The Demon's Gift by Isaac D. Peterson

Author:Isaac D. Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Books
Published: 2020-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

***

He slept little but awoke the next morning feeling stronger. Even his crippled arm seemed to have more strength. He closed his hand over the cane, testing his grip. His thumb felt along the edge of one of the carved aspen leaves and traced a texture he had never noticed before. There were Chinese characters inscribed in miniature and a tiny incised drawing of a rabbit. Li Feng had always been purposeful. He felt meaning pulse below the marks, as palpable as a heartbeat.

His whole body was suffused with a jagged, reckless energy, an after-effect of the image of Claire he had conjured. He felt it hardening around him, protecting him as he limped through the early-morning chaos of the station and made his way to his private office.

He was looking through an archive of reports, routine logs that every officer filed at the end of his shift. Filing the daily was routine drudgery, and he knew no one would notice he had taken the archive box for the whole year.

There was an anomaly, small but definite. Six months ago, in the spring, McMurtry had taken another officer’s shift validating the harbor master’s import records at the Battery shipyards. The document was straightforward, a list of tonnages of flour, sugar, textiles. There were several Chinese ships mentioned, their names transcribed in English. The Smiling Turtle, The Purple Mountain, The Sea Goddess, The Magnificent Cloud. The clerical notation, typed up by Renly of course, indicated that another officer, John Threnody, had been sick that day and McMurtry had been providing coverage. The problem was that the same day, Threnody had submitted a daily of his own, noting that McMurtry had been assigned the switch. He hadn’t been sick that day, and the accounts didn’t match. It was sloppy.

After shift, Tristan limped through Chinatown to the stationery store to show Ying Yue the carvings on the cane. She had always looked familiar to him somehow, as though he knew her from some other context, but of course he didn’t. She had strange eyes, yellow-green. He walked to the glass counter and laid the cane there. The marks were so small as to be nearly inscrutable, but Ying Yue produced a magnifying glass and peered at the cane, her long black hair sweeping over the cane and the countertop.

“Mazu de zhufu,” she said. “Blessing of the deity.”

“Mazu?”

“Yes. Mazu is the spirit of the sea. Protector of sailors on the ocean. A revered goddess.”

“The goddess of the sea.” It was the ship.

“Yes.” She ran her long finger over the inscription.

“And the rabbit? What does that have to do with…”

“The year of the tiger comes to an end when the moon is new, Paladin,” she smirked. “It will be the year of the rabbit.”

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