The metal horseshoe zipped from my hand. It flew so fast I couldn’t see its arc, but I did spot the hole it left behind in the roof after it punched straight through. The edges of the wood glowed red hot like a cigarette burn in a sheet of paper.
“Holy crap,” Quentin blurted out.
“You—you missed!” the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord said in nervous triumph.
“Good thing horses have four feet,” I said, waving three more horseshoes in the air.
30
It was three weeks after the night of the concert when finally I could take no more. We’d just finished a yaoguai hunt. A successful one, but somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory.
“Call them,” I said to Quentin.
“Why?”
The demon had been aquatic. Hence the reason we were currently standing waist-deep in freezing ocean water, still in our school uniforms.
We’d cut class for the second time. A third strike would go on my permanent record and earn me an in-person parent-teacher conference. There was a piece of seaweed stuck in my ear.
“I feel the need to talk,” I said. “Right now. Call them.”
Quentin gazed over the coastline. This section of the beach was normally open for people to bring their dogs to play in the surf, but right now it was vacant. The picnickers up on the cliff who’d triggered the earring alarm hadn’t seen our thrashing and flailing in the shallows on their behalf.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to keep our interactions with those two down to a minimum,” he said. “They never end well.”
“Quentin, we just spent the last hour beating up a fish. This can’t go on. Call them.”
He closed his eyes, put his palms together, and grumbled under his breath for about a minute. It looked like he was throwing a tantrum instead of praying.
Nothing happened.
“Okay,” I said. I waved my hands at the general lack of gods in the vicinity.
“What, you think they’re going to plop down in the middle of the water? They’re somewhere on shore. Go find them and talk to them.”
I couldn’t believe how much attitude he was giving me. “You’re not coming?”
Quentin responded by leaning back and floating on top of the water, arms crossed behind his head like he was relaxing in a lounge chair. The tide began carrying him slowly out to sea.
“Fine!” I waded back to shore by myself. My clothes were soaked through and the wind made me shiver down to the bone. If I was magically resistant to cold, it was only to the point of not letting me collapse of hypothermia.
There were no gods on the beach, which meant I had to continue up the low cliff using a sandy ramp that gave way under my steps. Grit got into my shoes. Probably dog poop as well.
Once I got to the top, I saw a lone figure standing by the roadside. It was Erlang Shen, sans Guanyin. He eyed my wet, bedraggled state.
If he had said one smartass sentence, even something as innocuous as “Rough day, huh?” then I might have committed deicide on the spot. Instead he silently raised his hand and made a “come hither” gesture.
It wasn’t me he was speaking to. It was the water. The dampness in my clothes wicked away, flying off my body and gathering into a sphere of liquid that hovered in the air before me. It grew and grew until I was completely dry. Not even the salt remained on my skin.
Erlang Shen flung the skinless water balloon back toward the ocean. Then he said the magic words that made me want to marry him right then and there.
“Let’s get you some coffee.”
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, trying to keep his laughter contained. “You destroyed the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, the Guardian of Thousand Flowers Cave at Purple Clouds Mountain, by chucking horseshoes at him?”
“What can I say.” I gulped from my cup of burnt water. Non-dairy creamer had never tasted so good. “I was out of lawn darts.”
It would have been generous to call the shack we were sitting in a diner. The surly, rotund man behind the counter had a hot plate to cook on but nothing else. This particular eating establishment was more of a hedge maze made out of single-serving potato chip bags.
Our conversation, if anyone could even hear beyond the sports radio blaring the scores, probably sounded like we were talking about a video game.
“It sounds like you could have also grown to giant proportions and swatted him down,” Erlang Shen said.
“I still haven’t figured that one out. I must have some kind of mental block against it.”
“Like I said before, it’s nifty but not essential.” Erlang Shen leaned back in his chair and gave me an appraising look up and down. “Is there something else you want to talk about? I don’t need true sight to see that something’s bothering you.”
My fingers trembled around my paper cup.
“Yeah, there is actually,” I said. “So we beat the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, right?”
“Yes. A while ago, if I followed your story correctly.”
“You did. And since then we’ve also taken down the Yellow Brows Great King, Tuolong, the Pipa Scorpion, Jiutouchong, and some generic-looking guy with bells whose name I didn’t catch. Today out there in the ocean was the King of Spiritual Touch. What kind of name is that for an aquatic fish-demon?”
“An unfortunate one.”
If I wasn’t so tired I would have laughed. “And then there’s Baigujing. Also the two others from before you and I met. Eight if you count Tawny Lion’s brothers.”
Erlang Shen nodded. “You’ve been productive to say the least. I know the faceless man still hasn’t been found, but other than that your success rate has been flawless. Heaven has no problem with the pace you’ve been keeping recently.”
“Yeah but what if I do?”
I was a little louder then I meant to be. Another customer glanced over at us before tilting the rest of his corn chips into his mouth and walking out the door.
The last three weeks had taught me that I wasn’t a machine, as much as I liked to pretend I was when it came to doing work. Trying to act like a heroic yaoguai-slayer of old had left me with my gears bruised and my fuel tank bleeding.
“This is hard,” I said to Erlang Shen. “This is really hard. I know that’s an idiotic thing to say, but it’s hard in a way I wasn’t expecting. The demons keep popping up here and there and everywhere. They don’t stop coming. It’s a giant game of whack-a-mole.”
My carnival game analogy may have been a little bit off. The pace of the demon incursions reminded me more of wind sprints, where Coach D would have us run end-to-end on the volleyball court until she decided we were done. It was supposed to improve our cardio, but without knowing when the whole thing would be over, it felt like pointless punishment.
“I don’t feel like we’re making any progress,” I said. “None of the other demons will give up Red Boy’s whereabouts, even under pain of death. Stamping them out while we wait for him is like having a sword hanging over our heads while we rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic.”