aforementioned daughter—was floating here and I believed him.

Cleft Chin stares hard at my father before letting his gaze slide across the room. It stops when he sees the two cups on the table and one shattered on the floor.

“Months?” Cleft Chin says. He turns to the five guys at his back. “Search the place.”

They obey immediately, fanning out to different areas of the room, one going to the back storage area. Four of them pass directly underneath me so closely I feel the air disturbed by their movement. Both of my hearts erupt in a synchronized techno beat and Sani tightens his grip around my scaled neck, his hearts joining mine until I can’t hear anything but crazed thumps. If they have heat sensors or particularly good hearing, we’re screwed.

“Clear,” a goon declares. He’s soon echoed by all the others.

Cleft Chin swaggers closer to my father and bends over to look him eyes-to-eye. “Where’s Katherine?”

The guy doesn’t know it, but this is the second he makes his big mistake. Saying my full name lets my dad know this guy knows absolutely nothing about me except what my official file says. And my dad will give him no more.

My father’s face stares back at him like a stone gargoyle, unmoving and hard. Liquid fire rises up in his eyes, begging for release, and my dragon-self aches to respond, but I sandbag it with fear and restraint. Mostly fear, though.

“Search harder,” Cleft Chin orders his men, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

Half a second after the command is given, the first crash rips through the air as an apothecary cabinet is knocked to the ground. Now there are so many things breaking and shattering I can’t keep up with the sounds.

Broken shards of glass, fragments of teacups, and a shower of herbs assault my scales and fall to the floor, harmless. I turn to look at Sani, who has his eyes slammed shut. His grip on my neck would choke me if not for the thick scales.

A teacup thrown high bounces off my belly, and I hold my breath, wondering if any of them saw it change direction in mid-air. But it doesn’t matter. The men aren’t even attempting to look for me; they’re simply destroying the place.

Jackasses.

I clamp my jaws shut, knowing that reacting wouldn’t help. Yesterday, my father was one of the most trusted and reliable consultants on covert strategy for the U.S. government. Today, he’s worse than a criminal—not even allowed the basic rights of the Constitution he gave his life, legs, eye, heart, and family to protect.

And it’s my freaking fault.

Watching this is different from a vague notion that the government is holding the dragons. Even the president’s announcement and the warning from Wallace didn’t solidify the betrayal, but every crash and break builds the picture in my mind like a computer rendering a scene, pixel by pixel.

As the thugs run out of things to break, the percussion slows and stops.

I know my father’s dragon-self must be searing with rage, as mine is, but he doesn’t show it. “Told you she wasn’t here,” he says simply.

“That’s too bad,” Cleft Chin says. He shrugs. “At least we’ll be returning one rogue dragon to the compound.”

One rogue dragon? I don’t think there are any other dragons out on assignment today due to last night’s mishap. Domestic missions had been immediately recalled, and foreign missions were told to hold off on returning until further notice was given. Who could they be bringing in?

When one of the thugs takes out a pair of handcuffs, I realize they’re talking about my father. My dragon-self roars in my head, the sound drowning out all logical thought.

“No!” I yell, but only Sani can hear me. My ability protects us from being heard, though I’m ready to lose control of that when Sani places a hand on the side of my dragon-head.

“Kitty.” He sounds scared, but far more in control than I am. “Look at me.”

I can’t. These assholes are putting handcuffs on my wheelchair-bound father and I’m calculating how many seconds it would take for me to rip out all of their throats. Less than three, I’d bet.

“Your father doesn’t want you caught,” he says. “They have half an army outside and I still can’t change.”

They start wheeling him out and the full length of my dragon body tenses. I’m thinking, as mad as I am, I could take out the bulk of the U.S. Army right now. If I let the dragon take full control, I probably wouldn’t even feel bad about it. I loosen my hold on the magnetic currents keeping me aloft and we descend a few inches.

“Look at me.” I hear Sani’s plea on the very edge of my rage-colored world. “Damn it, Kitty!”

That, of all things, steals my attention. Sani doesn’t cuss. Ever. I’ve seen him stabbed with a six-inch blade, fall seven stories down a climbing wall, and now shot—and he’s never uttered so much as an “oh, poop.”

I freeze our descent.

“Look at me,” he says again.

I turn my head slowly and meet his eyes, the cool green tempering my frenzy just enough so I can think clearly again. He places both hands on either side of my snout now, and his fingers feel like ice against the heat of my temper. My dragon quiets, and I feel very much like a teenage girl again, thrilling at Sani’s intimate touch.

“We’ll get him back,” he says. “I promise. But not now. There are too many of them outside. Listen, can you hear them?”

Closing my eyes, I let my hearing slide outside the shop’s front door. The rustle of gunmetal on leather, car doors closing, footsteps. There are at least forty men out there. Crap.

Forty men to get an old cripple and a sixteen-year-old girl? That’s a Public Enemy Number One situation.

Exhausted, I lower us to the littered ground. I stand there, Sani’s hands on my dragon face, amid the rubble of a ruined Chinese tea shop, until we hear the last man get in a car and drive away.

I echo Sani’s words. “We’ll get him back.”