He stopped pacing. A glimmer of hope poked through in his voice. “The Macaque’s not an ordinary demon. He’s not setting off the demon alarm . . . because he’s me. He’s me, down to the last hair on my head. He has my looks, my smell, my aura. My aura that reacts to your aura.”
Quentin kneeled down in front of me. “Genie,” he said. “I might be able to find them using you as a signal. But you have to be in a state of complete disconnection for your aura to be strong enough. This is a long shot and I know it’s never worked in the past, but I need you to calm yourself and—and—”
I knew what he was asking. He needed me to meditate.
“You can do it,” he said. “Just empty your mind and think of nothing. Nothing at all.”
I didn’t protest. This would be easy.
I took one last look around. The street was still empty and silent, the din of the emergency vehicles having ended. The firemen were probably making their way through the halls of the school right now, searching for two students who fit Mrs. Nanda’s description.
I closed my eyes and found only hollowness inside me. I didn’t want to continue anymore. I wanted to sever myself from the Earth completely.
A deep chime erupted from my core.
It was as if someone had struck a giant iron bell with a sledgehammer. Concentric rings of energy shot out from me in every direction. I could sightlessly feel them carry over the landscape, like I had joined the ranks of whales and bats and other creatures with echolocation.
“Stay here,” I heard Quentin say. “I’ll come back for you once I find them.”
He ran away so fast that a small dust cloud blew into my face. I opened my eyes. They were blurry with tears, so I could have been seeing things, but it looked like there was a geometrically increasing number of Quentins speeding off into the distance, chasing the invisible sonar waves of my aura.
I had no idea how long I had been sitting there in the street when Quentin returned. Even the position of the sun failed to register for me.
He came in hot. I felt the impact of his landing, a small quake in the ground under my feet, and then he was by my side again. Like he’d never left.
“Get on!” he shouted in my ear. “Hurry!”
He wouldn’t have motored like this if the situation were either irrevocably lost or saved. But I couldn’t share in his hope. I was still numb.
I wasn’t moving fast enough, so he swept me onto his back, and we were airborne.
We landed in the middle of a tree grove. We’d traveled all the way to the city in one leap, touching down in the forested park that drivers had to pass before crossing the landmark bridge where Quentin first taught me how to use true sight.
The eucalyptus trees reached to the sky, forming bar codes against the waning daylight. There was no beaten path anywhere near us. The woods were silent, strained free of man-made noise.
This was the site of a showdown. Handpicked for maximum effect. The director of the scene stepped out from behind a thick tree trunk, still wearing Quentin’s face.
“You made good time,” the Six-Eared Macaque said, using Quentin’s voice but in a slightly higher register, as if he was doing me a favor to tell them apart.
“So are you a copy, too?” Quentin said.
The Macaque grinned. “Nope. You’re looking at the head vampire right here.”
He was telling the truth.
“If you’re relieved that you only have to kill me one more time, I wouldn’t be,” the Macaque said. “After all, I have your friends. They’re still alive, but they won’t be unless you do exactly as I say.”
He spread his hands out like he’d arranged a delicious feast. “Let’s play a little game. One that requires you to use every power of the Ruyi—”
I was upon him before either of us knew how.
I pinned the demon to the ground by the neck with one hand and punched him with all of my might.
My knucklebones broke with the first impact, but so did part of his face. I punched him again, hard enough to indent the soil underneath his head.
The Macaque’s expression was one of total shock. “But—”
But nothing. The worldly detachment, the meditative calmness that had allowed me to harness my aura, was gone. Pitch-black hatred poured into my fist. I punched the demon again, knocking the Quentin out of him. The blank eggshell of the faceless man rippled into being and somehow under the smooth surface, he looked scared.
He was supposed to look dead. I smashed him again, over and over, and found enough rhythm to speak.
“DON’T YOU! EVER! TOUCH HER! YOU SON OF A BITCH!” I screamed, hammering him with each word. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL FOLLOW YOU TO HELL AND I’LL KILL YOU THERE!”
On second thought, I was glad the Macaque was tough. I didn’t want him to die easily. My blows struck growing cracks into his skull. I ignored the equivalent injuries to my hand.
The demon screamed and writhed in my grip. Like a threatened animal with camouflage, he changed color and shape, trying to find a form that would relieve the assault. His face cycled through random people, including the doorman and the maid from the apartment building we’d first found him in. He even tried switching to Yunie and Androu in turn, but by that point I’d done so much damage that only half of his face was capable of changing, ruining the illusion.
I didn’t stop. I hit him even harder. I needed to hit him so hard that my message would be stamped across the bones of the universe. There needed to be more of me just to hit him forever, until the end of time.
Suddenly the Macaque lost his solidness, my fist embedding in the ground up to my elbow. I would have kept going into the cloud of ink that indicated he was finally no more, but Quentin tackled me.
“Genie, stop!”
I flung Quentin away and looked around for something else to hit. My eyes still weren’t functioning properly, because all of a sudden there were Yunie and Androu, lying unconscious under a tree. I’d completely missed how they’d gotten here.
At the sight of my friend I fell to my hands and knees and dry heaved all over the ground underneath me.
“What is wrong with you?” Quentin said. “The Macaque had spells rigged up like a dead man’s switch in case you attacked him! I almost couldn’t save them in time! You put her in the most danger she’s been in today!”
I sat back down and clutched my ribs until they stopped fighting me. Quentin’s accusation wasn’t the half of it.
The Six-Eared Macaque had the Monkey King’s strength and knew how to neutralize my true sight. Which made him the perfect infiltrator. Someone had sent him to hurt me personally.
How could I have been so stupid as to think the demons would be content to wait in their lairs until I showed up to fight them? That they wouldn’t go on the offensive, hunting down me and my loved ones in kind? Yunie had been in danger ever since I took on this role—the instant I’d accepted that I was the Ruyi Jingu Bang. My first and biggest mistake.
I looked up to see Quentin angling his fingers for a spell. He put his hands on Yunie’s head.
“Wait!” I screamed.