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“What are you doing on the floor?” she said to me. “You look like a city bum.”
I glanced back to see Quentin gone.
He must have jumped out the window. I popped up and stepped to the sill, leaning into the air to look around. Not a trace of him anywhere.
“What’s the matter?” my mother snapped. “You sick?”
I pulled my body back inside and bumped my head against the window hard enough to make the glass rattle, but the pain was inconsequential right now. “No, I . . . I just needed some fresh air.”
She squinted at me. “Are you pregnant?”
“What!? No! Why would you even think that?”
“Well then if you’re not sick and you’re not pregnant then ANSWER ME WHEN I CALL YOUR NAME!”
Mom began screaming at me since she’d apparently been telling me to come down for the last five minutes and not ignoring me asking her to come up. This kind of crazy I could take. I almost sobbed with relief, her banshee song as soothing and familiar as a lullaby.
9
I had a whole sleepless night to figure out what to do. I couldn’t talk to anyone without proof. But at the same time, I needed to protect myself. I would have to take matters into my own hands.
I was ready when Quentin approached me after school the following day.
“Genie,” he said. “Please. Let me expl—moomph!”
“Stay away,” I said, mashin
g the bulb of garlic into his face as hard as I could. I didn’t have any crosses or holy water at home. I had to work with what was available.
Quentin slowly picked the cloves out of my hand before popping them into his mouth.
“That’s white vampires,” he said, chewing and swallowing the raw garlic like a bite of fruit. “If I was a jiangshi you should have brought a mirror.”
I wrinkled my nose. “You’re going to stink now.”
“What, like a Chinese?” He pursed his lips and blew a kiss at me.
Instead of being pungent, his breath was sweet with plum blossoms and coconut. Like his body magically refused to be anything but intensely appealing to me, even on a molecular level.
I tried to swat away his scent before it made me drunk.
“Stop it with the tricks,” I said. “I don’t know why you and your giant buddy needed to stage a magic show in front of me yesterday, but your act sucks and I never want to see it again.”
“Genie, I am telling you, that was a yaoguai.”
“Yaoguai don’t exist!” I was firm in my conviction, but that hadn’t stopped me from looking them up online last night. “They’re folk demons, and I bet no one has believed in them for hundreds of years!”
“That’s because no one has seen them in hundreds of years. They’re not supposed to be walking the earth anymore. Especially not that one.” Quentin looked chagrined, as if his disposing of another living being were akin to being caught double-dipping at a party.
“I came to this town because I felt a demonic presence stirring in the human world for the first time in centuries,” he said. “I knew modern people weren’t equipped to deal with yaoguai, so I hunted down the source myself. I didn’t expect to find you of all people here as well.”
There were many things I was not okay with in this explanation. The way he said human world like he had been hanging out somewhere else. His loose use of time signifiers. The way he still talked to me as if he knew me intimately.
“So you’re only stalking me as an afterthought,” I said.
“Yes. I mean no!” Quentin closed his eyes and pinched invisible threads from the air, trying to figure out which ones were connected to the end he wanted.
“Look,” he said. “What happened yesterday was impossible.”
