I thought of the way Mr. and Mrs. Park clutched each other for comfort tonight, the way they loved to gross out Yunie whenever possible by cuddling and kissing in front of me when I visited.
I remembered a fleeting dream in a fairyland tale, where my dad had chased my mom around a fountain trying to put a mouse-eared hat on top of her head while I watched and laughed and laughed.
Maybe I had been subconsciously trying to Parent Trap them into speaking again. Who knew.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, the vowels stuck in my throat. “You know what they say.”
Mom came in and immediately made a disapproving click. There was no way for me and Androu to avoid our legs touching each other. We were leg-making-out right next to her. Had we no shame?
Androu tried to help her settle in. “Where’s Mr. Lo—”
“Seating accident; not enough spaces together,” she snapped.
We all suddenly found our programs very, very interesting. Luckily we didn’t have to wait long for the curtain.
I tuned out the bespectacled, tweeded man explaining the history of the competition and how we could all get involved with the arts by making small donations. The pain was over for now. I could relax for as long as it took to determine who would emerge unscathed from musical thunderdome.
“Because they’ve already worked so hard to get here, we’re going to do something a little different tonight,” said the emcee. “Could our finalists please come on stage to take a bow? No matter who wins tonight, you all deserve a big hand.”
The majority of the audience believed that was patently false. There could be only one. But we clapped anyway as the contestants lined up on stage.
I spotted Yunie. She looked like a star in the night sky. Mom, Androu, and I mashed our hands together when she emerged, all prior conflicts forgotten.
And then someone flicked me in the back of my neck.
I turned around, ready to yell at the jerk who did it, but the little old grandmother behind me was busy trying to work up enough saliva to whistle for the brass section. It wasn’t her.
The same flick hit me from the same direction. I peered down the aisle until I saw where it was coming from.
Quentin. Hovering in the shadows by the fire exit.
He raised his fist to his lips and blew. The little bullet of air that shot out from the tunnel formed by his fingers smacked me in the face. It would have been the most annoying sensation in the world under any circumstances. Right now I was livid beyond belief.
Quentin waved his hands once he saw that he had my attention.
I slid my finger across my throat at him.
He widened his eyes and tugged frantically on his own earlobes, hopping up and down to exaggerate the motion.
Oh god no. Not now.
I surreptitiously glanced at my phone, which had been on silent all evening. Forty-six notifications. Quentin had been trying to contact me for more than an hour.
More than an hour of a yaoguai doing whatever it wanted on Earth, with no one to stop it.
I tried to unwedge myself from the chair and kneed the man in front of me in the shoulder. He frowned at me but decided I wasn’t worth it.
“Genie, what are you doing?” Mom hissed.
“I—I feel sick,” I stuttered. “Light-headed. I . . . have to go outside.”
“Now!?”
I was able to creep halfway down the aisle before I froze. On stage, Yunie was watching me. Watching me leave.
Of course I stuck out too much to make a clean getaway. Yunie’s eyes followed my path and flickered at its end. She’d seen Quentin.
My universe was reduced to a handful of silent, screaming voices. The distress on my mother’s face. The urgency of Quentin’s. Androu’s guileless concern.
And loudest of all was the confused heartbreak coming from my best friend on the biggest night of her life.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to anyone who would have it. I ran out the side door to where Quentin was waiting.
“We need to make up for lost time,” he said in the bushes behind the auditorium. “What’s the point of me having a phone if you’re not going to answer my—”
“Quentin,” I said, my voice as quiet as the eye of a hurricane. “I know what happened isn’t your fault, but before this night is through, I will kill someone. I would rather that person not be you.”
He shut up and pointed at where I should start searching. “There’s barely any towns in that direction, thankfully. I don’t think it’ll be as close to the population as the other demons were.”
I pressed the side of my head and swept over the landscape. Quentin was right; the area around the dancing light was mostly empty grassland, dotted with sleeping bovines. Guanyin’s alarm had given us a decent head start this time, for once.
“It’s in a farm,” I said.
Quentin plowed through the barn roof feet-first. I disembarked from his back and called out to the shadows.
“I’m not really in the mood,” I said. “So I’d appreciate it if we made this quick.”
A stream of sticky, gooey threads shot out of a dark corner with the volume of a garden hose. It methodically swept over Quentin and me, covering us in a thickening, hardening cocoon of webs. It didn’t stop until we were encased from the neck down, our legs glued to the floor of the barn.
A man stepped into the moonlight in front of us and wiped his mouth. His face was bearded with fingers—human fingers. They sprouted from his skin and wriggled as he spoke.
“Ha!” the yaoguai cackled. “You’ve fallen into my trap! Vengeance is mine!”
“Who are you?” said Quentin.
“The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord!” The fingers coating his face pointed in unison on certain words for emphasis. “Master of webs and venom!”
The yaoguai opened his jaws wide to flash a set of dripping fangs at us. “I’ve been distilling my poisons in the fires of Diyu for more than a thousand years, waiting for this moment! You cannot escape my bite, for the silk that imprisons you is stronger than the hardest steel—bu hui ba, what are you doing!?”
I tore my way out of the cocoon with a few thrashes of my arms. The strands of silk twanged like overtuned guitars as I snapped them. Looking down, I found that the one nice dress that I owned was completely ruined. There wasn’t going to be a way back into the performance tonight.
Quentin shook his head, not bothering to try and free himself.
“Oh buddy,” he said to the yaoguai with genuine sorrow for a fellow sentient being. “Oh, buddy, I couldn’t do anything for you now, even if you begged me. This is the end of the line.”
The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord looked at my face. Whatever he saw there made him give off a high-pitched skreee in alarm. He fell to all fours and scuttled away from me like an insect. The yaoguai backed into the barn’s wall and went straight up it, reaching as far as the rafters in his attempt to get some distance between us.
I didn’t feel like chasing him. Looking around the floor, I found the nearest object I could, picked it up, and winged it hard at the demon with all my might.