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“Hey!” I yelled over the din. “I didn’t mean you could bring everyone right this instant! Stop!”
No one heard me. The soldiers were concerned only with maintaining tighter coordination than the Wicked Witch’s guards. They had faces much more reminiscent of common yaoguai, with googly eyes, scaly skin, or crustacean mandibles.
And despite their marching discipline, they were in bad shape. The lucky ones nursed bandaged wounds, layers of cloth soaked through with dark blood. There were lost fins and claws left and right. Toward the middle of the pack, the weakest needed to hang on to their comrades to stay upright. It was like watching the aftermath of a re-enacted Civil War battle. All that was missing was the somber humming of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
“Eel messengers!” Ao Guang said. “Snail bannermen! Squid quartermasters! Seahorse stable boys!”
They were going to burst through the fence at this rate. Forget that, they were going to spill over the boundaries of the conceal spell.
“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind me.
Oh no. I turned around to see that guy who’d run into me earlier, returning to the scene of the accident. “I wanted to ask you something.”
As long as he’d stayed in the courtyard area, he would have only seen me, perhaps heard me babbling to myself like a theater kid doing a warmup. Ao Guang and his supernatural army would have remained invisible. But the boy had pushed through the gate I’d broken and collided with the edge of the cloaked zone. The magic stretched over his face like plastic wrap and then gave way, causing him to stumble through the thin air. He blinked rapidly. And then he saw the pool. With the full arrangement of sea creatures.
“Motherfuuuuu—”
His hand dipped into his pocket for his phone. I went for mine at the same time, a quick-draw match at high noon.
I won, hitting my panic button before the kid could record anything. Sometimes it was useful to have a goddess on speed-dial.
? ? ?
Guanyin cast her baleful gaze upon me, withering my life points from the outside in.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.
The pool around us was empty. Ao Guang’s legion of fishpeople had been teleported away. It was one of the biggest feats I’d ever seen the goddess pull off. So much magic had been fired off in the last ten seconds that her fingertips were smoking like the barrels of a machine gun. They cooled under her crossed arms.
The human witness had his mind wiped of a few seconds, which was just as taboo and last-resort as it sounded. We didn’t mess with people’s memories if we could avoid it. Though we’d sent him stumbling away down the well-lit street to regain his wherewithal safely away from the apartment complex, he’d have the equivalent of a massive caffeine headache in the morning.
“I didn’t have a choice!” I said to Guanyin. “Ao Guang was going to hurt himself, and his soldiers were barely holding it together!”
The goddess said nothing. She didn’t need to. I knew what her answer would be.
The critical choice to make had been days ago. We’d ignored the signs that something big was about to go down. Had I stayed at home, we could have handled Ao Guang’s arrival better than him blundering his way into Earth in a crowded location. And the fact that a Dragon General of Heaven got wrecked so badly meant the demonic threat the Great White Planet mentioned was existential. Guanyin, Quentin, and I, the supposed demon-fighting experts, failed to act on a white-hot tip, and now Earth was in peril.
All because I had to go to a party.
Hot damn. Guanyin had silent-treatmented me into giving myself my own scolding. What a pro.
I could have tried to explain to her that this trip was about other things than getting drunk. But it would have been a tough sell when the two of us could hear the music and shrieking from the windows where we stood. Enough time had passed that the attendees were a lot louder and more wasted by now.
Just as importantly, I wanted to explain how sorry I was that I’d made her bail me out yet again. I wanted to let her know that I didn’t see her as a Get Out of Jail Free card with unlimited uses. I hated disappointing her like this.
But if I said any of that, I knew she’d snap at me that apologies were pointless because her feelings were irrelevant. Which would hurt my feelings. A lot.
I abandoned trying to find the magic words. “Did you let Quentin know what happened?” I asked instead.
Finally Guanyin deigned to speak. “He came along.”
“Then where is he?”
I got my answer in the form of an uproarious cheer from the floor of the building where the party was taking place.
Uh-oh.
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