“Look, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“What do you mean? Xuanzang chose to go on his journey to get the sutras. The gods didn’t make him.”
“That was different. Xuanzang had a say because he was a human. You, however, are not.”
Clank.
My fist hitting the table sloshed the contents of the cup in front of me over the sides. Tepid water dripped on the floor but I made no motion to clean it up. Quentin shifted uncomfortably. He’d gotten pretty good at telling when I was primed to go off.
“Would you like to say that again? I don’t think I heard you right.”
Erlang Shen was unfazed by how long I’d dragged out the sentence through my teeth.
“Yes, you have a human form,” he said. “Yes, you’re mortal. But humans don’t have the essence of a celestial body inside them. Humans aren’t walking weapons so powerful they’re strategic assets in their own right. My uncle’s stance is that you’re still the lost property of Heaven and thus beholden to his will.”
I flexed my fingers open and closed a few times.
“From what little I understand of reincarnation,” I enunciated very carefully, “any person, spirit, or whatever can become human. So long as they work hard enough at it in their past life. I thought those were the rules. That everyone gets their chance to spin the Wheel of Life and Rebirth in the hopes of bettering themselves.”
“I’m sorry, Genie,” Guanyin said. “But there aren’t rules for what’s happened to you. A weapon reincarnating is completely unprecedented. Not in the history of gods and men has this ever happened. When you were the Ruyi Jingu Bang, no one even guessed you had a soul.”
Welp. Nothing like having your personhood denied in the morning to start the day off right.
I finally understood the piercing, migraine-y anger that shot through my core the first time Quentin had called me the Ruyi Jingu Bang. If there was any of my past self in me right now, it hated being thought of as an object. It hated not being acknowledged for what it accomplished by turning human. It valued Genie.
Even if no one else did.
“What a pile of crap,” said Quentin.
I turned to find him giving me a hard stare.
Most people probably would have thought from his facial expression that he was agreeing with the Jade Emperor. After all, he was the one who’d lost his most valuable possession as a result of my very existence.
Except that he glanced at the gods, and then back at me. I had a sense of what he was thinking.
“You come here to Earth to tell us how it’s going to be,” Quentin said to Erlang Shen. “Let me tell you how it’s going to be. If Genie refused, the Jade Emperor would be up the creek without a paddle. Your uncle has made the biggest gaffe of his career, letting these demons escape, and he’s so afraid of losing face over it that he needs to beg for her help without appearing to do so. Meanwhile you’re too much of a kiss-ass to go against his orders and pitch in the effort, you goutuizi.”
Erlang Shen didn’t change expressions, but I could have sworn the room got several degrees colder and draftier as he bristled at Quentin. A duel might have broken out in my kitchen right then and there, but Guanyin put her hand on the rain god’s forearm.
“Enough,” she commanded.
The thunderclouds slowly rolled back. Erlang Shen calmed himself under her grasp, but Quentin eyed the contact between him and Guanyin, not liking it one bit. Interesting.
Guanyin faced me with a wince of sadness and right then I knew I was in trouble. She wasn’t throwing in the towel with her long-suffering air. She was powering up.
“Genie, I know none of this seems fair,” she said. “But if demons are returning to the mortal world, this no longer becomes solely about you.”
I knew that. And I’m sure she knew I knew that. But we were going down this road anyway.
“These particular fugitives—they’re ambitious,” Guanyin said. “They’ll stop at nothing to gain more power. And their go-to strategy is to consume humans with strong spirits.”
“It doesn’t have to be a holy man like Xuanzang. There are plenty of laypeople in this day and age who have the essence they’re looking for, like that girl in the shop. Once the demons arrive, they’ll begin hunting, picking off innocents from the shadows.”
Guanyin motioned at Quentin. “Tell her. Am I exaggerating?”
Quentin let out a deep sigh.
“She’s right, Genie,” he said. “If this is the bunch that I’m thinking of, then the common folk are in trouble. Obtaining human energies was an obsession for some of these demons. A madness. They won’t stop, not even in the face of death.”