I noticed that the giant yaoguai’s fans might have hailed him enthusiastically as he walked by, but as soon as they were safely behind him, they adopted the same cynical, probing look as Benboerba, doing mental math while pumping their fists, flexing their claws. Waiting to observe what came next. Quentin’s little refresher on demon politics had made it so I couldn’t unsee the layers of scheming.
The big guy took his place at the head of the crowd. There was still a fair amount of distance between us, but his stance was all challenge and aggression.
“Hear me!” the demon shouted. “I am Yellow-Toothed Elephant, and I declare you, the so-called Shouhushen, to be unworthy of deciding our fates on Earth!”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “No cutting.”
“You operate under a false mandate!” Yellow-Toothed Elephant went on. “It is perverse that a human should govern yaoguai. I will end your reign of terror, harlot!”
Well of course. It wouldn’t be a proper reign-of-terror ending without a dash of misogyny.
I sized up Yellow-Toothed Elephant. He was even bigger than the giant Demon King of Confusion, the first yaoguai I had ever laid eyes on. Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s wrinkly gray hands and feet ended in blunt cylinders as thick as telephone poles, and the long trunk on his face pointed at me in contempt.
Great. I was about to get attacked by Babar.
The Quentins sidled away from me like I was in the middle of an embarrassing argument. What? No, I don’t know her. What gave you that idea?
I let the demon have one more chance. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back,” I said.
Yellow-Toothed Elephant stamped his feet and trumpeted. His body went tense and began to expand, his muscles ballooning around the limits of his joints. It was as if he was undergoing a yearlong ’roid bender over the course of ten seconds. Webs of veins rose to the surface of his skin. His temples started to leak a sticky orange tar. The liquid spilled down his head like tears of rage.
I recognized that last symptom from a nature documentary I watched once. It was a sign that he was going berserk. His testosterone levels were spiking uncontrollably. He needed to kill the object of his aggression. Namely, me.
“Genie,” Guanyin said with an edge of concern in her voice. “This is going a little too—”
Yellow-Toothed Elephant lowered his head and charged.
▪ ▪ ▪
The demon’s flat feet thundered over the clearing, knocking down a few of the nearby yaoguai from stampeding force alone. His eyes were inflamed with bloodlust, and they seemed to grow bigger and bigger as he approached.
In the instant before he made impact I raised my arm, palm outward, in the stop gesture, like a crossing guard. Yellow-Toothed Elephant smashed into my hand with what must have been a half a ton of weight moving at twenty miles per hour.
I didn’t budge an inch.
It was a lot of mass coming to a dead stop. The demon compressed like a slow-motion video of a tennis ball hitting the strings of a racquet before bouncing backward into his normal elephantine shape.
The only effect his charge had on me was that my hand turned glittering black, the original color of the Ruyi Jingu Bang. It spread from my wrist down to my fingers and up to my elbow. Quentin’s illusion that kept my arm looking like normal flesh often faded away when I used my full strength. He would have to recast it once this was done.
I heard a groaning noise at the painful-looking collision. It could have been Yellow-Toothed Elephant, the collected crowd of witnesses, or both. The demon staggered in front of me, waiting for the KO.
I looked over my shoulder to see if Quentin and Guanyin were clear. Then I grabbed Yellow-Toothed Elephant by the tip of his trunk.
I whirled my arm around my head, taking the massive yaoguai into the air with it. I spun his entire body off the ground using his trunk as a tether, making two full rotations, and slammed him onto the earth. Demons who had just gotten to their feet fell back down again from the tremors.
The dust finally settled over Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s unconscious, laid-out form. I looked around defiantly. “Anyone else want to call me names?”
No answer. If there had been a pebble in front of each yaoguai, every single one of them would have kicked at it morosely instead of meeting my gaze.
It was Quentin, surprisingly, who remembered why we were here to begin with. The real one stepped onto Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s heaving belly to use as a podium.
“And let that be a warning to the rest of you!” he shouted. “Exhaust the Shouhushen’s patience, and pain will be your lot! Now line up for your audience in the order you arrived, or else!”
There was a moment of silence before panicked shuffling broke out. The yaoguai mushed themselves into a reasonable column like frightened penguins.
But I could tell the cynical ones only considered this a minor setback. If they couldn’t test me through physical force, they’d find another way. They were never going to leave well enough alone.
Quentin hopped down from his stirring platform and rejoined me and Guanyin. The goddess glanced at what was left of Yellow-Toothed Elephant.
“Was that whole show really necessary?” she said to the two of us. True to her nature, she would never look at violence with anything but distaste, no matter how much she was personally involved.
“Of course it was,” Quentin said. “We should thank him once he wakes up. This little circus bought us at least two weeks of good behavior from the rest of them.”
I made a noise with my teeth. The going rate on demon obedience was getting worse all the time.
4
By the time I’d heard most of the yaoguai out, you could have watered the grass with my brain. The simple act of listening for hours had drained more energy from me than any fight in recent memory. If the demons couldn’t take me down with a direct challenge, they were going to whine me to death.
The field was nearly empty. No demon cared to stick around once they got what they needed. At the end of these sessions they vanished back into the woods without a trace. Today was an exception, as a large trail of broken shrubs marked where Yellow-Toothed Elephant’s friends dragged his slumbering carcass away.
I plastered my hands to my eyes as I called for the last one to step up. One away from going home. Depending on how low on patience I was, this last yaoguai might either get nothing or way more than it asked for.
Only it wasn’t a yaoguai who appeared when I took my hands off my face. It was an old man.
He was dressed in an embroidered robe that might have once been bleached and elegant but was now frayed down to dingy gray patchwork. The ends of his bushy white mustache swept back around his head in a perfect horizontal arc. He carried a wooden staff riddled with knots and knobs that widened to the size of a fist on top.
Before I could say anything, Quentin whooped out loud and leaped onto the old man’s back like a panther on a gazelle.
My first instinct was to scream at him to stop, but then again, maybe he detected a threat. It wasn’t out of the question for a yaoguai to have a really good human disguise. If anything, the better camouflaged ones were more dangerous.
The old man took the attack in stride, flipping Quentin over his shoulder. In the same smooth motion he twirled his staff with both hands and locked it around Quentin’s neck in a chokehold. I would have stopped him from strangling my boyfriend right there, except the two of them were laughing and having a grand time of it. Quentin was obviously not using his full strength.