Dragon Rising

Dragon Rising

Susan Brassfield Cogan

Copyright 2013 by Susan Brassfield Cogan

Published by Smashwords

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords License Statement

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Design by: Cogan Graphic Design

cogangraphicdesign.com

About the author:

Susan Brassfield Cogan is a full time writer and occasionally amuses herself as a graphic designer. She writes things that she enjoys and she enjoys quite a lot. She has been at various times a nurse’s aid, a belly dancer, an actress, a journalist, and a radio shock jock. Her career is long, varied, colorful, often exaggerated and occasionally untrue. Cogan is the author of many novels: Black Jade Dragon, Dragon Sword, Tangled Garden, The Button Man, The Last Gift, Heart of the Tengeri, Murder on the Waterfront and The Man Who Needed Killing. Her nonfiction works include: Hands of the Buddha, The Buddha’s Three Jewels, Rewriting the Buddha and The Pocket Darwin. She written numerous short stories, some of them contest winners.

Published by CoganBooks

If you enjoy this book, please go to CoganBooks.net to get a paper copy and to find other works by this author.

Chapter 1

Go to Hell.

It’s such a delicious phrase. I love to say it to certain people. I never thought I’d want to go there myself.

All of that that leads to this question: How do you get a dragon out of Hell?

I know that question makes me sound like I need serious drugs. Most of you don’t believe in dragons and most of you do believe in Hell.

Some of you are right and some of you are wrong.

Lazy Boy! Mrs. Chin bellowed. Bring me a beer! She didn’t bother to learn their actual names. Mrs. Chin’s employees cycled through pretty fast. It’s odd how even the poorest peasant won’t work for very little pay and lots of abuse.

The current Lazy Boy had been with us most of a month—some kind of record. Even so, Mrs. Chin wouldn’t make the effort to learn his name. He carried a tray loaded with steaming bowls of noodles. The Happy Parrot Tea and Noodle shop was busy, crammed with sailors, stevedores, bachelors with nobody to go home to, and a handful of beggars with a few panhandled coins in their pockets. They all showed up around sunset for tea brewed within an inch of its life and hot noodles flavored with the mystery fish of the day.

The current Lazy Boy wasn’t the usual skinny kid fresh off the farm or the fishing boat. This one was somewhere in his early 30s, arms rippling with ropey muscles. He wore a black eye patch pirate style and olive drab pants on their last legs. He only seemed to have one teeshirt. In almost illegible scrolly letters it read Kiss me I’m Irish. He looked about as Irish as Chow Yun-fat. I forgot to mention that he has an extremely nice ass and a million-kilowatt smile.

He turned this last on me. Hey, Angie! he said. Can you get that?

Sure. I rubbed my eyes and got to my feet.

Usually people spend their entire lives avoiding a trip to Hell. Not me. Long-ju was down there and it was all my fault. He is the Silver Dragon, magnificent, legendary, a work of art. He had sacrificed himself for me and I am only … me. I had to put that right. I had to get him out of there. Nobody was going to help me with that, certainly not the other dragons.

So I’d been reading children’s books. Now keep in mind I speak Chinese fluently but I can only read common phrases like keep out and employees only and shoplifters will be prosecuted. Therefore I had a Chinese-English dictionary and a stack of children’s books filled with colorful cartoon dragons and wizards. It was pathetic trying to research Hell in the Shaolong public library but I had nothing else to keep me busy.

I threaded my way through the mismatched collection of tables and earned a few growls when I blocked the view of the television bolted to the wall. Virtually every person in the entire place was glued to it. Football, aka soccer. It’s a disease. I’m immune.

Lollipop! Hurry up with my beer! Mrs. Chin probably doesn’t remember my name either. Lollipop is an annoying reference to my hair which is an unfashionable shade of orangey red. I’m a quarter Japanese but that’s all buried under a mix of European genes. I’m from LA. I hadn’t seen those smoggy hills for a long time and probably wouldn’t be seeing them again any time soon.

I headed for the cooler. The Happy Parrot doesn’t actually sell beer. The cases of Blue Girl were all private stock for Mrs. Chin and her mahjong buddies. Mrs. Chin was old and fat and more than a little bit oblivious. She played mahjong every night with three old ladies who were all variations on the same theme. I popped open five beers—there was no point in making a second trip—and set a bottle in front of each of the old harridans who were slapping down tiles and chattering a mile a minute. I carried the fifth bottle back to my table.

I flipped through the kid’s picture book that was on top of the stack.

If you want to get a dragon out of Hell, the first step is to figure out how to get there. I had searched for books based on old legends. Unfortunately, since these were children’s books, the dragons nearly always escaped and won in the end. Occasionally I’d get a story where a sorcerer would call up a demon and then hijinks would ensue. Those were the most interesting and to the point, but they tended to be a little thin on how the demon was called up.

Most of it was trash. How can they read that stuff to kids? Maybe it was my translations that sucked. What I needed was to get somebody to read this stuff aloud to me. The problem was, most of my friends—all two of them—were dragons who would know in a heartbeat why I wanted to hear these stories.

And then they’d stop me. Which is damned annoying right there. I wasn’t going to let them stop me. Nothing could do that.

By the time I finished flipping through the last of the books for the third or fourth time, the beer was gone. Over the last few weeks I’d been through about fifty or sixty slim volumes of the kiddie stuff. It was useless. I needed adult literature on how to call up demons. Yeah, good luck with that. When I asked the librarian she just gave me a little look like I wasn’t quite bright, but she’d be nice to me anyway.

Lazy Boy swept up with an enormous tray of dirty cups and bowls. He grabbed the empty beer bottle. Want another? he said.

I glanced over at Mrs. Chin. The mahjong game was beginning to wear down. I shook my head.

I need to get out of here and do something useful, I said. Can you put these things in the storeroom? I indicated the stack of lurid kid lit.

Sure. He sounded a bit hesitant. Not that he wouldn’t do it for me, but I knew he was super-curious about why I read these things. I had told him I was improving my reading skills but he obviously didn’t believe me.

Lazy Boy! We both looked over at Mrs. Chin. She waggled her empty bottle meaningfully.

Yes Ma’am! he said with that flashy smile. He glanced back and favored me with a little one-eyebrow shrug.

I stood. Well, I’m off, I said. Time to go to work.

I don’t actually work. Not like you’d think, anyway. I’m a thief. I know that’s not very nice. I’m trying to taper off. These days I only steal from other thieves. At first it felt odd, but I eventually began to enjoy the challenge. I headed for my motorbike which was tethered to a no parking sign I was sure only applied to cars.

My work site is anywhere people congregate. Shaolong is an island way smaller than Taiwan but we still have over a million people and there are some very nicely populated dives in town. I had three favorites, the Pigeon House, the Red Fan and the Buffalo Bar and Grill. The last one is a tourist trap. Not much grilling goes on there. That’s where I was going.

The Buffalo made a pathetic attempt to convince the customers that it was a gentleman’s club or an upscale gastropub with waitresses falling out of their teensy tiny bikinis. It’s a great place to be invisible. I wear way too many clothes and don’t apply make up with a trowel. The bouncer knew me by sight and, like most of the employees, ignored me. They knew there was a chance I’d give them a nice tip out of the proceeds. The employees all assumed I boosted wallets from the out-of-towners. That is not the case. I like to take wallets from pickpockets. Where is the challenge lifting the wallet off a shit-faced dentist on vacation from Tainan? I let the amateurs do that. When I can, and this doesn’t happen every time I go on the hunt, I like to take it from the pickpocket, extract the cash and slip the wallet back into the dentist’s pocket. That way he’s still got his credit cards and pictures of the wife and kids. Almost everybody goes home happy.

But I digress. This particular night I showed up at the Buffalo and something seemed off about the place. I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I say it felt dark I don’t mean the lights were out. It was always dark. It was a bar. People didn’t want to see each other clearly. Even the background music seemed more muted than usual.

When I entered, I nodded to the bouncer and he didn’t smile back. He’s not exactly Chuckles the Clown anyway, so that wasn’t too odd. The waitresses avoided me, but they always did, knowing that I was immune to a push-up bra. The bartender got my scotch and soda without comment. I forked over enough bills to cover it and turned around to see if I could figure out what was going on.

People were talking. There was the usual forced laughter and boozy conversation. There were the girls giggling at totally not funny jokes.

I spotted a guy whose pockets looked like he had too many wallets. He had one in his hip pocket, one in his right front pocket and one stuffed into the waistband of his pants under a loose Hawaiian shirt. He was clearly this evening’s lucky mark. I tossed off the watery drink and ditched the glass. Then I casually circulated around as if looking for someplace to sit. All the little tables were full. There were places at the bar, but I wasn’t interested in those. Finally the guy in the Hawaiian shirt headed for the bathroom and that was the signal to make my move.

I’d crowd close enough to him to force him to bump into someone else and that’s when I’d take the wallet out of his front pocket. A little more challenging than the hip pocket, but the one in front would most likely belong to the hypothetical vacationing dentist.

It was even darker over by the men’s room. Bulbs were burning, but they were giving out no wattage to speak of. It didn’t matter. I crowded him and he bumped into a beefy guy with no neck …

... who whirled around and knocked the Hawaiian shirt guy flat down on the ground.

Hey, what— The exclamation froze in my throat.

The guy standing in front of me was built like a Humvee with fists. Big fists. He was in a black hoodie but it didn’t make him look fashionable. It merely added to the feeling of menace that radiated out from him.

Mr. Humvee reeked of Hell. He wasn’t a demon. He wasn’t Hell-spawn, or at least I didn’t think he was. He wasn’t an archvillain. He was really more of an evil minion.

And he recognized me in the same instant that I recognized him. I uttered a little shriek and ran. I knew if he touched me, he’d kill me. I’d killed his compatriot and helped send his boss to the very same Hell I was trying to get into. He had lots of reasons to strike me off his Christmas card list.

I ran through the crowd pushing aside drunks and nearly naked ladies, leaving a flood of squeals and curses behind me. I only made it to the door because the bouncer delayed Mr. Humvee for a couple of seconds. Poor bouncer. I’m sure someone will drive him to the emergency room.

The couple of seconds was enough. I was out the door and around the corner and on my bike, stomping on the starter before he made it to the street. The motorbike came to life. I put it in gear and fed it gas.

The Buffalo isn’t in a well-lit part of town, but suddenly it was even darker. The lights dimmed and my bike lost power.

What the hell.

I gave it more gas and it varoomed but it inched forward as if it was going through thick mud. It was like one of those nightmares where the bad guy is chasing you and the air is like treacle and you can’t move your limbs or make any headway. This was exactly like that except I was awake and able to enjoy every detail to the fullest.

I glanced