by F. C. Yee
Quentin had the wherewithal to change his target. He scooped up the kid and wrapped her in his scarf. Then he leapt out of the window.
“Looks like you’ve been abandoned,” Baigujing said.
I nearly smiled; Quentin had only done exactly what he should have. I just needed to stall until he got back from putting the child somewhere safe. I raised my hands like I knew how to fight, hoping that Big Joe’s “don’t mess with me” stance from the self-defense class was a good enough bluff.
This was it. I was facing off against a demon. For real this time, with no blind rage to act as a crutch. There was a clarity to every second that passed while I was guarding a life other than my own. I felt pure. Unassailable.
Not in the literal sense, though, because Baigujing advanced upon me steadily. She was either being unnecessarily wary or she was toying with me.
“We can wait until the monkey gets back,” she said. “If you’d like.”
“Sure.” I jabbed at her eyes and missed. That must only work when they aren’t expecting it.
The demon tutted. “You’ve got to put your weight behind it, or else there’s no point. I’ve taken blows from you and the monkey at full strength.”
“Here’s another.” Quentin reappeared and delivered a flying knee to the side of her head.
Baigujing’s body rumpled and pinwheeled away. She righted herself, hardly any worse for wear.
“Displace,” she intoned, making the motions for a spell.
“Oh no, you don’t.” Quentin lunged at her to interrupt it.
But he didn’t succeed. In fact, he didn’t even come close to Baigujing. He dove in the wrong direction by more than ninety degrees.
“What the hell?” Quentin was unable to believe the extent to which he’d whiffed. He flailed in the empty air and tried to lay hands on her again, but he ended up running in a new angle that was equally bonkers.
Baigujing hadn’t moved at all, from my perspective. She must have screwed with Quentin’s eyes. There was no telling what kind of illusion he was seeing at the moment.
“Can you hear me?” I asked him. “I can see her but I’m not sure if she’s real or—”
The demon crossed the distance between us in one step and backhanded me all the way into the wall.
Okay, I thought through the smear of pain that was my spine hitting the bricks. Guess she’s real.
I keeled over on my hands and knees, gasping for breath. I saw Baigujing’s bare feet stop in front of me.
She nudged me in the chin with her toe. “Your turn,” she said.
I planted myself, a sprinter in a starting block, and slugged her as hard as I could in the stomach. I could feel her flesh wrap around my fist without taking any of the punch. It was like trying to fight a plastic bag floating in the breeze.
Baigujing smiled at me. She had to use her eyes to do it. She grabbed me by the jaw and bent me backward, squeezing hard enough that I couldn’t speak.
“You’re not going to get anywhere like that,” she said. “I met the monkey for the first time while disguised as a human. He knew I was up to no good, though, and struck me with the Ruyi Jingu Bang with all his might. I survived unharmed. Do you know how rare that is, to be able to shrug off direct hits from the Monkey King? I feel like I’m not appreciated enough for that.”
I glanced over at Quentin, who was still chasing shadows.
“The funny thing is, after he struck me I left behind a body of flesh to make it look like he’d murdered an innocent girl,” Baigujing giggled. “You should have seen how Xuanzang punished him for that one! The beast that threatened Heaven, rolling in the dust, clutching his head and pleading for mercy. I laughed for weeks!”
I didn’t know how I had any nerves left to touch, but she found them. I took her by the hair with one hand. She merely grinned, figuring I was going to punch her with the other.
But instead I used my grip to swing my legs around and wrap up her neck and shoulders. My ankles found each other and I squeezed Baigujing with every ounce of strength I had left.
I was ripping a page from Quentin’s playbook. Judging from the demon’s howl, it was a good one.
She clawed frantically at my face but couldn’t reach. My body was simply too long. I had her locked up with all the time in the world.
What did Quentin do next to the Demon King of Confusion? I wondered, my thoughts surprisingly cold-blooded. Oh yeah. This. I took hold of Baigujing’s skull with impunity and began cranking her neck.
“Aaagh!” she hissed. “Ugly girl! Ugly, ugly girl!”
Really? We were going to do that now?
“Yeah, well . . . you’re overdressed,” I said. I squeezed tighter and heard something crack.
Through the cloud of adrenaline fogging my brain, an idea slipped through like a ray of light. I closed my eyes and reopened them with true sight on. Baigujing was a skeleton once more, her muscle and skin invisible under my X-ray vision.
“Where’s Red Boy?” I bellowed. “Tell me, and I’ll spare your life!” I didn’t know if I was strong enough to dictate either way; but it sounded like the type of thing you said when you had a monster in a headlock.
Baigujing froze. But only for an instant. She began trembling in my grasp and making the most hideous noise. I almost let go out of fear before I realized she was simply laughing.
“I’ll never tell you,” she said. “Nothing you can do will ever make me tell you.”
There were no lie bubbles. Either she didn’t know or she really wasn’t going to say. So much for my idea.
“Spare my life?” she sneered. “You don’t have what it takes to end me. The instant you slip, I’ll find that child and rip the meat from her bones!”
Still no bubbles. “Come again?” I said.
“I’ll kill her and every other miserable human I get my hands on! I will turn this town into a sea of corpses! You will swim to me in dead flesh!”
The air was clear. If I let her go she’d do her best to make good on her threat.
“I can’t be killed by the likes of you!” Baigujing roared. “Do you hear me? You can’t kill me!”
Bubble.
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” I said. I arched back and snapped her in two.
Unlike the Demon King of Confusion’s slow melt, Baigujing burst into ink and nothingness like a popped balloon. I nearly hit my head on the floor as a result of her body’s vanishing act. I flailed and spat away the black inky liquid that I thought would be covering me, only to find that it was already gone.
I closed my eyes and shook the true sight out of my head. With it went all the rush that had been keeping me afloat.
It felt as if I’d been run over by a dozen trucks. My body hurt where I’d been hit, sure, but I also seemed to have self-torn every muscle fiber I had.
One down, ninety-nine to go, I thought to myself. If the remaining bottles of beer on the wall were going to be similarly hard, then I did not like my chances of emerging unscathed from this mess.
I staggered over to Quentin, who was only now coming out of his daze.
“Way to be useful, chief,” I deadpanned, slapping my hand on his shoulder. I kept it there for support, so I didn’t topple over in the next breeze.
Quentin scrunched his eyes. “I could see you two, but you were always just out of reach.”
He draped my arm over his neck and dragged me to the stairs. We took each step slowly.
“To think you beat her completely on your own,” he said. “You were amazing.”
“I was lucky. You have got to teach me wushu. I can’t handle not knowing what to do in these situations.”
“I keep telling you, I don’t know any formal martial arts. If you want these fights to get any easier, we should work on shape-changing you back into a staff so I can wield you like I used to.”
I smacked him on the chest with my load-bearing arm.
“That’s gross,” I said. “Wield me? No.”
“We did it
all the time back in the day! It would only be temporary.”
“I’m not transforming into anything else. If everything you’ve told me is true, then I must have worked my ass off as the Ruyi Jingu Bang in order to get a human body. I’m not throwing it away just so you have a blunt object to beat on people with.”
Quentin grumbled but gave up the argument. At least for the moment. He took me to the first floor, a much smaller room. The little girl sat in the corner on a pile of rubber hose, nervously chewing on his scarf.
She saw us and burst into tears. I kneeled in front of her and tried to pat her head soothingly. The cut on her cheek was clean and not too deep. Other than that she wasn’t injured.
“La llorona,” the girl sobbed. “La llorona.”
Crud. “Uh, todo bien,” I said. “Nosotros . . . ganamos? Todo bien, todo bien.”
Quentin picked the girl up and hushed her, swinging gently back and forth. She calmed down immediately. I’d forgotten how much of a wizard he was with children.
“La mala mujer se ha ido,” he murmured. “Ella ha sido derrotado. Vamos a traer a tu mama. Duerme ahora, preciosa.”
The girl nodded into his shoulder and fell asleep.
I gave Quentin a look. He shot one back.
“What?” he said. “I talk to non-Chinese people too, you know.”
25
I don’t remember how I got home after we snuck the girl into the fire station. I don’t remember how we did that without getting caught, either. Events were lost in a haze of exhaustion.
Mom usually gave me some wiggle room on when I returned from the city due to the vagaries of public transportation, but this evening was pushing it. I was only able to end her angry harangue by telling her I had run into Quentin on the walk back through town and stopped to chat. Her hypocrisy between me hanging out with “boys” as a vague concept versus an individual boy she knew and liked was astounding.
I ate a reheated dinner, showered any remaining demon residue off my skin, and collapsed in bed. I would never leave my mattress again.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I slipped my hand out from the mound of covers and groped around for the replacement clamshell phone I’d been forced to use after Quentin crushed my real one. There was a message from my dad, just his usual ping about how glad he was to see me. There were status updates from Yunie trailing into a long, one-sided thread that made me laugh. She knew that I went into the city for these appointments and wasn’t always online.
I scrolled past all of the messages and dialed Quentin while lying on my side. We were going full middle-school.
“What’s up?” he said.
It was noisy on his end. “Why is it noisy on your end?”
“I’m at a casino off the highway.”
“What?” I had to stop myself from speaking at full volume so as not to wake up Mom. “Why?”
“I’m earning money. I need cash to fit in and move around human society. Plus I don’t need as much sleep as you do, and it’s a decent way to kill time.”
It shouldn’t have been weird that he was blowing off steam by gambling; there were more ads for the local casinos written in Chinese than in English. But his teasing from before had been on point. It did feel strange, knowing that he did things without me.
“Did you just want to talk?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer. As cheesy as it was, maybe I simply wanted to know that I could hear him and that he could hear me, for a while.
“What’s Heaven like?” I said to break the silence. “Is it nice?”
“It’s very nice. Everything about Heaven is nice. There is nothing ugly, sick, or out of place in Heaven.”
Whoops. From the shift in his voice I could tell we had started off heavy for a simple chitchat.
“Being allowed inside was everything I wanted for a very long time,” he said. “When they let me through the door, I thought I would finally become content. At peace with myself. And then . . . well, you know what happened. Technically you were there, even if you don’t remember it.”
If the legend was true, then I’d been the instrument of the Monkey King’s wrath in Heaven after he realized he was nothing but a second-class citizen among the gods. The moral of the tale was probably supposed to be that patience and good manners were more important than power. But what I took from it was that the people in charge could withhold respect from you, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.
“Can I see Heaven? Can you take me there?”
“Absolutely not,” Quentin said sharply. “It’s too dangerous for a normal person born of Earth. Your base humanity would be scorched away by the excess of qi energies, leaving only your spiritual essence behind. Genie Lo would be gone, and only the Ruyi Jingu Bang would remain. Forever.”
“That’s not what you would prefer? You’d get to fight with your stick like you used to, without any backtalk.”
“Don’t twist my words. Even if I took you to Heaven now, any powers you haven’t recovered in your current human form would be lost forever. You’ve got strength and true sight, sure, but there are still a few tricks you haven’t remembered yet.”
“Well, if you didn’t want your magic iron staff back immediately when we first met, what exactly were you hoping for when you came to my school?”
Quentin sighed and took a sip of some unknown drink, the ice cubes clinking against his glass.
“I was hoping you’d recognize an old friend,” he said. “I assumed the memories would come rushing back and you’d be so happy to see me that you’d take my hand right there in class and I don’t know . . . we’d run off and have an adventure or something. Go exploring, like back in the day.”
“Ha! You wanted to sweep me off my feet. Dork.”
I could practically hear him blush through the receiver.
“I’m going.” His voice was adorably gruff. “You’re distracting me. I’m down seven thousand bucks because of you.”
I bolted upright. “You’re fooling around with that kind of money?”
Quentin laughed in my ear and hung up on me.
School felt a little weird the next day. People stared at me like they knew something.
I wandered around from class to class until I caught up with Yunie at lunch. When she saw me she covered her mouth trying not to laugh.
“What is it?”
“Are you trying out a new look?” she asked.
The answer was no. I’d slept like the dead, and ended up having to run to make it on time without washing up. But half the school came in looking like slobs. I couldn’t have been much worse.
Yunie pulled out her compact mirror and held it up. I peered into it until I found what didn’t belong.
My irises were gold. Shimmering gold.
“You shouldn’t leave those in overnight and forget,” Yunie said. “It’s bad for your eyes. But I like the color.”
Shining, 24-karat eyes. Ten-year-old me would have been thrilled beyond belief.
Sixteen-year-old me had to go find Quentin.
“Well, of course,” Quentin said. “My eyes turned gold when I gained true sight in Lao Tze’s furnace. I’d be worried if yours weren’t gold.”
We were outside, near the away team’s end of the soccer field. Quentin sat on a tree branch, eating a nectarine from a bag that was full of them. He really liked his drupes.
“People think I’m wearing contacts,” I complained. “They’re ridiculous.”
He raised his hand solemnly. “One should never feel ashamed about their true self.”
I picked up a rock and threw it at him. Yunie was still waiting for me back in the cafeteria.
“All right, all right.” He hopped down to the ground and dusted himself off. Then he reached for my face.
I batted his hands away. “What are you doing?”
“Genie, you’re asking me to conceal the mark of one of the greatest powers in the known universe, an ability that the gods themselves would env
y. I need a little more contact with you than for a normal spell. This is going to take a moment.”
Fine, whatever. I presented myself for a harsh grip as clinical as the Vulcan mind-meld.
But instead Quentin’s touch was feather-soft. He grazed the back of his nails over my skin and brushed gently at my hair, tucking the loose strands behind my ears. I couldn’t tell what he was whispering in his hushed tones, but it felt like poetry.
It was intensely soothing. Our faces drew closer as he chanted. The cadence of his voice seemed to be pulling me toward his lips.
God, he smelled good.
“There,” Quentin said, suddenly stepping back. “They’re brown again. Happy?”
No. Yes. Wait.
I collected the bits of myself I’d dropped on the ground and stacked them back in more or less the right order.
“You know you could have done that last night, before you left,” I said.
He shrugged. “I forgot. Plus, I like the color. They’re your real eyes, you know. The brown is just an illusion. I’ll have to recast the spell every time you use true sight.”
Great. I was permanently stuck as a Fae Princess from Emotionland.
“I don’t get how ‘spells’ work,” I said. “I’ve seen you and the demons perform them, but not Guanyin or Erlang Shen.”
“A spell is just an application of a person’s spiritual power to alter their surroundings,” Quentin said. “The smaller and more generic the effect, the easier it is to do, which is why we normally stick to one-word commands. You need sufficient internal energies to power a spell, but you also need sufficiently refined technique.
“It’s like throwing a punch,” he went on. “You could throw a crisp jab that has no power behind it, or a wild haymaker that has no chance to connect. Spells are tools, not guarantees.”
“Then what is Guanyin doing when she, you know, does her stuff?” I made jazz hands in a poor imitation of the goddess’ awesome abilities.
“That’s more of an innate thing. She’s still using her spiritual power, but she has so much of it that an individual domain of reality is hers to control. She doesn’t need to focus through words or hand motions.”