“Seating accident; not enough spaces together,” she snapped.
We all suddenly found our programs very, very interesting. Luckily we didn’t have to wait long for the curtain.
I tuned out the bespectacled, tweeded man explaining the history of the competition and how we could all get involved with the arts by making small donations. The pain was over for now. I could relax for as long as it took to determine who would emerge unscathed from musical thunderdome.
“Because they’ve already worked so hard to get here, we’re going to do something a little different tonight,” said the emcee. “Could our finalists please come on stage to take a bow? No matter who wins tonight, you all deserve a big hand.”
The majority of the audience believed that was patently false. There could be only one. But we clapped anyway as the contestants lined up on stage.
I spotted Yunie. She looked like a star in the night sky. Mom, Androu, and I mashed our hands together when she emerged, all prior conflicts forgotten.
And then someone flicked me in the back of my neck.
I turned around, ready to yell at the jerk who did it, but the little old grandmother behind me was busy trying to work up enough saliva to whistle for the brass section. It wasn’t her.
The same flick hit me from the same direction. I peered down the aisle until I saw where it was coming from.
Quentin. Hovering in the shadows by the fire exit.
He raised his fist to his lips and blew. The little bullet of air that shot out from the tunnel formed by his fingers smacked me in the face. It would have been the most annoying sensation in the world under any circumstances. Right now I was livid beyond belief.
Quentin waved his hands once he saw that he had my attention.
I slid my finger across my throat at him.
He widened his eyes and tugged frantically on his own earlobes, hopping up and down to exaggerate the motion.
Oh god no. Not now.
I surreptitiously glanced at my phone, which had been on silent all evening. Forty-six notifications. Quentin had been trying to contact me for more than an hour.
More than an hour of a yaoguai doing whatever it wanted on Earth, with no one to stop it.
I tried to unwedge myself from the chair and kneed the man in front of me in the shoulder. He frowned at me but decided I wasn’t worth it.
“Genie, what are you doing?” Mom hissed.
“I—I feel sick,” I stuttered. “Light-headed. I . . . have to go outside.”
“Now!?”
I was able to creep halfway down the aisle before I froze. On stage, Yunie was watching me. Watching me leave.
Of course I stuck out too much to make a clean getaway. Yunie’s eyes followed my path and flickered at its end. She’d seen Quentin.
My universe was reduced to a handful of silent, screaming voices. The distress on my mother’s face. The urgency of Quentin’s. Androu’s guileless concern.
And loudest of all was the confused heartbreak coming from my best friend on the biggest night of her life.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to anyone who would have it. I ran out the side door to where Quentin was waiting.
“We need to make up for lost time,” he said in the bushes behind the auditorium. “What’s the point of me having a phone if you’re not going to answer my—”
“Quentin,” I said, my voice as quiet as the eye of a hurricane. “I know what happened isn’t your fault, but before this night is through, I will kill someone. I would rather that person not be you.”
He shut up and pointed at where I should start searching. “There’s barely any towns in that direction, thankfully. I don’t think it’ll be as close to the population as the other demons were.”
I pressed the side of my head and swept over the landscape. Quentin was right; the area around the dancing light was mostly empty grassland, dotted with sleeping bovines. Guanyin’s alarm had given us a decent head start this time, for once.