Free Jade Tiger by Jenn Reese Page B

spoken by the monk, or the weather in Cairo over Christmas, or if the fortune-teller's tarot cards were written in English or Spanish.
    Shan circled the room. The three men were in what appeared to be a front study or living room just off the foyer containing the stairs up. Shan slunk away from the front door, following the path she'd seen One-eye take earlier. A dark hallway led around the back of the room. At the far end, Shan saw a refrigerator and a sink. On the left, just before the kitchen, was another door, presumably to a dining room. She guessed that One-eye was camped out in there.
    "So you have the tiger?" she heard Fortier ask from the study. "Do you have it with you?"
    "No, no," Ian answered quickly. "But now I know where to get it. And I've told my contacts to deal exclusively with me."
    Good boy, Shan thought. Keep yourself valuable.
    She made it to the dining room door and pressed herself to the floor near the doorframe. Her rib sent her a sharp pain to remind her that it was probably cracked, but the irritation was worth it to Shan. One-eye might notice a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye if she looked into the room, but she doubted he'd be able to spot her head so close to the floor.
    As Shan moved her body forward slightly and looked into the room, she stared straight into One-eye's scarred, smiling face. He was sitting next to the closed study door in a tall, straight-backed chair of a dark polished wood, but he was facing the dining room archway.
    "Damn," Shan muttered. One-eye'd been waiting for her.

CHAPTER 5
     
    Shan picked herself up off the floor and stood slowly. "You should at least tell me your name," she said in Mandarin, "so I know what to put on your headstone."
    One-eye smiled.
    "Thank you for bringing the crane," he said, also in Mandarin. "It's going to look very good in the collection."
    "You don't have them all," said Shan. She took a step into the room. One-eye's hands were hidden behind the huge dining room table. She needed to know if he had a gun.
    "No, not all," said One-eye. "But soon." His eyes followed her progress, but the rest of him remained motionless in his chair. "And the dragon is important, wouldn't you agree? It sits at the center of the circle, after all."
    Some things never changed, thought Shan. Yes, the dragon sat at the center of the circle and acted as a hub for the other four animals. But it did not follow that it was the most powerful. Size had nothing to do with power.
    "Yes," Shan lied, taking another step, "the dragon is the emperor of the sky, the ruler of us all. Even we know that." She used the word emperor to appeal to his patriarchal mindset, though it seemed to burn her tongue as she said it. One-eye smiled, his wide slit of a grin oozing malice.
    "Don't try to placate me, girl," he said. "It's unbecoming."
    "So is that eye," Shan said, giving up the pretense happily. "You know, plastic surgery has come a long way in the last few years." Shan switched between English and Mandarin as she spoke. It had been a long time since she had spoken in Chinese, and she certainly hadn't learned words for "plastic surgery." Her fluency was yet another legacy of her childhood that had begun to fade.
    The smile eroded from One-eye's face at her latest insult. Shan hadn't expected it to be quite that successful; surely he got regular abuse about the sunburst scar around his eye. In the next room, the archaeologists continued to trade quips of their own. Shan quieted her mind as she took another step toward her enemy. She needed mushin , the no-mind state, if she hoped to defeat the man before her. She needed stillness of thought, but not of body; she needed both yin and yang, both action and inaction.
    One-eye leaped out of his seat, moving almost as fast as his henchman Dart, and onto the table. Just as one leg landed, his other circled around in a wide arc. Shan watched it come toward her face. She bent backward and it zoomed past, an inch over her nose, as