Quentin inhaled so deeply that he could have snuffed out a campfire. “SLEEP!” he bellowed.
The shock wave of his voice expanded throughout the lobby, knocking people aside. The formerly berserking apartment-dwellers slumped against the walls and sank unconscious to the floor.
The room, littered with limply stirring bodies, looked like the aftermath of some devastating party. There wasn’t time to deal with these people, though. We got in one of the elevators and slammed the button for the top floor.
The sudden acceleration pulled at my stomach, as if my own dread wasn’t heavy enough. Each bell chime of the floors we passed was a countdown to a fight with a yaoguai that was smart enough and evil enough to use humans as expendable pawns. I’d known that demons were dangerous on an individual, starving-predator type of level, but this was different. Even Quentin was st
eeling himself, wringing the cricks out of his neck and knuckles.
The penthouse hallway only had one door. I didn’t want to let my fear catch up to the rest of me, so I walked up to it straight away and kicked it off its hinges. Quentin and I filed in and took a position in sight of the yaoguai that stood in the living room, his back turned to us as he gazed through the window over the landscape. Sunbeams filtered in through a large skylight overhead, casting dramatic shadows over our gathering.
“Okay asshole,” I said. “Time to dance.”
The demon turned to face us. Face being a relative term. The front of its skull had a slight taper to it, the way illustrators might draw a head by starting with an oval and a cross as a placeholder for the eyes. It looked at Quentin, rippled once, and then raised its hand into the air.
“Spell! Spell!” I shouted like a Secret Service agent spotting a gun.
Only it wasn’t. The wiggling of the yaoguai’s fingers didn’t do anything. It was the toodle-oo gesture.
He set his feet and then jumped straight up through the skylight. Glass shards rained down on us. It was like one of Quentin’s takeoffs, only more destructive.
“Track him!” Quentin said.
I tried to keep my eye on him with true sight, but it was much harder than I thought—the equivalent of trying to watch a jet plane with a telescope. The yaoguai kept slipping out of my narrow field of view. It didn’t help that right before I had a lock, I was hit in the back of the head with an upright vacuum cleaner, knocking me over.
I looked up to see Quentin with a rampaging cleaning lady wrapped up in a full nelson.
“Sorry,” he said. “She was quicker than she looks.”
I collapsed back to the floor and groaned.
Rearranging the hulking doorman back into his chair without making it look like he’d died mid-nap was an exercise in futility. I had to leave him slumped over, sleeping with the unnatural stillness that came with Quentin’s knockout spell.
I’d lost patience with the rest of the people in the lobby and stuffed them in the hallway of the first floor. They’d sort themselves out once they woke up.
Quentin emerged from an unmarked room holding a bunch of tapes and computer equipment.
“We’re lucky they had an old system,” he said. “The newer security cameras upload recordings to the Internet automatically.”
“How do you even know that?” I said. “Did you break into fancy apartment buildings all the time back in ancient China?”
He shrugged off the question and gave his armful of electronics a squeeze over the nearest trash can. The broken bits filtered through his fingers, shades of my annihilated phone.
My self-imposed deadline had been blown, and my mother would be furious with me once I got home. But that wasn’t what I was worried about right now.
“This is bad,” I said, chewing my fingernails. “This is so bad. We effed up, Quentin. He got away. The demon got away. There’s a hole in the roof of this building.”
A middle-aged man in running shorts with a Yorkie on a leash entered the lobby as I was speaking.
“What hole in the building?” the man asked. He saw the doorman spread-eagled behind the desk. “What did you do to Lucius? Who are you two?”
“Sleep.” Quentin tossed the spell over his shoulder without looking. The man crumpled to the carpet. His dog began licking his passed-out face.
I rubbed my arms and paced back and forth, suddenly cold. This was the first time we tried to apprehend a demon with full knowledge and preparation of what we were doing, and we’d borked it.
“Look, I’m not gonna lie and call this the best demon hunt I’ve ever been on,” Quentin said. “But look on the bright side. All of these people are . . . roughly okay. We scared off the yaoguai before it caused any real damage.”
His words weren’t much of a comfort. I kicked at the floor hard enough that it startled the dog into whimpering.