“YES!” she crowed in triumph. “I knew the two of you were going to become a thing! Called that from day one!”
I couldn’t do anything but turn into a beet.
“Okay, spill. How long has it been official?”
“Not long,” I mumbled.
“I take back everything I said. I hate you, and the only way you can ever earn my forgiveness is by spilling some juicy details.”
I couldn’t believe that this—of all things—was what Yunie wanted to hear about. Not the magic or the size-changing or any of that. I tried to come up with a small slice of information that might appease her, but I couldn’t get any words past the gate of sheer embarrassment.
“Come on, out with it,” she said. “How far have the two of you gone?”
I scratched my head. “Uh, us or our clones?” There was a pretty meaningful difference.
Yunie blinked slowly at the word clones and sat back down, disappointed.
“Okay, now you’ve made it weird,” she huffed.
2
Today
“No!” I screamed. “No! No! No! I hate you!”
“Genie, stop being dramatic,” Jenny Rolston said from where she was sitting on my chest. Weekend morning practice had just ended, and I’d been taken by surprise in the locker room. “You’re team captain next year, and that’s final. Now quit struggling and hold still.”
Despite my best efforts to thrash around on the cold, dirty floor, my volleyball team’s former leader managed to pin me down long enough to clip the enamel badge in our school colors to my shirt. Jenny got off me and blew strands of surfer-blond hair out of her face. The freshmen and sophomores watching us giggled and whispered to themselves about the most undignified transfer of authority they’d ever witnessed.
“It’s official now,” she said, leaving me on the ground instead of helping me get up. “If you take that off, I’m going to iron the C-patch to your jersey while you’re still wearing it. What the hell’s wrong with you anyway? I thought you wanted to be captain. Colleges love that kind of thing.”
“Leadership is not my personal brand! I have to rewrite my essays if I want to make use of this!”
Jenny scrunched her face like I was giving her a nosebleed. Maybe she’d thought she could exploit my need for as much application fodder as possible, but she had no idea how deep that swamp went.
“Look,” I said in an attempt to explain. “It would have been okay if I didn’t have to do anything but the coin toss. But you had to go ruin it by setting standards and being an actual team leader. You’ve made us rely on you, and I can’t handle that level of responsibility. You’ve doomed us all!”
“Genie, you’ll learn. And lesson one on being captain is not screaming about how your team is doomed.”
“See? You haven’t left the room and already you regret your decision.”
▪ ▪ ▪
“I mean, seriously,” I said to Quentin as I ducked under a tree branch. “What does she think is going to happen? If I’m captain I have to do things like watch game film, plan team outings, and tell Jiayi she’s doing great even though she sucks and should quit the sport forever.”
“That’s the point,” Quentin said. His hand flashed out, plucking a bug from its flight path. He examined it with mild curiosity before letting it fly away unharmed, his gentleness and control matching his speed. “Jenny knows you’ll be fantastic at all of those things. She wants the job done right, so she gave it to you. You’re the best choice and everyone knows it.”
Even though that statement was patently false, it made me smile. Quentin knew exactly what to say at times.
“All hail Empress Lo Pei-Yi,” he went on. “May her reign be as long and cruel as she is.”
I flicked my boyfriend in the back of the head.
We trudged through the woods in silence. In between the trees, bright green ferns littered the floor, bobbing and weaving as I tried not to trample them. We were technically on public park grounds, in a mountain popular with Bay Area hikers, but far enough off the beaten path that no one would ever find us. There was no obvious reason for anyone to be in this part of the forest as opposed to the other thousands of acres.
I was the only one making any noise with my footsteps. Quentin pulled a Legolas, stepping lightly over the terrain like he didn’t weigh anything. He could probably springboard off a leaf if he wanted to.
“We’re here,” Quentin said, stopping at a clearing in the forest that looked no different from any of the other dewy green patches we’d passed. He took a few steps forward and rapped the air in front of him with his knuckles.
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 your 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.