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“It’s in a farm,” I said.
Quentin plowed through the barn roof feet-first. I disembarked from his back and called out to the shadows.
“I’m not really in the mood,” I said. “So I’d appreciate it if we made this quick.”
A stream of sticky, gooey threads shot out of a dark corner with the volume of a garden hose. It methodically swept over Quentin and me, covering us in a thickening, hardening cocoon of webs. It didn’t stop until we were encased from the neck down, our legs glued to the floor of the barn.
A man stepped into the moonlight in front of us and wiped his mouth. His face was bearded with fingers—human fingers. They sprouted from his skin and wriggled as he spoke.
“Ha!” the yaoguai cackled. “You’ve fallen into my trap! Vengeance is mine!”
“Who are you?” said Quentin.
“The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord!” The fingers coating his face pointed in unison on certain words for emphasis. “Master of webs and venom!”
The yaoguai opened his jaws wide to flash a set of dripping fangs at us. “I’ve been distilling my poisons in the fires of Diyu for more than a thousand years, waiting for this moment! You cannot escape my bite, for the silk that imprisons you is stronger than the hardest steel—bu hui ba, what are you doing!?”
I tore my way out of the cocoon with a few thrashes of my arms. The strands of silk twanged like overtuned guitars as I snapped them. Looking down, I found that the one nice dress that I owned was completely ruined. There wasn’t going to be a way back into the performance tonight.
Quentin shook his head, not bothering to try and free himself.
“Oh buddy,” he said to the yaoguai with genuine sorrow for a fellow sentient being. “Oh, buddy, I couldn’t do anything for you now, even if you begged me. This is the end of the line.”
The Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord looked at my face. Whatever he saw there made him give off a high-pitched skreee in alarm. He fell to all fours and scuttled away from me like an insect. The yaoguai backed into the barn’s wall and went straight up it, reaching as far as the rafters in his attempt to get some distance between us.
I didn’t feel like chasing him. Loo
king around the floor, I found the nearest object I could, picked it up, and winged it hard at the demon with all my might.
The metal horseshoe zipped from my hand. It flew so fast I couldn’t see its arc, but I did spot the hole it left behind in the roof after it punched straight through. The edges of the wood glowed red hot like a cigarette burn in a sheet of paper.
“Holy crap,” Quentin blurted out.
“You—you missed!” the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord said in nervous triumph.
“Good thing horses have four feet,” I said, waving three more horseshoes in the air.
30
It was three weeks after the night of the concert when finally I could take no more. We’d just finished a yaoguai hunt. A successful one, but somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory.
“Call them,” I said to Quentin.
“Why?”
The demon had been aquatic. Hence the reason we were currently standing waist-deep in freezing ocean water, still in our school uniforms.
We’d cut class for the second time. A third strike would go on my permanent record and earn me an in-person parent-teacher conference. There was a piece of seaweed stuck in my ear.
“I feel the need to talk,” I said. “Right now. Call them.”
Quentin gazed over the coastline. This section of the beach was normally open for people to bring their dogs to play in the surf, but right now it was vacant. The picnickers up on the cliff who’d triggered the earring alarm hadn’t seen our thrashing and flailing in the shallows on their behalf.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to keep our interactions with those two down to a minimum,” he said. “They never end well.”
“Quentin, we just spent the last hour beating up a fish. This can’t go on. Call them.”
He closed his eyes, put his palms together, and grumbled under his breath for about a minute. It looked like he was throwing a tantrum instead of praying.
