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It made a dense, hollow noise. The length of the echo implied that he’d hit something very, very big.
When nothing else happened, Quentin made an annoyed sound with his teeth and knocked again, this time to the tune of “Shave and a Haircut.”
“You’re late,” said a female voice, completing the beat.
A rippling vertical surface appeared, as if we’d been leaning over the edge of a pond this whole time. Out of it stepped a tall, elegant woman who was completely unaffected by the grossness of the heat and insects around her. Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, had her arms crossed in a way that demanded answers from the lowly mortal in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was ambushed at school.”
Her annoyance at me vanished, replaced with concern. “By whom?”
“My volleyball captain. She’s making me take over for her once she graduates.”
“Genie, that’s wonderful!” said Guanyin. She rushed forward and gave me a bone-crushing hug. Despite not being known for her physical strength like Quentin, she lifted me into the air with her embrace as easily as a Goddess of the Clean and Jerk.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said after putting me back down. “I know how much you wanted more control over your team.”
“I never said that!”
Guanyin shared a knowing look with Quentin. “Sure, you didn’t say it.”
Before I could protest any further, she dropped her fun-time demeanor. “All right, now get inside, you two. We’re behind enough as it is.”
The three of us stepped through the invisible barrier. I always expected to feel the sensation of crossing over the threshold on my skin, but that never happened. Instead I felt the tug and resistance of the magic deep inside my organs, where my different types of qi supposedly collected and flowed from.
Inside, the landscape of the park grounds was perfectly normal. Except for the fact that it was covered in demons.
Sweating, snarling yaoguai. Fallen Chinese spirits. Animals who’d learned the Way to take partial human forms. Sinners from Diyu, the Chinese Hell with either eighteen or one hundred and eight layers, depending on whom you talked to.
Hackles raised, they all attacked at once.
3
Quentin did a backflip, and when he came down, there were six of him.
“Stay put!” he roared in unison, forming a chain in front of me and Guanyin. “Stay put! You’ll all get you
r turn!”
The tide of yaoguai surged against his multiple bodies. Quentin’s line held, but the demons were still close enough for it to feel like they were shouting their problems in my face.
“Shouhushen!” they screamed, half teenagers at a pop concert and half an orcish horde storming Helm’s Deep. “Shouhushen!”
Back when demons first came to Earth it had been an invasion wave, convicts plucked from Hell by the traitorous god Erlang Shen and let loose in the Bay Area to wreak havoc. Quentin and I had defeated the worst of them and foiled Erlang Shen’s schemes to the point where it would have been an exercise in cruelty to forcefully send the rest back to Diyu.
But the Jade Emperor, the ruler of Heaven, had tasked us with managing the yaoguai we’d shown mercy to, rather than dealing with them himself. I was now responsible for the well-being of the slavering demons, by virtue of being the only one who gave a rat’s ass about the consequences. If I didn’t want ogres and goblins wandering around populated areas into the nearest juice bar, I had to keep them away from civilization and hope for the best.
The best, as it turned out, was some kind of quasi-medieval system where each yaoguai theoretically kept to itself on its own plot of land in a centralized area of wilderness. About once a week, I had to visit them to hear grievances, settle disputes, and make sure they weren’t inching closer to the boundaries of humanity.
I didn’t know how we’d settled into this pattern. Maybe it was what the yaoguai gravitated toward, or maybe I’d watched too many fantasy miniseries and they’d imprinted onto my subconscious. I would have been open to alternate solutions because I really, really did not like holding court.
The yaoguai were impossible to get a read on. They seemed to hate every word that came out of my mouth during these sessions, and yet each week, more and more showed up in this designated meeting place to demand my judgment on this matter or that.
“Ugh, what is this, double the number of demons since last time?” I said.
“It was double,” Guanyin said dryly. “Until I took care of most of them. What you see right now are the ones that refused to deal with me and insisted on addressing the Great Divine Guardian in person.”
The slightly irked way she spoke my official, Heaven-appointed title highlighted the other issue here. Really, it should have been Guanyin in charge of all things supernatural on Earth. She knew it, I knew it, and the Jade Emperor knew it, which made appointing me the Shouhushen his way of spiting us both.
