Page 44 of The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo 1)

Aw, hell. I should have remembered that Yunie, sharp-eyed as ever, would recognize my earrings on Quentin. They weren’t exactly small. They weren’t exactly meant for anyone but a ten-year-old girl, either.

“Is he like your toy now? Does he have to obey your every command?”

I racked my brain for a feasible explanation and couldn’t.

“Just . . . just don’t tell anyone they’re mine, okay?”

Yunie grinned so wide I thought her face might split. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll keep your twisted little game a secret. Oh wait, look.”

Rachel Li had sauntered up to Quentin. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but the way she nearly brushed his hair with her fingers, it was obvious she was asking about his ears.

Quentin was completely oblivious to her flirting. He said something and pointed at me. Rachel frowned and glared daggers in my direction before stomping away.

“Oops,” Yunie giggled. I slammed my forehead into my open textbook.

As if on cue, a note fell out of the pages and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and held it to the light. It was in Chinese, a messy cursive written with as much forcefulness as lack of convention.

Meet me after your practice is over. Where I first showed you my true self.

He must have meant the park again. I looked up to see Quentin giving me an intense stare. He really couldn’t do anything with subtlety.

Over my shoulder, Yunie squealed with glee as she read the overdramatic note.

Crap. I forgot she understood traditional characters as well as I did, if not better. I wadded up the paper and shoved it as far down as I could in my backpack.

I cornered Quentin in the hallway the very next break.

“I thought we were meeting after school,” he said. “Didn’t you get my note?”

“You can just come over and talk to me, you dingus. Instead of skulking around like Batman.”

“It’s not safe to have our conversations out in the open.”

“I think we could tell if there were demons lurking around the corners of our school,” I said. “We have those earrings, remember? You’re being paranoid.”

Quentin grimaced. “You don’t understand. Tawny Lion got the drop on me. In the old days he wouldn’t have been able to come within a dozen miles without me spotting him.”

“What about the Demon King of Confusion? I thought you came to Earth because you sensed his presence.”

“I did, but I should have been able to pick him out immediately instead of bumbling across him like an idiot. The fact that he and Tawny Lion got so near means that something is incredibly wrong with my senses, earrings or no.”

He glanced around uncomfortably, as if the admission were a sign of weakness the hall monitors would just pounce on. “My true sight hasn’t worked since I came to Earth,” he said. “In fact, I think when you left my side to become human, you took a lot of my power with you.”

“So you’re weaker than you were in the stories?”

“Shh!” he hissed. “Do you know how many people would kill to know that?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Okay, so what does this mean for us?”

“It means you have to develop your abilities, and fast. Especially your vision. Or else we’ll be running around picking fights with random mailmen and lawyers and skateboarders who turn out not to be yaoguai.”

“Oh my god. That’s what happened the first day we met, wasn’t it? You weren’t being mugged. You just got aggro with a bunch of strangers thinking they were demons in disguise.”

“Yes, and I could have killed them by accident. We need another training date. Soon.”

“I’m busy this weekend.”

Quentin shook his head like he couldn’t hear me. “You’re busy?”