A pulse of energy bounced between his palms, and Yunie’s eyes rolled around under her lids like she was dreaming. The whole effect was too close to a person in an electric chair and I panicked, throwing myself between them.
“It’s just a forget spell!” Quentin said as I shoved him away. “She saw too much! If I don’t keep recasting it on her, she’ll remember the Macaque taking her, me using magic, all of it!”
“Don’t do that!” After everything that happened today, hexing Yunie was another intolerable violation. I was terrified by the notion that when she woke up, she wouldn’t recognize me, or even worse, herself. “Undo it! Take it back!”
“Genie, we don’t have time for this!” Quentin turned to Androu and scooped up the much larger boy with surprising tenderness. “He’s dying from smoke inhalation! We have to get him to a hospital right now, or he’s done for!”
32
I came home early from school for the fifth day in a row. But that would be it—volleyball practice was going to resume a normal schedule on Monday.
I tossed my bag on the counter. Mom stood over the stove. I’d been trying to talk to her more in general, and I could tell she liked having the few extra hours with me even if they ended up being filled with more of our usual squabbling.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Are you mad about something?” I couldn’t think of anything I’d done. I leaned over to look at her face.
It was perfectly still. The pinch of salt she was adding to the pot arced from her fingers, stuck in the air. The pot itself probably would’ve burned over hours before, but the bubbles hovered under the surface, never bursting, never moving.
“What the hell do you want?” I snapped. I turned around to see Guanyin sitting on the stairs.
“To talk.”
I looked around the house to see how much space had been affected. “I don’t want you doing this to my mother,” I snapped. “Don’t cast anything on her ever again.”
“You know she’s not being harmed in any way.”
“I said don’t screw with my mother!”
Guanyin frowned. “Then we should take a walk.”
I could have pretended we were headed to the town library. This was the long way, the same path Quentin and I had been walking when the Demon King of Confusion had shown up. Reality was an infinite loop.
“Quentin says you won’t speak to him,” Guanyin said.
I stepped on fallen leaves that were drying in the heat. Crushing their delicate, fractal forms felt good. I was ruining configurations that would never exist again.
“Perhaps you’ve decided you’ll cover more ground if you hunt separately. I don’t advise that. The two of you have always made a good team.”
I said nothing.
Guanyin closed her eyes, trusting that I wouldn’t take her into a ditch. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friends.”
“Yeah?” I stopped where I was. “Then maybe you should have led with that.”
“Forgive me my preoccupation with the bigger picture,” she said, a little testier than before. “I understood that Yunie was ultimately unharmed. And that Androu made a miraculous, complete recovery in the hospital. Which I may have had something to do with, by the way.”
“Gee, thanks!” I shouted. “It was the least you could do after nearly killing them both!”
“Genie, I didn’t consider that a yaoguai with the right skills could have copied Quentin so completely as to bypass detection. Are you angry at me for being fallible?”
“No, I’m angry at you for being a liar! You and Erlang Shen told me I was going to be hunting demons. But that wasn’t true, was it? The Demon King of Confusion and Tawny Lion took Quentin and me completely by surprise. Baigujing and the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord were laying traps. Red Boy is probably watching me right now, laughing!”
These were all clues I should have pieced together myself, but this is what I did when I was upset. Shift blame.
“I’m not the hunter here!” I said. “I never was. The demons are hunting me. And you let them!”
Guanyin didn’t deny my accusation. She stood there with the practiced air of a punching bag, waiting for me to finish. I didn’t have much left anyway.
“I’m out,” I said. “I’m done. You know what the Macaque proved? That I’m an awful person who doesn’t care about everyone equally. I have a hierarchy of people I care about, and random strangers who might end up as demon food don’t make the cut. Not when my friends and family are at risk.”
What I didn’t say aloud was that I was even worse than that. My loved ones also had their own ranks. Throughout the whole encounter with the Macaque, beginning with the fire in my school, I hadn’t given a single thought to Androu. If I had helped him carry our teacher, if I had given him just an ounce of consideration in the forest, he might not have come so close to dying.
I could claim distraction and panic over Yunie all I wanted as an excuse, but the fact of the matter was that I chose, even if it was by omission. I disgusted myself.
“I’m not like you,” I said to Guanyin. My anger was a burned-out husk at this point, exhaustion seeping in to claim the void. “I can’t be the world’s protector. I can’t even protect my hometown, let alone the entire friggin’ Bay Area. You have to find a different champion. Maybe Xuanzang’s reincarnation is hanging around somewhere, wondering why you haven’t shown up.”
Guanyin crossed her arms and went silent for a while, tapping her foot slowly. I watched her ruminate, a gentle worry creasing her brow. She looked all the more beautiful and heavenly for it, an angel wondering what she could do to shepherd her charge back onto the right path.
When she finally opened her mouth, I braced for the inevitable speech about how wrong I was, how only I could do this. A stronger, better rehash of the talk she used to convince me in the first place.
“Wow, Genie,” she said. “I never realized you were such a pathetic coward.”
Meanness did not suit the goddess’s lovely voice. It made her words creaky and rough. A muscle she hadn’t used in a long time.
“So you had a close call,” she said. “Big deal. You know what you learn after a few centuries of bearing the world’s suffering? They’re all close calls. The only victories you get are by the skin of your teeth.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“When things break their way, most people call themselves lucky and move on,” Guanyin said. “Instead you wallow in self-pity. How dare you.”
“Are you serious?” I shouted. “Do you know what could have happened that day!?”
“I hear the torment of billions of souls hammering on my ears every second of every day of every year. I know exactly what could have happened, in every permutation of death and suffering there is to know. I’m not impressed by your guilt, Genie. Or your love for your friends. I get that you want to peacock in front of me how much they mean to you. But I don’t care. I simply don’t.”
“You know what this is to me?” she said. “A numbers game. Perhaps I should have been more up front about that from the beginning. This is about head count. Not feelings.”