“Tell me.”
“We talked about many things. The translating I’m doing and—”
Cynna’s tunic parted along the shoulder. A red stripe appeared on her arm. Blood, welling up in the cut that had appeared all on its own.
“Tell me.”
“Th-the Codex,” Lily stammered. “Alice asked me about the Codex Arcana.” He didn’t react. Didn’t know the Latin phrase? She tried translating the name to Mandarin, though gods only knew if the cursed book was called the same thing in China. Or here. “The Shén de Suǒyǒu Mófǎ.” The Book of All Magic, if she’d said it correctly. Which she probably hadn’t.
“Do you mean the Shén de Shū? She asked about the Shén de Shū?”
Book of the Gods. “Yes. Probably. We spoke English so I’m not sure what you call it, but—”
Kongqi arrived in a thunderclap of displaced air. One second he wasn’t there. The next he was hovering about ten feet from his brother. Had he teleported? Gods, could they do that?
Dick Boy’s face flickered through expressions almost too fast to catch—alarm, chagrin, then a curled-lip sneer. “How dramatic you are, brother.”
Kongqi’s voice was a low rumble of rage. “You will tell me why you interfere with my prisoners!”
Dick Boy shrugged, his lack of concern an insult in itself. “I did little to the humans. A bit of blood on one, and no damage at all to the other. Shall I put the first one back where I found—oh, very well. You do it.”
Cynna’s arms folded up against her sides. Like a bulky arrow shot from an invisible bow, she shot back through the gaping hole in the wall. Lily threw herself aside barely in time to avoid being Cynna-struck, then saw her friend float gently to the floor.
“Shit,” Cynna said, sitting up. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Are you okay?” Lily whispered.
“For some value of ‘okay,’ yeah.” She scooted on her butt to get close to the hole and look out.
Dick Boy had crossed his arms. He sneered at his brother, his mustaches turning the expression into a parenthetical comment. “Are you worried about the stone? I will put that back when I am through.”
“You are through,” Kongqi told him in that deadly rumble. “If I allow you to leave.”
“Allow?” Dick Boy lost his sneer in affronted anger. “You speak of allowing? Since you interest yourself in my actions, you will tell me—”
“I tell you nothing! These two are mine!”
“Your memory fails you. Prisoners belong to all of us, not just—”
“I am Father of Law! All prisoners are in my custody. You interfere in my territory and think you will not pay for it?”
Lily stole a glance at Cynna. Her own heart was pounding way too hard, a drumbeat of go-go-go with nowhere to go. Cynna’s skin was like chalk beneath her tattoos. “You sure you’re okay? You look kind of shocky.”
“I don’t hurt anymore. Well, except for my arm, which is aching like a fucking bad tooth. But the other . . . if that’s what you felt with those pain ants . . .” She shuddered.
“I don’t know that it’s the same. After a certain point, though, the kind of pain doesn’t matter. It’s just pain, and it swallows you.”
Cynna nodded. “Did you, ah, cut things off with . . .” She filled in the silence at the end of the question by mouthing Rule’s name silently.
“Yeah.” Not because she was smart enough to act that quickly to keep the spawn from “seeing” her using mindspeech. She’d just been too startled when the wall exploded to keep her attention on her mindsense, so it had coiled up inside her once more.
What was left of it. She’d pretty much used it up. Her head pounded miserably.
“What are they saying?”
Oh, right. Cynna had no idea what was going on. Lily whispered a quick summary. “. . . so Kongqi claims you because he’s in charge of the Justice Court, but Dick Boy isn’t buying that. They’re exchanging insults now. At least I think that bit about breathing helium was an insult.”
Dick Boy was one solid glower, his shoulders bunched as if he might spring at his brother at any moment. “You are overly fond of subtlety. Right action can be direct—and at times should be, as any but a prissy [unknown] would know.”
Lily whispered the translation to Cynna.
“If I were certain you understood the meaning of [unknown], I might be offended. I fear, however, that you lack the—”
“Enough!” Dick Boy bellowed. “You will tell me why your granddaughter met secretly with—”
Kongqi roared. It was not a dragon’s roar, not precisely, but no human throat should have been capable of that much volume.
Fire engulfed Dick Boy.
And Kongqi.
And winked out, both fires vanishing at the same instant, leaving Kongqi and Dick Boy without so much as a smoky smudge on their fancy clothes.
The two brothers weren’t alone in the air anymore. The rest of the spawn had come.
TWENTY-THREE
FIVE Zhuren floated in the air—Kongqi, Dick Boy, and three that Lily had never seen before, but recognized from their descriptions. That meant the whole gang was here, with one exception: Zhu Huǒ, Master of Fire . . . who Lily knew as Tom Weng. Tom would still be busy on Earth right now, gearing up to steal Ryder, Toby, and the rest of the children.
Lily matched them to their descriptions. The tall, slim man in a midnight blue shenyi trimmed in pale green had to be Zhu Shuǐ, Master of Water and current Father of Study. His long hair hung loose, lifting and drifting languidly as if caught by currents of water instead of air.
The spawn on Shuǐ’s left was, simply put, beautiful. He wore an open robe rather than a proper shenyi, a gaudy brocade in turquoise and magenta, over linen the palest of pinks. That had to be Zhu Shēngwù, Master of Body Magic and current Father of Wealth. Gossip said he’d used his skills on his own body, making himself into a living work of art.
Opposite Shēngwù was the only one with a beard—Zhu Tú’àn, Master of Patterns. Tú’àn wore his beard in thin braids decorated with silver beads. His shenyi was the color of moss, trimmed and embroidered in silver; his dark hair was pulled back in a tight bun that reminded her disconcertingly of Grandmother. Tú’àn didn’t hold a position in government right now.
He was the first to speak, in a clear and lovely tenor. Lily did her best to give a running translation for Cynna. “As the only one of us present without a governmental position, I assume the role of arbitrator. Do any dispute that this is my responsibility?” He paused. No one responded. “Zhu Kongqi, you have a grievance against Zhu Dìqiú.”
“Do I need to state it?” Kongqi asked with meticulous courtesy.
“Not on my behalf.” Tú’àn glanced at the others. They gave no signal Lily could see, but maybe that lack of response was the signal. “Nor do the others require it. We are aware of his discourtesy.”