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She took a sip to be polite and set her cup aside.
“So you’re her,” Guanyin said with a warm smile. “I never would have guessed. You look a little like Xuanzang.”
I knew I looked like that drawing of him, but hearing someone else compare me to a guy made me hitch a little. “Xuanzang was prettier than the Four Great Beauties,” Guanyin said, sensing my discomfort. “It’s a compliment.”
“Thanks, I guess? You know who I am?”
“We know you’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang,” Erlang Shen said, eyeing me side-to-side like a vase that he would have been upset to find any cracks in. “Any spiritual being who has been in the As-You-Will Cudgel’s aura would recognize it if they got near enough. The Lady Guanyin and I have both seen your original form many times.”
It was unsettling to hear the two of them talk like that. Like meeting a distant aunt and uncle who only remembered you in diapers. “The two of you are really gods?”
“Yes,” said Guanyin. “We’re members of the celestial pantheon of immortal spirits, over which the Jade Emperor presides.”
Oookay. “And you’re from . . . Heaven?”
She nodded. “A different plane of existence than the one that contains Earth, if that helps you think about it.”
It really didn’t. My skeptical side was taking an absolute beating right now. But science! I wanted to shout. Empirical thought! Magnets!
“I know you might be a bit confused,” Guanyin went on. “But by and large, there’s no need to be. Earth is still Earth. Your universe is still your universe. It’s just that sometimes there’s bleed-over from other spiritual dimensions. Like today, for instance.”
I wasn’t sure what other kind of explanation would have kept my head from spinning, so I decided I’d have to roll with this one. Gods in Heaven. Check.
“To preserve order and stability, we retain dominion over the mortal realm in many areas,” Erlang Shen said, interjecting in case I’d gotten the wrong idea about the power balance. “Such as those involving yaoguai.”
Quentin slapped the nearest wall at the end of his lap around my kitchen. “Yes!” he said, his not-great patience already running thin. “Can we talk about that for a moment? Why a bunch of demons I personally dispatched a long time ago suddenly show up out of the blue?”
I cared more about the broader issue than the particulars of whom Quentin killed or didn’t kill once upon a time. “Why are there any demons walking around my town in the first place?” I asked, raising my voice above his. “These aren’t ye olden days of legend!”
“And why did Tawny Lion claim that more are coming!?” Quentin shouted, topping me with one last demand.
Erlang Shen met our agitation with stoicism. He picked up his tea, quaffed it, and set his cup down before speaking.
“The answer to all of your questions is that there’s been a jailbreak,” he replied.
Quentin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A jailbreak? From Diyu?”
“Yes. A number of yaoguai have escaped the plane of Hell, and we have good reason to believe they’re headed to Earth, if they’re not here already.”
Quentin didn’t respond, either a minor miracle in itself or a sign of impending disaster. He rubbed his face up and down.
“You would have learned about this had you not run off to Earth, itching for a fight, at the first sign of demonic presence,” Guanyin said to him gently.
“Hold up,” I said. “That doesn’t explain why a bunch of these escaped demons showed up in my hometown. There’s nothing special about Santa Firenza.”
“Of course there is,” Erlang Shen said. “You.”
It was my turn to go mute.
Erlang Shen saw that he needed to elaborate. He took the lid off the teapot and pushed it to the center of the table. This explanation needed props, apparently.
“Imagine the tea leaves are yaoguai,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I had chosen the glass set, so I could see the loose tea scattered across the bottom of the broad, round pot.
Erlang Shen held up his index finger. “And this is you. The Ruyi Jingu Bang, former axis of the Milky Way.”
He dipped his finger into the vessel. The pale green liquid began swirling around it in a miniature vortex. The tea leaves were whisked along by the flow, rising and falling in a tightening loop
