Chapter Text
In London, in a pea soup fog that never admitted the sky, Vlad gave into irony and was Prince St. John. In an opium den, he met a dead woman with lightening for eyes and a five fingered Lung dragon for a shadow. She smiled faintly with flaking carmine lacquered lips and her shadow bowed to him.
He bowed in return and said, "I am Vlad, Son of Dracul."
She shook her head and tiny chimes rang in the elaborate coils of her black hair. "Ancestor who watches, as I do, that is not why my shadow bows." She waved a withered hand at his black cloak. "Bats are a sign of good luck and long life." She looked down at the beautiful young Chinese woman smiling deep in opium smoke from a pallet on the floor. She pointed a fingernail twisting with flickering light at his own twenty times great descendent. "If I bless yours, will you bless mine?"
He should have said no, but he was old and he knew how to take only a little. Enough to cleanse. Enough to gaze deep into befuddled eyes and set a compulsion. He shattered into good luck and she into lightening.
That the descendents that they watched over married and became Protestant missionaries in Africa was a bit of a mystery, but Fa Bai said as she poured a steaming cup of tea from a carved white jade tea pot in the shape of a dragon, "These things happen."
He supposed it did. They travelled together for a time. It was as if he had a sister who could call down lightning. Although, perhaps it was as if she had a brother who was sometimes a cloud of bats.
When he splintered into bats, her dragon shadow would watch him with gleaming eyes and laugh rain. This proved useful while following missionaries in Africa.
Neither of their descendants realized that they were considered priests of minor weather deities by the locals. Fa Bai shrugged like a falling blossom when Vlad told her. "In a way, they are right."
It was an adventure of sorts. Although why exactly a clan of shape changing leopards attacked them, Vlad never quite understood. Fa Bai explained in the form of a poem, which since it was in Mandarin, did not help.
Then again, he did reply in a choice phrase in Turkish and they both laughed over the matter.
They were together for some twenty-three years. A blink of the eye for them. Still, he often thought of her in the rain.