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“Genie,” Erlang Shen said. “I’ll talk to the Jade Emperor and convince him to let me help you.”
“I wasn’t trying to guilt you into—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I should have been right beside you from the start. It was a mistake not to be more hands-on.”
The weight in my chest lifted significantly. Sure, none of my problems had gone away. But given how few people with the full story were actively assisting me, my support network had risen by fifty percent.
“Thank you,” I said. “I really mean it. Thank you.”
The god shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. In the meantime, remember that Red Boy’s plan to keep you distracted has a chance to backfire on him. Each time you catch a lesser demon, you’re training your true sight muscle, not to mention your combat skills. Eventually you’ll get to the point where he can’t hide from you anymore, in this world or the next. When that happens, I’ll be right there with you for the showdown.”
“Red Boy wouldn’t stand a chance with you in our corner,” I said. “He’s a fire-type, right? If you’re the master of water, you can just put him out.”
Erlang Shen laughed as he got up and pushed in his chair. “It doesn’t work exactly like that.” Then he cocked his head, pursing his lips. “It works a little like that?”
I let the divine being leave first and gave him a few minutes to do whatever it was he needed to do to get back to Heaven. It seemed polite, though I’d only made that rule up in my head.
When I stepped out of the shack, Quentin was there by the roadside, waiting for me.
“Have a nice chat?”
I knew his peevish tone was his usual allergic reaction to Erlang Shen, but for some reason I didn’t field it well today.
“Yeah, we really connected on an emotional level,” I snapped. “I promised to turn into a stick for him.”
That was perhaps the weirdest, most hyper-targeted dig I’d ever leveled at someone, but boy did it work. Quentin looked like I’d broken him in half and left him on the curb for pickup. He was completely silent the entire trip back to civilization.
He didn’t call or text me that night either. It had become a little ritual for us to debrief and unwind over the phone after every yaoguai hunt ever since Baigujing but instead, radio silence.
While I could have reached out first to tell him I was extremely sorry he was being such a baby about this particular subject, I figured I had time to do it when I saw him at school. So I went to bed and thought little of it.
But I was wrong. Quentin wasn’t the type to stew in anger by his lonesome. He preferred action to waiting.
Which was likely why the very next day at school, I came upon him in the hallway making out with Rachel Li.
31
Well, this certainly escalated more than I was expecting.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. He and Rachel pulled away from each other, but not very far.
“Is this important?” she asked, her lips still wet.
“It is, or I wouldn’t be interrupting.”
Once Rachel saw I wasn’t going to back down, she peeled herself off Quentin and walked away, trailing her finger across his jaw all the way up to his earlobe as she left. He gazed at her wistfully before turning to me.
“What is it?” he asked, as if nothing different had happened.
“It’s Friday. We were going to try high-altitude training this weekend.” My voice came out like a text-to-speech simulator, devoid of human emotion and jaunty in all the wrong places. “You know, to see if that would unlock more of my powers. You never picked a mountaintop. You said the feng shui had to be just right.”
“Oh. Yeah. Whatever’s fine.” He glanced around, as if searching for more interesting people to sidle up to at a party.
“All right then, I’ll pick a spot,” I said. Focusing on logistics, appointment-keeping, the squeezing of blood through my veins would keep my roiling guts on the inside. Or so I hoped. “When I text you, you’ll be ready to go?”
“Sure.”
“Is there something you want to talk about?” I asked, on the odd chance that he wanted to explain his behavior. But he was already shoving past me, done with this conversation.
