“I don’t want to talk about it!”
I was going to tell him that given he’d insinuated himself into my life on the basis that we were once a demon-slaying tag-team in the distant past, I had a goddamn right to know how the partnership broke up to begin with. But my words exploded into a coughing fit.
I turned around in my chair.
“Excuse me,” I said to the man smoking a cigarette at the table behind me. “You’re not supposed to do that so close to the shop entrance.”
He said nothing. And blew another deliberate plume of smoke into the air.
The metal of Quentin’s chair screeched as he stood up. “The lady is asking you to put it out.”
Ugh. There wasn’t a need to escalate like that. But the man got up, too.
Friggin’ dudes and their pissing matches. Fine. I got to my feet as well. Ace card played, buddy, tallest person right here.
The man turned around and looked up at me. I nearly jumped backward onto the table.
“Something on my face?” he said with a grin.
He looked to be a middle-aged construction worker, judging by how much blue denim he was wearing. There were tons of guys like him in the surrounding towns, tearing down and putting up houses at the behest of newly minted tech families.
But that was only from the neck down. His face was a Halloween mask, a really good one. Black-ringed eyes, a long muzzle, and facial hair that went all the way round like a mane. A big cat straight out of the savannah.
The bipedal lion exhaled more smoke, and suddenly his face fritzed back to a human’s. His entire appearance was a broken TV unable to decide which channel to land on.
Quentin obviously wasn’t seeing what I was seeing or else he would have immediately flipped out into rage mode. But he could tell something was wrong.
“Genie,” he said, his voice full of suspicion. “Does that guy look normal to you?”
“Probably not,” the man answered for me. “Given that I’m a demon.”
16
“So,” the man said to Quentin in a catchy-uppy tone. “How have you been?”
I wanted to smack myself for being so stupid. Quentin and I had spent the entire morning cozying up over which member of the X-Men I wanted to be, when what really mattered was the two of us had killed a monster only three days ago. I should have pressed him about whether the Demon King of Confusion was some kind of onetime incident or not.
Because the answer was most decidedly not.
From the look of it, though, Quentin was as much on his back foot as I was. He frowned like he was at a party where he didn’t know anyone.
“Something wrong with your eyes?” the man asked. He pointed to himself. “Huangshijing? No?”
The name finally rang a bell for Quentin. “Tawny Lion,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you without your trash brothers around.”
“That’s rude of you. Especially since they’re right here.”
Six more men filed around the corner to back up the first. They had human faces, but they were dressed identically to the smoker, down to the last stitch. The costume department somewhere had gotten lazy.
They made a semicircle around us, hemming us in against the building. I’d always thought the shots of the criminal gang pouring in to attack the hero in martial arts films were silly. But in real life, from the hero’s perspective, being outnumbered? It was actually rather terrifying.
Quentin tensed up for another knock-down, drag-out fight. His muscles snapped into readiness hard enough to be audible. My stomach lurched at the prospect of more bloodshed and violence on the level of our previous encounter.
“Oh come on,” said the leader of the gang. “Have you no decorum?”
A young couple pushed their baby stroller right by us. The street was filling up. Whatever we did outside was sure to be noticed.
The man tossed his cigarette butt aside and motioned to the inside of the tea shop. “Let’s talk. The girl, too. I wouldn’t want to be rude to your guest.”