by F. C. Yee
Oh.
Ohhh.
Oh fu—
19
I don’t think I could be blamed for being slow on the uptake. It isn’t like one gets conscripted as a demon hunter on the reg.
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. That is a bad idea. A very bad idea.”
“I wish I could say that the circumstances were different, and that the two of us could take charge,” Guanyin said. “But for better or worse, the Jade Emperor’s policies adhere strictly to the philosophy of wu wei.”
“Without action?” I asked, translating the words directly.
“Yes. The belief that doing nothing is the best, most natural way to behave. That everything will play out as it should, as long as you don’t interfere. This is why he’s ordered the rest of the pantheon to stand by as Sun Wukong and the Ruyi Jingu Bang take care of the problem. The two of you are not true gods, so you don’t represent a commitment of Heavenly resources.”
I glanced at Quentin. His face said, I told you so. This must have been why he was so reluctant to call upon divine help in the first place. The favor they’d done for us today was snowballing out of control.
“It is the Way of Heaven to act on Earth through lesser intermediaries,” Erlang Shen said. “This is how it’s been through the centuries, from the first dynastic kings to Xuanzang to now.”
“But I’m not the intermediary you want doing this!” I said. “I don’t know anything about monsters and magic. You want some kind of sorcerer with a cage full of gremlins. Or a wushu master who’s been training his whole life for this sort of thing.”
“Did you not just wipe the floor with several yaoguai at once today?” Erlang Shen asked.
“I don’t . . . I can’t do that on command.”
“Then I suggest you learn how. And quickly.”
“What happens if I say no?”
“Look, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“What do you mean? Xuanzang chose to go on his journey to get the sutras. The gods didn’t make him.”
“That was different. Xuanzang had a say because he was a human. You, however, are not.”
Clank.
My fist hitting the table sloshed the contents of the cup in front of me over the sides. Tepid water dripped on the floor but I made no motion to clean it up. Quentin shifted uncomfortably. He’d gotten pretty good at telling when I was primed to go off.
“Would you like to say that again? I don’t think I heard you right.”
Erlang Shen was unfazed by how long I’d dragged out the sentence through my teeth.
“Yes, you have a human form,” he said. “Yes, you’re mortal. But humans don’t have the essence of a celestial body inside them. Humans aren’t walking weapons so powerful they’re strategic assets in their own right. My uncle’s stance is that you’re still the lost property of Heaven and thus beholden to his will.”
I flexed my fingers open and closed a few times.
“From what little I understand of reincarnation,” I enunciated very carefully, “any person, spirit, or whatever can become human. So long as they work hard enough at it in their past life. I thought those were the rules. That everyone gets their chance to spin the Wheel of Life and Rebirth in the hopes of bettering themselves.”
“I’m sorry, Genie,” Guanyin said. “But there aren’t rules for what’s happened to you. A weapon reincarnating is completely unprecedented. Not in the history of gods and men has this ever happened. When you were the Ruyi Jingu Bang, no one even guessed you had a soul.”
Welp. Nothing like having your personhood denied in the morning to start the day off right.
I finally understood the piercing, migraine-y anger that shot through my core the first time Quentin had called me the Ruyi Jingu Bang. If there was any of my past self in me right now, it hated being thought of as an object. It hated not being acknowledged for what it accomplished by turning human. It valued Genie.
Even if no one else did.
“What a pile of crap,” said Quentin.
I turned to find him giving me a hard stare.
Most people probably would have thought from his facial expression that he was agreeing with the Jade Emperor. After all, he was the one who’d lost his most valuable possession as a result of my very existence.
Except that he glanced at the gods, and then back at me. I had a sense of what he was thinking.
“You come here to Earth to tell us how it’s going to be,” Quentin said to Erlang Shen. “Let me tell you how it’s going to be. If Genie refused, the Jade Emperor would be up the creek without a paddle. Your uncle has made the biggest gaffe of his career, letting these demons escape, and he’s so afraid of losing face over it that he needs to beg for her help without appearing to do so. Meanwhile you’re too much of a kiss-ass to go against his orders and pitch in the effort, you goutuizi.”
Erlang Shen didn’t change expressions, but I could have sworn the room got several degrees colder and draftier as he bristled at Quentin. A duel might have broken out in my kitchen right then and there, but Guanyin put her hand on the rain god’s forearm.
“Enough,” she commanded.
The thunderclouds slowly rolled back. Erlang Shen calmed himself under her grasp, but Quentin eyed the contact between him and Guanyin, not liking it one bit. Interesting.
Guanyin faced me with a wince of sadness and right then I knew I was in trouble. She wasn’t throwing in the towel with her long-suffering air. She was powering up.
“Genie, I know none of this seems fair,” she said. “But if demons are returning to the mortal world, this no longer becomes solely about you.”
I knew that. And I’m sure she knew I knew that. But we were going down this road anyway.
“These particular fugitives—they’re ambitious,” Guanyin said. “They’ll stop at nothing to gain more power. And their go-to strategy is to consume humans with strong spirits.”
“It doesn’t have to be a holy man like Xuanzang. There are plenty of laypeople in this day and age who have the essence they’re looking for, like that girl in the shop. Once the demons arrive, they’ll begin hunting, picking off innocents from the shadows.”
Guanyin motioned at Quentin. “Tell her. Am I exaggerating?”
Quentin let out a deep sigh.
“She’s right, Genie,” he said. “If this is the bunch that I’m thinking of, then the common folk are in trouble. Obtaining human energies was an obsession for some of these demons. A madness. They won’t stop, not even in the face of death.”
I squeezed my nose between my palms. Partly out of frustration and partly to keep the stench of the Demon King of Confusion from flooding back into my nostrils. Closing my eyes only brought the image of Tawny Lion’s gaping, distended jaws back to the forefront of my mind. Monsters like these couldn’t be left alone.
Guanyin sensed her victory was near. “I can tell deep down that you want to help,” she said. “You’re the type of person who takes matters into her own hands. You’re like me in that regard.”
I remembered some of Guanyin’s legend. The story went that she was once a mortal girl who was so pure, kind, and enlightened that she easily attained Buddhahood in her youth. Just like that, in a relative snap, she accomplished what some holy men couldn’t in lifetimes of training.
But as she was about to leave the planes of Heaven and Earth entirely for the ultimate nirvana, she looked back and heard the cries of the suffering and downtrodden. Her compassion led her to stay behind as a Bodhisattva, a lesser divine being, so that she could do her best to relieve the pain of humanity and guide it to its own enlightenment. She was a figure of self-sacrifice and humility. I couldn’t see how we compared.
This sucked.
This sucked so goddamn much.
“Fine,” I said, in a grouchy harrumph that was very un-Bodhisattva-like. “I’ll do what I can.”
20
Guanyin’s eyes sparkled at
me. It was too pretty to look at, and I wanted to sneeze.
The sunbeams of her countenance traveled around my kitchen until they found Quentin, still the only one of us who hadn’t taken a seat at my table.
“What about you, dear?” she asked.
“Sure,” he replied with a shrug. “I have my reputation to think about. Sun Wukong doesn’t shy away from a fight.”
Maybe I was reading into it too much, but that was a pretty weaksauce reason to go along with everything, even for someone as prideful as Quentin. Which meant he was taking up this burden to protect the little people, like in the old stories. Or he was doing it simply to have my back.
It was a nice feeling either way. The cockles of my heart and such.
“So do you have names?” Quentin asked. “Or do we have to wait until every yaoguai shakes our hands and reintroduces themselves?”
“Baigujing,” Erlang Shen answered. “The Immortals of Tiger, Deer, and Goat. Linggandaiwang. The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord. Huangpaogui. General Yin. The Wolf of the Twentieth Mansion . . .”
He went on. And on.
And on.
Quentin’s frown grew more and more profound with each successive name until finally he threw his hands into the air.
“Tamade!” he shouted, interrupting the roll call. “What’s the point of having a Hell in the first place if you’re going to let every asshole walk free?”
“What’s the total count of escapees?” I said. “Or do you not know how many?”
“We know how many.” Erlang Shen squared his shoulders like an accountant about to report to his boss that the whole company was insolvent. “It’s one hundred and eight.”
“A HUNDRED AND EIGHT?”
“Well a hundred now, after today’s events,” Erlang Shen said. “If it gives you any reassurance, I can almost guarantee you won’t have to fight them all at once.”
I could certainly guarantee him that it did not. A wedding guest list’s worth of demons. A Roman centuria. Enough demons to create a half a professional soccer league, without substitutions.
While my fretting brain coped by forming worse and worse analogies, Quentin laughed bitterly.
“A hundred and eight,” he said, shaking his head. “A hundred and eight! If it had been a handful of the small fry slipping through the cracks, I could have chalked this up to your uncle’s usual negligence! You want to tell me how every demon from Chang’an to Vulture Peak managed to parade through the gate?”
“We think Red Boy broke them out,” Guanyin said.
Quentin immediately went silent. He stood where he was for a brief second, and then stormed over to her. He grabbed her arm.
Erlang Shen and I both started to say something about him being too rough, but Guanyin didn’t pull away. Quentin shoved her unseasonably long sleeve up to her elbow, exposing her wrist and forearm. It was covered in burns.
The wounds had healed, but they’d been bad. Really bad. The vicious, blood-colored splotches shone under the ceiling light. Against the rest of Guanyin’s beautiful skin the injuries looked like an act of vandalism.
Without a word Quentin led Guanyin out of the kitchen, never letting go of her hand. The goddess followed him into the hallway, where she gestured over their heads. I could feel something come down around them, similar to Tawny Lion’s spell of concealment, only the two of them were still visible.
Quentin’s wild-eyed screaming, however, was completely muted. He and Guanyin began noiselessly going at each other.
“So, uh, what’s going on?” I asked Erlang Shen.
“During his journey with Xuanzang to recover the sutras, the monkey faced an exceptionally powerful demon named Red Boy,” Erlang Shen said. He watched the proceedings with an unreadable look on his face. “Red Boy had the ability to breathe True Samadhi Fire, which no substance, mortal or divine, could resist. The monkey tried to defeat him several times but could not.”
I didn’t know there was anyone Sun Wukong flat-out couldn’t beat in a fight. I’d assumed even Erlang Shen was a coin flip.
“He asked the Lady Guanyin for assistance. With her magic, she captured Red Boy and bound his limbs. The monkey wanted to slay him, but Guanyin pushed for mercy.”
“Well that sort of makes sense, given she’s the Goddess of—”
“Three times,” Erlang Shen interrupted. “Three times Guanyin released Red Boy after he swore to give up fighting. Three times he went back on his word and attacked her.”
“Wait, he attacked her? After she took his side?”
“Yes.” Erlang Shen’s mask of dispassion slipped a little, and I could see how upset he was underneath. “Guanyin finally subdued Red Boy for good. In order to receive the clemency he’d thrown away so carelessly before, he promised to become her disciple. Instead of being thrown into Hell, he was given an acolyte’s position on a small island shrine in the middle of a Heavenly ocean—isolated from other spirits, but still a paradise compared to what he deserved.
“Over the years he served faithfully. He appeared to have reformed. But the last time Guanyin was with him, he attacked her yet again and fled. That was when she suffered those wounds.”
No wonder they were screaming up a storm. Nothing to light a fire under an argument like an “I told you so.”
“Red Boy wants revenge against everyone that he believes wronged him,” Erlang Shen said. “Springing the other demons from Hell is his return stroke against Guanyin and Sun Wukong. A personal message. All the events that have transpired so far are his doing, ultimately.”
“You’re certain of this?”
Erlang Shen nodded. “There aren’t that many ways out of Hell before your sentence is up. You can either get out on borrowed karma from someone like Guanyin, or you can make an escape route if you’re powerful enough. Red Boy is that powerful.”
“But if that’s the case, why’d he wait until now to make his move?”
“He must have caught word that the Ruyi Jingu Bang was no longer the fearsome weapon of the Monkey King,” he said, making a valiant attempt to keep the irony levels in his voice from reaching critical mass. “The fighting power of his enemies has been reduced immeasurably. Now is the perfect time for him to exact his vengeance.”
Erlang Shen didn’t go so far as to say this whole deal was my fault. Which was good, because if he had I would have blown my stack from here all the way to Canada. The god seemed to be learning where to toe the line with me much faster than Quentin had.
“How strong is he exactly?” I asked. I had a tough time placing supernatural beings on a relative power scale. “Like if the Demon King of Confusion is a ‘one’ then Red Boy—”
“Red Boy once burned a country to the ground,” Erlang Shen said curtly, without a trace of exaggeration.
I hesitated. “Wouldn’t that have been noticed in history somewhere?”
Erlang Shen shook his head. “He really burned it to the ground.”
“Holy crap. You know, this is the kind of news you should lead with. Seems a little important not to mention right away.”
His response was to gesture at Guanyin and Quentin tearing each other apart. “If I had, there would have been no chance whatsoever of a reasonable conversation afterward.”
Touché, I guess.
Quentin and Guanyin must have reached a tipping point in their monumental argument, because the goddess left the zone of silence and came back to the kitchen. On the way she ran her hand over my backpack, which had been lying on the countertop.
“Mind if I borrow these?” she asked. I didn’t know what she was referring to until she opened her hands. My earrings rested in her palm.
“Those are actually kind of important to me,” I said.
“This won’t work unless they are.” Without waiting for my permission she went over to Quentin, who was fuming in the corner. Before he could resume shouting, she leaned over and pulled him into a kiss.
Quentin was so surprised that he went completely rigid as her hands c
aressed the back of his neck. Erlang Shen grunted in protest. But I was at the right angle to see that it was a total fakeout. She stopped just short of his lips, needing only for him to hold still while her fingers brushed his ears like a pickpocket.
Guanyin straightened up and waved the silencing spell away. My souvenirs from the Happiest Place on Earth were now fastened to Quentin’s earlobes. He realized he was involuntarily wearing jewelry and began pawing helplessly at the clasps. They were probably stuck on there with magic, but it could also have been that he was a boy and didn’t know how to undo them.
“What was that?” I asked her.
“A bit of forbidden help,” she said. “Those earrings will let the wearer know every time a demon gets too close to a human.”
“Okay,” I said. “How close are we talking about? Like restraining order distance or county lines distance?”
She gave me a look that said I was examining her gift horse in the mouth. “Far enough away that you should be able to react accordingly. The magic in them will provide a general sense of what direction the demon is in, but beyond that you’ll have to do the searching yourselves. Once you receive the alarm, you must strike as soon as you can, Genie. A yaoguai that has fed will be exponentially more dangerous.”
The human tragedy inherent in that statement was probably implied. “But what about Red Boy?”
A shade of agony passed over Guanyin’s face. “For now we have no choice but to wait until he shows himself. There will undoubtedly be a confrontation with Red Boy at some point, but until then you have to minimize the damage caused by the other demons.”
She gestured behind her at Quentin. “The earrings will also help if he gets out of control. Just say the magic words. You know which ones.”
She swept past Erlang Shen and motioned for him to follow, in no mood for any departing pleasantries. The mighty nephew of the Jade Emperor got up without a peep. He nodded to me before closing the door.
Another flash of light streamed through the windows and then faded. I didn’t feel the need to go outside and check that they were gone. Guanyin really did not screw around when it came to making an exit.
