Ahem.
I knew Quentin was referring to my true sight. If I ever turned it on at school, I’d be able to see him no matter where he was. Deep down, way deep down, I knew that was what he meant. No question.
But.
There was also the slightest chance that he was either A) making a comment about my height like he’d never done before, in a “yo’ momma sits AROUND the house” sort of joke, or B) accusing me of being clingy and a tagalong, which honestly felt a lot worse.
I didn’t want to play interpreter in my current mood. I shut my eyes and walked past him.
With nothing going the way it was supposed to, I did what I always did. I threw myself under the mountain. Schoolwork.
That afternoon in study hall I was so deep in a paper that it took me a minute to notice the fire alarm ringing.
Someone shook me gently by the shoulders.
“Genie,” Androu said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I blinked and looked around the classroom. Everyone else had left.
I swatted off his attempt to take me by the hand and ran into the hallway to see what was going on.
The air was hazy, like someone had smeared Vaseline on a camera lens. I got that there was a fire in the building somewhere, but this was too much smoke, too fast. SF Prep wasn’t made out of dried pine needles.
Red Boy, I thought to myself in a panic. We spoke the devil’s name too many times and now he was here. I turned on true sight.
And instantly regretted it. The irritating smoke became full-blown acid. It felt like I’d just scrubbed my pupils with sandpaper. I couldn’t keep the vision going for more than a second before doubling over in tears.
But it was enough to catch a quick glimpse of blue-black light. A yaoguai, in my school.
I started pushing in that direction.
“Genie!” Androu shouted. “You’re going the wrong way!”
I hadn’t made it much closer to the source of the demonic energy when I noticed a teacher slumped over in his classroom, passed out. My first thought was that someone had cast sleep on him, but it could have also been a regular old fainting spell. Mr. Yates wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.
Androu came running up behind me.
“I don’t know how you saw him, but thank god you did.” He scrambled past the student chairs and wrapped his arms around our AP calculus teacher’s sandbagging weight, hoisting him away from his desk.
“He’s still breathing,” Androu grunted. “You should have stuck to that Paleo diet, Mr. Yates.”
I bit my lip. I could help him carry the body out. But in that time the yaoguai . . . there was no way to tell how many people the demon had its hands on right now. I made the same choice as I did when I bailed on Yunie and my family at the auditorium.
“I saw someone else who needs help,” I lied.
“Go,” Androu said. “I’ll be fine.”
I left the classroom and ran down the hallway at a speed that would have made him or any other witnesses do a spit-take. The smoke tore and stripped at my face until I had to slow down.
Right when I thought I’d have to crawl on my hands and knees to get any farther, I heard a violent crash in one of the classrooms. I pressed myself against the wall outside and tilted my head around the door to take a peek.
There were two people fighting in the back, rolling around behind the lab tables. The air in the classroom was soupy with grit. There was no way normal people could have exerted themselves in it.
“Quentin!” I shouted. Just the one word made me want to hack up a lung.
“Genie! Stay back!”
The brawl spilled over the table into view. Quentin had his opponent in a headlock. The struggling figure in his grasp was . . . also Quentin.
There were two Monkey Kings.
“It’s the Six-Eared Macaque!” said the one who was getting his trachea squeezed. “He’s a shape shifter! He copied my form to infiltrate the school!”
“You’re the fake, you bastard!” said the other. “You set this fire so she wouldn’t be able to see through your disguise!”
A wave of anger washed over me. I’d been expecting the king of all monsters and instead I got two clowns playing grab-ass with each other.
I ran into the room, gathering all my frustration into my fist, and punched the one on top in the face. He went sprawling back over the table.
“Thanks,” the other Quentin said. He rubbed his throat. “I knew you could tell the real—”
I kicked that one in the stomach. He curled up and gasped on the floor.
I backed away to block the exit and tried true sight again. Not a good idea. The smoke in the room flat-out blinded me. By the time I recovered so had the two Quentins, and we were now in a three-way standoff.
“He knows everything I know when he copies my form,” said the one on the left. “Secret questions won’t work.”
“Then how did you beat him last time, back in the old days?” I said.
“The Buddha intervened,” said the one on the right.
The Buddha. Oy vey. I dug the heels of my hands into my eyeballs.
Wait a sec, I thought. The Buddha could help me after all. I raised my head and put on my best ultra-pissed-off face, which wasn’t too hard given the circumstances.
“OM MANI PADME!” I shouted, leaving off the last syllable.
The two Quentins were identical down to the last hair. And they were both wearing my earrings. But only one of them involuntarily cringed in fear for a split second like a whipped dog, his body flooding with whatever the monkey god version of cortisol and stress hormones were. Knowing of great pain was not the same thing as having actually suffered great pain.
I turned to the other Quentin. The Six-Eared Macaque, whatever the hell kind of yaoguai that was, realized his mistake in the face of my aborted spell. It threw him off to the point where his disguise briefly slipped, Quentin’s eyes and mouth rippling away into a smooth, featureless surface.
“Psych,” I said to the faceless man.
Quentin and I crawled outside the building and flopped onto the grass. I was bleeding from a gash across my forehead that he promised would seal itself and disappear within minutes, as long as I didn’t die first. With the way I felt, we’d have to wait and see.
Quentin grabbed his own fingers and pulled, relocating his joints. The popping noise made me want to vomit.
“Dear god,” I croaked. “How did . . . why was that . . . so hard?”
“He was an identical copy of me,” Quentin said. He spat a bloody tooth out to the side. “What were you expecting, a pushover?”
I watched his blood sink into the ground and sprout a little daisy with perfect white petals. Whatever. I was beyond surprise when it came to Quentin at this point.
“He seemed so eager to get away from us before that I thought he’d be weaker,” I said. “But he fought like a prison inmate from Krypton. He nearly killed the both of us just now!”
“You know we would have had a bigger edge if you ever let me use you as a weapon.”