Shadow Pavilion Read Online Free PDF

Ro Shi had never made the connection, even though it was now somewhat moot: Singapore Three had had the supernatural thrust so unmistakably in its collective face over the last couple of years that being married to a woman from Hell seemed almost unworthy of comment.
    â€œMa, what’s going on?”
    â€œI’ve been keeping the building under surveillance, sir, but no one’s come into or out of it. I’ve got people on all sides. Do you think we should go in?”
    Chen thought about this. On the one hand, the situation was exactly the same as it had been on the previous instances of busting­—or trying to bust—illegal warehouses: as he had related to Inari, they’d gone in and found nothing. Then again, he’d not had two officers missing. Badger counted as an officer in Chen’s mind, at least for the purposes of this discussion.
    â€œWe go in,” he said.
    A ram at the door, two officers—Shao and Pa Chin—sent in with guns, a quick survey, the all-clear, and then Chen and Ma were bursting into a completely empty room with no doors. Curtains lay in piles of dusty fabric around the edges of the room.
    â€œOh dear,” Ma said, with commendable restraint.
    â€œThere’s nothing here.” Officer Pa Chin looked about her.
    â€œNo,” Chen agreed. “But there was.”
    The magic was so strong that he could almost smell it. As an experiment, he said to Ma, “Sergeant? Can you smell anything?”
    Ma sniffed, and wrinkled his nose. “Why, yes. Something like—I’m not sure. Incense, perhaps? Or blood?”
    If the insensitive Ma could detect it, it must be pungent.
    â€œWhat is it?” Ma continued.
    â€œMagic,” Chen said. “But I don’t know what kind.”
    It smelled of Hell, but next moment, of something else entirely: floral and sickly sweet. Familiar, Chen thought , I’ve smelled that before , but he did not know where.
    â€œSir,” Pa Chin said, “did someone get out of this room by magic?”
    â€œHas to be,” Chen replied. “Unless there’s a secret door.”
    His own magic could not detect that sort of thing, though it might be able to trace the thin, alien thread that still lingered in the room. Quickly, he and the rest of his team made a search of the walls. There were no secret panels or entrances that anyone could detect: the walls seemed solid through and through.
    â€œOkay,” Chen told them at last. “There’s no point in wasting any more time.”
    He motioned them to the sides of the room and, obediently, they complied with his instructions. He could not help reflecting on how things had changed. Less than a handful of years ago, he was a pariah in his own department; shunned by the majority of staff apart from the captain and Exorcist Lao, who was not generally that popular himself. He remembered Ma tiptoeing nervously around him as though he might suddenly burst into flames. Now, Ma barely seemed to notice Zhu Irzh, let alone Chen himself, and the other two officers—admittedly on secondment from Beijing, where supernatural incursions might be somewhat more common due to the city’s status and age—appeared to treat this as a normal assignment. Pa Chin blinked slightly as Chen pricked the palm of his hand and let a droplet of blood fall to the floor, whereas Officer Shao’s attention was fixed on the opposite wall, watching Chen’s back.
    Chen let the blood hit the floor and spoke a word. No jade fire this time, but a spiral of neon blue that twirled up in a butterfly dance and streamed out and down.
    â€œIt’s going back under the floorboards,” Pa Chin said, clearly fascinated.
    In Chen’s own opinion, the origins of the magical trace went far deeper than this, but he’d learned to listen to the prickle of instinct.
    â€œGet the boards up,” he said. Shao ran out to their patrol car and returned with a