by F. C. Yee
“Do not give me bad news right now,” I snapped. “Don’t you dare.”
“All right,” said Quentin. “Good news, then. We found what we were looking for.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how there were one hundred and eight escapees from Hell? And we only took care of a handful at most?”
I groaned. “And I said that the rest were probably hiding here under the cover of the smoke, waiting for Erlang Shen to call upon them as needed.”
“Yeah,” said Quentin. “The good news is that you were right, as usual. Yaaay.”
The wildfires had receded without Red Boy there to sustain them. They mostly just disappeared instead of burning out, leaving behind brush that didn’t even appear scorched. The smoke that had been clogging my true sight rolled up and left, drawing back the curtain on . . .
Demons. Lots and lots of demons.
“There’s the Black Wind Demon,” said Quentin. “Lingxuzi as well. The Golden Horned King. Xiong Shanjun. The Scholar in a White Robe—”
“Quentin, I get it.”
They could have been a crowd sitting around an outdoor concert waiting for the band to appear. The smoke clearing up got them on their feet. Maybe the show was about to start.
A few of them tapped tentatively at the air, expecting there to be a barrier of some sort. If Erlang Shen had been using one to contain them, it was gone now.
I could tell the figures were all yaoguai without true sight. They fit the profile—human forms, with one or more monstrous aspects. Clothes that were just slightly off-kilter somehow. An expression of intense hatred once they spotted Quentin.
I seethed right back at them.
“This is bull crap!” I shouted. “I’m tired! I don’t have the energy for this!”
“Genie,” Quentin said. “Please stop telling the swarm of yaoguai how weak you are right now.”
“I don’t want to deal with you!” I hollered at the demons from afar. “Screw everything! Evil wins, are you happy?”
“You know, if you’re not up for another fight, you could let me take care of it. Like in the old days.”
And here I thought our make-out session had signaled progress.
“Oh my god fine,” I shouted, throwing my hands in the air. “I will let you use me as a stick. I’ll be the Ruyi Jingu Bang again. Get it out of your system just this once, and then shut up forever about it.”
I was even more disappointed than I was letting on. Getting closer to Quentin didn’t mean much if he’d been simply playing the long, long game to get his staff back. I didn’t know what the process was for turning into the iron staff of yore, so I shut my eyes and held out my arms angrily as if I was demanding a hug.
“That’s not what I’m asking for!” Quentin said. “I was talking about something else! I know how much you hate that idea!” He looked deeply hurt that I would even imply that.
I opened my eyes so I could roll them at him. “Okay, then what is your plan?”
“This.” He reached around my back and grabbed the end of my ponytail, which had miraculously held together throughout the whole ordeal.
“Ow!”
“Relax, I’m using my hair, too.” He showed me the two dark strands in his fingers, one plucked from his head and one plucked from mine. Long and short, just like us.
Then he did something gross and popped them into his mouth.
The action meant something to the yaoguai, beyond being disgusting. Their eyes grew wide and they stopped in their tracks, afraid to come any closer.
He chewed the hairs with the front of his mouth instead of his molars, chopping them into little bits. Then he stepped forward and spat an army into the air.
I assumed that the pieces of hair were turning into clones. Like the trick he’d pulled with his parents. That was the only way I could explain the horde of Genie Los and Quentin Suns that spilled out of his mouth onto the hillside.
The doppelgangers started out small but then grew to full size as they scrambled to their feet and blinked in the sunlight. They were like baby foals, able to walk and see only moments after being born. They looked exactly like us, right down to the burns and tears on our clothing.
Once he was done hocking the world’s weirdest loogie, Quentin wiped his mouth and pointed toward the assembled yaoguai.
“Sic ’em,” he commanded.
The assembled legion of us took off for the yaoguai with a delighted roar. The demons were outnumbered, a clone-Genie and clone-Quentin for every one.
“See?” the real Quentin said to me. “We’re on perfectly equal footing, technically. Full partners.”
“I . . . uh . . . sure?”
The brawl that ensued once the two sides made contact was ugly, lopsided, and quick. The yaoguai had no chance, and some of them even tried to pre-emptively flee, only to get tackled from behind.
But despite the savage beatdown our side was raining upon them, there were no telltale whorls of ink that indicated the demons were being slain. In fact, you could have argued that the little clone army was being relatively merciful. They grabbed and pinned their enemies, forcing the demons to look at Quentin and me.
Real Quentin leaped onto a boulder.
“Hear this!” he bellowed. “If any of you even look funny at the human world again, I swear on every god who ever sits upon the Dragon Throne that you will regret it. Harm a human and I will turn you into puppets of suffering and regret. Do you understand?”
I saw a few demons nod as much as their captors would allow them to. The general look of terror on their faces told me that this bunch wasn’t quite as nasty as Red Boy or Baigujing. They might have been rounded up by Erlang Shen to fill out the B-squad.
“Swear it!” Quentin shouted. “Swear on your very spirits!”
The demons bowed as hard as they could before the clones let them go. They scattered into the hillsides, leaving with some kicks on the backside for good measure.
“That was lenient of you,” I said.
“My earrings still work. If they threaten humanity, we’ll stop them. Like we always do.”
Once the demons were gone, Quentin let out a pinky whistle with the proficiency of a football coach.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s pack it up.”
The clones began poofing into white smoke. I watched, dumbfounded. I was wrong about Quentin before. Somehow, even after everything that we’d been through, he could still show me things that screwed with my head.
Quentin plopped back down next to me and sighed. “Man, that trick takes a lot out of me.”
“Probably for the best that you don’t do it too often. It’s kind of unsettling and . . . hey! Hey! You two!”
A delinquent Genie-clone and Quentin-clone had ignored the order to self-destruct and were instead getting busy with each other, right there on the ground. Sure, Quentin and I had kissed, but this was escalating to a higher MPAA rating.
I couldn’t believe I needed to chaperone my own clone. “THAT’S OFF LIMITS!” I shouted at them. “NOT UNTIL YOU’RE NINETEEN!”
“Aw, come on,” Quentin said with pure dismay on his face. “Nineteen?”
“Go wait it out in Heaven if you don’t like it.”
We were almost home before I remembered I’d forgotten something.
“Crap!” I said. “My arm!”
I wasn’t too worried, because I figured Quentin had a spell to hide it. But his face told me otherwise. It said I should worry.
“I’m not sure what I can do about that,” he said. “The True Samadhi Fire burned away anything that masked your inner nature.”
“Well, you better friggin’ try.”
Quentin grumbled and took my iron hand. His skin felt extrawarm against the metal. He hummed to himself and swayed with the effort.
Slowly but surely the iron color receded, leaving my skin behind. It drew out of my fingertips, removing the gold from my nails.
“There,” Quentin said. “Done.”
&n
bsp; “Uh, no. Not done.”
Most of the metallic hues had disappeared, but there was still a halo around my wrist. A swirl of gold pinpoints on a black background circled my arm. It looked like a beautiful tattoo of the Milky Way, the kind that I would see shared in an online photo feed.
“Get rid of it,” I said.
“I can’t. This is the most I could reduce the perception of your inner self. Like how I can’t hide my tail.”
“Get. Rid. Of. It.”
“It’s fetching,” he said.
“It’s a tattoo. Do you know what my mother will do when she sees it?”
Quentin gave a helpless shrug. I started panicking more than I ever had in any of the demon battles. Forget my mom. Not even my dad would be cool with this, and he couldn’t get worked up over anything. Disowning me would be their first agreement in years.
“Quentin!” I shouted.
He threw his hands in the air. “I could always bewitch your mother so she permanently overlooks whatever’s on your wrist?”
“Do it!”
He frowned. “I wasn’t being serious.”
I was, despite the hypocrisy of it, after having told Guanyin not to magic my mom.
“Trust me,” I said, gripping him by the shoulders. “This is the lesser of two evils.”
38
I was taking a break from studying in my room when I first saw the video on the evening news.
Some hiker had caught distant snippets of our rumble with Erlang Shen. There I was, growing taller and taller until I swatted something that couldn’t be seen out of the air. That’s when the clip ended. A freeze-frame of me in all my titanic glory.
I looked like a giant robot in a skirt. In what I could only assume was yet another favor from Guanyin, an unnaturally cloudy mist obscured my face from view.
“Witnesses are calling it a CGI marketing stunt, most likely for an unannounced reboot of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” the news anchor said. “Which begs the important question—is Hollywood out of ideas?”
I groaned into my palms. I would have to burn that outfit and pray Yunie didn’t have my wardrobe catalogued in her head. I didn’t want her suddenly remembering the magical crap she’d been exposed to.
Not before I could tell her about it.
I had decided. Yunie was going learn everything that had happened to me regarding gods and demons, down to the last tooth and claw, and she was going to hear it from me, face-to-face. Quentin’s long-lasting forgetfulness spell had given me the chance to make a proper confession to my friend, and I wasn’t going to waste it.
There was a tapping at my window. I ignored it. Quentin could let himself in.
“The Colossus of the Headlands,” he said. “You have so many likes.”
“You’re going to have to cast another spell on my mother. Being online famous is her worst nightmare for me. More so than being eaten by demons.”
“How’s your arm?” he asked. “No one else thinks you have a new tattoo?”
I raised my wrist. “I haven’t taken off this sweatband in three days,” I said. “I’m going to be known as Sweatband Girl. You’ve cursed me to that existence. I hope you’re happy.”
I heard Quentin sit on my bed, the springs creaking up and down. The pages of a book riffled open. He’d probably helped himself to the contents of my shelves.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You cleaned up the worst of the demonic incursion. You beat your oldest enemy. There’s no reason for you to stick around.”
“Of course there’s a reason. The yaoguai could always go back on their promise to stay out of trouble. New ones might arrive. I’ll have to remain on Earth to keep watch over the whole situation.”
I’d been biting my lip the entire time in anticipation of his response. But he said he was staying. I could stop chewing on myself now.
“I’ll flesh out my background,” he said. “Set up clones for my parents on a long-term basis. I sort of miss having them around. Even if they were overly strict.”
“Don’t change their personalities,” I said. “I like your parents. In fact, I have them penciled in for dinner with my mom next week.”
“Sure,” Quentin said. “What about you, though? What are your plans now that Heaven and Hell are out of your hair?”
“It’s back to the grind. I’ll be a junior soon. Application season is going to start for real.”
“Still aiming for the promised land, huh?”
“I’ve got no reason not to. I don’t care what Anna said. I’m gunning for every top-tier school out there. If they want to say no to me, I’ll make them go through the effort.”
“Bash on the gates and see what happens,” Quentin concurred. “I can’t argue with that logic.”
“And in the meantime, I’m hitting the programming books. I’ll learn what I can on my own, and Rutsuo offered to mentor me for the rest. My goal is to make my own app by the end of the year.”
“I thought you weren’t into computers.”
“I’ve recently learned that what I am into is having skills,” I said. “Skills that no one can deny or take away from me. People can always say I don’t look impressive enough, but they can’t argue over how strong I am once I punch them in the face.”
Quentin chuckled.
“With an app,” I corrected. “Once I metaphorically punch them in the face with a really slick, well-made app.”
“You should be careful,” Quentin said. “If you go too far down that route, you could end up making a life in the Bay Area.”
I let the statement hang as I went back to my notes. Sometimes you just had to accept that you might never change as much as you want to.
Quentin smiled, flipped a page, and began reading.
Half an hour passed before he got bored and stood up.
“Want to go make out while flying through the air?” he asked. “We can land in Wine Country.”
I spun around in my chair to face him. “I don’t know. Any higher than a thousand feet up and I only kiss the ancient legends I’m in a proper relationship with.”
Quentin immediately dropped to one knee. “Eugenia Lo Pei-Yi, will you—”
I knocked him over with a kick before he could finish the sentence.
“Okay, too fast.” He sprang back up and grinned, undaunted. “How about a date then?”
That was acceptable. I took Quentin’s hand and left all my plans, all my fears, all my worries behind me. They’d be there when I got back.
“This looks like the stuff that comes with bubble tea.” Quentin prodded the tapioca pearls that garnished his oyster.
“That’s because it is,” I said. “Give me that if you’re not going to eat it.”
I wasn’t going to let the food go to waste. We were sitting at a table inside the best restaurant in the country.
We’d lost track of time during our jaunt to Wine Country and gotten hungry. Quentin had asked me where I wanted to eat, and I’d said the name of this place as a joke. But after a quick search on his phone, he’d jumped us to the unassuming, renovated saloon that served as the premier culinary destination in the western half of the United States.
The inside of the restaurant was pretty unassuming for a fancy place, mostly white wallpaper and white tablecloths and dark wooden leather chairs. But the other diners had the nervous air of competitive high-divers on the ledge, about to take their last shot at the gold.
Magic and hexes must have gotten us past the door and into our seats. That, or Quentin bribed the crap out of the staff with more gambling winnings than I could have hidden under my mattress. I let the details slide. I deserved a nice meal after everything I’d been through.
A waiter set down the next course as gracefully as a ninja in early retirement. It was something made out of cucumbers, which was much more Quentin’s speed. We both wolfed it down in an instant.
Quentin swallowed his portion first, which gav
e him time to laugh at me.
“What?”
“You’re the only human being here who isn’t taking pictures of the food before eating it,” he said.
“You mean we’re the only human beings. As far as I’m concerned, you’re one of us. Help as many people of Earth as you have, and you’re part of the club. Past the gate.”
Quentin’s eyes softened. “I don’t think it works like that. I haven’t been reborn as a human. I didn’t earn it like you did.”
“You did in my book. Besides, I’m not open-minded enough to have a boyfriend who isn’t at least part human.”
He grinned and shook his head at me. “You’re crazy, you know—”
BONGGGGG.
Quentin was interrupted by the sound of a gong. A big brass gong. A big brass Chinese gong, right here in a French restaurant.
Dozens of pairs of feet tromped over the wooden floors. Two columns of hatted, robed men shuffled into the room, making use of all the space in between the tables. Someone who was better than me at being Asian could have said what dynasty their colorful silken dress was from.
Judging by their subservient posture, they weren’t a threat. Quentin hadn’t leaped out of his seat, ready to fight. In fact, he was leaning back and slumping over like he did when he was bored in class.
The men all took a knee simultaneously, forming a human walkway that led straight to our table. A sedan chair entered from the other end. The golden, lacquered palanquin was borne by silent armored guardians who coordinated their steps like ballet dancers so as not to jostle the occupant.
Ever so slowly the chair made its way across the room to our table. Once it finally arrived, a servant pulled the embroidered silk curtain aside.
Out stepped a fuming, red-faced bank manager. Or a summer camp director. That was the impression I got of the man, even though he was decked out in fineries that could have stocked the Met’s exhibition halls for ten seasons straight.
A servant cleared his throat. “All hail His Imperial Majesty, August Ruler of Heaven and Divine Master of—”
The Jade Emperor waved off the announcer so violently that he backhanded the poor schlub in the mouth. I hadn’t expected to meet the king of the gods under these circumstances.