Chapter 15
I’D BEEN CAUGHT up in events over my head quite a few times over the years. Just when I thought I was getting pretty good at treading water and keeping stable, a new wave came up to knock me over. A bigger one. The waves were getting very big these days, and I was less sure of my ability to stay afloat than ever before. There was too much to know. I’d never learn it all. I would never learn half of what I needed to know. Yet somehow I had to keep trying—and hope.
Of course they were gods. Anastasia had worshipped this woman since she was a child, eight hundred years ago. Because Xiwangmu had earned such worship.
Still, I shook my head. “No. I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff and met a lot of weird beings. But this is where I draw the line.”
Sun said, “Take everything else that you know is real—vampires and werewolves and ghosts are the least of it. Why not this, too?”
“But that would mean everything is real,” I said.
Sun raised an affirming brow.
I had always drawn lines. Before I became a werewolf, I had assumed—blithely, confidently—that I knew what was real and what wasn’t. The world was solid and logical. Then I’d been attacked by an oversized wolf late one night, and a lot of assumptions turned inside out. Werewolves were real, and I’d stepped through a certain kind of looking glass. Then I’d met vampires, were-jaguars, were-tigers, psychics, wizards, ghosts, djinn, fairies. With each encounter I erased the line and drew it a little further out. Like, maybe Bram Stoker’s Dracula had been based on a real-live—real-undead—vampire. Maybe a lot of those stories had their roots in reality. But that didn’t mean that some ultrapowerful guy named Zeus ever turned himself into a swan to try to pick up girls. It didn’t mean that when you prayed there was actually someone out there listening.
Did it?
“I don’t understand,” I said simply. Maybe it was don’t. More likely it was can’t. I was caught in a cosmic tsunami.
“It’s best if you don’t think about it too hard,” Sun said.
That was the problem—I didn’t trust what I couldn’t think about and pick apart. What was I supposed to do, knowing that the world was that big? How did you strip down and take a shower knowing that some omnipotent god somewhere might be watching? Answer: you lived very, very softly, to make sure no god took an interest in you. I thought about this, regarded the Monkey King and Queen Mother of the West, and realized I was pretty much fucked, wasn’t I?
Ben loomed protectively nearby. He put his arm across my shoulders, pulling me into the shelter of his body, kissed my head above my ear and stayed there a moment, his lips pressed against me, his breath stirring my hair. I closed my eyes and focused on that touch, because that was my answer—you clung to what you loved, and that kept you going.
“We need to discuss,” Xiwangmu said. She clapped twice and a pair of girls appeared from the shadows, dressed in elaborate silk gowns, their hair done up with pins and charms. They carried trays stacked with bowls and saucers and a steaming pot of what smelled like earthy, spicy tea. They spread a cloth on the floor and began arranging tea service for seven.
“Do we have time for this?” I said. “It must be getting close to dawn.”
“It’s an hour away,” Anastasia said.
I didn’t have a watch; our phones had gone back to dead, and we had no way of telling time. The night seemed to have gone on for days already. It had gone on forever. But clearly Anastasia knew exactly how close sunrise was. Not that she seemed worried about it—she’d gone back to her poised, superior self. She was also staying close to Xiwangmu, within reach of her throne, as if she planned on kneeling at the goddess’s feet at any moment. She and Grace both stayed close to her, like an honor guard.
“This is a war council,” Xiwangmu said. “Now, sit.”
The serving girls had vanished when I wasn’t looking. Xiwangmu left her throne to take her place in the circle, and Anastasia and Grace sat on either side of her. The nine-tailed fox crept out from under the table and pressed itself to its mistress’s side, and she clicked at it and scratched its ears. I sat across from her, flanked by my own escort of Cormac and Ben. Ben was looking growly; Cormac looked like he wanted to take notes. He still had a bruised eye and cuts from his fight with Roman, but he didn’t seem to mind. The injuries were fading, as if just being here had a healing influence. Maybe it did.
Sun Wukong dropped his staff, which vanished. I was looking right at it and it vanished. He let go, it should have fallen to the floor, but it never did. He flopped cross-legged in the spot between Grace and Cormac, the two magicians. I kept staring.
“What?” he said.
“Where’d it go?”
He tilted his head and smirked, clearly admonishing me for asking such a silly question.
Xiwangmu raised an apple-size bowl of tea and sipped. The rest of us followed suit. I didn’t know what I expected the tea to taste like—something magical and divine, probably. Exotic and full of sparks and fireworks. A tea that would fill me with enlightenment and reveal the answers to all my abstract questions.
It was just green tea, maybe with a hint of mint. It tasted very good, maybe the best green tea I’d ever had—perfect leaves harvested at the perfect time and brewed perfectly in exactly the right temperature water. But I couldn’t sense anything magic in it. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Xiwangmu said, “You seem disappointed.”
“What? Oh, no, it’s fine. It’s really good. It’s just I wondered if maybe you’d spike
