Bound (Chinatown Demons #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,1

living, keeping his feeding to a minimum, there was always going to be somebody 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,