Chapter One

Rain drenched the streets of Toronto’s Chinatown. Streaming off roofs and through gutters, then gushing into the sewers, it carried with it the dust of one of the hottest summers on record. The fruit stands and fish markets and herb shops stayed open for business under canopies, their owners oblivious to both the heat and the rain.

Nicki arrived in Toronto in the evening; she caught a bus from the airport, then a subway to Chinatown. She was used to the city in July and the kind of humidity that sticks to you like a second skin. In some ways, she preferred it to Honolulu. No turquoise ocean lapped at her door, and no plumeria-scented breeze wafted by, but whenever she landed in Toronto, it felt like home.

The sixteen-year-old pulled a rumpled paper from her duffel bag and checked the address she’d scrawled down while still in the Pineapple State. She was close now, closer than ever to her dream of working with David Kahana. A native Hawaiian, and one of the most highly respected martial artists in the world, he had come to Toronto for the summer to train elite athletes.

Nicki ran the last block, stopping once to shake off the rain and ask for directions to the Fire Dragon Academy.

An old Chinese woman pointed across the street, and Nicki spotted it. It was modest: a couple of rooms on the second floor over a tavern full of drunks, but it looked like heaven to her. She gazed up at it and smiled, glad to see that the lights were still on.

Good, she thought. We can work out a schedule right away.

She climbed a narrow staircase that had spent the last two decades as a canvas for street artists. At the top, where the concrete ended and a dirty carpet began, a smudge caught her eye—blood red and in the shape of a shoe.

Looks like paint, she told herself. She knew it wasn’t. And it wasn’t graffiti red—too dark for that.

Blood. It was blood. Fresh blood. And someone had tracked it out of the Fire Dragon Academy.

Maybe it’s from a nosebleed. She’d had a few of those herself, when the sparring got too vigorous. Or maybe the students have been working with swords.

The rationalizations didn’t work. Her pulse quickened.

The door swung open when she touched it.

When she passed the threshold, a nail sticking out of the woodwork snagged her pant leg. She pulled herself loose, then stepped inside.

“Hello,” she mumbled. “Master Kahana?”

The only replies came from a car horn at street level and a guy yelling at his girlfriend in the bar.

A desk in the middle of the room was covered with files, empty coffee cups, business cards, martial arts magazines, and manuals. Nicki followed the footprints past the desk; they came from the training room. Halfway in, a trail of red accompanied the footprints to the door of a storage area.

She opened it.

Inside lay David Kahana, face down in a pool of blood.

“Master?” gasped Nicki.

His head moved.

“Nicki…”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“The…Ming…” Kahana was trying to tell her something.

“I can’t hear you.”

“The vase,” he murmured. “Get the vase…no police…”

“Vase?”

“Everything…is up to you.”