“That’s freaky,” I said. “I don’t think I’d want to know all the time if people were lying to me.”
“It’ll come in handy at some point, trust me.”
I went back to drinking in the view. It was moving artwork, zooming and flattening where I wanted it to for my inspection. I watched a container ship full of almonds and canned tomatoes steam away into the distant Pacific. One of the crew members was bluffing his ass off in a poker game, holding nothing but unsuited low cards.
I turned toward land, drawn by a column of smoke. The wildfires in the scrubby hills north of the city were no closer to being put out than when I’d first heard about them on the news. The black whorls looked more like a series of opaque screens than vapor, blocking out anything behind them.
“You should try looking at yourself,” Quentin said.
My eyes were starting to get tired, but I held my hands up in front of my face. As I wiggled my fingers, rippling lines of pressure played out in the air, almost like a topographical map or an artist’s rendition of sound waves.
“That’s how I recognized you,” Quentin said. “Guanyin and Erlang Shen, too. Out of the billions of humans that have come and gone since the old days, only you have an aura as steady and unshakable as that. Just like the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
I watched one of the bigger pulses travel from my skin across the distance until it made contact with Quentin’s erratic inner fire. Rather than clashing, the two energy signatures meshed with each other to become brighter. Stronger. On some fundamental level, Quentin and I harmonized.
Then the waves vanished. My vision reverted back to normal.
“Ow,” I said, fighting back the ache in my corneas. “Is there a time limit on this thing?”
“Sort of. It’s extremely difficult to sustain if you’re not used to it. You’ll have to build up your endurance through practice.”
“Oh my god, everything is always practice, practice, practice with you Asians.”
Quentin laughed, and then suddenly hiccuped. His whole body began shaking like a phone on vibrate. He dropped to one knee and clamped his hands to the platform we were standing on in order to steady himself.
“Jeez, it wasn’t that funny,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”
Quentin wriggled his shoulders back and forth to clear the spasms. “The magic in the earrings is going off. There must be a yaoguai within striking distance of a human.”
“Where?”
He pointed to the south. “Somewhere over there. The feeling is stronger on that side of my body.”
“That’s as much resolution as you get from those things? That’s barely better than a grandpa saying it’ll rain because his trick knee’s gone all a-tingly.”
“Well, Guanyin said they’re meant to be an early warning signal, not a map with GPS.”
I leaned on top of Quentin, using him like a tripod over his protests. Turning true sight back on was surprisingly easy, merely a matter of knowing there was an extra level of vision available to me and then concentrating until I got there. I didn’t know how I was supposed to pick out a demon from the rest of the visual noise, but once I started looking in the direction Quentin was pointing, the answer made itself pretty clear.
A blip appeared that was both brighter and darker than anything else around it—a smear of white ash on top of black soot. I was able to zoom in farther by instinctively squinting.
The flare was coming from inside an industrial building. What industry I didn’t know; something that involved large gray tanks and a jungle of pipes next to a broad warehouse. Judging from its state of disrepair and the long weeds growing around the entrance, the facility should have been completely abandoned. But the eerie, colorless light moved from room to room in the pattern of something alive.
I realized why I was having such a hard time making out the source’s silhouette. It didn’t have one. It was a translucent skeleton, completely fleshless. My eyes kept passing through the spaces between its ribs.
“Quentin,” I said, thoroughly weirded out by the apparition. “Do you have any friends who are skeletons?”
“Skeletons? Is that what you’re seeing?”
“I see one skeleton,” I said. “Kind of floating around, pacing back and forth. It’s giving off light like you do, except without any color or brightness. Am I even making sense?”
Quentin’s grim expression alone told me yes, unfortunately I was. “Baigujing. The White Bone Demon. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
Watching the yaoguai waltz to and fro unnerved me beyond the fact that its appearance was firmly lodged at the bottom of the uncanny valley. I felt like a vulnerable Peeping Tom. In horror movies, the person trying to watch the monster through a telescope is usually moments away from biting it.
“What do we do now?” I asked. “Do we . . . do we go get her?”
“Hell no. We sit our asses down and think of a plan.”