by F. C. Yee
The slightly irked way she spoke my official, Heaven-appointed title highlighted the other issue here. Really, it should have been Guanyin in charge of all things supernatural on Earth. She knew it, I knew it, and the Jade Emperor knew it, which made appointing me the Shouhushen his way of spiting us both.
By mutual agreement, we’d shifted as much as we could to her plate while I tried to gain my footing as the Divine Guardian. It was . . . an ongoing process. Without her help, the entire Bay Area would have probably been awash in human and demon blood combined.
I was determined to make my own contribution, no matter how meager, even if it was mostly for the sake of not looking worthless in front of Guanyin. Deciding to go in reverse size order, from smallest to largest, I pointed at a yaoguai who’d squirmed his way to the front.
“State your name and your business,” I said.
A chorus of disappointed howls filled the air. The Quentins bellowed for everyone to shut up but didn’t get compliance until they started showing their fangs.
The imp who shuffled forward grinned obsequiously. He was only about three feet tall and barely human-shaped. He rubbed his clawed hands over each other as he spoke with an accent I’d never heard before.
“Oh most Great Divine Guardian, I beg a thousand pardons for disgracing your presence with my filthy visage,” he said, never dropping his over-toothed smile. “I am but a poor spirit known as Benboerba, an unworthy minnow looking only to survive in a shark-filled ocean by the grace of your hand.”
Ugh. This guy.
“That’s . . . great,” I said. “What is it you want?”
My question caused the already tiny demon to wither before my eyes. “Oh Shouhushen, you have already provided so much for such a despicable character such as myself,” he groveled. “A lair in this blessed Kingdom of California to call my very own, where I neither have to fear the wrathful eye of Heaven upon my brow, nor the grasping claws of Hell around my ankles. It would be a crime against the justice of the Universe to ask you for anything further.”
Pfft. If that were true, he wouldn’t be wasting my time right now. I made a rolling motion with my hand. “But?”
“I should be flayed for my impudence in even mentioning this,” he said. “In the past, I was accustomed to gardening as part of my meditative rituals, raising gouqi as a technique to cultivate the Way. I do so miss that practice . . .” Benboerba trailed off to let me put two and two together.
The Way, huh? He was definitely using a scripted catchphrase that was becoming common among the yaoguai petitioners. A demon could make a request on the grounds of personal development by mentioning the Way, but the Way was vague enough it could encompass nearly any activity. I was waiting for the day when one of the yaoguai grew bold or dumb enough to claim eating babies was crucial to understanding the Way.
This, however, was harmless. “Sure,” I said. “Gardening is fine. Keep it to a ten foot by ten foot patch, and only what you can raise by hand. If I see a plague of magic wolfberries taking over the country, there’ll be hell to pay. Got it?”
“Oh, supremely understood, Shouhushen,” said Benboerba. “Your clarity befits your skills as a leader, as does your illuminating beauty.”
Oh my god. I might have thrown up on my shoes right there on the spot, had Guanyin not given me a look that told me to maintain composure. I shooed the demon away before his “thousand thanks” became more than a metaphor.
I thought that one went pretty smoothly, all things considered. But as soon as Benboerba turned his back, his obsequious grin re-formed itself into a cold smirk. He walked away not with the hunched, submissive posture he’d used to approach, but with an upright swagger, hands clasped behind his back.
I pulled one of the Quentins closer to me.
“Why’s that guy trying to make an exit like he’s a stone-cold badass?” I whispered. If Benboerba was hiding something, he’d forgotten that I could see straight through his skull to his face on the other side if I wanted to. The only reasons why I hadn’t had true sight on was because it had been hurting a lot more lately, and Guanyin said that not using it would establish trust.
“He thinks he’s gotten one over on you,” Quentin said.
“What? How? He asked for a favor that wasn’t a big deal and acted like a turd while doing it.”
“That’s not how he sees it. The gouqi were his way of proving his mental superiority. When he tells his yaoguai friends about them, he’ll claim he tricked you into disgracing your authority by using your weakness for flattery. It’ll be a big boost to his status around these parts.”
I was running out of ways to be exasperated with this job. It would have been easier if everyone weren’t so concerned with maintaining face and playing games and climbing a demonic social ladder that I didn’t know existed until recently.
I mean, they couldn’t even help me out by lining up. Chinese yaoguai didn’t queue at all. At least Dante’s demons kept themselves in ordered levels of the Inferno.
An unfamiliar noise caught my ear. A cluster of yaoguai was cheering. And it wasn’t for me.
A very large demon stepped forward from the group. His smaller friends pushed him forward, slapping the parts of his back that they could reach, hollering encouragement at him. The champ was here, making his way through the crowd.
I noticed that the giant yaoguai’s fans might have hailed him enthusiastically as he walked by, but as soon as they were safely behind him, they adopted the same cynical, probing look as Benboerba, doing mental math while pumping their fists, flexing their claws. Waiting to observe what came next. Quentin’s little refresher on demon politics had made it so I couldn’t unsee the layers of scheming.
The big guy took his place at the head of the crowd. There was still a fair amount of distance between us, but his stance was all challenge and aggression.
“Hear me!” the demon shouted. “I am Yellow-Toothed Elephant, and I declare you, the so-called Shouhushen, to be unworthy of deciding our fates on Earth!”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “No cutting.”
“You operate under a false mandate!” Yellow-Toothed Elephant went on. “It is perverse that a human should govern yaoguai. I will end your reign of terror, harlot!”
Well of course. It wouldn’t be a proper reign-of-terror ending without a dash of misogyny.
I sized up Yellow-Toothed Elephant. He was even bigger than the giant Demon King of Confusion, the first yaoguai I had ever laid eyes on. Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s wrinkly gray hands and feet ended in blunt cylinders as thick as telephone poles, and the long trunk on his face pointed at me in contempt.
Great. I was about to get attacked by Babar.
The Quentins sidled away from me like I was in the middle of an embarrassing argument. What? No, I don’t know her. What gave you that idea?
I let the demon have one more chance. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back,” I said.
Yellow-Toothed Elephant stamped his feet and trumpeted. His body went tense and began to expand, his muscles ballooning around the limits of his joints. It was as if he was undergoing a yearlong ’roid bender over the course of ten seconds. Webs of veins rose to the surface of his skin. His temples started to leak a sticky orange tar. The liquid spilled down his head like tears of rage.
I recognized that last symptom from a nature documentary I watched once. It was a sign that he was going berserk. His testosterone levels were spiking uncontrollably. He needed to kill the object of his aggression. Namely, me.
“Genie,” Guanyin said with an edge of concern in her voice. “This is going a little too—”
Yellow-Toothed Elephant lowered his head and charged.
▪ ▪ ▪
The demon’s flat feet thundered over the clearing, knocking down a few of the nearby yaoguai from stampeding force alone. His eyes were inflamed with bloodlust, and they seemed to grow bigger and bigger as he approached.
In the instant before he made impact I raised my arm
, palm outward, in the stop gesture, like a crossing guard. Yellow-Toothed Elephant smashed into my hand with what must have been a half a ton of weight moving at twenty miles per hour.
I didn’t budge an inch.
It was a lot of mass coming to a dead stop. The demon compressed like a slow-motion video of a tennis ball hitting the strings of a racquet before bouncing backward into his normal elephantine shape.
The only effect his charge had on me was that my hand turned glittering black, the original color of the Ruyi Jingu Bang. It spread from my wrist down to my fingers and up to my elbow. Quentin’s illusion that kept my arm looking like normal flesh often faded away when I used my full strength. He would have to recast it once this was done.
I heard a groaning noise at the painful-looking collision. It could have been Yellow-Toothed Elephant, the collected crowd of witnesses, or both. The demon staggered in front of me, waiting for the KO.
I looked over my shoulder to see if Quentin and Guanyin were clear. Then I grabbed Yellow-Toothed Elephant by the tip of his trunk.
I whirled my arm around my head, taking the massive yaoguai into the air with it. I spun his entire body off the ground using his trunk as a tether, making two full rotations, and slammed him onto the earth. Demons who had just gotten to their feet fell back down again from the tremors.
The dust finally settled over Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s unconscious, laid-out form. I looked around defiantly. “Anyone else want to call me names?”
No answer. If there had been a pebble in front of each yaoguai, every single one of them would have kicked at it morosely instead of meeting my gaze.
It was Quentin, surprisingly, who remembered why we were here to begin with. The real one stepped onto Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s heaving belly to use as a podium.
“And let that be a warning to the rest of you!” he shouted. “Exhaust the Shouhushen’s patience, and pain will be your lot! Now line up for your audience in the order you arrived, or else!”
There was a moment of silence before panicked shuffling broke out. The yaoguai mushed themselves into a reasonable column like frightened penguins.
But I could tell the cynical ones only considered this a minor setback. If they couldn’t test me through physical force, they’d find another way. They were never going to leave well enough alone.
Quentin hopped down from his stirring platform and rejoined me and Guanyin. The goddess glanced at what was left of Yellow-Toothed Elephant.
“Was that whole show really necessary?” she said to the two of us. True to her nature, she would never look at violence with anything but distaste, no matter how much she was personally involved.
“Of course it was,” Quentin said. “We should thank him once he wakes up. This little circus bought us at least two weeks of good behavior from the rest of them.”
I made a noise with my teeth. The going rate on demon obedience was getting worse all the time.
4
By the time I’d heard most of the yaoguai out, you could have watered the grass with my brain. The simple act of listening for hours had drained more energy from me than any fight in recent memory. If the demons couldn’t take me down with a direct challenge, they were going to whine me to death.
The field was nearly empty. No demon cared to stick around once they got what they needed. At the end of these sessions they vanished back into the woods without a trace. Today was an exception, as a large trail of broken shrubs marked where Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s friends dragged his slumbering carcass away.
I plastered my hands to my eyes as I called for the last one to step up. One away from going home. Depending on how low on patience I was, this last yaoguai might either get nothing or way more than it asked for.
Only it wasn’t a yaoguai who appeared when I took my hands off my face. It was an old man.
He was dressed in an embroidered robe that might have once been bleached and elegant but was now frayed down to dingy gray patchwork. The ends of his bushy white mustache swept back around his head in a perfect horizontal arc. He carried a wooden staff riddled with knots and knobs that widened to the size of a fist on top.
Before I could say anything, Quentin whooped out loud and leaped onto the old man’s back like a panther on a gazelle.
My first instinct was to scream at him to stop, but then again, maybe he detected a threat. It wasn’t out of the question for a yaoguai to have a really good human disguise. If anything, the better camouflaged ones were more dangerous.
The old man took the attack in stride, flipping Quentin over his shoulder. In the same smooth motion he twirled his staff with both hands and locked it around Quentin’s neck in a chokehold. I would have stopped him from strangling my boyfriend right there, except the two of them were laughing and having a grand time of it. Quentin was obviously not using his full strength.
“I take it you two know each other?” I called out.
Quentin relented first and snaked out of the old man’s grasp. “Genie,” he said, proud to make the introduction. “This is the Great White Planet. Herald of the gods, and maybe the only one who’s not an ass.”
If I remembered the story of Sun Wukong correctly, the Great White Planet was the embodiment of Venus. And he was the first being to recognize that the Monkey King was not a mere beast but a special, uncategorizable being. He’d recommended that Sun Wukong be given a role in the celestial pantheon, like a real god.
That explained the friendly terms he and Quentin were on. While Sun Wukong’s entry-level foray in Heavenly duties had been a disaster, at least the Great White Planet had tried. It didn’t matter what culture or plane of existence you were talking about. Anyone who got you a job, who tried to get you your money, was as good as gold.
Dude’s name still sounds like an online forum that needs to be monitored by the FBI, I thought to myself.
Guanyin, who Quentin had forgotten was also not an ass, stepped forward and smiled. “It’s good to see you again, Grandfather.”
She was calling him by an honorific. True family relations between gods, like the one between the Jade Emperor and his nephew Erlang Shen, were somewhat rare. The Great White Planet took her hand and bowed. “My lady, you are as radiant as ever,” he said in a warm, raspy voice. Then he turned to me.
“The Shouhushen.” He made the title sound grander and a lot less sarcastic than the Jade Emperor or anyone else had. He gave me the kindest, crinkliest smile, his gentle eyes positively dancing with wisdom and understanding.
Then he bashed me in the face with his staff.
His attack moved me as much as Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s did, which is to say not at all. The head of the shillelagh shattered along the grain, splitting the body down to where he gripped it. The sudden cracks in the wood must have pinched the Great White Planet’s skin, because he yipped and put the web of his thumb into his mouth.
“You were supposed to dodge that,” he said, looking disappointed. “I suppose reflexes aren’t your strong suit.” He planted his ruined staff into the ground, pulled out a faded yellow booklet from his sleeve, and began scratching in it with a surprisingly modern ballpoint.
A lot had happened in the past three seconds, and my senses, dulled from yaoguai complaints and introversion fatigue, were only now beginning to catch up. The first thought that went through my head was that I, unlike Quentin, didn’t owe this guy a damn thing, and second, I was perfectly willing to commit eldercide right here and now.
I cracked my knuckles loud enough to make the Great White Planet look up.
Quentin put his hand on my elbow. “He was testing you. That’s part of his job. Besides carrying messages, he’s also like the inspector of Heaven.”
“That is correct,” the Great White Planet said in a distracted cadence, scribbling all the while. “I’m here to evaluate the performance of the Shouhushen in her Earthly duties on behalf of the Jade Emperor, whose mandate she is blessed by.”
Quentin and Guanyin seemed to be blind to how
infuriating that was. “I’m being judged on a job that I was forced into and don’t even want?” I said incredulously.
The Great White Planet glanced at me over the top of his notes. “I see motivation could be improved as well.” He went back to his scrawling, this time at double speed.
I knew what points being deducted sounded like. The Great White Planet was making blatant use of negative reinforcement. And it was working. The instinct to simultaneously grovel for a better grade and try harder at whatever I was lacking rose to the forefront. Motivation? I’ll show you motivation, you wrinkly old windbag. Also, please kind sir, don’t fail me, I beg you.
I cleared my throat. I wasn’t Little Miss Perfectionist anymore. I’d grown. I could call his bluff.
“I don’t have to put up with this nonsense,” I said as casually as I could. “This is horse crap.”
The Great White Planet gave me a mournful look before shaking his head and tsking with his teeth. He put his pen away and brought out a bigger, redder one. The tip of it glistened with ink like a snake’s fang, wet with crimson venom.
Quentin and Guanyin had to restrain me from grabbing the pen and shoving it up his nose.
“Tea!” Guanyin shouted as she twisted one of my arms into a hammerlock. “We should have some tea and catch up. It would be nice to sit down with a drink instead of being under the hot sun, no?”
The Great White Planet’s eyes lit up, and he put away the Red Pen of Doom. “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” he said. “There is a particular Earthly confection I’m interested in trying.”
▪ ▪ ▪
I stared at the Great White Planet from across the table in the bubble tea shop, plotting out how I could grab his booklet and force-feed it to him. My best option seemed to be waiting for him to slip on the greasy, canola-oiled floors.
The cafe was right around the corner from a more popular one that served the same menu, so we didn’t bother with disguises or illusions or the like. The clerk was sitting in the back unhygienically on the prep counter, more interested in his phone than the Great White Planet’s odd robes. If anyone cared, we could have passed him off as a cosplayer.