Page 141 of Dragon 7

The trafficking ring had been the actual story. This Dorian had been hired by some powerful men to move Black girls out of New York through the sewer system to outlets in other cities.

The officer had walked me through the maps and the names of the girls they'd found.

And one name had stayed with me long after the story ran.

Vicky Jamison. Ten years old.

So excited to get this out to the public, I had brought the story to my paper. My editor had said it wasn't important enough.

Later, I had pitched it to three more outlets before someone finally ran it. I'd taken the byline at a tenth of what the original paper would have paid, just to get the names out where someone could read them.

However, the next day. . .that outlet went bankrupt and was closed. Some powerful men had made some calls to get it shut down.

I spent months trying to discover who. . .but nothing ever came up except dead witnesses and empty buildings.

They’d covered everything up.

But, at least Deja killed the pimp helping them. Fuck. . .that was the third Betty Boop shooting.

Chapter twenty-two

Tiger Eyes

Hiro

As the plane headed back to the island, Kenji held me and I stared up at the twins’ ghosts.

Like when they were alive, they stood together in the red emergency light at the edge of the crates, side by side. Aki on the left. Yuki on the right. Seeing them stand there, whole and easy, was a hand closing around my windpipe.

Even odder, they were not in their battle gear and didn’t have their kitsune masks.

Instead, they wore the clothes from the Claws party. Identical shirts made from layers of horizontal pearl chains. They gave me peeks of their muscular chests and arms. They had on those same razor-tailored black pinstripe trousers that echoed the 1920s with black polished shoes. Matching diamond gold watches covered their wrists as diamond studs decorated each ear.

Even their hair was the same from the party. Matching waves. Glossy and sculpted tight to the head with pearl barrettes layered through a few waves.

It was cruel that their ghosts had come back to me exactly as they had been on the best night of their lives.

They looked exactly the same. . .except for the wounds.

Aki carried his at the throat, a dark bloodied hole sitting under all that glitter and pearl. Yuki carried his wound at the side of the head, above the ear, the same place I had watched him press the gun.

The party clothes said one thing. The wounds said another. Both things were true at once, and that was the brutal agony of this moment.

Kenji held me tighter. “I’m so sorry, Hiro.”

The twin ghosts drifted toward me through the red light, and even dead and ruined, they moved in sync, one creature in two bodies.

Aki looked at Yuki. "Hiro said he could see ghosts, and we didn't believe him."

Yuki grinned, and the shimmering red on his lips caught the light. "I'm glad we were wrong."

Of course the twins would be the ghosts who talked to me.

It wouldn't be enough to haunt me, to stand silent in the corners the way the others did, the wrist-open woman, the half-faced fisherman, and all the rest.

No.

That would be too easy for the twins. They would be the ghosts to annoy me too.