Supernatural Heart of the Dragon Read online

  She stiffened under his arm.

  “She died of leukemia,” Debbie said sternly. “She just happened to die while she was flying home to Oslo.”

  Crestfallen, David didn’t know how to respond.

  “Oh,” he said. Before he could try to salvage the conversation, a voice came from behind them.

  “Hello, David.”

  Whirling around, he saw a young pointy-nosed Oriental in a Nehru jacket and green slacks. But despite the man’s unique appearance, David didn’t recognize him at all, and was a bit insulted at the familiarity from someone like him.

  “Excuse me? Have we met?”

  Debbie moved in closer, and he held her more tightly. He shifted slightly to place himself between her and the Oriental.

  “David, who is this?” she asked nervously.

  “That’s what I’m gonna find out, doll.”

  The Oriental shook his head.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?” David asked angrily. “Who are you?”

  “You have the unmitigated gall to ask me that?” the man responded, his voice rising with each word. “I’m Albert Chao! I’m the man you fired just because I talked to the wrong girl!”

  Debbie looked up at him.

  “Is that true, David?”

  He swallowed now, trying to remember. The supermarket’s owner, Mr. Wilhelm, had always insisted on hiring Orientals as stock boys, but he’d left the firing to David. He supposed this Chao character was one of them.

  “Look, buddy,” he said, putting on his best manager’s voice, “if I did fire you, it was for a good reason, all right? So let me and my girl here move along, and you can go back to your opium den or wherever.”

  The Oriental broke into a big grin.

  “Oh, I’m going to enjoy this.”

  Something about that grin got under David’s skin, and he didn’t want to look at it anymore. Remembering the boxing classes he’d taken at school, he extricated himself from Debbie, stood in a proper fighting stance, and punched Chao right in the face.

  The Oriental tried to duck, but he wasn’t fast enough. The impact of David’s fist on the man’s nose sent sharp knives of pain cascading up and down his arm, and as he heard the crack of bone breaking, he hissed out a sharp breath. He didn’t remember it hurting this much to punch someone. Of course, he’d worn gloves back then....

  Debbie, bless her, ran right up to him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  But the Oriental hadn’t budged. His pointy nose was bloodied but he seemed unfazed.

  David couldn’t believe it—that was his best punch!

  Then the man started muttering something. David couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but there was something in the way he whispered it that sent a chill through his bones.

  Debbie held him tighter.

  “David, what’s he doing?”

  “I—I don’t—” David stammered. Then he found he couldn’t catch his breath.

  What the hell is he doing?

  Then Chao stopped speaking, and the sudden silence was even more frightening. David found that he couldn’t even hear the noises of the street. It was a Friday night in the middle of San Francisco, there was noise everywhere, but David couldn’t hear anything except the ragged sounds of his own breathing and the beating of his heart against his rib cage.

  Suddenly, hot air pushed hard against his face. Sweat formed almost instantly, even as he saw a huge fire erupt from the Steiner Street sidewalk.

  A man stood in the center of the fire. David couldn’t make out his features, but he somehow just knew that the figure was staring right at him.

  It was like something in one of those bizarre psychedelic songs that that band had played at the Fillmore. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Yet he could feel the fire on his face, see the flames flickering into the night air—and hear Debbie’s strangled cry.

  The man in the fire raised a giant sword.

  The last thing David heard was his own scream.

  The Campbells converged on the Emperor Norton Lodge.

  Much to Samuel’s chagrin, Mary also called Jack and told him about the sulfur that had been found at the first murder scene. He promised to see if he could find out whether or not there had been any signs of demonic activity recently.

  Deanna revealed that they had found a lead on “the heart of the dragon,” but that it was in Japanese. Samuel was dubious—Chao was a Chinese name—but every little bit helped. They’d know more when Bartow’s professor friend at Berkeley translated the texts.

  Then—armed with a name—they split up, each trying to find the man known as Albert Chao, and any connection he might have with the other victims.

  They all returned to the Lodge late that night. Deanna ordered them a room-service meal, and the family compared notes.

  Samuel went first.

  “I found a lead on a possible target, but I got there too late. First I checked the bars near where Verlander was killed, and found a place where the name Albert Chao rung a bell. The bartender told me that Albert had been fired from a supermarket job two months ago, and he was angry about it.

  “So I tracked down the supermarket and found out who did the firing. They said the guy was taking his girlfriend to Winterland tonight.”

  Mary perked up.

  “Ooh, who was playing?”

  “It’s a skating rink, Mary,” Samuel said with a frown.

  “Really? I thought it was a concert hall. Hendrix and the Dead play there all the time.”

  Samuel didn’t even pretend to know what she meant.

  “Anyhow, when I got to Winterland, the cops were already there, just down the street, and so were reporters. Both the supermarket manager and his girlfriend had been burned to death and cut to ribbons.”

  Deanna winced.

  “Oh no!”

  Mary’s mouth set in a line.

  “We’ve got to stop this guy, Dad.”

  “Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Samuel said bitterly, angry at having failed to get there in time. “What did you find out at Berkeley?”

  Mary had headed to Berkeley to talk to some of Marybeth Wenzel’s fellow students, under the guise of being a high-school student who was looking into Berkeley as a possible college. Her cover was that she was concerned at the news that one of the students had been killed.

  “Marybeth got straight As, and all her friends thought she was pretty swell. The only thing was that people said she had weird taste in men.”

  Samuel frowned.

  “What does ‘weird’ mean, exactly?”

  Mary’s expression mirrored his own, a look of distaste on her face.

  “The girls wouldn’t say, but there was one boy who claimed, ‘She only liked slant-eyes.’ I think he meant Orientals.”

  Samuel nodded.

  “So this is one of Chao’s old flames?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  Deanna went next.

  “Not surprised it’s an ‘old’ flame. I talked to the people at the laundry and the restaurant where the two Chinatown victims worked, pretending to be one of Albert’s old teachers, and in both cases I was told that he had worked there. Both of them said he was fired, and our two corpses are the ones who did the firing.

  “What’s especially interesting is that one of the reasons he was fired from the laundry is that he lied on his application: Chao said he was Chinese—when he’s really half-Chinese and half-Japanese.”

  Samuel sighed.

  “So the only people Chao had a grudge against, that any of us could find out about, are dead.” If that was true, they were at a dead end.

  “You think maybe he’s done?” Mary asked hopefully.

  Deanna shook her head.

  “There’s a demon involved here, Mary, remember? That means that it’s not going to end. Chao may think he has control of this, but he doesn’t. And the demon won’t stop the killing j
ust because Chao’s run out of grudges.”

  “Besides, a guy like that probably has a long list of people who’ve pissed him off,” Samuel said, then he sighed. “We need to find out where Chao lives. That was one thing I couldn’t get out of anyone.”

  “We should call Jack, and see if he found out anything,” Mary said brightly, ignoring the shadow that crossed her father’s face.

  “Okay,” he said. “Call him, but—”

  Mary bounded up from the bed.

  “—use the pay phone outside, I know.”

  Samuel called after her as she headed to the door.

  “I just don’t want to pay what the hotel charges for calls!” But she was gone before he could finish.

  When the door closed behind her, Samuel looked at Deanna and started to speak, but she cut him off.

  “This is why you lost your hair, right?”

  At first, Samuel scowled, then he broke down and laughed. She laughed with him.

  Then he pulled her into an embrace.

  “You still love me, even though I’m a broken-down old bald man?”

  “You’re darn tootin’, Mr. Man,” she said with a mischievous grin, then she kissed him.

  NINE

  Albert showed them. He showed them all.

  I’m sorry, Albert, you’re nice and all, but—you’re just too heavy for me. I just can’t handle all that intensity, you dig? Call me when you lighten up....

  “Lighten up?” Pfagh.

  He was destined for great things. He just knew it.

  If only all these people wouldn’t keep getting in his way.

  I don’t want liars on my payroll, nor half-breeds. Remove yourself from my establishment before I throw you out.

  Before she died, his mother used to tell him stories of her ancestor, the legendary Heart of the Dragon: a ronin who had traveled the countryside of feudal Japan righting wrongs and punishing the guilty, until he was condemned by a mob of ignorant peasants.

  I saw you talking to that girl. We don’t like that kind of behavior around here, mister. Consider yourself fired.

  People liked to think that ignorant peasants didn’t exist in this day and age. After all, a man had walked on the moon, which meant mankind had evolved, right?

  Wrong.

  It took different forms these days, but it was the same old song.

  After that bastard at the supermarket fired him, he fell into a deep state of depression. All he could imagine, all he could see, all he could dream about were the people who kept him down.

  Stupid half-breed! You don’t belong in Chinatown with the real people!

  It had started when he was a child, with the other Chinatown kids taunting him because his mother was Japanese. His parents both told him they were just ignorant, that they were kids who didn’t know any better, and things would improve when he grew up.

  But things didn’t improve. Everywhere he turned he was met with rejection, disgust, and revulsion.

  But always he remembered his mother’s stories about the Heart of the Dragon.

  Once he was unemployed, he had plenty of time on his hands. So he took a trip to the library, tried to see if there was anything in their collection of Japanese texts.

  And he found more than he had bargained for.

  The stories told of a demon who had imprisoned Doragon Kokoro’s soul. Yet according to the texts, the power of blood could supersede the power of the demon’s incantation.

  A descendant of the Heart of the Dragon could summon his demon-tainted ancestor back to the land of the living, where it would wield great power.

  The problem was that the texts were incomplete, so he wasn’t sure of the entirety of the spell, nor its ultimate effect. Still, he was certain that it would tether the Heart of the Dragon to him, thus granting him the ability to right all wrongs, and remove the petty people from his life.

  There was another spell—this one complete—that would banish the spirit again for eighty seasons, but what use had he for that? Why would he wield great power, only to surrender it?

  At first he hadn’t entirely believed everything he read. But what did he have to lose?

  He had no girl.

  No family, no job, no friends.

  Nothing.

  But he had a destiny. He was a descendant of the Heart of the Dragon. He deserved better—and he would have it.

  Someone in a bar he frequented told him about Moondoggy Verlander, a burned-out hippie who was good at tracking down the arcane, and Albert hired him. Moondoggy became his first test subject, and he had felt a bit of remorse about that, but the results were exactly what he had hoped for. Guilt quickly gave way to euphoria.

  Then Albert was finally able to avenge himself on those who had wronged him, who had kept him from his destiny.

  Now they were gone, he found himself at a crossroads. What was next for him and his very own ancestral ronin?

  It had caught him off guard, when that idiot supermarket manager had punched him. But, though startled, Albert had only felt a brief sensation of pain. And even though he was pretty sure he’d heard the crack of his nose breaking, when he had wiped away the blood, he had found no injury.

  It seemed as if he was indestructible as long as he had the Heart of the Dragon bound to him. That hadn’t been in the texts, and he wondered what other unknown facets existed in this great union between him and his ancestor. What else had been contained in that lost text?

  Looking around now, he knew there had to be more that he could do.

  Enough dwelling on the past, he mused. He needed to think about his future.

  The apartment in which he lived was, charitably speaking, a dump. The “pad,” as the landlord had referred to it, was tiny, with warped wood floors in the living room, a frayed and stained carpet in the bedroom, and cracked linoleum in the kitchen. He could barely afford a hammock to sleep on, and macaroni in the cabinet. The only reason he had a chair was that he’d found it on the street.

  He needed to move up in the world.

  And the Heart of the Dragon would accomplish that for him.

  With a small smile at the thought of what he might be able to achieve, he once again started to chant the spell. Perhaps spending more time with the ronin would allow him to take what was rightfully his from society.

  The fires of the netherworld burned bright, and the form of the ronin appeared within the flames that licked toward the ceiling. Just as fire had consumed Yoshio Nakadai in his death, so did flames continue to follow him across the centuries. Albert felt the warmth of the fire dance on his face, driving out the chill of the inadequately heated apartment.

  Yet it wasn’t just heat he felt. No, it was power. He had in his possession a creature who could kill anyone. It was time he used his ancestor for something other than petty revenge.

  The Heart of the Dragon had been a great hero, renowned throughout Japan. Albert Chao was determined to be at least as famous.

  He hadn’t had the money to pay Moondoggy, but now he could get all the money he wanted.

  A loud noise from behind him prompted him to spin around, only to find a bald man standing in the doorway. He had apparently kicked the door in, splintering the lock, which irritated Albert. Not so much that he’d kicked in the door, but that his apartment was so awful that its door could so easily be kicked in.

  The man had a handgun, but he didn’t look like a robber.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “My name doesn’t matter,” the bald man said. “But I know yours. You’re Albert Chao, you’ve killed six people in cold blood—and I’m here to stop you.”

  Albert broke into a large smile.

  “I doubt that.”

  And wordlessly he willed the Heart of the Dragon to kill the bald man. Surrounded by the eternal fires, the spirit married Albert’s thoughts to immediate action. The ronin raised the katana over his head at an angle, ready for an immediate downward sokutso slice at the bald man’s collarbone. As he did so, Albert
spoke again.

  “I control the Heart of the Dragon, gaijin. He is mine to command for as long as I live.”

  “Fine,” the bald man said. He raised his gun and shot Albert.

  Samuel had to admit to enjoying the look of utter shock on Albert Chao’s face as the Smith & Wesson Model 60 revolver’s .38 calibre bullet slammed into Chao’s knee, blood blooming into a stain on his pants leg as the young man fell to the warped wood floor.

  Chao’s head collided with the wall on the way down, slicing open a nasty gash on his forehead.

  Unfortunately, while it put Chao down for the count, the man with the sword was still moving toward him, wreathed in flames that flickered cruelly in the dimly lit apartment.

  Samuel pointed his revolver at the spirit.

  “That’s not going to do any good, Samuel,” Deanna said from behind him. She and Mary had waited in the hallway, preparing the counter spell that they’d found in the library, helpfully translated by Bartow’s professor friend at Berkeley.

  “Yeah, I know,” Samuel snapped over his shoulder as he hastily backed away from the spirit as it bore down on him. “I was just hoping it might flinch a bit. Handguns weren’t all that common in feudal Japan.”

  The extensive notes Bartow had provided told of a masterless samurai named Yoshio Nakadai who had lived in nineteenth-century Japan and who had been given the nickname of Doragon Kokoro, which translated to “heart of the dragon.”

  Bingo.

  They chronicled his death, allegedly at the hands of a demon, and revealed that his spirit could be resurrected by a descendant possessing the proper incantation, a portion of which was included amidst the papers at the library.

  Since Chao was half-Japanese, they realized he may well have been kin to Nakadai.

  The demon’s role in Nakadai’s death explained the sulfuric residue. Bartow hadn’t found any other omens that indicated demonic activity—which was pretty rare, in any case—so he and the Campbells chalked it up to the spirit’s origins, rather than any specific demonic intent.

  Also amidst the texts was a spell that could send the spirit back—and this one was complete. It didn’t banish the spirit permanently, but it beat the alternative....