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“What are you doing?” I shouted at Quentin.
He didn’t even take the time to respond. He zeroed in on a ditch and threw me into it, hard. Then he dove on top of me.
The sky above turned into plasma. It felt as if we were trapped in one of those Tesla globes, blanketed by neon filaments that reached for human contact. Quentin pressed me down, away from the colorful display like my life depended on it.
The heat was so intense that it overloaded my nerves. The scale went all the way around again to cold, a frost-burn numbness that my brain had to take as a joke. There was no fire like this on Earth, ha-ha.
Then it stopped. I could see blue again.
“We have fifty-eight seconds before he can do that again,” Quentin said into my ear. “Fighting a god and Red Boy—we’re not prepared. We should run.”
We should have. We should have fled and come up with a plan. We should have fled to the other side of the world and retired from the demon-fighting business.
But what rooted me in place, of all the random images that had to come to my mind unbidden right now, was that stupid book sitting in my room. The book of Sun Wukong’s tales.
I couldn’t shake the thought of how many unnamed villagers and peasants in those stories had to die just so that Xuanzang’s deeds would look greater for it. Were they like the babbling, happy people in the park, completely oblivious to the end? Or did they see the demons coming for them, their last moments full of terror and pain?
Genie Lo, caring about strangers, bearing the weight of the world? No one was more surprised than me.
“We can’t run,” I said. “Erlang Shen’s willing to blow his cover and start killing anyone he can get his hands on. We have to stop them here and now.”
Quentin smiled at me. “Then we have forty-seven seconds to do it.”
Maybe it was because we were in mortal danger, but he’d never looked more beautiful. I craned my neck upward and gave him a peck on the lips. “Let’s go.”
We sprang out of the ditch and ran straight at the source of the unholy flames. Red Boy greeted our attack with mild interest.
“Forty!” Quentin shouted. “Thirty-five!”
“Zero,” Red Boy said. He inhaled through his nose, opened his mouth, and another vor
tex of color came out.
I wasn’t fast enough to react. Quentin elbowed me to the side. I fell just in time to see the sun itself wash over him. He was completely engulfed in flame.
The pain from the True Samadhi Fire this close was a crisis of faith. It felt like my organs would never speak to each other again. The blood stopped in my veins.
Red Boy closed his mouth and the storm cleared.
“I’ve been training, too,” he said. “I don’t take as long to recharge now. I got a lot stronger on that island without anyone knowing.”
I tried to crawl back to Quentin, my eyes barely working, the gravel stinging my skin. A rock formation with his shape stood where he should have been. I put my hands on it without worrying about the residual heat searing me to the bone.
He’d been tempered. His body didn’t even feel like tissue anymore. This was a gray stone cast of Quentin, a mineral replacement.
And it had a crack running across the body from shoulder to hip.
“No,” I said, trying to figure out how deep it went with my fingernails. “No!”
Quentin didn’t move or speak. The expression that had been frozen on his face wasn’t shock or anger. It was resignation. His eyes were closed, his mouth calm. It was too much of a goodbye, and I screamed.
36
Erlang Shen swooped in and grabbed me by the back of the neck. He flew up, up, and away, taking me into the sky.
I thrashed in his vise grip, but he kept me at arm’s length. I tried to say that I’d kill him, but it came out as an unintelligible shriek of rage.
Quentin should have been invulnerable. Immortal. Always by my side. Maybe I was destined to lose, but I was never supposed to lose Quentin, not even in the most tragic of possible outcomes. I had been cheated down to my very soul. This was an abomination.
