The Macaque’s expression was one of total shock. “But—”
But nothing. The worldly detachment, the meditative calmness that had allowed me to harness my aura, was gone. Pitch-black hatred poured into my fist. I punched the demon again, knocking the Quentin out of him. The blank eggshell of the faceless man rippled into being and somehow under the smooth surface, he looked scared.
He was supposed to look dead. I smashed him again, over and over, and found enough rhythm to speak.
“DON’T YOU! EVER! TOUCH HER! YOU SON OF A BITCH!” I screamed, hammering him with each word. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL FOLLOW YOU TO HELL AND I’LL KILL YOU THERE!”
On second thought, I was glad the Macaque was tough. I didn’t want him to die easily. My blows struck growing cracks into his skull. I ignored the equivalent injuries to my hand.
The demon screamed and writhed in my grip. Like a threatened animal with camouflage, he changed color and shape, trying to find a form that would relieve the assault. His face cycled through random people, including the doorman and the maid from the apartment building we’d first found him in. He even tried switching to Yunie and Androu in turn, but by that point I’d done so much damage that only half of his face was capable of changing, ruining the illusion.
I didn’t stop. I hit him even harder. I needed to hit him so hard that my message would be stamped across the bones of the universe. There needed to be more of me just to hit him forever, until the end of time.
Suddenly the Macaque lost his solidness, my fist embedding in the ground up to my elbow. I would have kept going into the cloud of ink that indicated he was finally no more, but Quentin tackled me.
“Genie, stop!”
I flung Quentin away and looked around for something else to hit. My eyes still weren’t functioning properly, because all of a sudden there were Yunie and Androu, lying unconscious under a tree. I’d completely missed how they’d gotten here.
At the sight of my friend I fell to my hands and knees and dry heaved all over the ground underneath me.
“What is wrong with you?” Quentin said. “The Macaque had spells rigged up like a dead man’s switch in case you attacked him! I almost couldn’t save them in time! You put her in the most danger she’s been in today!”
I sat back down and clutched my ribs until they stopped fighting me. Quentin’s accusation wasn’t the half of it.
The Six-Eared Macaque had the Monkey King’s strength and knew how to neutralize my true sight. Which made him the perfect infiltrator. Someone had sent him to hurt me personally.
How could I have been so stupid as to think the demons would be content to wait in their lairs until I showed up to fight them? That they wouldn’t go on the offensive, hunting down me and my loved ones in kind? Yunie had been in danger ever since I took on this role—the instant I’d accepted that I was the Ruyi Jingu Bang. My first and biggest mistake.
I looked up to see Quentin angling his fingers for a spell. He put his hands on Yunie’s head.
“Wait!” I screamed.
A pulse of energy bounced between his palms, and Yunie’s eyes rolled around under her lids like she was dreaming. The whole effect was too close to a person in an electric chair and I panicked, throwing myself between them.
“It’s just a forget spell!” Quentin said as I shoved him away. “She saw too much! If I don’t keep recasting it on her, she’ll remember the Macaque taking her, me using magic, all of it!”
“Don’t do that!” After everything that happened today, hexing Yunie was another intolerable violation. I was terrified by the notion that when she woke up, she wouldn’t recognize me, or even worse, herself. “Undo it! Take it back!”
“Genie, we don’t have time for this!” Quentin turned to Androu and scooped up the much larger boy with surprising tenderness. “He’s dying from smoke inhalation! We have to get him to a hospital right now, or he’s done for!”
32
I came home early from school for the fifth day in a row. But that would be it—volleyball practice was going to resume a normal schedule on Monday.
I tossed my bag on the counter. Mom stood over the stove. I’d been trying to talk to her more in general, and I could tell she liked having the few extra hours with me even if they ended up being filled with more of our usual squabbling.
“What’s for dinner?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Are you mad about something?” I couldn’t think of anything I’d done. I leaned over to look at her face.
It was perfectly still. The pinch of salt she was adding to the pot arced from her fingers, stuck in the air. The pot itself probably would’ve burned over hours before, but the bubbles hovered under the surface, never bursting, never moving.
“What the hell do you want?” I snapped. I turned around to see Guanyin sitting on the stairs.
“To talk.”