“Oh my god fine,” I shouted, throwing my hands in the air. “I will let you use me as a stick. I’ll be the Ruyi Jingu Bang again. Get it out of your system just this once, and then shut up forever about it.”
I was even more disappointed than I was letting on. Getting closer to Quentin didn’t mean much if he’d been simply playing the long, long game to get his staff back. I didn’t know what the process was for turning into the iron staff of yore, so I shut my eyes and held out my arms angrily as if I was demanding a hug.
“That’s not what I’m asking for!” Quentin said. “I was talking about something else! I know how much you hate that idea!” He looked deeply hurt that I would even imply that.
I opened my eyes so I could roll them at him. “Okay, then what is your plan?”
“This.” He reached around my back and grabbed the end of my ponytail, which had miraculously held together throughout the whole ordeal.
“Ow!”
“Relax, I’m using my hair, too.” He showed me the two dark strands in his fingers, one plucked from his head and one plucked from mine. Long and short, just like us.
Then he did something gross and popped them into his mouth.
The action meant something to the yaoguai, beyond being disgusting. Their eyes grew wide and they stopped in their tracks, afraid to come any closer.
He chewed the hairs with the front of his mouth instead of his molars, chopping them into little bits. Then he stepped forward and spat an army into the air.
I assumed that the pieces of hair were turning into clones. Like the trick he’d pulled with his parents. That was the only way I could explain the horde of Genie Los and Quentin Suns that spilled out of his mouth onto the hillside.
The doppelgangers started out small but then grew to full size as they scrambled to their feet and blinked in the sunlight. They were like baby foals, able to walk and see only moments after being born. They looked exactly like us, right down to the burns and tears on our clothing.
Once he was done hocking the world’s weirdest loogie, Quentin wiped his mouth and pointed toward the assembled yaoguai.
“Sic ’em,” he commanded.
The assembled legion of us took off for the yaoguai with a delighted roar. The demons were outnumbered, a clone-Genie and clone-Quentin for every one.
“See?” the real Quentin said to me. “We’re on perfectly equal footing, technically. Full partners.”
“I . . . uh . . . sure?”
The brawl that ensued once the two sides made contact was ugly, lopsided, and quick. The yaoguai had no chance, and some of them even tried to pre-emptively flee, only to get tackled from behind.
But despite the savage beatdown our side was raining upon them, there were no telltale whorls of ink that indicated the demons were being slain. In fact, you could have argued that the little clone army was being relatively merciful. They grabbed and pinned their enemies, forcing the demons to look at Quentin and me.
Real Quentin leaped onto a boulder.
“Hear this!” he bellowed. “If any of you even look funny at the human world again, I swear on every god who ever sits upon the Dragon Throne that you will regret it. Harm a human and I will turn you into puppets of suffering and regret. Do you understand?”
I saw a few demons nod as much as their captors would allow them to. The general look of terror on their faces told me that this bunch wasn’t quite as nasty as Red Boy or Baigujing. They might have been rounded up by Erlang Shen to fill out the B-squad.
“Swear it!” Quentin shouted. “Swear on your very spirits!”
The demons bowed as hard as they could before the clones let them go. They scattered into the hillsides, leaving with some kicks on the backside for good measure.
“That was lenient of you,” I said.
“My earrings still work. If they threaten humanity, we’ll stop them. Like we always do.”
Once the demons were gone, Quentin let out a pinky whistle with the proficiency of a football coach.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s pack it up.”
The clones began poofing into white smoke. I watched, dumbfounded. I was wrong about Quentin before. Somehow, even after everything that we’d been through, he could still show me things that screwed with my head.
Quentin plopped back down next to me and sighed. “Man, that trick takes a lot out of me.”
“Probably for the best that you don’t do it too often. It’s kind of unsettling and . . . hey! Hey! You two!”
A delinquent Genie-clone and Quentin-clone had ignored the order to self-destruct and were instead getting busy with each other, right there on the ground. Sure, Quentin and I had kissed, but this was escalating to a higher MPAA rating.
I couldn’t believe I needed to chaperone my own clone. “THAT’S OFF LIMITS!” I shouted at them. “NOT UNTIL YOU’RE NINETEEN!”
“Aw, come on,” Quentin said with pure dismay on his face. “Nineteen?”
“Go wait it out in Heaven if you don’t like it.”
We were almost home before I remembered I’d forgotten something.
“Crap!” I said. “My arm!”
I wasn’t too worried, because I figured Quentin had a spell to hide it. But his face told me otherwise. It said I should worry.
“I’m not sure what I can do about that,” he said. “The True Samadhi Fire burned away anything that masked your inner nature.”
“Well, you better friggin’ try.”
Quentin grumbled and took my iron hand. His skin felt extrawarm against the metal. He hummed to himself and swayed with the effort.
Slowly but surely the iron color receded, leaving my skin behind. It drew out of my fingertips, removing the gold from my nails.
“There,” Quentin said. “Done.”
“Uh, no. Not done.”
Most of the metallic hues had disappeared, but there was still a halo around my wrist. A swirl of gold pinpoints on a black background circled my arm. It looked like a beautiful tattoo of the Milky Way, the kind that I would see shared in an online photo feed.
“Get rid of it,” I said.
“I can’t. This is the most I could reduce the perception of your inner self. Like how I can’t hide my tail.”
“Get. Rid. Of. It.”
“It’s fetching,” he said.
“It’s a tattoo. Do you know what my mother will do when she sees it?”
Quentin gave a helpless shrug. I started panicking more than I ever had in any of the demon battles. Forget my mom. Not even my dad would be cool with this, and he couldn’t get worked up over anything. Disowning me would be their first agreement in years.
“Quentin!” I shouted.
He threw his hands in the air. “I could always bewitch your mother so she permanently overlooks whatever’s on your wrist?”
“Do it!”
He frowned. “I wasn’t being serious.”
I was, despite the hypocrisy of it, after having told Guanyin not to magic my mom.
“Trust me,” I said, gripping him by the shoulders. “This is the lesser of two evils.”
38
I was taking a break from studying in my room when I first saw the video on the evening news.