White Tiger

both a force of nature and a Raised Immortal. He was a prehistoric totem-like creature, a black turtle, or a combination of a snake and a turtle, two animals together. But he was also a human Emperor who had lived in ancient times and been taught and then Raised to Immortality by his friend, Kwan Yin.
    Much of what was said about him was contradictory. I wondered which twenty-five per cent was true.
    It was the strangest feeling in the world to read the literature about these people on an intellectual level and then match them up to the visitors who wandered inthrough the front door. It was weird to see statues of Kwan Yin all over the place and then remember that she was the same delightful woman who had cared for us all so well in Paris.
    There were some stories about Bai Hu in which he appeared almost demonic. That fitted.
    There were some insinuations that the Jade Girl was half Dragon. The Golden Boy was also called the Clever Boy. They seemed to serve every major deity in the Taoist pantheon. I began to wonder exactly how old Jade and Gold really were; both of them looked in their mid-twenties.
    I looked up some of Mr Chen’s many names in the dictionary. I knew the characters for them and I had an excellent Chinese-English dictionary, so I flipped through to find them.
    ‘Xuan’ meant ‘dark’. Not ‘black’, which was a completely different word. Definitely ‘dark’, as in lack of light. When they called him the Dark Lord, they really meant it.
    ‘Wu’ didn’t really seem to have a proper translation, but generally came out as ‘martial arts’. It was the same ‘Wu’ as in Wu shu.
    ‘Xuan Wu’ meant ‘Dark Martial Arts’.
    At some time during his history, his name ‘Xuan’ had been too close to the dynastic name of the presiding royal family and he’d somehow been changed from ‘Xuan Wu’ to ‘Zhen Wu’. ‘Zhen’ meant ‘truly’ or ‘absolutely’. No messing around: he was really the God of Martial Arts.
    In some places in Southern China he was known as ‘Chen Wu’, the ‘Chen’ being another form of ‘zhen’. He wasn’t even using an alias.
    But why John? Why such a dead-common English name? Was he trying to avoid too much attention?
    No, he wasn’t. ‘John’ sounded like ‘Xuan’.
    Leo took us down to Causeway Bay in the Mercedes to buy Simone’s birthday presents. We parked in one of the older, smaller car parks. Mr Chen owned the parking spot outright; it had probably cost him upwards of a million Hong Kong dollars.
    We took Simone around the shops, and let her take her time. She didn’t want to spend all of her money. Sometimes she seemed much more mature than her five years. I wondered if it had something to do with her mixed parentage—and not just the Chinese/European mix; possibly something to do with the martial arts training and the discipline involved too. She would grow up with wisdom and strength that would give her an edge over anybody her age. All she needed were the social skills she would gain from going to school.
    We stomped up the car park stairs carrying all of Simone’s shopping bags and laughing together. Leo leaned against the door to open it for us. Simone went through the door and stopped dead. I nearly crashed into her.
    Leo dropped all the shopping bags and pushed us both behind him. ‘Stay here.’
    A group of six young men with dyed hair, blond and red, lounged against the car waiting for us. They were all covered in elaborate tattoos and looked like gangsters.
    ‘Are they demons?’ I whispered.
    ‘Yes,’ Simone said. ‘Not very big, about level twenty.’
    ‘Can Leo handle them?’ I said. ‘Should I call your dad on my mobile phone?’
    ‘Leo should be okay.’ Simone moved forward and I stopped her. ‘I wanna help Leo.’
    I pulled her next to me. ‘You stay here with me where you’re safe.’
    Leo walked casually to the demons and stopped about two metres away from them.
    ‘Get off the car,’ he said, perfectly calm.
    One of the demons grinned and levered himself off the car. As soon as he was upright he threw himself at Leo. The other demons didn’t move.
    Leo ducked under the demon’s outstretched arms, grabbed it around the middle, turned and effortlessly threw it into the wall of the car park.
    It exploded into feathery black ribbons that dissipated quickly.
    I pulled Simone closer to me. I thought about running, but decided it would be better for us to stay where we were, with Leo protecting us. There were