“I’m guessing I have a fair shot.”
“You misunderstand. There was a reason why I approached you here, in a crowd.”
He waved his arm across the field of sunbathers as if to wipe them all away. “Are you willing to sacrifice these people to deny me my prize?”
I didn’t answer. I hadn’t yet seen a god or demon perform deadly, offensive magic, but now was not the time to test whether Erlang Shen could throw lightning bolts.
I took a deep breath.
“Scream if you want,” he said. “I don’t care about the Jade Emperor’s secrecy anymore. There’s really nothing you can say at this point that will do you any good.”
Sure there was.
“NA MO GUAN SHI YIN PU SA!” I shouted, dropping to my knees. “Salutations to the most compassionate and merciful Bodhisattva!”
Erlang Shen’s eyes went wide.
Only a few people looked our way. This was the city after all; people screaming unintelligibly in public spaces were as common as pigeons.
But even still, there were some witnesses to Erlang Shen fritzing into thin air where he stood, his tail between his legs.
Their shocked expressions became their portraits. Every Frisbee stopped its journey through the air and decided to hover over the lawn like a UFO. A dog was caught mid-bound, a happy smile frozen on its face.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen Guanyin arrive with my naked eyes. A glowing fireball grew out of the air twenty feet up, like the way a child would paint the sun in the corner of the paper. It was like the brightness of a welding torch with none of the discomfort of looking at it. The sphere reached the limits of its containment and burst into a nova ring that spread over the entire field.
Guanyin stepped down onto the Earth as if she’d taken the stairs. She looked at me in my supplicant’s pose, puzzled over why I’d summoned her. Especially after how poorly our last conversation went.
“I know where the remaining yaoguai are!” I shouted at her. “And I know who’s responsible for setting them free! I need to talk to Quentin, right now!”
The goddess frowned, then reached into her back pocket.
“You know you could have just called him yourself,” she said, putting her cell phone to her ear.
35
“I told you he was a prick!” Quentin said. “What did you think, I was saying it for funsies?”
He was shouting partly because he was still mad at me and partly because the wind rushing by this high up in the air made it hard to hear.
“I thought you were jealous or something!” I said. I felt my grip on him loosening as he made the turn on his somersault and clutched his warm body tighter to mine. I’d missed that feeling.
“Why would I be jealous? That’d be like you getting jealous
of Guanyin!”
“Wait, you think I’m in the same league as Guanyin? Quentin! That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!”
His skin flushed all the way up to his neck. “Focus! What are we doing here?”
“It’ll make more sense once we land. Trust me.”
The demons hadn’t been appearing randomly. They’d been dealt out like cards from a pack. And to do that required a home base nearby, one that could keep them hidden if I swept over it with true sight. There was only one place in the entire Bay where my vision was blocked, ever since that first day on top of the bridge.
The wildfires burning in the remote headlands north of the city. They created shrouds of smoke—the only substance that Sun Wukong’s golden eyes couldn’t penetrate.
Quentin landed us on a hill upwind of the blaze. The scrubby ground, brittle from the drought, crunched beneath our feet. The greenery on the surrounding slopes was fighting a losing battle against the brown.
Pillows of smoke nestled over the peaks, only ascending with great reluctance. I couldn’t use true sight in a place like this, which was exactly what Erlang Shen had been counting on.