The men who’d been fighting with Quentin now littered the corners of the café, crumpled and discarded like straw wrappers. They hadn’t been beaten. They’d been caved in, wrecked to the point where they weren’t even twitching.
The remnants of a broken chair lay at my feet instead of theirs, and there were splinters in my hair. If I didn’t know any better, I would think someone had smashed the heavy piece of furniture over my head. But I didn’t feel a thing. No lumps, no bruises.
Given the demons’ identical dress, it took me a second to locate Tawny Lion. I used deduction to find him—seeing who’d gotten the worst of it. There he was.
The leader of the demons had been hammered face-first into the wall so hard he was partially embedded like a nail. It would have been comical—Sunday morning–cartoonish—if not for the blood leaking out of the cracks. I watched it drip to the floors, wondering when I would start to feel sick or scared or anything but hugely satisfied with the carnage.
I heard a whistle. “Damn,” said Quentin. “Remind me never to piss you off.”
“I did this? It wasn’t you?”
“Nope. I just got out of your way. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”
An awkward silence passed. It probably should have been filled with me vigorously denying everything. There was no way I could have done any of this! I’m not that strong! I’m not that violent!
But instead, nothing.
Ah dang it. I kept forgetting the girl in the shop. I ran over to her and laid her on the ground. She was breathing, deep and slow enough to give me pause, but breathing nonetheless.
“You saved her life,” Quentin said. “I didn’t get through the barrier in time. She’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”
It had been such a close call that a drop of blood trickled down her forehead from where one of Tawny Lion’s fangs had pricked the skin. I dabbed it away with my sleeve, a brief motherly instinct overtaking me even though I was younger than her.
“I thought from reading the book of your stories that consuming spiritual power might be like a ritual, or a vague kind of energy vampirism,” I said.
“Nope. Straight-up chewing and swallowing.”
The sound of tapping on glass startled me out of my reverie. I looked over to see the opaque shield that Tawny Lion had put up over the front of the store beginning to fade. There were people outside, some of whom looked like they wanted in.
Oh god.
What was I doing? There were bodies in this store. Dead ones, maybe. We couldn’t be caught like this.
Oh god oh god.
I ran over to the door and locked it before anyone could come in, but once the veil disappeared completely we’d still be visible to bystanders. “Quentin!” I shouted. “What the hell are we going to do about this?”
“About what?”
I waved my arms around. “This!”
“Oh!” he said. “Right. Wow. This is not good for you, is it? Not a thing that happens to people these days. Hrm.”
He began pacing about like we had all the time in the world for him to think. I wanted to scream.
“Can’t you hide them with magic?” I pleaded.
“I could, but the next people to walk in here might, oh, I don’t know, notice tripping over invisible bodies? You know this would have been a lot easier if you had killed them.”
“What!?”
“Yaoguai disappear back to Hell once they’re dead. These guys are still alive, even Tawny Lion. You want me to, uh . . .” He made a clicking noise with his teeth and a twisting motion with his hands.
“No!” Fighting was one thing, but straight-up killing a downed enemy was a line I couldn’t cross yet.
Quentin rolled his eyes at me like I was being the unreasonable one.
“Then the only other option is to have a member of the celestial pantheon come and take them into custody,” he said. “But Tawny Lion and his brothers were never associated with any gods. There’s no one who’d be willing to pay bail. Except for maybe—”
“No maybes! Get help now or else the two of us will be seeking enlightenment from the inside of a juvenile detention facility!”
He scrunched his nose. Whoever it was I was making him call upon, he really didn’t want to owe them one. He sat down in the middle of the floor and pulled his legs underneath him.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Praying.” He took a deep breath, inhaling for what seemed an eternity, and lowered his head.
A vibration like a brewing storm emanated from his throat. It hardened into syllables. He was chanting, not like a monk but like a whole choir of monks in an echoing stone abbey that doubled and redoubled their voices. The air tingled with a sense of urgency.
“Na mo guan shi yin pu sa,” Quentin droned.
“Namoguanshiyinpusanamoguanshiyinpusa Namoguanshiyinpusa.”
I could have sworn the ground was shaking under our feet. Quentin grew louder and louder until it seemed like all the glass inside the shop would crack.
“Na mo guan shi yin pu sa,” Quentin continued. “Salutations to the most compassionate and merciful Bodhisattva.”
A burst of light came from the window, startling the bejeezus out of me. Quentin, however, appeared to be expecting it. He got up, opened the door, and motioned for me to come outside with him.
I was so worried at what I might see that I shielded my eyes, a bomb shelter refugee stepping out of the hatch. But the scene in the street was fairly normal. Sunshine, people, cars.
Everything was just frozen in time, was all.
Pedestrians had stopped mid-stride. Anyone who had been talking had their mouths open. A driver checked her mirror for a turn that had been paused indefinitely. The entirety of Johnson Square, as far as the eye could see, had been turned into a snow-globe without any white flakes.
There was no sound anywhere. I snapped my fingers to see if my ears still worked. Thankfully they did.
“Did you do this?” I asked Quentin.
He shook his head. “I’m not that powerful.”
I tried not to touch anything. I’d read enough sci-fi to be unsure of what time manipulation rules applied here. Maybe I could have posed everyone’s bodies in amusing positions, or maybe any contact with them would have triggered a quantum wave collapse or something.
Quentin led me to one person who turned out not to be frozen, just standing still across the street. I probably should have noticed her earlier. She was only the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen in my whole life.
She was as tall as I was. But she wore her height with such grace and poise that it made me feel unworthy to share that trait with her. Her elegant face was the kind that needed to be painted and housed in a museum, just to be fair to everyone born in the next century. She smiled at Quentin, and then at me.
“Genie Lo,” Quentin said. “This is the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, She Who Hears the Cries of the World. Benefactor to Xuanzang and my friend from the old days.”
“Hey girl!” Guanyin threw her arms around me in a fierce hug.
Huh. I thought the deified personification of kindness and compassion would have touched down on Earth in flowing robes and a crown of jewels. Not jeans and a pixie cut.