The Ninja's Oath, page 1
The Ninja's Oath
Tori Eldridge
Contents
THE NINJA’S OATH
Also by Tori Eldridge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Acknowledgments
About the Author
THE NINJA’S OATH
A Lily Wong Thriller
Tori Eldridge
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Tori Eldridge
Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design
ISBN 978-1-947993-97-6
eISBN: 978-1-951709-53-2
Library of Congress Control Number: available upon request
First hardcover edition September 2023 by Polis Books, LLC
62 Ottowa Road S
Marlboro, NJ 07746
www.PolisBooks.com
Also by Tori Eldridge
The Lily Wong series
by Tori Eldridge
available from Agora Books
The Ninja Daughter
The Ninja's Blade
The Ninja Betrayed
For Moana, my precious granddaughter
born in Shanghai.
One
Soggy leaves squished silently beneath my boots as I picked through a tangle of branches and vines. After sprinting up the mountain, the need for stealth had slowed my pace. My lungs hurt—hot, wet air, like drowning to breathe. The sickening sweetness of flowers and decay. I swallowed hard and picked my way through the treacherous roots, following voices through the jungle to my quarry ahead.
A cigarette burned brightly beneath a canopy so dense it blotted out the sun. The man wore a patchwork of military castoffs, American, French, and Vietnamese. Baggy pants bunched over combat boots, clownishly big for his size. Even so, he had a half foot of height and a sandbag’s weight more than me. I approached from behind and melded with the trees.
He sucked in the smoke and tipped his head back to exhale. Bored and careless. He didn’t even flinch until I leaped into the air and chopped the blades of my hands into the sides of his neck. Nerves deadened, the guard crumpled to the ground.
I crushed his cigarette with my toe, relieved him of the pistol, and stuffed it behind me in the waistband of my pants. I took his hunting knife and lighter as well. Since my stunning attack wouldn’t keep him out for long, I slammed the knife hilt against his head, gagged his mouth, and tied his wrists and his ankles behind his back. Trussed like a turkey, I left him in the mud.
Men shouted up ahead. Although I feared what they might be preparing to do, I circled the perimeter to search for other threats.
Muddy leaves sucked at my boots. A second sentry snapped his head toward me. I froze, hands to my chest so my arms wouldn’t create a human silhouette, and held the hunting knife poised vertically to throw. After three measured breaths, the man looked the other way.
I could silence him for good if I let the knife fly.
Was I willing to take a life?
Perhaps, but not yet.
I followed the voices toward a clearing with structures on one side and a training area on the other. Sunbeams spotlighted a horrible scene. As a handful of men chanted and jeered, boys fired rifles too powerful for their adolescent shoulders to brace. The younger boys strained to fire pistols. A few breadfruit targets exploded off stumps. Most remained untouched.
Closer to me, dried-grass dummies suffered a more violent fate as child soldiers with machetes hacked off chunks of faces, shoulders, and legs. As the children shrieked battle cries warped by their fear, their trainers heckled and laughed.
Bullies like these needed killing.
Easy, Lily. All in good time.
I scanned the clearing for a familiar face. When I didn’t spot him, I darted past Jeeps and motorbikes to the first structure in the camp, a barrack with hammocks and cots. I followed the stench of feces and sweat out of the main room into cells with cement floors, piss pots, and rotted threshes for beds. A rat glared at me from a food-crusted tin plate.
The next barrack was homier than the first, with assorted comforts and belongings clipped to hammocks or stacked on the ground. The sight of books surprised me, although I didn’t know why. What else did these men have to do in their downtime between raining terror and training children to kill?
Gunshots.
Focus, Lily.
My friend needed help. I was running out of time.
I hurried into another room where a woman rose behind a kitchen counter with a bag of rice in her hands. I held out my palm to forestall her scream and slid the hunting knife in my cargo pants pocket so she wouldn’t be afraid. Bruises marred her face and arms, but her slumped posture and dead eyes told me more.
“Do you want my help?” I repeated the question in French, then pantomimed taking her with me as I left.
She shook her head and returned to her work. Either she doubted a lone woman like me could protect her from an army of men, or she had accepted her fate and simply wanted to survive. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that she truly wanted to stay.
I stepped forward to ask again, but froze when an engine rumbled outside. The woman jerked her head for me to leave and knelt to clean up the rice she had spilled. I pulled the knife from my pocket and headed for the door.
A new crop of children had arrived in an open-bed truck. The driver stopped. Men jumped to the ground. One of them opened the tailgate and motioned with his rifle for the boys to get out. Most were teens. A couple might have been seven or eight.
They regrouped into a huddle except for one lone boy, skinny as bamboo yet rooted to the ground. Spine straight. Shoulders squared. He lifted his pre-adolescent chin. Not in fear. In defiance.
A boss man unstrapped his rifle and shouted commands at the boy. When he didn’t move, the man jabbed the barrel into his narrow chest. The boy stumbled back a few steps, then recovered his balance with a skipping ninja-like step. Sensei had trained me to do the same. The movement came naturally to the boy, as if ingrained.
When the boss man yelled again, the boy faced his new peers. The child soldiers lowered their weapons, puffed-out chests and taunts hiding their relief. Fresh meat had arrived. Their masters would have someone else to abuse.
The boy, on the other hand, gave nothing away, except for a slight lift of one peaked brow. His steely calm sent a chill up my spine. Although half the size and age of the youngest adult, he had the jaded composure of a man.
The guerrilla warriors laughed and congratulated their boss on the tough new recruit. When one of them grabbed the boy’s arm, he side-stepped him easily. Not to resist. To move of his own accord. Was it pride? Or did this boy not want to be touched?
The men and child soldiers parted to reveal a prisoner kneeling in the dirt, face lowered, wrists tied behind his back. Another prisoner lay dead beside him, limbs disjointed on the blood-soaked earth. Organs had escaped through the machete gashes across his belly, the head partially detached by unskilled hacks.
A soldier strode behind the kneeling prisoner and toe-kicked his spine.
As the man arched, I saw the person I had come to save. A man I had known all my life. The friend who had called me for help.
Uncle was more than my father’s crotchety old cook. Lee Chang had been the chief enforcer of the Shanghai Scorpion Black Society. A few days earlier, we had fought together in a Hong Kong alley where he bested tough young gangsters without breaking a sweat. How could Red Pole Chang have allowed a ragtag army of bullies to do this to him?
I darted past Jeeps, barrels, and bales of dried grass, some bound into human-shaped dummies, just in time to see a gun slapped into the boy’s hand. The weight of it made his arm dip and flex. Other than that, the boy didn
Soldiers shouted commands. Their trainees took up the chant, whipping into a frenzy as if volume alone could prove their worth and keep the violence pointed away from them.
I grabbed a metal rod and pried open a barrel. Black and oily. It smelled flammable to me. I stuffed the legs of a dummy inside, lit the dried grass with the sentry’s lighter, and ran into the fray, pistol drawn to gun down as many soldiers as the magazine would allow.
The erupting fireball made the boy stumble and illuminated his face.
His cold eyes narrowed. The corners of his mouth raised into what would become a hauntingly familiar smirk. He didn’t run or hide. He didn’t slip into the chaos and hope to be forgotten. He aimed the gun at Uncle’s chest and fired.
The wheels hit the tarmac, drowning the gunshot with a roar, as I stared out the double-pane glass at my first glimpse of Shanghai.
Where had I been? And why had I dreamt of a young J Tran?
Two
The man I had known as Uncle waited for me on the other side of Pudong International Airport’s customs gate looking more tense than when we had waltzed into the Scorpion den the previous week in Hong Kong. I checked the terminal and saw no sign of the pro-democracy protesters I had grown accustomed to seeing nor the Scorpion thugs who had damaged my grandfather’s business and tried to kidnap and murder Ma. And why would I? Neither was responsible for my presence in Shanghai.
If Lee hadn’t called while Ma checked us in for our flight home to Los Angeles, I would have been reclined in a luxurious business-class traveling pod, sipping chrysanthemum tea, and rewatching a new action release. Instead, I was trudging my battle-torn body into yet another unknown war. This time, trouble had most definitely come looking for me.
Lee glanced at my backpack and marched toward the doors.
“Wait. I have luggage.”
“I didn’t invite you here for a vacation, Lily.”
I dug in my heels. “You didn’t invite me at all. Look, if I’d known in advance you were going to hijack me to mainland China, I would have repacked and sent my luggage home with Ma.”
“Aiya. I called you as soon as I heard.”
As annoyed as I felt, I was glad to see him ornery and alive. My dream on the plane had rattled my nerves. If the wheels hadn’t hit the tarmac, would young J Tran have shot Lee Chang? Or would my own bullet have torn through the boy’s head?
I shook off the horrid thought.
J Tran had grown up in a Vietnamese orphanage after the war, named J for his unknown G.I. Joe father and given the placeholder surname they used in Vietnam. He had killed an older boy when he was seven and a man soon after that. Although he hadn’t shared why, the implication was clear. Regardless of what he had suffered to drive him to such violence, the nuns threw him out and the guerilla warriors took him in.
Had I imaged Tran’s transition from an abused Vietnamese orphan to guerrilla child soldier? What would I dream of next? His mentor in Cambodia with an “eye for talent” who had shaped him into what he was now? I didn’t want to think of J Tran at all. Yet he had shown up in Hong Kong to, what…watch my back? How had he even known I was there?
“Eh, lazy girl. Stop daydreaming and find your bag.”
Lee’s scorpion tattoo peeked from beneath his shirt as he crossed his sinewy arms. It’s tail aimed at me, poised to sting. Although older than my father and almost as slightly built as me, my father’s cook had fought with ruthless efficiency against my enemies in Hong Kong. I hadn’t known he was triad before this trip, and I still hadn’t decided whether I should alert Baba of this fact. Nor could I bring myself to call a gang enforcer “Uncle” as I had done all my life.
I heaved my suitcase onto the shuttle and squeezed beside Lee. Had I come to Shanghai out of friendship or debt? Either way, I had made my decision. Time to put aside these distractions and help.
“When was she taken?”
“Last night.”
“Why didn’t you call me then?”
“I didn’t find out until morning. My grandniece lives with her family on my brother’s farm in Chongming. He and I don’t get along.”
“Then why call you at all?”
“As always, he lays the blame at my feet.”
Lee hurried off the shuttle bus and onto a train before I could ask why his brother would blame him. He sat in a lone seat and made it impossible to talk. I aimed the full force of my ninja intention at him and willed his eyes to raise. His cheek twitched. His fingers curled into fists on his knees. The stubborn ox just stared at the floor. I increased my efforts until the veins in Lee’s neck bulged and turned blue.
Reactions to targeted energy were personal. Some claimed to feel burning ice or heat. Some leaned toward the danger. Others rocked away. Some described the sensation as insects crawling on their skin, a sense of dread or an urgency they couldn’t ignore. When directed at me, focused intent stung my skin with electric shocks. Although every person radiated and sensed energy on an unconscious level, it required dedicated practice to hone it into an intentionally directed and quantifiable skill. Through a thousand hours of exercises and drills, my ninjutsu teacher had taught me to control, confuse, and calm my opponents with projected intent. He had also attuned my ability to sense and locate the source of energy directed at me.
When the train slowed at the station, Lee rose abruptly and jammed his shoulder into mine. “If you’re done playing games, ninja girl, this is our stop.”
Three
“Will you please slow down?” I said, yanking my roller suitcase up yet another curb. I would have enjoyed the paved sidewalks and tree-lined avenues if he’d only given me a chance.
Lee picked up his pace, still annoyed with my prank on the train.
“Hey,” I yelled. “You’re the one who called me.”
The tension in his shoulders eased a notch as he slowed just enough to let me catch up.
“Thank you.” I took in the brick and stone façades around me. I recognized this iconic neighborhood from photos in the flight magazine. “Where are we going?”
“To my apartment.”
“You have an apartment in the French Concession?”
“Former French Concession.”
I gaped in surprise. Back in Los Angeles, Lee caught the bus to my father’s restaurant, wore inexpensive clothes, and only took time off every few years to go home to Shanghai. I had assumed most of what he earned at Wong’s Hong Kong Inn went to squeaking out an existence for him and his wife.
“I didn’t mean to sound incredulous. I just thought you’d be staying with family is all. I suppose it’s cheaper to rent an apartment than stay in a hotel.”
“Rent? Ha. Expats lease it from me.” He chuckled at my surprise. “They moved out last month. We can stay until my new renters move in.”
Triad, linguist, and duo-property landlord? What else didn’t I know about Baba’s irascible cook?
The sweet scent of pork wafted in on the breeze, making my stomach growl loudly enough for Lee to stop and stare.
