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I smacked him on the chest with my load-bearing arm.
“That’s gross,” I said. “Wield me? No.”
“We did it
all the time back in the day! It would only be temporary.”
“I’m not transforming into anything else. If everything you’ve told me is true, then I must have worked my ass off as the Ruyi Jingu Bang in order to get a human body. I’m not throwing it away just so you have a blunt object to beat on people with.”
Quentin grumbled but gave up the argument. At least for the moment. He took me to the first floor, a much smaller room. The little girl sat in the corner on a pile of rubber hose, nervously chewing on his scarf.
She saw us and burst into tears. I kneeled in front of her and tried to pat her head soothingly. The cut on her cheek was clean and not too deep. Other than that she wasn’t injured.
“La llorona,” the girl sobbed. “La llorona.”
Crud. “Uh, todo bien,” I said. “Nosotros . . . ganamos? Todo bien, todo bien.”
Quentin picked the girl up and hushed her, swinging gently back and forth. She calmed down immediately. I’d forgotten how much of a wizard he was with children.
“La mala mujer se ha ido,” he murmured. “Ella ha sido derrotado. Vamos a traer a tu mama. Duerme ahora, preciosa.”
The girl nodded into his shoulder and fell asleep.
I gave Quentin a look. He shot one back.
“What?” he said. “I talk to non-Chinese people too, you know.”
25
I don’t remember how I got home after we snuck the girl into the fire station. I don’t remember how we did that without getting caught, either. Events were lost in a haze of exhaustion.
Mom usually gave me some wiggle room on when I returned from the city due to the vagaries of public transportation, but this evening was pushing it. I was only able to end her angry harangue by telling her I had run into Quentin on the walk back through town and stopped to chat. Her hypocrisy between me hanging out with “boys” as a vague concept versus an individual boy she knew and liked was astounding.
I ate a reheated dinner, showered any remaining demon residue off my skin, and collapsed in bed. I would never leave my mattress again.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I slipped my hand out from the mound of covers and groped around for the replacement clamshell phone I’d been forced to use after Quentin crushed my real one. There was a message from my dad, just his usual ping about how glad he was to see me. There were status updates from Yunie trailing into a long, one-sided thread that made me laugh. She knew that I went into the city for these appointments and wasn’t always online.
I scrolled past all of the messages and dialed Quentin while lying on my side. We were going full middle-school.
“What’s up?” he said.
It was noisy on his end. “Why is it noisy on your end?”
“I’m at a casino off the highway.”
“What?” I had to stop myself from speaking at full volume so as not to wake up Mom. “Why?”
“I’m earning money. I need cash to fit in and move around human society. Plus I don’t need as much sleep as you do, and it’s a decent way to kill time.”
It shouldn’t have been weird that he was blowing off steam by gambling; there were more ads for the local casinos written in Chinese than in English. But his teasing from before had been on point. It did feel strange, knowing that he did things without me.
“Did you just want to talk?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer. As cheesy as it was, maybe I simply wanted to know that I could hear him and that he could hear me, for a while.
“What’s Heaven like?” I said to break the silence. “Is it nice?”
