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A little speck with a big voice perched on the fox’s head. “Of course you had to be in the last plane I looked!” Tiny said.
I stared at her without comprehending her form or her words. She might have been offering me something. I wasn’t sure I wanted it.
“We wouldn’t leave you stranded, not after what you’ve done for us!” the yaoguai queen said. “Now hurry! This portal spell is really hard to maintain!”
28
A rough, Chopper-Esque noise whipped quentin’s voice into froth.
Genie! he might have been shouting.
It was the pounding of blood in my own head. The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes.
We’d been dumped unceremoniously in an empty lecture hall somewhere on campus. My body was draped across two different rows of seats. A great green chalkboard stared at us, judging.
The fox and Tiny and the mass of her surviving yaoguai followers who’d lent the spiritual juice necessary to punch a new hole from Earth to Xing Tian’s lair were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’d been hurled down a different fork in the road.
The bootleg portal had kicked my ass as thoroughly as Princess Iron Fan. But even if the journey had been bump-less, I wouldn’t have moved. I wanted to decompose, rot away. I’d given up my bones.
“Genie!” Quentin shook me.
Get up, Guanyin’s voice said to me. You still have work to do.
I don’t. I can’t. Please don’t make me.
You have to, Genie.
“Genie! You have to get up!” Quentin shouted. “There’s traces of demons everywhere!”
Yunie. I bolted upright. I had to save my friend. If it was still possible.
? ? ?
The solemn, detached, Bodhisattva-like thoughts I’d had about honoring Guanyin’s lesson to me vanished the instant we hit the street outside the lecture hall. What replaced them was sheer human panic. A flailing fear of death that lacked any dignity whatsoever. I would beg the Universe not to take Yunie. I would offer it money, the toys from my childhood, my hair.
Without Quentin’s earrings, the only lead we had was the glimpse of the street the Jade Emperor had shown me. I turned true sight on and spun around like a lighthouse, the least efficient way to use it but my best option right now.
There. Not too far from Ji-Hyun’s apartment. The same unfinished building I’d seen through the portal. The fires of demonic energy blanked out anything behind them. I couldn’t spare the time to make out more details or describe the location to Quentin for a jump. Instead I ran.
I ran like an animal. The lower I got, the more forward motion I could get into each step. I was nearly climbing on all fours, my hands dallying with the idea of yanking on the ground for more speed.
Pushing myself over the ground like this made me incredibly fast. People noticed me—oh boy did they notice. The wind I created knocked over cups, startled dogs, set off car alarms. I didn’t care.
Coming to a stop in front of the unfinished building required plowing a yard-long furrow into the asphalt. I hurled myself through the wall of insulation sheeting. The hallway was tissue paper as I scraped it into ruin. And then—
There, in the largest room, was Yunie. Surrounded by demons.
She was reading them a book.
I’d made so much noise coming in that she and every other pair and trio and quintuple of reptilian, birdlike, and compound eyes stared at me.
“Uh, hey,” she said. “Can you hang on for a second longer? We’re at a good part.”
? ? ?
Seeing that I was catatonic, Yunie remained the picture of calm. She finished up what she was doing with the yaoguai, got up, and silently took me by the hand. She led me out of the room.
We passed demons who looked like they should have been slaughtering the B-movie cultists who’d arrogantly summoned them. They were already working on undoing the damage I’d caused to the building. A giant termite chewed at the wall studs I’d snapped, drooling glue-like saliva over the weakened points to hold them together.
