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“Huh?” he said in a daze from where he was lying beside me. He’d been asleep as well, the first time I’d ever seen it happen.
“Turn the alarm off,” I groaned, my eyes shut against the morning light. “You’re closer.”
His body rustled and twisted over the grass. “Ow,” he muttered. “I think you broke me. I haven’t been this sore since I was trapped under the mountain.”
Maybe I’d only dreamed of last night. The whole thing could have been a mirage to an overwhelmingly thirsty traveler. A manifestation of my pent-up desires.
But the twigs burrowing into my hip and the chill in the air told me yes, I had slept outdoors in a forest. Quentin and I had indeed made up with a vengeance, and now there were a whole new bunch of items to keep secret from Yunie. At least until she dragged them out of me by force.
Wait.
That meant we weren’t in my bed. Or my house. Or Earth. Which meant that alarm noise was coming from—
Quentin and I both bolted upright. We were able to catch the last remnants of grayish dawn making their escape, daylight returning even faster than it had left. I stared at Quentin, my eyes wide with dismay.
His earrings were buzzing.
? ? ?
Quentin and I burst back onto the scene with the others. We were in such a hurry that I hip-checked more than one tree into splinters on the way over.
I missed the chance to see what gods did at night. Maybe they kept operating twenty-four seven. When we arrived they looked at us like we’d only been gone a few minutes. I couldn’t tell if they’d moved.
“Ears!” I yelled at everyone. “Ears!”
Even though the jewelry he wore was trying to fly away from his head like trapped insects, Quentin was able to stay much more on point. “How good is the signal on these?” he said to Guanyin. “Are they still working?”
She looked horrified that she couldn’t refute the charges. Guanyin’s good craftsmanship spanned planes. Which meant that somewhere back home in the Bay Area, a human being and a yaoguai were about to run smack dab into each other.
Why? I screamed at myself. Why had I not learned my lesson? Don’t stop, don’t rest, don’t forgive yourself until the problem was solved. The yaoguai who’d managed to get through the portal before Princess Iron Fan attacked. The only thing keeping them away from humans was a flimsy promise made to the Shouhushen, who they’d obviously figured out wasn’t around to watch them. Christ, the entire campus could be swarming with demons right now.
“They won’t stop!” Quentin shouted, clutching his head.
Guanyin passed her hands over his ears and undid whatever magic she’d used to bind them there. They buzzed and lurched in her hands so violently that she cried out and dropped them on the ground. In one last spasm, they flared with energy and burst into melted drops of pewter. The gold color was fake, after all.
The fact that I’d lost a gift from my father hurt. But losing the earrings themselves didn’t hurt as much as seeing Quentin without them on. It felt like every moment we’d shared while he’d worn them had been stripped away.
And in the place of those memories, I now had a disaster of my own making. It wasn’t difficult to make the mental connection. The harder the demon alarm buzzed, the more humans in peril. So many that the system had overloaded.
This is your lot, the voice inside my head whispered. It was the same one that spoke to me as a child while I stared at an opened birthday gift, my parents’ voices screaming in the background. Destined to fail. A girl who breaks what she touches.
I turned to the gods, whom I wanted to collectively throttle. In my frantic state their hesitance last night seemed more like cowardice. “How far away is this energy that’s trapping us here? As the crow flies?”
The Great White Planet raised a finger toward a part of the gnarled forest that appeared identical and arbitrary to me. “At your speed? Probably an hour, if the way were clear. But making our way through that growth could take us a day or more.”
“We’d want to approach carefully,” Erlang Shen said. “Announcing our presence could be the last mistake we make.”
Uh-uh. Not good enough. I wasn’t going to waste more time having a friggin’ woodland adventure.
I snapped my fingers at Guan Yu. “Big man. Can you clear a path? I don’t care how messy or loud you are.”
The red-faced warrior’s eyes lit up with glee. “Ha!” he bellowed. “I like the way you think, Shouhushen!”
Guan Yu unslung his massive polearm and wound up with a two-handed grip like a batter at a home run derby. Above him, the keen edge of the blade caught the light before it suddenly disappeared from the speed of his swing.
Nothing happened.
Erlang Shen was about to make a smartass comment but Guan Yu pre-empted it, holding up his hand. “Wait for it.”
