by F. C. Yee
“You made good time,” the Six-Eared Macaque said, using Quentin’s voice but in a slightly higher register, as if he was doing me a favor to tell them apart.
“So are you a copy, too?” Quentin said.
The Macaque grinned. “Nope. You’re looking at the head vampire right here.”
He was telling the truth.
“If you’re relieved that you only have to kill me one more time, I wouldn’t be,” the Macaque said. “After all, I have your friends. They’re still alive, but they won’t be unless you do exactly as I say.”
He spread his hands out like he’d arranged a delicious feast. “Let’s play a little game. One that requires you to use every power of the Ruyi—”
I was upon him before either of us knew how.
I pinned the demon to the ground by the neck with one hand and punched him with all of my might.
My knucklebones broke with the first impact, but so did part of his face. I punched him again, hard enough to indent the soil underneath his head.
The Macaque’s expression was one of total shock. “But—”
But nothing. The worldly detachment, the meditative calmness that had allowed me to harness my aura, was gone. Pitch-black hatred poured into my fist. I punched the demon again, knocking the Quentin out of him. The blank eggshell of the faceless man rippled into being and somehow under the smooth surface, he looked scared.
He was supposed to look dead. I smashed him again, over and over, and found enough rhythm to speak.
“DON’T YOU! EVER! TOUCH HER! YOU SON OF A BITCH!” I screamed, hammering him with each word. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL FOLLOW YOU TO HELL AND I’LL KILL YOU THERE!”
On second thought, I was glad the Macaque was tough. I didn’t want him to die easily. My blows struck growing cracks into his skull. I ignored the equivalent injuries to my hand.
The demon screamed and writhed in my grip. Like a threatened animal with camouflage, he changed color and shape, trying to find a form that would relieve the assault. His face cycled through random people, including the doorman and the maid from the apartment building we’d first found him in. He even tried switching to Yunie and Androu in turn, but by that point I’d done so much damage that only half of his face was capable of changing, ruining the illusion.
I didn’t stop. I hit him even harder. I needed to hit him so hard that my message would be stamped across the bones of the universe. There needed to be more of me just to hit him forever, until the end of time.
Suddenly the Macaque lost his solidness, my fist embedding in the ground up to my elbow. I would have kept going into the cloud of ink that indicated he was finally no more, but Quentin tackled me.
“Genie, stop!”
I flung Quentin away and looked around for something else to hit. My eyes still weren’t functioning properly, because all of a sudden there were Yunie and Androu, lying unconscious under a tree. I’d completely missed how they’d gotten here.
At the sight of my friend I fell to my hands and knees and dry heaved all over the ground underneath me.
“What is wrong with you?” Quentin said. “The Macaque had spells rigged up like a dead man’s switch in case you attacked him! I almost couldn’t save them in time! You put her in the most danger she’s been in today!”
I sat back down and clutched my ribs until they stopped fighting me. Quentin’s accusation wasn’t the half of it.
The Six-Eared Macaque had the Monkey King’s strength and knew how to neutralize my true sight. Which made him the perfect infiltrator. Someone had sent him to hurt me personally.
How could I have been so stupid as to think the demons would be content to wait in their lairs until I showed up to fight them? That they wouldn’t go on the offensive, hunting down me and my loved ones in kind? Yunie had been in danger ever since I took on this role—the instant I’d accepted that I was the Ruyi Jingu Bang. My first and biggest mistake.
I looked up to see Quentin angling his fingers for a spell. He put his hands on Yunie’s head.
“Wait!” I screamed.
A pulse of energy bounced between his palms, and Yunie’s eyes rolled around under her lids like she was dreaming. The whole effect was too close to a person in an electric chair and I panicked, throwing myself between them.
“It’s just a forget spell!” Quentin said as I shoved him away. “She saw too much! If I don’t keep recasting it on her, she’ll remember the Macaque taking her, me using magic, all of it!”
“Don’t do that!” After everything that happened today, hexing Yunie was another intolerable violation. I was terrified by the notion that when she woke up, she wouldn’t recognize me, or even worse, herself. “Undo it! Take it back!”
“Genie, we don’t have time for this!” Quentin turned to Androu and scooped up the much larger boy with surprising tenderness. “He’s dying from smoke inhalation! We have to get him to a hospital right now, or he’s done for!”
32
I came home early from school for the fifth day in a row. But that would be it—volleyball practice was going to resume a normal schedule on Monday.
I tossed my bag on the counter. Mom stood over the stove. I’d been trying to talk to her more in general, and I could tell she liked having the few extra hours with me even if they ended up being filled with more of our usual squabbling.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Are you mad about something?” I couldn’t think of anything I’d done. I leaned over to look at her face.
It was perfectly still. The pinch of salt she was adding to the pot arced from her fingers, stuck in the air. The pot itself probably would’ve burned over hours before, but the bubbles hovered under the surface, never bursting, never moving.
“What the hell do you want?” I snapped. I turned around to see Guanyin sitting on the stairs.
“To talk.”
I looked around the house to see how much space had been affected. “I don’t want you doing this to my mother,” I snapped. “Don’t cast anything on her ever again.”
“You know she’s not being harmed in any way.”
“I said don’t screw with my mother!”
Guanyin frowned. “Then we should take a walk.”
I could have pretended we were headed to the town library. This was the long way, the same path Quentin and I had been walking when the Demon King of Confusion had shown up. Reality was an infinite loop.
“Quentin says you won’t speak to him,” Guanyin said.
I stepped on fallen leaves that were drying in the heat. Crushing their delicate, fractal forms felt good. I was ruining configurations that would never exist again.
“Perhaps you’ve decided you’ll cover more ground if you hunt separately. I don’t advise that. The two of you have always made a good team.”
I said nothing.
Guanyin closed her eyes, trusting that I wouldn’t take her into a ditch. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friends.”
“Yeah?” I stopped where I was. “Then maybe you should have led with that.”
“Forgive me my preoccupation with the bigger picture,” she said, a little testier than before. “I understood that Yunie was ultimately unharmed. And that Androu made a miraculous, complete recovery in the hospital. Which I may have had something to do with, by the way.”
“Gee, thanks!” I shouted. “It was the least you could do after nearly killing them both!”
“Genie, I didn’t consider that a yaoguai with the right skills could have copied Quentin so completely as to bypass detection. Are you angry at me for being fallible?”
“No, I’m angry at you for being a liar! You and Erlang Shen told me I was going to be hunting demons. But that wasn’t true, was it? The Demon King of Confusion and Tawny Lion took Quentin and me completely by surprise. Baigujing and the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord were laying traps. Red Boy is probably watching me right now, laughing!”
These were all clues I sh
ould have pieced together myself, but this is what I did when I was upset. Shift blame.
“I’m not the hunter here!” I said. “I never was. The demons are hunting me. And you let them!”
Guanyin didn’t deny my accusation. She stood there with the practiced air of a punching bag, waiting for me to finish. I didn’t have much left anyway.
“I’m out,” I said. “I’m done. You know what the Macaque proved? That I’m an awful person who doesn’t care about everyone equally. I have a hierarchy of people I care about, and random strangers who might end up as demon food don’t make the cut. Not when my friends and family are at risk.”
What I didn’t say aloud was that I was even worse than that. My loved ones also had their own ranks. Throughout the whole encounter with the Macaque, beginning with the fire in my school, I hadn’t given a single thought to Androu. If I had helped him carry our teacher, if I had given him just an ounce of consideration in the forest, he might not have come so close to dying.
I could claim distraction and panic over Yunie all I wanted as an excuse, but the fact of the matter was that I chose, even if it was by omission. I disgusted myself.
“I’m not like you,” I said to Guanyin. My anger was a burned-out husk at this point, exhaustion seeping in to claim the void. “I can’t be the world’s protector. I can’t even protect my hometown, let alone the entire friggin’ Bay Area. You have to find a different champion. Maybe Xuanzang’s reincarnation is hanging around somewhere, wondering why you haven’t shown up.”
Guanyin crossed her arms and went silent for a while, tapping her foot slowly. I watched her ruminate, a gentle worry creasing her brow. She looked all the more beautiful and heavenly for it, an angel wondering what she could do to shepherd her charge back onto the right path.
When she finally opened her mouth, I braced for the inevitable speech about how wrong I was, how only I could do this. A stronger, better rehash of the talk she used to convince me in the first place.
“Wow, Genie,” she said. “I never realized you were such a pathetic coward.”
Meanness did not suit the goddess’s lovely voice. It made her words creaky and rough. A muscle she hadn’t used in a long time.
“So you had a close call,” she said. “Big deal. You know what you learn after a few centuries of bearing the world’s suffering? They’re all close calls. The only victories you get are by the skin of your teeth.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“When things break their way, most people call themselves lucky and move on,” Guanyin said. “Instead you wallow in self-pity. How dare you.”
“Are you serious?” I shouted. “Do you know what could have happened that day!?”
“I hear the torment of billions of souls hammering on my ears every second of every day of every year. I know exactly what could have happened, in every permutation of death and suffering there is to know. I’m not impressed by your guilt, Genie. Or your love for your friends. I get that you want to peacock in front of me how much they mean to you. But I don’t care. I simply don’t.”
“You know what this is to me?” she said. “A numbers game. Perhaps I should have been more up front about that from the beginning. This is about head count. Not feelings.”
Guanyin stepped closer, and it was all I could do not to crumple into a ball from her presence.
“I sacrificed the chance to leave Heaven and Earth behind me,” she said. “I gave up Enlightenment. Can you imagine? The greatest personal accomplishment one can possibly achieve in existence. And I gave it up because one is not a very big number, is it?”
She was nearly toe-to-toe with me at this point. “I keep going because there’s a chance I can help a few more people out of the billions. But you! Getting spooked because it’s finally sunk in for you that stoves are hot, scissors are sharp, and someone could get hurt! If I were as weak as you I wouldn’t have lasted a minute as a Bodhisattva.”
The goddess finally looked off to the side, too disgusted with me to make eye contact anymore. Her jaw flexed angrily like a heartbeat.
I wasn’t prepared for this line of attack. I had thought that somewhere deep down, Guanyin would have given me the same consideration she gave her other supplicants. I thought it was her job to do that, to cradle my hopes and fears. Instead she’d done the math of human suffering and figured I was merely the end of the lever she could pull for maximum results.
It took me a few swallows to force the lumps down my throat. “You ever give Xuanzang this kind of pep talk?”
Guanyin scoffed. “I didn’t have to. Xuanzang was an incompetent boob who had nothing better to do than go on a journey where he faced zero hard choices. He never had to make any real trade-offs in the first place.”
She’d said it with the sureness and momentum of someone treading on familiar ground. If she hadn’t spoken those words out loud before, she’d certainly thought them countless times before.
“Don’t you dare try to compare yourself to Xuanzang,” Guanyin pressed on. “People like Xuanzang and the Jade Emperor are free to do as they please. People like you and me are not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Xuanzang was free to bumble across a continent and fail upward into sainthood. The Jade Emperor is free to sit on his ass and ignore the world screaming for his help. You and I are not free. You and I have a duty.”
“As what?” I could only spot one glaring difference between figures like the Jade Emperor and Xuanzang in one hand, and me and Guanyin in the other. “You and I have duties as what?”
She raised her palms up, letting her generosity flow out. It was the posture she was worshipped in. It was also a shrug.
“As beings of great power,” she said.
We stared at each other for what could either have been an eternity or a time freeze. Maybe the problem wasn’t that Guanyin didn’t understand. It could have been that she understood too well.
The goddess broke the silence first.
“In the off-chance that it gives you enough spine to resume the hunt, I’ve put your entire town under my direct protection,” she said. “You have no idea what that act cost me among the other gods, and you never will. But at least that’s one less concern for you.”
I didn’t let on how much of a relief it was to hear that. Instead I decided to ask a question that I’d been holding in my head for a while. It wasn’t as if there was going to be a better moment.
“Did Red Boy actually break out those other demons? Or did you make a mistake giving out your karma again, to the point where they could leave Hell on their own?” It would have explained why she was so dead set on me finishing this quest. She might have needed me to right her wrong.
“Please,” Guanyin said. “That’s the first thing everyone in Heaven accused me of. I made one error long ago, thinking that a general amnesty for those sentenced to Hell might be a good experiment, and I’m still dealing with the fallout to this day.”
“Well it is kind of your M.O.”
“Any powerful being can give away their karma. Erlang Shen can do it. The Jade Emperor can do it. I happened to be the only one who was willing to take the risk.”
The corner of her lip hiked upward in amusement.
“But you’re right in that the rest of the celestial pantheon thinks this whole mess is my fault anyway,” Guanyin said. “ ‘That stupid woman was too soft on Red Boy! What was she thinking, putting a fearsome demon on a blessed island instead of sending him to Hell where he belonged?’ ”
“You were thinking that imprisoning Red Boy in Hell would be pointless if he could break in and out so easily,” I answered for her. “You cared more about minimizing the harm he could do than making sure he was punished. You put him on an island in the middle of a Heavenly ocean because that’s as good a jail as any for a fire demon. You took the burden of watching him upon yourself because everyone else was too afraid.”
Guanyin smiled, proud that I’d figured it out
. “There’s my smart girl.”
It seemed like our talk was coming to a close. I didn’t want to let her get away completely unscathed.
“You know, you wouldn’t have to put up with crap from the other gods if you took over from the Jade Emperor,” I said. “If you were sitting on the Dragon Throne of Heaven.”
She looked at me incredulously. I could tell I was speaking treason.
“But that’s me saying crazy things,” I went on. “After all, you know your place, don’t you?”
Guanyin blinked, and then burst out into laughter. Surprisingly deep, side-clutching laughter. It was as rusty on her as her cruel voice was.
“Oh man,” she said when she was finally done. “If you ever try to provoke me like that again, I’ll slap the taste out of your mouth.”
She wiped a tear from her eye and smiled, her face put back to its normal serenity.
“And then I’ll turn you into a goddamn cricket.”
33
I may have acted tough, standing up to Guanyin, but in reality I felt as if I’d barely escaped that conversation with my life. I could finally see why Quentin was so hesitant to get on her bad side.
In what I considered a massive reprieve, she didn’t show up again for a while. I assumed the goddess was plotting her next move now that her best piece was proving wayward.
Despite what I’d told her, though, I hadn’t left the game entirely. After what happened to Yunie and Androu, I’d simply switched my priorities to defense. Guanyin might have put wards of some kind around Santa Firenza, but like she said, she wasn’t infallible. There were still more than ninety demons out there, and I’d be damned if I let one get too close again.
I used true sight preemptively at school until the brink of exhaustion, trying to act like an early warning radar for the entire building in case a yaoguai came back for more. Eventually I had to settle for only looking during class breaks, or I wouldn’t have had the stamina to extend the search at night.
I stayed awake in my room until my eyes nearly fell out of my head, scanning as far and wide as I could. Without the height advantage that Quentin’s leaping provided, it took a lot longer to get a decent area covered. I began to feel like a human lighthouse, casting high beams into the endless sea.
