Wei Jia watched his granddaughter’s granddaughter, Xinhua, from a second-storey window of their row house home overlooking Kensington Avenue; watched the young woman make her way through crowds browsing the street market; watched Xinhua thread through them like the waters of a swiftly flowing river. Like her mother, and all the daughters of his line, she had taken quickly to his training.

Xinhua’s mother, Lin, coughed at Jia from the adjacent room. “The neighbours,” she said.

He sighed and moved away from the window, slipping around the doorjamb and drifting down the stairs, the fog of his feet trailing slowly after his translucent form. He was at the front door when Xinhua unlocked it from the other side. He could hear her talking to someone. Laughing. She said her farewells as she opened the door, her friend’s footsteps fading.

“Welcome home,” Jia said in Mandarin, smiling at his great-great-granddaughter as she slipped inside and closed the door quickly behind her.

“Xianxian Jia,” she reproached, slipping into English in the space of a single breath: “What are you doing?”

“Must we, in English?” Jia asked, working the memory of his lips around words still uncomfortable nearly a century after he had learned them. Death did not make them easier to say.

“Yes, in this house we must,” Lin said from the top of the stairs, her hands on her hips as Jia whirled slowly in midair like a leaf caught on the wind. Wisps of his form trailed after him in a lazy circle. “What are you doing near the front door? What if someone had seen?”

“Someone nearly did,” Xinhua whispered, frowning at Jia.

“Can I not even greet my line-daughter in my own home?”

“We’ve discussed this, Xianxian Jia.” Lin descended the stairs in quick two-steps. At the bottom, she looked into Jia’s eyes and, as though talking to a recalcitrant child, said, “You must not be seen by others.”

Jia harrumphed and stood straighter, putting his hands on his hips, his self-image still lithe and muscular—the image of a man in his prime: the image of his body at the time of his death. “And who was it who taught you both of stealth?” he began.

Both women groaned and turned toward the kitchen, Jia drifting after. “Did you remember the milk?” Lin asked Xinhua.

Xinhua nodded. “And the bak choi, and the duck,” Xinhua rattled off, tapping her full backpack for emphasis.

“—Who was it,” continued Jia, slipping into Mandarin, “who first fought for our people in this strange land?”

“How was the interview?” Lin asked her daughter as they moved into the kitchen.

“I think it went well,” Xinhua said, pursing her lips and slipping her backpack off. “I’m not sure I’m what they’re looking for though.”

“—Who first woke Tianlong to our plight, and begged him whisper of it to the Celestial Bureaucracy, that it might make its way to the Jade Emperor?”

“Do they know what they want?” Lin asked, leaning on the wooden table in the centre of the kitchen.

“Probably not,” laughed Xinhua, unpacking her backpack and handing the items one by one to her mother.

“—Who was it who was granted the blessing of the Jade Emperor himself and was made the first Xun Long, defender of our people against the violence of the Canadian gweilo?”

“I will not have you using that word in my house,” Lin said, finally acknowledging Jia’s presence in the kitchen, “divinely appointed Swift Dragon, or no.”

Xinhua watched them both, leaning back against the table.

“You have gone soft, line-daughter.” Jia said in slow English, and shook his head, frowning. “It is good your daughter has taken up the mantle of the Xun Long. She is still fierce,” he said proudly, looking to Xinhua to support him.

“Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Xinhua said, offering an apologetic smile to Jia.

He raised an eyebrow, his gaze flitting between Xinhua and Lin. “Talk to me about what?”

“Well, I—” began Xinhua.

“—Xinhua has found work,” interjected Lin.

“Mom!”

“She won’t be able to patrol anymore,” Lin said.

“Is this true?” Jia asked Xinhua, bewildered. “You are abandoning the mantle of the Xun Long?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure if I have the job yet, but. . . .” Xinhua shrugged, seeking the right words. “Well, between college and the new job I do need to cut back on the patrolling.”

Now Lin looked bewildered. “You said you wanted to drop it entirely.”

“No,” said Xinhua, putting up one finger to ward off her mother’s words. “I said I wanted to cut back on patrolling, I didn’t say I was giving up the mantle. I want this in my life, I just . . . I don’t know exactly how it fits right now.” She looked to Jia, then to Lin. “I wasn’t going to bring this up now. I. . . . You know what, I’m just gonna go be in my room for a while.”

Lin opened, then closed her mouth. “Will you be back down for dinner?”

Xinhua ran a hand through her hair, short black strands waterfalling around her fingers, as she turned back to her mother. “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

Jia watched Xinhua go, his youngest line-daughter disappearing up the stairs as Lin unpacked Xinhua’s bag. “You cannot let her do this,” he said.

“She needs to have a life.” Lin paused between the table and the fridge, one hand clutching a plastic bag of milk. “Other heroes have risen where once the Xun Long stood alone,” she said to Jia. “And we are no longer a community of strangers, of outsiders. We are citizens of a different land, protected by its laws and by heroes who will fight for us as well as their own people.”

“You are still so naïve, line-daughter. I never could train it out of you.”

“No, not naïve. . . .” The refrigerator made a soft sucking noise as she pulled it open to slip the milk into its empty plastic container. “. . . Hopeful.”

She smiled at the ghost of Jia.

Xinhua stood in her room, half undressed with her shirt tossed on the bed and the door closed, when Jia’s voice spoke from behind her. “Your mother makes an interesting argument,” he said in Mandarin.

“What the hell are you doing?” Xinhua jumped, snatching up her shirt from the bed and holding it across her chest.

“Talking to you?” Jia said, switching to English.

“It was sort of okay that you randomly showed up in my room when I was six, awkward when I hit puberty, and now it’s just incredibly creepy.”

Jia shrugged his spectral shoulders and made a face of disinterest. “I am indifferent to the pleasures of the flesh.”

“So not the right answer,” said Xinhua, moving past Jia without looking at him. “What do you want?”

“To talk to you about your decision to . . . suspend . . . or scale back, or . . . I do not know what you are planning on doing with your activities as the Xun Long,” Jia finished awkwardly, watching Xinhua open her closet, hang up the formal shirt she had worn to her interview, and pull out a faded tee-shirt.

“I’m not giving it up if that’s what you’re afraid of.” Xinhua’s words were muffled as she slipped into the change of clothes. “Do you mind turning around?” she asked as she reached for a pair of skintight leggings.

“I did not think you were,” Jia said, turning his back on Xinhua and studying the soft rug of her room. “But your mother said something that. . . .”

Xinhua listened, changing her pants, then said, “Yes?” when Jia didn’t continue.

“Xinhua, what do you see as the role of the Xun Long?” Jia asked, turning around as his line-daughter pulled the leggings up to her waist.

“To protect others,” she answered without hesitation.

“Yes, but who are those others?”

“I don’t understand,” Xinhua said as she ruffled her short hair and bound it back with a thin hairband.

“When I first called upon Tianlong,” Jia said, passing a hand through the air, a furl of his chi flowing after it, “our people were still new to this city. We had been in Toronto in number little more than a generation. We were feared because of who we were when we came to this country, and I sought to protect the young communities we had made in this city from that fear. From that ignorance. I did it for our people.”

“You sought to save them from the hatred of others,” Xinhua said, asking And, so? with a shrug of her shoulders.

Jia thought for a moment, drifting past Xinhua. He used his chi to pull back the hidden panel at the back of closet to reveal the costume of the current Xun Long: the figure-conforming black polymer fibre with its breathable face covering, so different from Jia’s own original shenyi and mask. “Spirits live in the past, Xinhua. That is all that we know. The world passes us by because we are no longer a part of it. Cannot be a part of it.” Jia turned to his line-daughter. “I am beginning to wonder if I have done you all a disservice through what I taught you.”

“What was it Mom said to you?”

“That the Xun Long is no longer needed,” Jia said, scrutinizing the carpet beneath the mist trailing from the hems of his pant legs.

Xinhua crooked an eyebrow up. “What? Seriously?”

“Not in so many words,” Jia said. “But she wants you to have a life, and I cannot deny that she is right in that. No, your mother said that there are others who can do now what once only we could. And that they protect our people as well. So what need is there for us now?”

“Maybe,” said Xinhua, reaching into the back of the closet to retrieve her costume from the hidden recess. “But just because other people can do it doesn’t mean I don’t have an obligation to do so as well,” said Xinhua, slipping into the bodysuit one limb at a time. She stopped when she reached the mask, leaving it hanging in bunched folds at the back of her neck. “I don’t just protect our community, xianxian. I use our gifts to help everyone, because I can’t imagine doing otherwise.” Xinhua closed her closet behind her and opened the door of her room. “Once,” she said, glancing at Jia and leaning half out of the open door, “our community needed a protector for its own people, when no-one else would stand up to help them. Now we are in a position to help other communities; people who need protection just as much as we did, and still do.” Xinhua leaned fully out of her doorway. “Mom! I’m heading out. You don’t have to wait dinner for me. I’ll grab something on the way back!”

“Be careful!” Lin called up from the kitchen, her voice ringing off walls and around corners.

“Always!” shouted Xinhua. She turned to Jia as she pulled her door half-closed. “I don’t know how I’m going to balance everything yet, but I will.” She walked to the window and opened it. Xinhua closed her eyes and breathed in and out, the visible expansion and retraction of her focused chi flexing on the air. She drew the cowl of her costume up and over her head, stretching it down across her face and securing the material to seal at the front of her neck. “There are too few heroes as it is,” she said, and climbed over the lip of the open window and was gone.

Jia watched his line-daughter fade into the gathering dark. He felt the weight of time passing—a slow river dragging him along in its currents.

Eventually, Lin came up to join him, and together they stood watching out the window, waiting for Xinhua’s return.

__________

A native of Toronto, Michael Matheson is a writer, editor, and book reviewer. His reviews have appeared at ChiZine, Innsmouth Free Press, and The Globe and Mail. His fiction is featured in, among others, Future Lovecraft, Chilling Tales 2, and Dead North.