Anna looked up at me and sucked in air through her teeth. “I’m sorry. The minimum requirement for a Van Helsing Grant is thirty demons.”
It took me a while to come back. I opened my eyes.
Once I did, I was treated to the sight of Anna reaching across her desk and patting my hand in sympathy.
“I know it’s hard to hear, but we should talk about what to do if we need to pivot. Consider local schools, maybe lean more on sports. There are plenty of colleges that could be a great fit. Many of them right here in the Bay.”
Have a life just like the one I had right now. Stop all forward movement. Be pinned under the Milky Way.
“I could live at home instead of a dorm,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’d save on boarding fees with my mother as my roommate.”
Anna nearly said “that’s the spirit” before she saw my eyes. She squeezed my hand. I couldn’t believe how wrong I was about her before—how utterly kind she was underneath her imposi
ng exterior.
“I think I should go for today,” I said, suddenly short of breath. “Even if the session’s not over. I have a . . . thing.”
“Of course, hon. We’ll prorate the time and I’ll clear up an extra half-hour next month to make up for it.”
I nodded and stumbled out her door.
Hon. That’s how pathetic I was. I was a hon.
Quentin was outside Anna’s office, waiting for me. I hadn’t asked him to come, but here he was. People passed around us on the busy sidewalk like we were stones in a river.
“Back when I was storming Heaven,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to start a sentence like that, “when you were in my hands, and together we were smashing the door to the throne room of the Thunder Palace—the most powerful barrier in the known universe, turning bit by bit to splinters and dust—a funny thought occurred to me then.”
A funny thing happened on the way to the Dragon Throne. There was an epic punch line coming.
“Gatekeepers decide within a few seconds whether or not they’re going to open the gate for you,” he said. “And then once they decide to keep you out, you’re out forever. All it takes is a few seconds.
“Once they make their snap judgment, they can’t be swayed. They will never open the gate. You could be on fire and they could have water and they won’t open the gate. They could be starving and you could be made of food, and they still won’t open the gate.”
Quentin scratched the back of his head, embarrassed to reveal he wasn’t the insensate berserker the story made him out to be.
“I stopped swinging, one blow away from breaking through the doors to the other side and becoming King of Heaven,” he said. “I sat down on the floor and waited for the Buddha to show up. I patiently waited for a very long time. Then once he arrived, I climbed into his hand, and he did his whole thing with the mountain.”
It was a good story. But I wanted a different one right now.
“How did I die?” I said.
“Huh?”
“How did I die? When I was the Ruyi Jingu Bang?”
Quentin hadn’t been willing to tell me before, but he knew better than to deny me now. He took a deep breath, as if he were the one who needed steadying.
“You didn’t die,” he said. “You moved on. I woke up one day and you were gone from my side. You’d taken all the karma you’d earned from hundreds of years of fighting evil and saving lives and expended it in one risky attempt to become human.
“I can’t tell you how because I don’t know. There was no guarantee it would work. You could have stepped into the Void and ended up in Hell, or worse. You could have disappeared entirely. But that’s how badly you wanted to keep moving forward. That’s how much you hated being told to stay in your place.”
I felt my eyes burn in a way that they wouldn’t for anyone else in the world. I’d let the old me down, more than I ever thought possible. After epic toil and hardship, the Ruyi Jingu Bang had erased herself from existence to become something new, and I’d failed her by hitting the wall within one lifetime.
“You should go back to Heaven,” I said to Quentin.
“Why?”
“To sit there and wait eighty, ninety days.”