Crossover Earth '98
Moonlight and Avalon Christopher Shea
"You want me to what?"
"I want you to guard him."
"Me?" I snorted, then laughed. "That’s the first time anyone’s ever asked me to do that. Usually I’m the guy going through the guards. What do you care about him, anyway?"
"It is not your place to question me." Oh, boy, this again. I knew what the next words out of Wong’s mouth would be. "I am your sifu, and you must do as I instruct, Wayward." He thinks it’s clever to call me by my super name all the time, like he’s reminding me that I’m undisciplined and out of control. I don’t need reminding of what I am, which is better than him, for one.
I laughed again, right in his face this time. "You ain’t no sifu. You’re a broken-down failure, and I’m counting the days until I can kill you and start my real training."
He gives a little hiss of anger. "Maybe that is so, but my employer, the man you want to learn from, has placed me over you, and if you do not obey me, I will have to report to him that you failed. Unless you feel ready to fight me now. Without Wing Foo Chang’s training to help you."
He stares at me. I stare back. Lot of staring going on.
"How many?"
Wong shrugs. "Perhaps half a dozen." He smiles as he says it, like he’s hoping that his old buddies will take the gwailo down a peg. Or better yet, kill me and save him from what I’m going to give him real soon now. Not that the time I’ve been spending with him has been totally wasted - if he was that bad, he’d be dead already - but he doesn’t have the secrets I’ve come back to Hong Kong for, and I’m not going to learn them until I’m through with him. "You may use your other abilities to aid you in this, but it is important that the target not learn of your presence."
As if I didn’t know that. You want to know the funny thing? The guy I’m guarding - he’s no politician or rich guy or movie star. He’s Avalon. Yeah, the wizard, the one who needs protecting from ninjas about as much as I do. I’ve got a feeling here that Wong is just jerking me off, maybe using me to settle some scores with the ninja clan that threw him out. "Great. Where do I pick him up?"
So here I am, following Avalon around the city. And I do mean around the city. I don’t know what he’s doing in HK, but he seems determined to visit every square inch of it, from skyscraper-top offices on Victoria Peak, where security goons in silk suits give me the fish eye, to crummy little one-room apartments in Mongkok, where having white skin is the same as going around with a "Please kill me" sign on your back. I can’t get too close to him without blowing the deal, so I don’t know who he’s going to see or what they talk about, but he’s got a worried look most of the time, like a guy who remembers he forgot his wallet just as he picks up the check. Why should I care, though?
I’m following him two on, two off - being able to exist in more than one place at a time is useful on this kind of job. While part of me is resting back at my/our place, I’m also trailing Avalon on foot through the streets and following along on the rooftops when I can. The followers dress in street clothes and wear hats, because tall red-haired white men really stand out in this city. I don’t think he’s spotted me at all, though - too preoccupied with whatever’s got him taking the ten-cent tour, maybe. Doesn’t matter, as long as he doesn’t see me. The only time I’m away from him is when I have to get back together and do the meditation that keeps space from putting its rules back on me again. 24-hour coverage, the Wayward way. I’m actually good at this, but it’s not something I’d want to make a career of. Just following is boring. And watching Avalon push his way through crowded HK streets isn’t doing my nerves any good - if just one of those deliverymen, sidewalk vendors, or yuppie types has a knife up his sleeve, I probably won’t be close enough to do anything until Avalon’s gotten cut at least once. That’s the only interesting part of the job - thinking of ways he could get killed. Not that I’m a psycho or anything, but after staring at his back for a week, I’m getting pretty damn sick of him.
When I finally see them that night, I almost have to laugh. I mean, here I’ve been breaking my ass chasing around the city and going cross-eyed paranoid. I’ve been thinking that any moment one of those shopkeepers is going to whip out a sword from under the bok choy and try to fillet Avalon, or some Hawaiian-shirted tourist is going to use his camera strap to garrote the jerk. But these … these guys look like someone called Central Casting and asked for ninjas. There are four of them, two on either side of the street. Black bodysuits, black masks, crawling over the rooftops. The big spotlight moon makes them look like giant spiders. They’re even carrying sticks, for Christ’s sake. Where else but in HK could you find someone stupid enough to attack a big-time wizard with a stick? It’s so neon-sign obvious that I hold off for a moment to study the street further, wondering if this isn’t some kind of diversion. But nope, the Stupid Ninjas are crouching down, getting ready to jump. It’d be fun to let them get turned into frogs and then sell them to one of the restaurants down here, but I have a job to do. And no one is ever gonna say I failed a job.
Time for an education in tactics. First, jumping and screaming is not subtle. Rearranging space is. In a thought, I go from me on the street to me on the rooftop behind one of the ninjas. He half-turns, hearing something. I kick his legs out from under him, chop his throat, and stomp on his chest, feeling a couple things give way. While he’s still groaning and flailing, I move myself across the road to face another of the idiots. He snarls something, the only word of which I recognize is gwailo, as he backs away from my first punch, trying to use the reach of his weapon against me. I duck under the swing of his stick, and then watch him stiffen, eyes going wide behind the mask as he drops. Standing behind him is my partner, the other me. He’s the one carrying our dimension lance, not stained by the ninja’s blood even after making a mess of the poor fool’s insides. (Lesson two: Numbers count.) The lance catches the moonlight, a thin and brilliant line of white. It’s a beautiful thing. I wish I had more of them.
"Not bad," I say to myself.
He grins back, a ferocious grin just like my own. "You know it."
And then we’re moving again, because there are still a couple more Stupid Ninjas heading toward us over the rooftops, too dumb even to run when they’re beat. Not that we’d have let them get away, anyway. I turn to face the one approaching us, while he pops over to the other side of the street to put the guy I stomped out of his misery and take care of the last of the losers.
The ninja approaches cautiously, proving that he’s not a complete moron. He takes a swing at me with his stick and I duck it and close in one move, trying to come up under his guard. He skips back, though, and I have to sidestep to dodge the stick again. I hook his front ankle with a foot and, when he stumbles, unload a spin kick into his gut, but he recovers and twists away fast, so it doesn’t hit as hard as it should have. Still, it’s already obvious that he’s nowhere near as good as me, and I can take him apart whenever I want. And he knows it too - I can see it in his eyes. Jesus, I love this. I fake him out with a twitch of my shoulder. He thinks I’m going that way and lunges, so of course I step the other way and hit him in the heart and the side of the head as he goes past. He’s breathing raggedly already, and I know he must be hearing bells. Moving slower, too. Okay, what should I do to him next?
But then my double’s back on the rooftop with us, and before I can do anything he rams the point of the dimension lance into the ninja’s temple, a foot-long silver needle sprouting from the guy’s mask just under one eye. What the hell is he - am I - doing? I know I hate being upstaged -
"I had him!" I snap at my double.
He jerks his head down toward the street. "Avalon." Sure enough, magic-boy has paused in the middle of the block and is looking up at the rooftops curiously.
"Right." I force myself to calm down. "Clear out and - "
"Pick him up later. I know." Blip, he’s gone. A second later, so am I.
I’m smiling again as I step onto a rooftop a couple blocks over and turn to watch the bodies of the Stupid Ninjas. Even without my power over space, I could probably have taken them. They hadn’t been all that bad - just not in my class. Not by a long shot. I was getting better - and that meant Wong was going to have a surprise real soon. Maybe before he cooked up another bullshit assignment for me to waste time on.