I thrashed in his vise grip, but he kept me at arm’s length. I tried to say that I’d kill him, but it came out as an unintelligible shriek of rage.
Quentin should have been invulnerable. Immortal. Always by my side. Maybe I was destined to lose, but I was never supposed to lose Quentin, not even in the most tragic of possible outcomes. I had been cheated down to my very soul. This was an abomination.
I screamed and screamed again, so hard that I tasted blood.
“It upsets me to see you mourn him,” Erlang Shen said. “Wasn’t the whole point of your reincarnation to get away from Sun Wukong and find a better owner? One who wasn’t such a brute? One who treated you with more dignity and respect, like a gentleman?”
“Shut up!” I howled. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“I found your new human form first, you know. By all rights you’re mine, not the monkey’s. The only reason I didn’t reveal myself was because I needed his unwitting assistance to draw out your powers. Talent as big as yours can require multiple coaches, you know.”
He kept flying higher, but he turned us around to face the city.
“I have the feeling you didn’t take my threat in the park seriously,” he said. “So I’m going to take as many lives as the Great Fire of 1906 did, and make you watch. We’ll see how willing you are to come with me to Heaven after that.”
“Shenyingdawang!” He had to shout to be heard over my screaming. “I’d like a couple of blocks removed from the city.”
“Which ones?” the demon asked, a contractor sizing up his quote.
“Any. Just make sure you get—”
Erlang Shen glanced at me and made a coy little face of trying to remember something.
“Make sure you include New Viscount Street and Second,” he said.
My father.
Guanyin had put my town under her protection. But it didn’t extend to the city, and I hadn’t remembered to ask. I’d neglected my father. I’d shelved him outside my conception of “home.”
I’d killed him.
“You know what?” Red Boy shouted back from the ground. “I think I’m just gonna level all of downtown entirely. I don’t feel like going through the effort to be picky.”
Erlang Shen laughed his consent.
Red Boy made two fists and began rubbing his knuckles together. His bright color became incandescent, the heat inside him forcing its way through his skin into the surrounding air.
“It’s really quite fascinating, what you’re about to see,” Erlang Shen said to me. “The best way to describe it would be a human missile. A demon missile, rather.”
Red Boy drew his legs up into the air, encased in a thick layer of energy, his pose a mockery of an abbot in meditation. He began skimming silently over the ground toward the heart of the city in a straight line, slowly at first but accelerating, doubling and redoubling in speed. He wasn’t a missile; he was the bullet in a railgun.
The demon reached the velocity where I knew there was no stopping him. The trigger had been pulled—the button had been pressed on my father and thousands of other innocent people.
I couldn’t bring myself to look. I shut my eyes, shut my true sight down, shut everything down except for the tears streaming over my face.
“What are you doing?” Erlang Shen asked.
I didn’t answer him. Then I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I came back to the world of the living, steadied my sobs, and looked around.
Red Boy was no longer moving toward the city. He hovered where he was, the nucleus in a hot streak of light. A snapshot of a shooting star.
“Red Boy!” said Erlang Shen.
“He can’t hear you,” I said, sniffling. “He’s trapped in a time bubble.”
Erlang Shen had forgotten about the other divine being in my corner and smashed his head into a great big ceiling of impenetrable nothing. I could see the giant barrier spell hovering over us only because the wildfire smoke had stopped rising at that point. He dropped me, and I fell.
The air whistled past my ears. Erlang Shen shook off his daze and flew straight down to catch me, but he only made it a dozen yards before he hit another wall. He was caught in a smaller barrier, forced to play an angry mime in a real invisible box. The Goddess of Mercy had the aim of a cold-blooded sniper.
I plunged toward the ground. The wind stung my eyes, but the Earth taking over my view filled me with a sudden calm.
It’s okay, I said to myself, a moment before impact. I’m made of iron.
The noise was greater than any Quentin and I had ever made upon landing. It was meteoric. Cataclysmic. But I’d absorbed none of the shock. The shock was heaped upon the rest of the world, and the planet would have to deal with it.
I stood up in the middle of a smoking crater. I was untouched. My lack of injury made perfect sense.
I saw Guanyin kneeling over Quentin’s body, and I clambered out of the depression to their side. She was checking him with her hands, much as I’d done, but this time it meant something.
Guanyin looked up at Erlang Shen and then gave me a bitter smile.
“I sure can pick ’em, huh?” she said wryly.
“He had us all fooled. Can you heal Quentin?”
“I can try to restore Quentin, or I can help you end this,” she answered. “But not both. It’s taking most of what I’ve got to hold the two of them back, and I don’t have enough karmic juice to go around. I’m already bewitching too many people right now to keep this fight a secret.”
That she didn’t talk about Quentin like he was dead gave me a thump of hope in my chest. “Fix him,” I said. “Please.”
“The two of you will be on your own afterward. You’re asking me to put my faith in you.”
“We can do it.” I was ready to lie to her to get Quentin back, but this felt like the truth.
“Very well.” She cleared a space around him and put her hands on the sides of his face.
A sphere of energy encircled them both. Quentin and Guanyin began twitching. Their movements weren’t voluntary, especially not his. The little settlings of his stony form and her breathing were being played at higher than normal speed. And, I soon noticed, in reverse.
Dust around them that had risen sank back down to the ground. Errant stalks of dry grass cartwheeled backward, cleaning up their tracks as they went. A tiny beetle caught in the bubble moonwalked away.
A rocky splitting noise sent fear through my spine, but it was only the seam on Quentin’s body sealing up. The gray pallor of his skin dissolved, and it became warm and touchable once more.
Guanyin was winding back causality itself. Undoing the passage of time.
She was so powerful. I had to fight the urge to fall to my knees and clasp my hands together in awe.
Quentin awoke with a gasp. He scrambled back from Guanyin in surprise. She staggered to her feet, breathing heavily.
“Well,” she said, “that’s everything I’ve got left in the tank.”