The Iron Will of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo 2)

Creating a rift out of this plane was not going to work. Guanyin said so herself. But she was trying anyway. Putting her life into it. In the last moments before the Jade Emperor did who knew what to her, her only thought was to get me home.

But we got caught. The Jade Emperor noticed the weak, flickering shine of the portal and laughed. Under the crushing weight of his spiritual power, it was like a candle at the bottom of a deep-sea trench. He came over to me and grabbed me roughly by the back of my neck.

“What do we have here?” he said. “A rift to Earth? Interesting.” He thrust my face toward the flickering glow. “Let’s see what channels we can get.”

Up close to the portal, my eyes swam in a sea of amber. I saw Earth as a planet, a swirling blue and green marble, before plummeting down, zooming in, freefalling into the western half of North America, landing nearby the college campus before I could register the distance that had passed.

Suddenly I was inside a building undergoing construction, an off-campus apartment complex similar to Ji-Hyun’s. The top floors were still nothing but I-beam skeletons. Hunched figures perched on the girders and stalked through the shadows. Yaoguai. I could see through their shrouds of concealment, the layers of magic moving along with their bodies.

They weren’t using the spell by sitting still and keeping quiet like I thought when I’d negotiated our truce. The demons had mastered a perfect mobile camouflage, the kind that would let a hunter remain invisible to its prey. And every single one of them was fixated on a human walking down the street toward the construction lot.

Yunie.

I recognized her face, her stride, the way she held that stupid shoulder bag that was too big for her. I used to have nightmares and cold sweats about my friend being pursued by yaoguai, and now she was blundering straight into a nest of them, her life on offer without the cost of a chase. Those demons were hungry and wounded. I couldn’t have put her in more danger if I’d tried.

I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t protect anyone.

Please, I begged, not knowing whom I was speaking to. I gasped for air I didn’t deserve. Make it stop.

The Jade Emperor yanked me back. I lost sight of Yunie and wailed like a child.

“Oh, you look like you want to go home,” he said, tsking. “You know, I think I might let you. This isn’t business for a human girl, no matter how strong she is. Tell me, Shouhushen. Would you like to give up and go home?”

“Yes,” I sobbed. I was so broken it came out as two syllables.

“I’ll send you home,” he whispered. “But just you. You’ll have to leave everyone else behind. Oh, what I’ll do to them. You can’t imagine.”

He twisted my head around so I could face Quentin and Guanyin. I could barely make their forms out through my tears. Quentin had managed to move a few paces toward me. His mouth was bleeding from a self-inflicted bite. Guanyin was shaking with effort. She couldn’t hold the portal open any longer and was on the verge of losing the spell. There wouldn’t be another.

Between two worlds, I made a choice. There was no way to say if it was the right one. But as with all of my choices, I could and would hate myself later.

“So?” the Jade Emperor said. “Are you going back to Earth?”

He let me drop my arms onto his shoulders to steady myself. They felt like jelly. He glanced left and right at the two useless blobs that were my hands and smirked. He released me out of pity, knowing that whatever I did next, it would eat me up inside.

He was kind of right.

My fingers clenched like I’d stuck them into a wall socket. They made an audible bone-crunching noise as they dug into the Jade Emperor’s shoulders.

“You first,” I said.

His eyes widened. I shoved his head into the portal, and it snapped shut, leaving the rest of his body on this plane.

27

Everything stopped.

The suffocating spiritual pressure emanating from the Jade Emperor ceased. It felt like gravity had cut out on a space station. Even though my feet were still planted on the ground, my newfound freedom gave me the sensation of drifting.

The endless chanting of the sleep spell stopped, too. It must have required the maintained attention of its caster. Who I presumed was the guy lying on the floor without his head.

Footsteps came running up behind me. I turned, expecting Quentin, but found the Great White Planet instead. Man, I kept forgetting about him.

“You—you killed the King of Heaven!” the Great White Planet cried.

“Was I not supposed to?” I slurred.

“No!”