I screamed and screamed again, so hard that I tasted blood.
“It upsets me to see you mourn him,” Erlang Shen said. “Wasn’t the whole point of your reincarnation to get away from Sun Wukong and find a better owner? One who wasn’t such a brute? One who treated you with more dignity and respect, like a gentleman?”
“Shut up!” I howled. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“I found your new human form first, you know. By all rights you’re mine, not the monkey’s. The only reason I didn’t reveal myself was because I needed his unwitting assistance to draw out your powers. Talent as big as yours can require multiple coaches, you know.”
He kept flying higher, but he turned us around to face the city.
“I have the feeling you didn’t take my threat in the park seriously,” he said. “So I’m going to take as many lives as the Great Fire of 1906 did, and make you watch. We’ll see how willing you are to come with me to Heaven after that.”
“Shenyingdawang!” He had to shout to be heard over my screaming. “I’d like a couple of blocks removed from the city.”
“Which ones?” the demon asked, a contractor sizing up his quote.
“Any. Just make sure you get—”
Erlang Shen glanced at me and made a coy little face of trying to remember something.
“Make sure you include New Viscount Street and Second,” he said.
My father.
Guanyin had put my town under her protection. But it didn’t extend to the city, and I hadn’t remembered to ask. I’d neglected my father. I’d shelved him outside my conception of “home.”
I’d killed him.
“You know what?” Red Boy shouted back from the ground. “I think I’m just gonna level all of downtown entirely. I don’t feel like going through the effort to be picky.”
Erlang Shen laughed his consent.
Red Boy made two fists and began rubbing his knuckles together. His bright color became incandescent, the heat inside him forcing its way through his skin into the surrounding air.
“It’s really quite fascinating, what you’re about to see,” Erlang Shen said to me. “The best way to describe it would be a human missile. A demon missile, rather.”
Red Boy drew his legs up into the air, encased in a thick layer of energy, his pose a mockery of an abbot in meditation. He began skimming silently over the ground toward the heart of the city in a straight line, slowly at first but accelerating, doubling and redoubling in speed. He wasn’t a missile; he was the bullet in a railgun.
The demon reached the velocity where I knew there was no stopping him. The trigger had been pulled—the button had been pressed on my father and thousands of other innocent people.
I couldn’t bring myself to look. I shut my eyes, shut my true sight down, shut everything down except for the tears streaming over my face.
“What are you doing?” Erlang Shen asked.
I didn’t answer him. Then I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I came back to the world of the living, steadied my sobs, and looked around.
Red Boy was no longer moving toward the city. He hovered where he was, the nucleus in a hot streak of light. A snapshot of a shooting star.
“Red Boy!” said Erlang Shen.
“He can’t hear you,” I said, sniffling. “He’s trapped in a time bubble.”
Erlang Shen had forgotten about the other divine being in my corner and smashed his head into a great big ceiling of impenetrable nothing. I could see the giant barrier spell hovering over us only because the wildfire smoke had stopped rising at that point. He dropped me, and I fell.
The air whistled past my ears. Erlang Shen shook off his daze and flew straight down to catch me, but he only made it a dozen yards before he hit another wall. He was caught in a smaller barrier, forced to play an angry mime in a real invisible box. The Goddess of Mercy had the aim of a cold-blooded sniper.
I plunged toward the ground. The wind stung my eyes, but the Earth taking over my view filled me with a sudden calm.
It’s okay, I said to myself, a moment before impact. I’m made of iron.