Sun laughed, but it was good-natured, not mocking. Friendly. He said, “You want the Elixir of Immortality from her, you have to steal it.”
“You would know, wouldn’t you,” Xiwangmu said to him darkly, hinting at a story between old, old friends. The kind that neither party would ever let the other forget. For all their power, for all their talk, they seemed like friends. Like people. Which made it even harder to believe in gods.
The council began.
* * *
XIWANGMU HAD known what she was doing with the council. We hadn’t stopped, rested, eaten, drunk anything, done anything but hunt, fight, seek, and flee for hours. Even ten minutes of sitting, sipping tea and nibbling on little rice crackers that the young women brought out, made me feel better—a little more ready to head back into the tunnels and face what was there.
But only a little. We were talking about confronting Roman, after all.
“How do we know he’s even still here?” Ben said. “He’s got the pearl, why do you think he’s going to stick around?”
“Because Anastasia’s here,” I said. “He wouldn’t pass up a chance to finish her off.”
“Or you, really,” Anastasia said.
Yeah, I supposed there was that, though I didn’t like to think of being that high up on Roman’s hit list.
Sun said, “I’d really love to know who’s helping him.”
“Yes,” Xiwangmu said. “So would I.”
Ben said, “There’s still the problem of where exactly he is, and what you’re going to do once you find him.”
Sun chuckled. “Oh, I’ll take care of that, don’t worry.”
As to how to find him, I had an idea. “What do you do when you want to draw someone out?” I said. “You lure him. Your fox taught us that.”
The creature yipped and opened its mouth wide; Xiwangmu scratched its ears.
“So, what, we use you as bait? No way,” Ben said.
Cormac said, “We’ve got his tokens. We ought to be able to track them backward.”
“But they’ve been neutralized,” Anastasia said. “The magic in them is gone.”
“Maybe it is,” he said. “They still came from him.”
The idea seemed chancy, but it also gave me a little hope. If Roman was still around then so was Henry, so was the pearl. All wasn’t lost, yet.
“We have to try,” I said, pulling the coin from my pocket and giving it to Cormac.
The vampire closed her eyes, and for a moment was so still she seemed truly dead. Her chest was still, her skin lacked color. I could push her and she’d fall over.
Finally, she opened her eyes and said, “I would love to see that devil gone. Forever, so he can never hurt anyone else.”
Xiwangmu said, “I agree that Gaius Albinus will look for a chance to destroy you. You can use that desire against him.”
Anastasia nodded. “Yes. Let’s catch Roman.”
We made a plan.
The problem was, we didn’t know anything about Roman’s guide. He or she was Chinese, most likely, to know the secrets, tricks, and magic of the tunnels. Sun Wukong and Xiwangmu seemed confident that he or she was a god. They also said there were hundreds of Chinese gods and goddesses. “Even we need books to keep track of them all,” Sun said, laughing. Still joking at a time like this.
Whoever it was, Roman had kept the guide hidden. We didn’t know what its powers were, or its weaknesses. Now, had Roman hidden the guide because he/she/it was weak? Or because he was a powerful ace in the hole that Roman would only use in an emergency? Like if, say, Sun Wukong showed up again?
Assuming we could draw them both out—assuming that Roman hadn’t decided to flee since he had the pearl and he didn’t need to bother with Anastasia—we had to hope we had enough firepower to get the pearl back and drive them both off, if not destroy them entirely.
It would be such a relief to drive that stake through Roman’s heart here and now, and never worry about him again.
We didn’t have much time to gather supplies and organize. Dawn was close—I was afraid that Roman had left Henry senseless on street level in full view of sunrise where he’d go up in flames at the first hint of daylight. Cormac made a whole list of items he wanted—a crossbow, wooden bolts, holy water, stakes, crosses. Sun Wukong found him a crossbow, and Cormac looked at it askance—it was old, the wood weathered, the mechanism stiff and unwieldly, as if it hadn’t been used in a century. I think he was hoping for something big and modern, made of plastic and steel.
Grace had a bag full of charms, spells, and unlikely weapons—sticks of incense, bells and rattles, firecrackers. “Noises drive off demons,” she explained.
“So I could just scream real loud?” I wasn’t helping very much. All I had were my convictions. And teeth and claws, if it came to that.
Xiwangmu was our ace in the hole, which meant she was staying here. It seemed somehow unfair. I was in awe of her, but also perplexed. I didn’t know how to act around her. Maybe she really was a god and not some powerful sorceress with delusions of grandeur. But she wasn’t my god. The world may have been stranger than even I ever imagined, but I wasn’t going to fall on my knees before every being who came along claiming to be divine. Seemed like a person could get in a lot of trouble doing that.
“My warrior days are behind me,” she said, seeing us off at the doorway to her garden.
“I thought gods were supposed to be eternal. Once a warrior, always a warrior,” I said.
Her smile was amused—and way too human. She didn’t match my idea of divinity—austere, distant, unknowable. Metaphor and literary invention. Obviously, I was going to have to think about this.
“We live our lives same as
