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  Chinatown Demons: Book One

  By Rhys Ford

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  CHINATOWN, SAN FRANCISCO.

  A different place — another time— and where the city’s streets keep secrets, shadowy mysteries SFPD Inspector Spencer Ricci needs to dig through after he finds himself on a case involving a dismembered, mummified man in a restaurant’s locked storage room.

  Spencer drags around a lot of baggage, including an ongoing battle with the bottle and a long career as an LAPD detective he’d set fire to in a blaze of booze-soaked mistakes. San Francisco is supposed to be a new start but his old ghosts haunt him, beckoning him back into his self-destructive bad habits. Bad habits that include contemplating doing dirty things with the wrong kind of guy and this time, it’s a sleek, cold-tempered medical examiner named Xian Carter with a complicated reputation.

  For a century-old demon, Xian Carter is content with his secretive life. Hiding his nature from the mundane world, he blends in with the city’s inhabitants as best he can but even the best of predators make mistakes. Delving into the mysteries of the dead provide a welcome distraction from endless nights and hiding in plain sight amuses him, until something supernaturally wicked comes knocking on his door with an extremely hot, broody Inspector close behind.

  Murder makes for strange bedfellows and this one is no exception. The twists and turns of the case leaves Xian and Spencer on a wild goose chase after clues but Xian can only hope there’s a human at the end of the trail—because the last thing San Francisco needs is another predator.

  Dedication

  I wish I had the words to express how much I love the Five. So, to Jenn, Tamm, Penn, and Lea, this adventure is for you.

  Also for Bru, the most easily startled Red Panda I know. And last but not least, to Greg who has the universe in his voice and stars in his heart.

  Acknowledgements

  There are so many people who have brought me here and made this book possible but most of all, I would have to thank the members of Coffee, Cats, and Murder for supporting me through the worst of times and celebrating with me during the best of times. You guys rock.

  And a HUGE thank you to Penny Rogers and Brian Holliday for bringing this book from A to Z. Without you, I’d have less commas, more Ses and greys. A little bit of each even.

  Published by

  Rogue Firebird Press

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Chinatown Demons: Book One

  Copyright © 2020 by Rhys Ford

  Cover Art by Reece Notley

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Rogue Firebird Press, 6615 Estrella Ave, San Diego, CA 92120

  http://www.roguefirebird.com/

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-954159-00-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  November 2020

  One

  THE SOFT WINDS sweeping through Chinatown whispered Xian’s name as he strolled through the district’s night-drenched streets. Rain tickled the sky, a damp promise of a wet morning to come. For the moment, the clouds were blustering, an empty threat billowing above the city, soaking up the lights into their water-swollen bellies. Xian kept an eye on them as he walked, catching glimpses of the moon through the trailing rivers of dirty gray clouds.

  He was avoiding the main streets, cluttered with the occasional pack of tourists at two in the morning. The back alleys were where Xian felt more comfortable, more like the warrens of Hong Kong that he’d grown up in. The tight, compact walkways behind the main streets often held much more interesting things than what ran out in the open. Turning the corner, he nearly ran into four nearly identical elderly Chinese women gathered around an open bucket, their arthritis-twisted fingers digging through bloody, dirty water to pull up finger-length fish. Flashing snicks of knives dispatched the heads and guts, the discarded bits flung to the side with a quick flick of their wrists. Three calico cats of dubious origin sat waiting for the offerings to come their way, their fangs as sharp as the blades working through the fishes’ bodies. The cat’s eyes followed him as he passed, but the old women paid him no mind, intent on filling the baskets sitting on the ground at their feet.

  Xian worked his way carefully past the old women, but they never looked up from their task. The cats, however, were a different story. Their golden gazes followed his every move, the fur on the backs of their necks ruffling up when he drew near. One gave a slight hiss when he got too close, but a flying fish caught its interest, and it turned its head to snatch the bony offering out of the air. He was nearly clear of the alleyway when one of the old women shook the bracelet of bells at him, chasing Xian’s steps.

  “I want no quarrel with you, grandmother,” he murmured in his native Cantonese, frozen where he stood, caught on the edge of the alleyway by the old womens’ stares. “I’m just passing through.”

  “Let the demon pass,” one of the women scolded the other, but Xian couldn’t tell which one was speaking. “If you stop it, it will come looking for us later. Best let it be.”

  In his over a century and a half of living, Xian was sure of a few truths. The first was a cat could always see what he truly was and that they were very protective of the humans who fed them. The second was elderly Asian grandmothers often had better second sight than cats and were very protective of the felines they fed. Either they were remarking on his Chinese-British features and hair, or the one with the bells knew of ways to kill him that he’d never imagined.

  Whichever it was, Xian wasn’t intending on sticking around to find out.

  There’d been a festival a few days before, and the sulfurous stink of firecrackers lingered in the air despite the on-and-off drizzle. It was odd to walk the streets after the popping cacophony of a celebratory purging and not be ankle-deep in red paper bits. He’d always loved shuffling through the streets following the display of fireworks, the burnt remains of ten thousand long strings of firecrackers catching on his feet. There’d often been food left in places a hungry child could find if one was industrious enough. In many ways, Xian had more in common with the cats than the old women. He’d been as much of a stray, begging for food, looking for any handout he could find.

  He did well enough until he found himself in the clutches of someone with a lot more power behind them than a bracelet of demon-vanishing bells. And now, many years later, he walked through a city with the sights and sounds of his childhood following behind him like ghosts.

  Much like the heavy-footed thief trailing him. Or at least Xian assumed it was a thief. He hadn’t run afoul of anyone lately. Not that he could remember. The gambling den he was headed to was discreet and glad for his business. He owed no one any money, but there was always the off chance he was being hunted. It had been a long time since someone had come after him for more than his wallet, but despite years of careful living, keeping his feeding to a minimum, there was always going to be s
omebody offended by his very existence.

  The old women he passed proved that.

  He turned left instead of right, altering his course. Ho Chin would forgive a lot of things, but bringing a thief to his front door wasn’t one of them.

  “All I want to do is play hanafuda. My one night off,” Xian said, casting his eyes up to the clouds. It was a futile gesture. He knew that. No God had ever intervened before, and he wasn’t expecting one to do so now. “Fine. Let’s see how this goes.”

  He knew Chinatown. He’d known Chinatown before the earthquake, and after she lifted her skirts, exposing her privates to any and all who would come her way, he got to know her even more. The area was capricious, as deadly as a riled-up cobra and just as venomous. His shadow was going to have to do better than skulk behind him.

  Especially since he or she was interrupting a very rare day off.

  Xian broke into a run and was thrilled to hear the heavy footsteps behind him pick up their pace, matching his loose jog. The alleys got tighter the further in he ran, some of the side streets barely wide enough for a man to get through. He dodged dumpsters and nearly lost his footing on a pile of rotting cabbage leaves outside the back door of a restaurant he would never eat at. Keeping his pace slow, Xian found the alley he was looking for, turning into its dead end and spinning about to meet his attacker face-to-face.

  It seemed to take forever before the man finally found where Xian had gone, and he’d been about to give up when the mountain’s looming shadow fell across the end of the alley. A brutish face peered out from a sliver of light cast by a parted curtain from the apartments somewhere above, and the hulking shape that followed soon blocked off the entire passage, making it impossible for Xian to flee.

  Impossible only if he had wanted to run.

  The dead end stank to high heaven. The ground was slimy beneath Xian’s boots, slippery from stagnant water puddled around a clogged drain and rank with the smell of cast-off fish scales, glittering half-moons scattered over the unevenly poured cement. Garbage bins piled high with dirty takeout containers and seafood carcasses ran along the right side of the narrow walk, and a single metal door broke the brick wall to the right. The building behind the bins was a flat face of cinder block, stretching up for two stories before thin windows appeared on its side. At some point, someone added to its already severe block-like structure, jogging an L across the back of the twenty-foot-long walkway, cutting it off from the main street. There was nowhere for Xian to go, but then, nowhere for his would-be attacker to hide.

  “Give me your wallet and phone,” the man said, lurching into the walkway. He swore at Xian, using an unrecognizable dialect slang, but if Xian hammered at the edges of it, it sounded as if it had something to do with Xian’s long, almost-white hair. Also, possibly, the ethnic origins of his mother. But lingual shifts were tricky, and it wasn’t something Xian would bet on. “I can cut you.”

  The knife seemed to come out of nowhere. It was more of a machete, but anything smaller would have looked ludicrous on a man that size. A mountain did not wield a toothpick to go into battle, and certainly not anything tiny enough to get swallowed in his hand when trying to shake someone down for their belongings.

  The man shoved himself further into the tight passage, far enough in for the light from the windows to fall upon his face. Life and genetics had not been kind. He was from a Chinese people, that much Xian could determine, but beyond that, his features had no recognizable stamp to them. Perhaps they had at some point, but a lifetime of brutality left his bones broken and twisted, scars running down his face and neck, long purple keloids puckering the skin. His dark hair was short and missing in patches, the skin running over the bald spots mottled in bright pink-and-white splotches. Up close, he smelled just as bad as the alleyway, and Xian had only one regret.

  He didn’t think he was going to be able to find a clean spot to bite.

  Sticking to Cantonese, Xian warned, “You don’t want to do this. No one will find you here for hours. The rats would have gnawed off your nose by then, and trust me, that will not help your face one bit.”

  The scarred man’s face twisted about in a fractured puzzle of confusion before solidifying into tight anger. “You calling me ugly?”

  “Not really,” Xian replied, coiling his strength around him. “Still, you would look a lot better if you weren’t rat bit. But don’t let me stop you from continuing with what you started. If you could make it quick, though. There’s someplace I really want to be, and they don’t let anyone in past three in the morning.”

  Xian always felt it was necessary to give a fair warning. There was little in life that separated man from beast, and there were times when he felt courtesy was the only shred of humanity he had left inside of him. Then again, insulting a man armed with a machete while trapped in a Chinatown back alley filled with trash and fish scales probably wasn’t the best time to debate anything philosophical.

  His attacker apparently felt the same way because, after a few furious blinks, the man lowered his shoulders and rushed Xian, screaming in an unintelligible mangle of Cantonese.

  There was always a moment between the time Xian let loose the tethers on his humanity and released the creature he’d tucked away inside of its folds. In that brief gasp of the second, his awareness swam in a discordant vertigo, caught in the rushing tide of his hunger and his desperate need not to kill. His control had become absolute, but there were always dangers lurking in every corner of his mind. He knew he didn’t need much. He’d actually not fed from live flesh in years—or at least, reluctant live flesh—but his fangs were the only weapons he truly had, and he would be a fool not to use them.

  He could snap the man’s neck. In fact, that thought ghosted over his mind, sending an itch along his hands, but the practical nature of being a prostitute’s son recoiled at the waste of so much flesh and blood. Even if that blood was probably tainted with more than a few drops of something along the narcotics spectrum and the flesh hadn’t seen a bar of soap in perhaps as long ago as the man’s birth.

  Then he blinked and that moment was washed away, replaced by the encroaching hunger lingering in his belly.

  “This is seriously a bad decision. Just so you know,” Xian said, bracing his heel against the wall as he crouched, ready for the man’s attack. It was slow going—almost comical, really—and Xian wondered if he’d have to walk over to fight the thief after the man fought to break free from a garbage bin. “Seriously, I’m like a tiny crab. I am too much work for too little meat.”

  The machete swung inches away from the top of Xian’s head, and he abandoned any hope for reasoning with the crazed man. Desperation rolled off of his attacker’s skin in waves of sour sweat, and dried spittle turned white at the corners of his fleshy mouth. The swing left his right shoulder vulnerable, powerful in its delivery but weak in its aim. He twisted around with the momentum of his attack, and Xian sprang forward, taking down his prey in a single lunge.

  Pushing off of the wall left a small crater in the bricks, a concussive shallow created by the push of Xian’s inhuman strength against its stony surface. The brace provided a push-off point, a central focus for Xian to gather up his energy, then strike. Packed with muscle and denser than many humans, he struck the thief with the solidified force, knocking the man off of his feet.

  The thief’s head struck the ground, splattering up droplets of fish-stink water into the air, and Xian turned his head, refusing to let the foul liquid into his mouth. Straddling the man, he was careful not to let his knees touch the alley floor. The gambling den would not let him in if he smelled like a two-week-old dead sardine. For a moment, he stared down at the groaning man.

  Perhaps it was perverse to finally give in a little to the hunger circling around his belly. Or maybe he was just tired of seeing people chip away at the edges of society without doing anything about it. He knew he needed to be careful about falling into the trap of feeding on criminals, wrapping his animalistic nature in a f
alse narrative of justice and goodwill. The rush of blood beating in the man’s jugular called to him, but Xian wasn’t going to fall for that particular sin.

  He didn’t need the push of blood flooding his mouth to satisfy the animal inside of him. Despite everything his sire claimed, a single tablespoon would satisfy any craving he had. He knew that now.

  “I haven’t tasted live blood in a long time,” Xian murmured to himself, tracing down the line of the man’s throat, curling his lip up when his finger came up dirty. “I am not so sure I want to start with you.”

  The man’s knee into his crotch solved that dilemma quickly. Choking on the rush of sour coursing up from his throat, Xian cursed as filthy as he could, working his fingers into the thief’s hair, then tapping the back of his skull against the ground. Shifting so he wouldn’t slide off of the man’s writhing body, Xian opened his mouth and brought his teeth closer to the man’s filthy skin.

  The opening refrain of “Oh Death” burbled from his back pocket, and Xian froze, closing his eyes in frustration. Beneath him, the man bucked and thrashed, trying to work loose of Xian’s tight grip, pinned down by his weight and caught between his powerful thighs. Contemplating his choices, Xian let loose a long, withering sigh, then let go of the man’s hair. Grinning down at the thief’s angry, conflicted face, Xian shrugged.

  “Apparently, I am being called in to work for some reason,” he said, lightly slapping the man’s cheek. It was an insult. Touching anyone’s face was always bordering on offensive, but the mocking tap left no question about Xian’s disdain for the man who probably wished him dead. “May we never meet again. And to be honest, while you are quite ugly, you would probably be better off if you took a bath once in a while. I could grow rice in the dirt behind your ears.”

  Balling up his fist, Xian punched the man’s chin, more than a little happy to see his eyes roll back in his head, then felt the thief’s body go slack beneath him. Carefully standing up, he dug his phone out of his back pocket, then stepped out of the alleyway, brushing at a stray fish scale he’d gotten on his jeans.