Erlang Shen said nothing.
“Or was he lying about it being dangerous? He said my humanity would be burned away, but he could have been making up an excuse to get out of taking me there.”
Erlang Shen still said nothing. Not even a mumble.
I frowned.
I had only been speaking in a by-the-way manner, but something wasn’t right. I gave Erlang Shen a closer look. There was an odd cold spot on his flank where the spiritual heat was completely missing, like he’d donated a kidney to someone. Given part of his godliness away.
“Hey,” I said, ignoring the blistering sensation on my eyeballs. “I asked a question. How were you planning to bring me to Heaven without killing me? I’m talking about me as in Genie Lo, not the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
Erlang Shen puttered his lips in frustration. “You know it’s really rude to ask someone a question with true sight on. Don’t you want to turn it off before I answer? For the sake of good manners?”
“I don’t.”
“Then I suppose I have no choice but to tell the truth,” said Erlang Shen. “I was planning on you dying.”
No.
It couldn’t have been.
I didn’t want it to be.
“You really should have come with me when I offered,” Erlang Shen said, his voice suddenly laced with venom. “Instead of being such an unpleasant girl. Humans can only be taken to Heaven if they’re willing to go. There was no need for a fuss.”
I tried to put the pieces together in my head as fast as possible. Why. How. Where. As if solving the greater mystery would make the immediate danger in front of me stand still.
But of course it wouldn’t.
I slowly clenched my hands into fists. “Sorry to disappoint,” I said. “Apparently I’m a well-known fuss-maker.”
“You really think you’re going to fight me?”
“I’m guessing I have a fair shot.”
“You misunderstand. There was a reason why I approached you here, in a crowd.”
He waved his arm across the field of sunbathers as if to wipe them all away. “Are you willing to sacrifice these people to deny me my prize?”
I didn’t answer. I hadn’t yet seen a god or demon perform deadly, offensive magic, but now was not the time to test whether Erlang Shen could throw lightning bolts.
I took a deep breath.
“Scream if you want,” he said. “I don’t care about the Jade Emperor’s secrecy anymore. There’s really nothing you can say at this point that will do you any good.”
Sure there was.
“NA MO GUAN SHI YIN PU SA!” I shouted, dropping to my knees. “Salutations to the most compassionate and merciful Bodhisattva!”
Erlang Shen’s eyes went wide.
Only a few people looked our way. This was the city after all; people screaming unintelligibly in public spaces were as common as pigeons.
But even still, there were some witnesses to Erlang Shen fritzing into thin air where he stood, his tail between his legs.
Their shocked expressions became their portraits. Every Frisbee stopped its journey through the air and decided to hover over the lawn like a UFO. A dog was caught mid-bound, a happy smile frozen on its face.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen Guanyin arrive with my naked eyes. A glowing fireball grew out of the air twenty feet up, like the way a child would paint the sun in the corner of the paper. It was like the brightness of a welding torch with none of the discomfort of looking at it. The sphere reached the limits of its containment and burst into a nova ring that spread over the entire field.
Guanyin stepped down onto the Earth as if she’d taken the stairs. She looked at me in my supplicant’s pose, puzzled over why I’d summoned her. Especially after how poorly our last conversation went.
“I know where the remaining yaoguai are!” I shouted at her. “And I know who’s responsible for setting them free! I need to talk to Quentin, right now!”
The goddess frowned, then reached into her back pocket.
“You know you could have just called him yourself,” she said, putting her cell phone to her ear.
35
“I told you he was a prick!” Quentin said. “What did you think, I was saying it for funsies?”
He was shouting partly because he was still mad at me and partly because the wind rushing by this high up in the air made it hard to hear.
“I thought you were jealous or something!” I said. I felt my grip on him loosening as he made the turn on his somersault and clutched his warm body tighter to mine. I’d missed that feeling.
“Why would I be jealous? That’d be like you getting jealous of Guanyin!”
“Wait, you think I’m in the same league as Guanyin? Quentin! That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!”
His skin flushed all the way up to his neck. “Focus! What are we doing here?”
“It’ll make more sense once we land. Trust me.”
The demons hadn’t been appearing randomly. They’d been dealt out like cards from a pack. And to do that required a home base nearby, one that could keep them hidden if I swept over it with true sight. There was only one place in the entire Bay where my vision was blocked, ever since that first day on top of the bridge.
The wildfires burning in the remote headlands north of the city. They created shrouds of smoke—the only substance that Sun Wukong’s golden eyes couldn’t penetrate.
Quentin landed us on a hill upwind of the blaze. The scrubby ground, brittle from the drought, crunched beneath our feet. The greenery on the surrounding slopes was fighting a losing battle against the brown.
Pillows of smoke nestled over the peaks, only ascending with great reluctance. I couldn’t use true sight in a place like this, which was exactly what Erlang Shen had been counting on.
Quentin and I rounded a bend and saw the flames. They weren’t sprawling, but more like a patchy film of flickering orange over the landscape. Had they been any bigger the fire department would have attacked them in force.
As they were, it was a controlled burn. And the person in control was the shirtless, bright red man sitting on the ground cross-legged, with his back to us.
We flanked him as quietly as we could, ducking behind shrubs and rocks. The gentle roar and crackling of the flames masked our footfalls.
His skin was the same color as an artificially ripened tomato. I thought he might have been meditating, but it turned out he was engrossed in a handheld video game. Every so often he would inhale deeply and then blow out through his mouth. The entire fire-line glowed brighter when he exhaled, like one giant tinder puff he was keeping stoked with his breath.
He did this absentmindedly, without looking up from his screen. It was a chore he’d been assigned.
Quentin and I hunkered down behind a boulder.
“That’s Red Boy,” he whispered. “How did you know he would be here?”
“Process of elimination,” I said. The way Erlang Shen had clammed up in the park under the influence of true sight made it clear—this was about what I couldn’t see rather than what I could.
“You think there’s more?”