I picked up a rock and threw it at him. Yunie was still waiting for me back in the cafeteria.
“All right, all right.” He hopped down to the ground and dusted himself off. Then he reached for my face.
I batted his hands away. “What are you doing?”
“Genie, you’re asking me to conceal the mark of one of the greatest powers in the known universe, an ability that the gods themselves would env
y. I need a little more contact with you than for a normal spell. This is going to take a moment.”
Fine, whatever. I presented myself for a harsh grip as clinical as the Vulcan mind-meld.
But instead Quentin’s touch was feather-soft. He grazed the back of his nails over my skin and brushed gently at my hair, tucking the loose strands behind my ears. I couldn’t tell what he was whispering in his hushed tones, but it felt like poetry.
It was intensely soothing. Our faces drew closer as he chanted. The cadence of his voice seemed to be pulling me toward his lips.
God, he smelled good.
“There,” Quentin said, suddenly stepping back. “They’re brown again. Happy?”
No. Yes. Wait.
I collected the bits of myself I’d dropped on the ground and stacked them back in more or less the right order.
“You know you could have done that last night, before you left,” I said.
He shrugged. “I forgot. Plus, I like the color. They’re your real eyes, you know. The brown is just an illusion. I’ll have to recast the spell every time you use true sight.”
Great. I was permanently stuck as a Fae Princess from Emotionland.
“I don’t get how ‘spells’ work,” I said. “I’ve seen you and the demons perform them, but not Guanyin or Erlang Shen.”
“A spell is just an application of a person’s spiritual power to alter their surroundings,” Quentin said. “The smaller and more generic the effect, the easier it is to do, which is why we normally stick to one-word commands. You need sufficient internal energies to power a spell, but you also need sufficiently refined technique.
“It’s like throwing a punch,” he went on. “You could throw a crisp jab that has no power behind it, or a wild haymaker that has no chance to connect. Spells are tools, not guarantees.”
“Then what is Guanyin doing when she, you know, does her stuff?” I made jazz hands in a poor imitation of the goddess’ awesome abilities.
“That’s more of an innate thing. She’s still using her spiritual power, but she has so much of it that an individual domain of reality is hers to control. She doesn’t need to focus through words or hand motions.”
“So I could learn spells too?”
Quentin scoffed. “You could if you weren’t so ass at meditating. We’ve been relying on your raw power to force your talents to the surface like a high-pressure boiler.”
I glared at him but he simply shrugged. “Harsh truths. Red Boy’s domain is fire. Erlang Shen’s is water. Your domain is hitting stuff really hard.”
I tried to come up with a different specialty that could have applied to me, but he pretty much had me in a corner.
“I’ve been thinking more about what happened with Baigujing, though,” he said. “Did any of that seem strange to you?”
That was a dumb question. Besides the parts where we fought an evil skeleton and sent it back to Hell?
“She didn’t say anything unusual,” I offered. “For a demon trying to kill me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. She didn’t say anything. She was just there, in the factory. It was all such a . . . set piece.”
“Well, we could always deduce her motives by cross-checking police reports with eyewitness accounts of the security footage following the paper trail of blah blah-blah blah blah. Quentin, she was going to eat a baby.”
“In an abandoned factory?”