I couldn’t believe I needed to chaperone my own clone. “THAT’S OFF LIMITS!” I shouted at them. “NOT UNTIL YOU’RE NINETEEN!”
“Aw, come on,” Quentin said with pure dismay on his face. “Nineteen?”
“Go wait it out in Heaven if you don’t like it.”
We were almost home before I remembered I’d forgotten something.
“Crap!” I said. “My arm!”
I wasn’t too worried, because I figured Quentin had a spell to hide it. But his face told me otherwise. It said I should worry.
“I’m not sure what I can do about that,” he said. “The True Samadhi Fire burned away anything that masked your inner nature.”
“Well, you better friggin’ try.”
Quentin grumbled and took my iron hand. His skin felt extrawarm against the metal. He hummed to himself and swayed with the effort.
Slowly but surely the iron color receded, leaving my skin behind. It drew out of my fingertips, removing the gold from my nails.
“There,” Quentin said. “Done.”
&n
bsp; “Uh, no. Not done.”
Most of the metallic hues had disappeared, but there was still a halo around my wrist. A swirl of gold pinpoints on a black background circled my arm. It looked like a beautiful tattoo of the Milky Way, the kind that I would see shared in an online photo feed.
“Get rid of it,” I said.
“I can’t. This is the most I could reduce the perception of your inner self. Like how I can’t hide my tail.”
“Get. Rid. Of. It.”
“It’s fetching,” he said.
“It’s a tattoo. Do you know what my mother will do when she sees it?”
Quentin gave a helpless shrug. I started panicking more than I ever had in any of the demon battles. Forget my mom. Not even my dad would be cool with this, and he couldn’t get worked up over anything. Disowning me would be their first agreement in years.
“Quentin!” I shouted.
He threw his hands in the air. “I could always bewitch your mother so she permanently overlooks whatever’s on your wrist?”
“Do it!”
He frowned. “I wasn’t being serious.”
I was, despite the hypocrisy of it, after having told Guanyin not to magic my mom.
“Trust me,” I said, gripping him by the shoulders. “This is the lesser of two evils.”
38
I was taking a break from studying in my room when I first saw the video on the evening news.
Some hiker had caught distant snippets of our rumble with Erlang Shen. There I was, growing taller and taller until I swatted something that couldn’t be seen out of the air. That’s when the clip ended. A freeze-frame of me in all my titanic glory.
I looked like a giant robot in a skirt. In what I could only assume was yet another favor from Guanyin, an unnaturally cloudy mist obscured my face from view.