“Ugh!”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late — my blood spattered across Bai Yu’s white clothes.
“Quick! Take off your clothes! It’s toxic!” Panic surged through me. Even though I knew Bai Yu belonged to the earth-immortal clan, I couldn’t shake the fear that my blood might poison him.
“Don’t move.” Bai Yu didn’t seem bothered. He pinned me to the reclining chair with one hand and, with the other, gently twisted the silver pin that had pierced my collarbone.
A cold thread of sensation crawled through me, skimming along my insides until it hit my sternum and stopped as if an invisible barrier held it back.
“What an annoying brat.” Bai Yu glanced toward the backyard. Despite his boyish face, there was an air of a seasoned healer about him. “And a deity, too, fooled by a mortal — even wounded you without checking. Let Mr. Si teach him a lesson.”
He inhaled deeply, as if stifling a yawn, and a tiny bead of light, iridescent and crimson, appeared between his lips.
“You… you have a demon-core?” I hadn’t expected such an inner pearl in such a small boy. Could he really be stronger than Old Lady Bai?
“Mm.” Bai Yu smiled, a little embarrassed. “It was a fluke. Master Gu helped me. Otherwise, I’d probably have been struck into dust by heaven’s thunder already.”
“Master Gu must be something else. Who is he?” My eyes followed the red bead as it bobbed and twined over the spot where the silver pin had entered me. “Can he come? Please — can he help Si Jiangchen?”
I’d been worried about Si Jiangchen. Lord of Mount Tai might be furious with me, but he was a proper deity. If he appeared, even the Ten Kings of the Underworld would take orders from him; I didn’t want Si Jiangchen to be handed over to that kind of punishment.
“Mr. Si doesn’t need help.” Bai Yu kept working to reknit the organs that had been scattered by the deity’s strike, while listening intently to noises from the backyard. “Seems like it hasn’t started…”
He hadn’t finished when a thunderclap tore through the sky above us, so loud it made the windowpanes rattle. I sprang up and reached for the pin — but it had already dissolved into a wisp of white smoke and seeped into my body.
The numbness in my chest-and-belly vanished at once. The crimson little bead, as if having completed its task, floated lazily back to Bai Yu’s side.
“Si Jiangchen is in danger!” I ignored Bai Yu’s attempts to stop me and bolted for the backyard.
The thunder had been called down by the Lord of Mount Tai — a righteous strike aimed at the corpse-like, malevolent Si Jiangchen.
Before I could reach the closed courtyard gate, the old wooden panel exploded into splinters and slammed toward me like cannon blast.
“Demon bead — shield!” Bai Yu snapped. The tiny pearl flared and formed a pale red light that rose like a shield between us. Then Sheng Shixun stepped out, supporting Si Jiangchen in his arms.
I stared. There was no way I’d expected those two to emerge together like comrades in arms.
“Miss Du…” Sheng sighed softly when he saw the shock on my face. “Please don’t judge me yet. I’m an old friend of Ah-Chen’s. I wouldn’t harm him — or you.”
I didn’t believe a word. The first time I’d seen him, the pale infant spirits crawling all over his back had terrified me. I’d already decided then that he wasn’t to be trusted.
“Infant spirits?” I glanced at Sheng’s back — they were gone. Had he found someone to pacify them, or had he used some darker art to erase them?
“Put him down!” I demanded. Sheng still had Si draped over his shoulder. I worried he might do Si harm; after all, he’d absorbed countless prayers of the One-Eyed Buddha Mother. I’d never seen him use magic, but judging by how limp Si Jiangchen looked, he’d been gravely wounded by the Lord of Mount Tai.
Someone as eager to profit from others’ misfortunes wouldn’t help Si out of the goodness of his heart.
“Ah-Chen would have been pulled into Mount Tai’s deepest hell by the Lord’s thunder if I hadn’t pleaded,” Sheng said, as if cataloguing his virtue. I tuned him out.
“Give Si Jiangchen to me!” I reached for Si’s arm.
“Miss Du… why the rush?” Sheng moved protectively. I wouldn’t let him control Si, so I grabbed Si Jiangchen’s waist to steady him — and my hand met a wave of cold.
My heart lurched. This wasn’t Si Jiangchen. Si was warm despite being a jiangshi; that small, human heat had kept him blending among people all these years. The body I held felt like ice.
“So fond of men, are you?” The figure I’d thought was Si lifted its head. The face resolved into a woman of around thirty, beguilingly beautiful, crimson lips curling in a mocking smile. “I knew a woman would fall for it.”
Before I could react, she coiled her arm around my waist like a snake, pressing her face close, her smile ugly with intent. “I’ve never possessed a jiangshi before. I wonder if a soulless corpse is easier to move.”
She flicked her tongue across her lips — and it lengthened, thinning into a snake-like proboscis that shot for my nose.
“Lu Ling — you just won’t die, will you?” Bai Yu had noticed too. He plucked three silver pins between his fingers and drove them toward the woman’s forehead.
“I’m your great-aunt!” Lu Ling hissed, teeth bared. She kept straining to burrow into me even as Bai Yu’s needles came. A white dust whisk swept through the air and sent the needles spinning aside before they reached her.
“What a little beast, to try killing an elder!” Sheng’s voice rang out. He produced a jade-handled horsehair whisk as if from nowhere and, with a casual shake, knocked Bai Yu’s needles aside. The silver pins were transformed into three short, grayish spikes that clattered to the ground.