by F. C. Yee
“So I could learn spells too?”
Quentin scoffed. “You could if you weren’t so ass at meditating. We’ve been relying on your raw power to force your talents to the surface like a high-pressure boiler.”
I glared at him but he simply shrugged. “Harsh truths. Red Boy’s domain is fire. Erlang Shen’s is water. Your domain is hitting stuff really hard.”
I tried to come up with a different specialty that could have applied to me, but he pretty much had me in a corner.
“I’ve been thinking more about what happened with Baigujing, though,” he said. “Did any of that seem strange to you?”
That was a dumb question. Besides the parts where we fought an evil skeleton and sent it back to Hell?
“She didn’t say anything unusual,” I offered. “For a demon trying to kill me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. She didn’t say anything. She was just there, in the factory. It was all such a . . . set piece.”
“Well, we could always deduce her motives by cross-checking police reports with eyewitness accounts of the security footage following the paper trail of blah blah-blah blah blah. Quentin, she was going to eat a baby.”
“In an abandoned factory?”
“She probably took the kid back to her lair like a jaguar dragging its prey into a tree. People have eating habits. I’ve seen you bury your peach pits because you have some idea in your head that they’ll magically grow into trees and you’ll get a second helping of peaches. I hate to break it to you but the soil here probably isn’t as fertile as the mystical mountain where you’re from.”
“I know that,” he said with a scowl. “All I’m saying is that something doesn’t add up.”
“And I’m saying that if we waste time on recaps, we’ll never get through this—this quest or geas, or whatever it is we agreed to. Quentin, that was one demon. One, and it nearly ended us! We have ninety-nine more to catch. Let’s focus on them instead of fights we already won.
“We put the bad guy in the dirt and saved a baby,” I concluded. “That’s perfect math to me.”
Quentin snorted. “Someone’s taking to the demon slaying lifestyle rather comfortably.”
26
Yunie slammed her hand down in the middle of the textbook I was reading. She was the only person who could do that without pulling back a stump.
“This is the final round of the concours,” she announced. “The last stage of the competition. The performance that counts.”
I looked at the four concert tickets underneath her fingers, dated for a couple weeks out. One was for me.
I knew that two were for my parents. Both of them loved her like a second daughter. Mom had gotten all the “why-can’t-you-be-more-like-Yunie” out of her system by fourth grade, and Dad was resigned to the fact that most of his family photos of me past a certain age also had Yunie in them.
It was unspoken that those two tickets were for me to decide a suitable arrangement. She wasn’t not going to invite them to the most important event in her musical career to date. Nor would she ever show a favorite. But I could freely pick one or none or both of my parents to come, and feel guilty about whatever combination I chose in order to keep the peace.
It was the fourth ticket that confused me. “What’s this for?”
“That one’s for you to give to Androu as your plus one.”
“Why would I take Androu and not Quentin?”
Yunie rolled her eyes at me like I was trying to play checkers at a chess match. “To make Quentin jealous. You really have to get with the program here, because your lack of game is disturbing.”
She slid the ticket back and forth with her pinky. “And way to incriminate yourself. You didn’t even hesitate there.”
I prickled all the way up the back of my neck. My mind had only gone to Quentin because it’d be easier to explain his presence to my mother. And I’d talked to him most recently. And because demons.
“You didn’t tell me the two of you were that far along,” Yunie continued.
Anyone else would have thought she was teasing me. And she was. But my Yunie-sense, the only superpower that I truly believed in, indicated that she also sounded slightly hurt.
“We’re not,” I said. “I mean, we’re not anywhere along. Of course I would tell you if we were anywhere. There’s nothing to tell, really. Really.”
I couldn’t keep track of what I was embarrassed about at this point. I only wanted to make sure she knew that I wasn’t trying to hide something as important as a relationship from her. While at the same time hiding a massive supernatural conspiracy that she could never know about.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should lay off. I just like seeing you without that line of concentration running down your forehead all the time. Sometimes you get so stressed out from studying that you could hold a playing card between your eyebrows.”
I looked at my friend. She was brimming with nervous energy, almost bouncing on her toes. Which meant for once she wasn’t convinced she would win this competition. Yunie showed fear by turning even more radiant and pretty. Judging by the glow on her face, this one was for all the marbles.
I handed her back the fourth ticket.
“I won’t need this,” I said. “I’m going without distractions. You’re the only person who matters.”
She threw her arms around me and squeezed. “Well, yeah, duh.”
“What’s the need for secrecy?” I asked.
“Huh?”
Quentin and I were on the school roof again, giving meditation training another shot. I’d bought us this window of time by telling my mother that all team workouts had been changed to doubles, so I’d be home late every day. She wasn’t happy about it, and I couldn’t help imagining the gross liquid metal escaping my lips as I lied to her, but this was for the greater good.
The roof had become our own private spot, mostly because we could get there without tripping the stairwell alarms. The thrum of the ventilation units provided white noise that I had hoped would drown out my thoughts. That obviously hadn’t worked, but at the very least I found this a relaxing way to cool down after practice.
“Every supernatural being I’ve met so far has been in disguise, or hiding,” I said. “Or concerned to some degree with not being found out by a normal human. Why do they care whether people on Earth know about gods and demons?”
Quentin scowled at how quickly I’d given up trying to sit still, but he kept his eyes closed as if he could still salvage the session for himself. “In the case of yaoguai, the simple answer is because it’s easier for them to hunt if no one knows about their existence.”
“And the complex answer?”
He drew a deep breath. Either because his exercise required it or he was about to say something serious.
“At their core, every demon desperately wants to become human,” he said. “Even if they’re in denial about it.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Are you sure? You are what you eat. There’s a psychological drive behind a demon’s hunger, besides the powers they might gain. The yaoguai who wanted to consume Xuanzang’s flesh also wanted to become more like him, in a way.”
I shuddered. That was the logic of cannibal serial killers.
“That’s also why they wear disguises even if they can’t really pull them off,” said Quentin. “Back in the old days, the few demons who could successfully pass for human sometimes built entire lives inside monasteries and villages without being discovered. The really disciplined elite were able to manage it without eating anyone.”
“Sounds like it would take a lot of willpower, fasting right next to your food source.”
Quentin nodded. “Those demons tended to be either relatively decent beings, or the most dangerous monsters of all.”
“Okay—but why would the gods bother with hiding? Why not reveal themselves in a big, glitzy display across the sky? The world would get pious in a hurry.”
“Ugh, that’s privileged BS if I ever heard it. ‘Hey, I’m personally doing fine so let’s not rock the boat, okay? You people who have nothing just need to wait and it’ll all work out somehow.’ ”
Quentin’s laugh petered out. “If you don’t like it, you can wait a couple hundred eons until the Jade Emperor steps down and another god becomes Supreme Ruler of Heaven.”
Huh. That got me thinking.
“Does that mean Guanyin could be in charge?” I asked. “I can’t imagine she’d be so passive if she were the leader of the celestial pantheon.”
Quentin frowned and opened his eyes at the mention of Guanyin.
“I asked her about it once,” he said quietly. “She refused to think about leading the gods. She said it would keep her from tending to the suffering of ordinary humans.”
“Too busy doing actual work.” I replied with a sigh. Verily, on Earth as it was in Heaven with some people. I went back to my poor excuse for meditating and focused on my—
“Aaagh!”
Quentin suddenly leaned across the small gap between us and seized me by the shoulders. The shaking traveled from his body into mine, rattling my teeth. There was nothing I could do except hold him steady until the tremors passed.
“Sorry,” he said once he’d settled down. “I didn’t mean to grab you like that. The yaoguai alert doesn’t hurt like the Band-Tightening Spell, but it hits me deep down in my body the same way.”
I didn’t mind. Mostly because his aftershocks resembled a dog twitching adorably from a vigorous petting session. I had the overwhelming urge to rub his belly and ask him who the good boy was.
But as enjoyable as that would be, it would have to wait. “All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “We’ve got an hour and a half at most before I have to be home. Dial me in.”
Quentin gave me a funny look, but if he thought I was being too cocky he didn’t say so.
The two of us stood on the sidewalk, craning our necks upward to look at the grand stone residence framed by the evening sky. It was much smaller and older than the glass towers in the financial district of the city, but also much more elegant. The exterior was styled in fanciful Art Deco, as if to say, Have fun in your liquefaction zones, losers—we’re on bedrock.
“Is he still there?” Quentin asked.
I touched my temple like a mutant with eyebeams; I’d found that the gesture helped me manage my newfound supernatural vision. The floors of the building dissolved away until only the penthouse remained. Sitting on a couch in the living room was a glowing green man with a face as blank and smooth as an eggshell. He had no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Nothing.
“He’s still there,” I said. “I think he’s watching TV.”
Despite not having any sensory orifices to speak of, the yaoguai was channel-surfing on a huge wall-mounted screen. Each time he clicked the remote, the surface of his face rippled like a pond with a pebble thrown into it. I had the distinct feeling that he was absorbing something from the experience, the way hit men in movies practiced different accents while looking into mirrors.
I couldn’t see any signs of the apartment’s original occupants. Maybe they were still at work. Maybe the demon had swallowed them whole. We had to move now.
“So the plan is we go in through the main entrance on the ground floor to cut off his escape,” Quentin said. “I get us past any security on the way up, and we confront him once we’re sure that no one’s around to get caught in the cross fire.”
A strange well of confidence filled my chest. “Let’s do it.”
We strode into the lobby like we owned the place. I approached the blazer-wearing man at the front desk and put on a cheery smile.
“Excuse me sir,” I said, Quentin winding up for a spell behind me. “Can you tell me if the folks on the top floor have—”
The doorman leaped over the desk and clamped his jaws around my windpipe.
27
I let out a shriek of surprise. The man’s teeth slid off my skin without drawing blood as I frantically pulled away. But the fury in his eyes was terrifying in its complete mindlessness. He would kill himself trying to kill me.
I reared back to clock him in the head.
“No!” Quentin snagged my arm from behind and brought me down, allowing the man to pummel me with impunity.
“What’s wrong with you?” I screamed at him. My attacker was doing his best to cram more of my face into his mouth.
“He’s a human!” Quentin said, pinned under us both. “You’ll kill him if you hit him that hard!”
I was going to snap at Quentin for not giving me any options, but then I remembered how many I really had. The doorman was a massive, bulky guy, and only my head thought that I lacked the strength to throw him off. That wasn’t the case anymore.
With a form that would have made Brian and K-Song proud, I grabbed the rabid human by the collar and belt and hoisted him bodily over my head. He continued to thrash and flail in the air, but he wasn’t as frightening once I held him like an overgrown toddler.
“Okay, so what’s his deal then?” I said to Quentin, craning my neck to avoid a frothy wad of spit dangling from the man’s mouth.
“He’s under some kind of frenzy spell. If you put him down he’s liable to tear his own skin off.”
“I can’t hold him like this forever. We still have the yaoguai on the top floor to deal with. Do you think it noticed us by now?”
Ding!
All three elevators reached the lobby at the same time. The doors opened to reveal they were packed sardine-tight with people bubbling at the mouth with pure hatred for no one but Genie Lo and Quentin Sun. They barreled out the doors at us like horses at the Kentucky Derby.
“I would say yeah,” Quentin called out before disappearing under a pile of rage zombies.
I got tackled to the floor and landed with my face in someone’s armpit. As gently as I could under the circumstances, I shoved at the mass, hoping to get some breathing room. A few of the people went flying across the lobby hard enough to crack the full-length mirrors they landed on. Whoops.
“Cast Dispel Magic on them or something!” I shouted at Quentin.
“That’s not a thing!” he said scornfully. “The effects have to wear off over time!”
A woman in hair curlers with a good left hook busted her knuckles wide open on my nose. “Then put them to sleep! For however long it takes!”
Quentin spun around, throwing attackers off his back with centrifugal force. I acted as a human chain-link fence, keeping back anyone who would have interfered with his hand motions.
“Sleep,” he declared. “Sleep!”
“Why isn’t it working?”
“This spell is really strong! Whoever cast it is nearly as good as I am!”
“Then you have to do one better! Now!”
Quentin inhaled so deeply that he could have snuffed out a campfire. “SLEEP!” he bellowed.
The shock wave of his voice expanded throughout the lobby, knocking people aside. The formerly berserking apartment-dwellers slumped against the walls and sank unconscious to the floor.
The room, littered with limply stirring bodies, looked like the aftermath of some devastating party. There wasn’t time to deal with these people, though. We got in one of the elevators and slammed the button for the top floor.
The sudden acceleration pulled at my stomach, as if my own dread wasn’t heavy enough. Each bell chime of the floors we passed was a countdown to a fight with a yaoguai that was smart enough and evil enough to use humans as expendable pawns. I’d known that demons were dangerous on an individual, starving-predator type of level, but this was different. Even Quentin was st
eeling himself, wringing the cricks out of his neck and knuckles.
The penthouse hallway only had one door. I didn’t want to let my fear catch up to the rest of me, so I walked up to it straight away and kicked it off its hinges. Quentin and I filed in and took a position in sight of the yaoguai that stood in the living room, his back turned to us as he gazed through the window over the landscape. Sunbeams filtered in through a large skylight overhead, casting dramatic shadows over our gathering.
“Okay asshole,” I said. “Time to dance.”
The demon turned to face us. Face being a relative term. The front of its skull had a slight taper to it, the way illustrators might draw a head by starting with an oval and a cross as a placeholder for the eyes. It looked at Quentin, rippled once, and then raised its hand into the air.
“Spell! Spell!” I shouted like a Secret Service agent spotting a gun.
Only it wasn’t. The wiggling of the yaoguai’s fingers didn’t do anything. It was the toodle-oo gesture.
He set his feet and then jumped straight up through the skylight. Glass shards rained down on us. It was like one of Quentin’s takeoffs, only more destructive.
“Track him!” Quentin said.
I tried to keep my eye on him with true sight, but it was much harder than I thought—the equivalent of trying to watch a jet plane with a telescope. The yaoguai kept slipping out of my narrow field of view. It didn’t help that right before I had a lock, I was hit in the back of the head with an upright vacuum cleaner, knocking me over.
I looked up to see Quentin with a rampaging cleaning lady wrapped up in a full nelson.
“Sorry,” he said. “She was quicker than she looks.”
I collapsed back to the floor and groaned.
Rearranging the hulking doorman back into his chair without making it look like he’d died mid-nap was an exercise in futility. I had to leave him slumped over, sleeping with the unnatural stillness that came with Quentin’s knockout spell.
