The air was thick with the acrid scent of gunpowder, fowling the natural aroma of aged tea that normally filled the room. A bullet had just missed Detective Alex Woo, whizzing dangerously close to his ear before embedding itself into the wall behind him. He took cover behind an overturned table — a poor makeshift barricade in a quaint teahouse now transformed into a war zone. His pulse raced, every beat reminding him of the direness of his situation.
“Alex, status report. What’s happening?” crackled the voice of Sophia through his earpiece. Her voice projected authority and a disconcerting hint of worry.
“I’m pinned at Feng’s Teahouse. Need backup ASAP,” Woo responded, his words pressured as he pushed the earpiece deeper into his ear canal, hoping he’d hear something to quicken his rescue.
“Understood. ETA two minutes. Stay put,” Sophia commanded.
Two minutes. An eternity in a firefight. Woo tightened his grip on his SIG P320, thumbing off the safety. This was not his first brush with death in the line of duty. His gut reaction was to think, think fast about tactics, angles, and exits. His mind raced. Adrenaline drunk, he was in survival mode. He’d have to calm himself. To breath. Woo chambered a round.
Glancing around the room, he was struck by how what used to be serene now appeared so foreboding. Broken shards of antique vases strewn across the wooden floor, their once-delicate landscapes transformed into scattered fragments of color. In one corner, a statue of Guan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, stood eerily unfazed amid the room’s lost tranquility.
Woo couldn’t see his unknown assailant, and wondered what the next move would be. Then he considered a chilling possibility — the shooter might be magically cloaked. Woo and his partner, Sophia, were officers in the Urban Mysteries Division; they often dealt with cases that straddled the line between natural and supernatural phenomena.
Inhaling deeply, Woo centered himself. The air was thick with the scents of herbal teas, and something more ancient, like the smell of parchment or old books. His badge, hidden beneath his Kevlar vest and etched with runes for protection and focus, was beginning to grow warm against his skin, when a nearly imperceptible shift in the air broke his concentration — a ripple, a disturbance in the atmosphere.
This was his chance. His eyes darted to a tall mirror adorned with filigree, positioned to oversee the entire room for Feng Shui. But now it might serve another purpose. It could give him an edge.
The warmth of his badge surged, like a pulse of energy from unseen allies. With calculated swiftness, Woo burst from behind the table, his eyes catching those of the assailant in the mirror for just a split second. It was enough to disconcert the shooter. Woo squeezed the trigger twice. Bang, bang — the sounds reverberating in his ears.
His shots found their mark. A cry. The assailant fell, wounded. In a swift motion, Woo disarmed him and snapped on ethereal cuffs — restraints imbued with magical properties to detain even those with arcane abilities.
He stared into the man’s eyes. “Identify yourself. Who sent you?” Woo asked?
A flicker of something unreadable passed through the assailant’s eyes — a combination of disdain and perhaps, a cryptic form of recognition. Then it was gone.
The radio buzzed. “Alex, we’re approaching your location. Are you secure?” It was Sophia.
Woo exhaled deeply, his eyes sweeping over the room. It was a sanctuary violated, a space where the known and the unknown had clashed violently.
“I’m good, Sophia. Suspect detained. But I’ve got a feeling we’re just scratching the surface here.”
And as he stood there, amongst the ruins of a disrupted equilibrium, he knew that this was, indeed, just the beginning.
to be continued…
