Given the demons’ identical dress, it took me a second to locate Tawny Lion. I used deduction to find him—seeing who’d gotten the worst of it. There he was.
The leader of the demons had been hammered face-first into the wall so hard he was partially embedded like a nail. It would have been comical—Sunday morning–cartoonish—if not for the blood leaking out of the cracks. I watched it drip to the floors, wondering when I would start to feel sick or scared or anything but hugely satisfied with the carnage.
I heard a whistle. “Damn,” said Quentin. “Remind me never to piss you off.”
“I did this? It wasn’t you?”
“Nope. I just got out of your way. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”
An awkward silence passed. It probably should have been filled with me vigorously denying everything. There was no way I could have done any of this! I’m not that strong! I’m not that violent!
But instead, nothing.
Ah dang it. I kept forgetting the girl in the shop. I ran over to her and laid her on the ground. She was breathing, deep and slow enough to give me pause, but breathing nonetheless.
“You saved her life,” Quentin said. “I didn’t get through the barrier in time. She’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”
It had been such a close call that a drop of blood trickled down her forehead from where one of Tawny Lion’s fangs had pricked the skin. I dabbed it away with my sleeve, a brief motherly instinct overtaking me even though I was younger than her.
“I thought from reading the book of your stories that consuming spiritual power might be like a ritual, or a vague kind of energy vampirism,” I said.
“Nope. Straight-up chewing and swallowing.”
The sound of tapping on glass startled me out of my reverie. I looked over to see the opaque shield that Tawny Lion had put up over the front of the store beginning to fade. There were people outside, some of whom looked like they wanted in.
Oh god.
What was I doing? There were bodies in this store. Dead ones, maybe. We couldn’t be caught like this.
Oh god oh god.
I ran over to the door and locked it before anyone could come in, but once the veil disappeared completely we’d still be visible to bystanders. “Quentin!” I shouted. “What the hell are we going to do about this?”
“About what?”
I waved my arms around. “This!”
“Oh!” he said. “Right. Wow. This is not good for you, is it? Not a thing that happens to people these days. Hrm.”
He began pacing about like we had all the time in the world for him to think. I wanted to scream.
“Can’t you hide them with magic?” I pleaded.
“I could, but the next people to walk in here might, oh, I don’t know, notice tripping over invisible bodies? You know this would have been a lot easier if you had killed them.”
“What!?”
“Yaoguai disappear back to Hell once they’re dead. These guys are still alive, even Tawny Lion. You want me to, uh . . .” He made a clicking noise with his teeth and a twisting motion with his hands.
“No!” Fighting was one thing, but straight-up killing a downed enemy was a line I couldn’t cross yet.
Quentin rolled his eyes at me like I was being the unreasonable one.
“Then the only other option is to have a member of the celestial pantheon come and take them into custody,” he said. “But Tawny Lion and his brothers were never associated with any gods. There’s no one who’d be willing to pay bail. Except for maybe—”
“No maybes! Get help now or else the two of us will be seeking enlightenment from the inside of a juvenile detention facility!”
He scrunched his nose. Whoever it was I was making him call upon, he really didn’t want to owe them one. He sat down in the middle of the floor and pulled his legs underneath him.