Chapter Text
Xie Yun was having a pretty good week right up until the array exploded.
The array was not supposed to explode, he’s pretty sure. Less than thirty seconds prior he’d been putting the finishing touches on the last few characters at the outer edge, already reveling in a great wash of pride at having accomplished the thing. It was over six feet across, the (expensive) (custom-ordered) (handmade) mulberry paper spread out over almost his entire living room floor and covered with intricate characters, some of it in seal script and some of it—as far as his research had concluded—decorative nonsense.
(Xie Yun specializes in recreating ancient Chinese arrays, talismans, official seals, tomb engravings… Most historical Chinese art and writing, honestly. He’d thought about doing a deep dive in grad school, getting an actual masters degree and maybe some publications out of it, but then he’d had Yet Another Fucking Flare right before graduating with his dual Art History and Chinese Language BA, and decided that grad school was probably not the place to deal with a constantly recurring chronic illness that tended to be specifically triggered by stress. Five years later he was still the foremost authority on Chinese arrays in the US, and the essays he published on his personal website were being referenced by actual grad students, so he figured it worked out.
Anyway. The point is that nothing in the texts he was working from indicated that the array was supposed to explode.)
Explode is maybe a strong word, since there hadn’t been an actual sound associated with it, and the Xie Yun of now (post-explosion) is pretty sure all his limbs are in working order. Still, though: He’d connected the last radical and BOOM! Blinding red light, a distinct smell of burning, and a wave of something that has him lying flat on his back, blinking up at his ceiling.
...A distinct smell of burning?
Shit shit shit shit shit. Xie Yun shoves himself up to his elbows, trying to remember if the fire extinguisher in the kitchen has expired or not—if it is expired, he can dump baking soda on the fire, right? Does he have baking soda? He cannot afford to deal with water damage, this is a rental—and discovers, to his relief, that the burning smell is not coming from any actual fire, and his apartment remains intact.
It’s much less of a relief to realize the burning smell is coming from the glowing characters of the array itself, and that underneath the glowing characters, the (expensive) (custom-ordered) (handmade) mulberry paper and the floor beneath it both seem to have disappeared. In their place is a bottomless pit, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Xie Yun doesn’t have a bottomless pit below his apartment. Mrs. Garcia-Diaz lives below him. She doesn’t live in a bottomless pit! She lives in a perfectly normal apartment!
The surface of the bottomless pit shimmers, like ripples in water, and a form emerges from the center of the ripples, painted entirely in the glowing red of the array itself.
Sure, Xie Yun thinks to himself as he watches it emerge like something out of a horror movie, horns and wings and a mostly-human glowing-red shape oozing up from the bottomless pit in his apartment that used to be a very normal floor. Sure, this might as well happen. His illness (illnesses, multiple, probably) hasn’t manifested hallucinations before, but there’s always room for a new symptom! The more the merrier!
The form—the person? The hallucination?—continues its ascent, a red silhouette that makes his eyes hurt when he looks at it directly. The part of his brain always interested in learning about the world notes the shapes, the sharp edges at the shoulders that might be armor or might be a distinctly cut robe, the flare of a skirt that hits at about mid-thigh (assuming the form has thighs), the overall human appearance? Is it more or less reassuring that his glowing hallucination is person-shaped?
The silhouetted toes of the glowing hallucination shape emerge from the bottomless pit, and it starts to hover a few inches above the array, high ponytail and skirts blowing in an updraft that doesn’t touch Xie Yun’s skin at all. The whole array pulses with another one of those not-quite-explosions, knocking him flat on his back again and quite possibly burning his retinas. He should probably see an eye doctor about it, huh? Just what he needs: another fucking specialist to pay.
Xie Yun stays on the floor for a little while, having previously ascertained that his apartment is not on fire. If he gets up he has to deal with the fact that he’s having hallucinations now, and he’d prefer not to be having hallucinations or dealing with said hallucinations. Also, regardless of the hallucination situation, he’s pretty sure the array is completely ruined, and he extra doesn’t want to have to face the idea of re-buying the (expensive) (custom-ordered) (handmade) mulberry paper and re-sketching the whole thing in the lightest of pencil lines before hand-grinding expensive ink and repainting it. He already aches from the work he put into this one. He’s gonna need a week of his physical therapy exercises before he can try again. There goes his deadline for this project!
“Hey. Human. Are you dead?”
The voice is feminine, blunt, and carries an undercurrent of the same level of power that knocked him on his ass twice. It’s also speaking in an archaic form of Chinese that Xie Yun only recognizes because he’s a language nerd along with being a nerd about everything else, and to that end he’s part of an online discussion group of academics focused on recreating the dialect. The voice isn’t speaking like a scholar, though. It’s speaking like this archaic Chinese is its native language.
Xie Yun is pretty sure he couldn’t actually hallucinate a voice speaking to him in archaic Chinese using phrasing so casual as to be insulting. He shoves himself up to his elbows again, because if he’s not hallucinating—
He makes direct eye contact with the glowing red gaze of the figure in the middle of his ruined array. They’re no longer a silhouette, which is good.
Unfortunately, not being a silhouette doesn’t make them make any more sense, since now he can confirm that, while they (she? Xie Yun can see the curves of breasts and hips, but he doesn’t want to make any assumptions about gender) are vaguely human-shaped, they also definitely have horns and wings, red at the base shading out to black at the tips. They have red-tipped pointed ears, visible talons at the ends of their fingers, and—oh yeah—the glowing red eyes to tie it all together.
The wings alone are so distracting it takes a moment for Xie Yun to realize the figure is dressed like something out of an extremely high-budget c-drama, embroidered robes in leather and silk fastened with a sturdy belt. (He has so many questions about those robes he wants to ask immediately—how old are they? How are they so well-preserved?), but then he spots the hilt of a sword peeking out over one shoulder and immediately forgets all his questions about the robes in favor of wanting to ask about the sword. (He is also a blacksmithing nerd. Really, it’s easier to list the things he isn’t nerdy about.)
“What are you staring at?” the being says in that archaic Chinese, arms crossed in front of their chest. It strikes Xie Yun suddenly that, in addition to being a fascinating mystery, they are extremely fucking attractive, a compact, athletic frame and high cheekbones and an unmistakable aura of power that has the horny part of Xie Yun’s brain sitting up and paying very close attention. He is but a simple bisexual and is attracted to people who look like they could kick his ass without trying, sue him.
“Your robes are very beautifully made,” Xie Yun says honestly, doing his best to speak the same dialect and choosing not to mention any of the horny thoughts he’s currently having.
The being gives him a withering look. “Did you summon me to compliment my robes?”
Xie Yun blinks. “No?” he offers, feeling very wrong-footed, which is not a way he’s used to feeling.
The being straightens their shoulders and nods. “Who do you want me to kill, then?”
Okay, that is a pretty significant escalation. “No one?” Xie Yun tries.
The being frowns at him. “Then what did you summon me for?”
Xie Yun decides that having this conversation while lying propped on his elbows on the floor is undignified, and he pushes up to sitting. “Pardon me, honored guest, but I didn’t summon you.”
The being raises their eyebrows. Their eyes don’t have whites or pupils, but Xie Yun can still track them looking significantly at the array and then back at him. Okay, point.
“I didn’t intend to summon you,” Xie Yun amends.
The red eyes go to the array again, and then down toward their own body, and then back to Xie Yun. “You created the array to call me,” they point out, tapping the toes of one boot against the visibly scorched paper. Impatience rolls off them in waves. He expects to see the air shimmering with it.
“In my defense, honored—” Okay, Xie Yun cannot continue like this, it’s untenable. “May I ask the name of my honored guest, and if I should refer to them with gongzi or guniang?”
The being throws their taloned hands in the air. “You don’t even know who you summoned?!”
“I thought I was creating an art commission,” Xie Yun explains, gesturing to the binders of notes sprawled out behind him. “I really didn’t know it was going to actually summon anyone, or I would have been prepared to greet you properly.” He’d have… made tea. Roasted a duck. Something like that. He wraps one hand around his opposite fist and offers the best bow he can manage from his seat on the floor, thanking his wushu shifu silently in his head for teaching him how to do it properly. “This one is Xie Yun.” Demons probably know what human genders are, but just in case, he adds, “I’m a man.”
The being huffs irritably and returns the bow with immense sarcasm. “Zhou Fei; First Daughter of the Ruling House of Hells’ Ximo River; Heir to the Blade of the South.” There’s a pause, where they seem to be reviewing this statement. “Female.”
“Zhou-guniang,” Xie Yun says with another bow. “What can I do for you?”
Zhou Fei; First Daughter of the Ruling House of Hells’ Ximo River; Heir to the Blade of the South—apparently a literal actual demon now standing in his apartment—crosses her arms in front of her chest again. “You don’t have any enemies you need destroyed?”
Xie Yun thinks vaguely about the American healthcare system, but discards that idea since one person definitely can’t stab it into a better form. (He’s not above admitting that he also spends a moment thinking about having several horrible politicians removed from office.) “Unfortunately, no,” he admits when he’s done enjoying his impractical assassination fantasies. “I don’t think you can kill capitalism.”
“I could try,” Zhou Fei mutters, apparently to herself. Does she know what capitalism is? Unclear. Something occurs to her, and she gives him a suspicious look, wings drawn in tight to her back. “Am I here because you want to fuck me?”
Xie Yun chokes on his own spit in surprise. “No,” he splutters, “no, I—Zhou-guniang, no.”
Her eyes narrow. “They tell me it’s common for mortals to summon demons for sexual favors.”
“I didn’t intend to summon you in the first place,” Xie Yun points out desperately. “And if I did, it wouldn’t be for that.”
She arches an eyebrow. “What would it be for?”
Company? Xie Yun’s brain offers, which—rude. Sure, his closest friends are his rich foster brother and a troupe of traveling theater lesbians, neither of whom are around right now, but that doesn’t mean he’s lonely. He has Mrs. Garcia-Diaz! And a crow he feeds peanuts through his window every morning! He really thinks he’s making progress befriending that crow.
“Historical inquiries,” he says smoothly, ignoring the spinning wheels of his brain to focus on the conversation.
She rolls her eyes, which he can tell somehow even though they glow red all the way through. “Do you have any historical inquiries for me?”
Xie Yun has forgotten every single question he has ever had about history. “Ah. No?”
Zhou Fei’s wings rustle irritably, and Xie Yun actually has a lot of questions about how her robes are tailored to work for her wings, and whether she can fly, and what do her wings feel like, but he smashes down all of them—if he asks leading questions about her wings, she’ll definitely think he’s asking because he wants to fuck her, and he’s trying to get out of this un-stabbed. He can see the sword she has strapped to her back, and he doesn’t want to give her an excuse to use it.
(Xie Yun has discovered exactly how much of a monsterfucker he truly is in the last ten minutes, because he is, in fact, extremely into being glared at by a demon woman with horns and wings and talons and glowing red eyes, but a. he knows his own tastes otherwise, and he’d really rather be the fuck-ee in this case, and b. he likes to get to know people a little before he gets into bed with them. Call him a romantic! You’d be right.)
“I’m really very sorry to have disturbed you,” he says apologetically. “You’re not obligated to stay on my account.”
“I am,” she says after a moment where she very clearly tries to count the number of functioning brain cells in his head. Xie Yun hums a question, and she clarifies, “Obligated to stay. On your account.” When he still doesn’t get it, she huffs and snaps, “You have to send me home.”
That does make sense. There’s just one problem. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“How can you not know how to send me home?” Zhou Fei stalks forward with each step, looming over him with flared wings. Oh, great, now he’s scared and horny, exactly what this situation needs.
“Zhou-guniang—First Daughter—Hell Princess, please!” Xie Yun scoots backward with one hand on the floor, the other held up in front of him protectively. “I really didn’t mean to summon you! I didn’t know any of this was going to work!”
“Don’t lie to me!” she yells, power washing off of her like static electricity as she yanks her sword free from its sheath and points it at him. (Oh, it’s a saber, how interesting!) “You think you can keep me here in your little circle—”
Zhou Fei’s boot hits the wood floor, and her words cut off at the impact. She looks down, where she’s clearly outside the array, and all the hellish power she’d gathered disappears. She closes her wings and gives him a thoughtful look, the tip of her blade tucked steadily under his chin. (Oh, great, he’s into knifeplay? Xie Yun is tired of learning things about himself.)
“I’m not in the array,” she says without moving her sword.
“You are not,” Xie Yun confirms, doing his best not to look turned on by this course of events.
“You didn’t bother to make the array able to contain me,” she continues, giving him a considering look.
“Sure didn’t,” Xie Yun agrees. If he swallows he can feel cold steel barely brush his skin. He’s trying not to swallow too much.
“Hm.” Zhou Fei glares at him for a moment longer. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” Xie Yun can’t help but argue. “I’m very competent in many aspects of my life, just not this one.”
Zhou Fei does not look like she agrees with this assessment, but she does step back and sheathe her sword again. “You really didn’t mean to summon me.”
Xie Yun shakes his head, touching his fingers to his throat to check for blood and thankfully finding none.
“And you don’t know how to send me home.”
“If I did, I would,” he says honestly. “I’m not the kind of person to trap someone, Zhou-guniang.”
She snorts and yanks him to his feet with a casual strength that makes his head spin, which is why it takes him a moment to realize that Zhou Fei, for all her terrifying aura of power, is a full head shorter than him (not counting the horns). He could rest his chin on the top of her head, assuming he didn’t want to get stabbed to death for doing it. She’s tiny. It’s delightful. Xie Yun wants to kiss the tips of her horns just because they’re so accessible, and reins himself in bodily.
“Do you have any wine?” she asks with zero preamble. “I need a drink.”
“Of course, Zhao-gunaing,” Xie Yun says, dragging himself away from thoughts of horn-kissing, and he heads for the kitchen.
⯏⯏⯏
Xie Yun does actually pride himself on being a good host (when he’s had a chance to prepare) in spite of his general lack of visitors, so he has several alcoholic options available depending on the tastes of his rare guests. Zhou Fei scans the labels when he opens the cupboards and points at the baijiu, then eschews a cup to drink directly from the bottle. It’s rude. It’s also attractive.
This might become a problem.
“So if you weren’t trying to summon me with that—” Zhou Fei indicates the array with a flick of a wing “—what were you trying to do?”
“Complete an art commission,” Xie Yun says for the second time, getting down a bottle of nice sake that his foster brother Zizhen bought him, because he also deserves a drink for his agonies. (He pours it into a glass, though.) He wanders back to the living room as he sips and drops into a crouch to examine what’s left of the paper. Maybe some of it’s salvageable?
The paper crumbles into dust as he tries to lift a corner, the places that used to be the array burned all the way through and the rest of it clearly no longer maintaining any kind of structure. Xie Yun sighs, accidentally kicks up some of the mulberry dust, and escapes the mess with a cough. Nope. Not salvageable at all. Great.
“Someone was paying you to make that?” Zhou Fei asks, peering over his shoulder at the mess.
“Quite a bit,” Xie Yun says glumly. At least whatever power burned the characters on the paper didn’t burn the floor. Small favors. “If you’ll excuse me, Zhou-guniang, I have to clean this up.”
“Mmm,” she agrees, taking a swig of baijiu and sauntering away to leave him to it, which is… Okay, this isn’t her fault, either, but it would be nice to get some sympathy, maybe? He drinks some more sake about it, then goes to find his vacuum.
Zhou Fei stands in the door to his kitchen and watches him vacuum, watches him put the vacuum away, and watches him shift his futon and coffee table back into position. When he’s done she plops down onto the futon and takes another long swig, her throat working as she swallows. Something about her… shrinks slightly, and it takes him a moment to figure out that it was literal—her wings are a much more reasonable size, and her horns aren’t quite so intimidating.
“So,” she says, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and looking at him with eyes that are basically human except for their mahogany-red color. “How exactly did I end up stuck with you?”
Xie Yun sighs and gathers up his various binders and notebooks, stacking them on the table before joining her in somewhat-exhausted sitting. “I’m hoping you can help me figure that out,” he says, pulling out the final design for the array and spreading it on top of everything else. “Do you know how this works?”
Zhou Fei shrugs, one wing flicking with the movement. “Human creates the right array, demon gets summoned, human has a demand, the demon does it, the demon leaves,” she recites blandly. Her eyes narrow, and she taps the bottle against her lower lip consideringly. “Sometimes the human does the array wrong and the demon kills them, and then leaves.”
Xie Yun is about to ask a very foolish question. He can see exactly how foolish it is, but is incapable of stopping himself from asking it. “If you killed me, would you be able to leave?”
“No,” Zhou Fei says in tones of complaint, making a very annoyed face. “No, you got the array wrong, but not wrong like that.” She raises a hand and gestures, a heat-shimmer in the air solidifying into a glowing red line. One end of it loops around her wrist, the other around his. “If I kill you, I die,” she says bluntly. “If you kill me, you die.”
Xie Yun’s shoulders drop as he exhales. “I hope it’s not rude to tell you that’s quite a relief for me, Zhou-guniang.”
“Not like you’d be worth the effort,” she mutters to herself. “No challenge at all.” She shakes her hand and the red line disappears. “And stop calling me that.”
“Zhou-guniang?” Xie Yun clarifies, glass frozen halfway to his mouth.
Zhou Fei grimaces and nods. “No one calls me that. It sounds like you’re talking to someone else.”
Well, so much for being respectful. “What should I call you then?”
She narrows her eyes at him thoughtfully. “Everyone calls me A’Fei.”
Oh, so they’re jumping directly to familiar names! That’s fine! Xie Yun can handle that. “A’Fei?” he tries, just to see how it sounds. She nods, and he lets the tones settle into his mind, which suddenly serves up something he’d noticed vaguely but hadn’t had the mental power to care about: Zhou Fei—A’Fei—is no longer speaking that archaic dialect. She sounds like—like an international student, like the language he grew up speaking. “Wait, you can speak modern Mandarin?”
A’Fei raises her eyebrows, giving him a flat look all through her next swig of baijiu that makes him cringe internally. “Obviously,” she says witheringly when she’s done. “What language do you think the dead speak?”
“I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about speaking to the dead before now,” Xie Yun says honestly, “but you were speaking—” ugh, he doesn’t even know what the actual name of it is “—differently when you first arrived.”
“Oh.” A’Fei flicks a hand dismissively. “That’s traditional.” Xie Yun hums in what he hopes is a leading way, and she does him the favor of clarifying, “Apparently humans get disappointed if demons show up talking normally. It’s not…” She curls her lip in disgust. “Impressive enough.”
“I would have found it impressive regardless of language,” Xie Yun reassures her. “It was a very good entrance. Extremely intimidating; no notes.”
The corner of her mouth maybe, maybe ticks up a tiny amount, which she promptly smashes under another scowl. “This was the array you used?” She leans forward to scrutinize it, which gives her wings room to stretch a little behind her. Xie Yun has to fight with himself not to stare, but in his defense: Wings.
“Yes,” he says, when he eventually manages to refocus. “The client was very specific about it. It took me almost a month to research all the details and experiment with the right order of brush strokes.”
A’Fei grunts. “Why does he want it?”
Xie Yun doesn’t usually bother asking that, both for his array re-creations and for his other commissioned work. He doesn’t really care; what matters is that the client wants to give him money for it. He doesn’t think A’Fei is going to like that answer, though, so he racks his brain for a better explanation. “I think he said he wanted it to go on the wall of his office?”
She gives him a disbelieving look. “You treat this like decoration?”
Xie Yun shrugs. “I have very nice calligraphy,” he says unrepentantly. She looks unimpressed, and he feels compelled to add, “No one actually uses these anymore. A lot of my research is trying to figure out what they were for, and if any of the symbols can be translated. It’s like—like having an antique sword on your wall.”
A’Fei considers this. “I think if you have a sword on your wall you should be able to use it.”
Xie Yun glances at the handle of her saber before he can stop himself. “That’s fair.” Some antique swords are absolutely still usable. Really, if you get down to it, all antique swords are usable, it’s just a question of how long you can use them before they become entirely unusable again. He opens his mouth to say as much and forcibly reins himself in. No, they can’t keep getting off topic like this. “Can you tell me what I did wrong with this?” He gestures at the diagram.
“What, so you can summon another demon and actually bind them in the circle this time?” A’Fei asks, which is valid.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Xie Yun says, trying to project absolute honesty. “But if you know what I need to do to the array to send you home, we could start there.”
A’Fei grunts at him and flops back against the couch cushions, taking the paper with her. Her bad mood is not improved by studying it; instead she scowls even harder as she rotates it around in a circle, mouthing to herself as she goes.
“Well, this is how you got me,” she says when she’s done, tapping a large section with a very elaborate seal design that Xie Yun had thought purely decorative. Xie Yun hums a question, and she very kindly adds, “It’s my name in demonic seal script.”
“There’s a demonic seal script?” is the first thing out of Xie Yun’s mouth, five thousand fresh questions crowding the back of his throat. Is it its own language? Is it a calligraphy style? Is it more complicated, or just different? Regular seal script is complicated enough; Xie Yun tries to imagine a worse seal script and physically feels his translation rates rise to compensate for it.
A’Fei ignores this question, which Xie Yun thinks is rude but probably fair. “This is summoning,” she continues, pointing to the repeated characters around the outside of the array. “This is the binding part, and I think this is the part that’s supposed to keep me inside the array, but it’s… wrong.”
“Didn’t know it was going to work,” Xie Yun reminds her.
“And this is…” A’Fei squints at the characters, cocking her head. “Ah, the standard release… What’s the—the legal term? If you do this, then this happens?”
“A clause?” Xie Yun offers after a moment in which every word that ever existed abandoned him.
A’Fei grunts in acknowledgment. “This is the part that says if I do you a big enough service, the conditions of the summoning are met and I can go home.”
Well, Xie Yun knows much more about this summoning than he had earlier today, and he has several promising avenues of research to pursue. He’s still missing the answer to a big question, though: “So how do I send you home without having to do the service part?”
A’Fei grumbles something and tosses the diagram in his direction so her hands are free to drink directly from her bottle of baijiu. Xie Yun carefully sets it aside and, as though she hadn’t pointedly ignored him, asks, “My apologies, Hell Princess, I didn’t hear that.”
“I don’t know,” A’Fei says at an actually audible volume this time.
Great, that makes two of them. “But you can understand this?” Xie Yun asks, tapping the paper diagram. A’Fei nods after a moment, so he adds, “So you can help me reverse-engineer it?”
A’Fei looks at the ceiling, and then at the wall, and then at the floor. “No,” she says in a tiny, sulky voice. It takes a moment for her meaning to penetrate Xie Yun’s brain, since he’s already thinking about the process of reversing all the meanings of the characters—some of them have actual translations, so he has a starting point there, but the others… Yikes—and trips over his own thought process like a fold in the rug.
“No? What do you mean, no?”
A’Fei continues her scrutiny of every part of her apartment. “I mean no like no.”
This does not make things any clearer. “No, as in you don’t understand this? Or no as in you can’t help me reverse-engineer it?”
A muscle in A’Fei’s jaw jumps twice, not that he’s watching it extremely closely or anything. “No,” she repeats with great irritation, “to both.”
Xie Yun gapes at her. He can’t help it, especially since… “But you read the array?”
A’Fei closes her eyes for the space of one long, angry inhale before finally looking him in the face again. “I recognized parts of the array that I already knew,” she corrects him, biting out each word. “That doesn’t mean I read it.”
Xie Yun supposes that’s a fair point. “Would you be able to recognize other array sections, and tell me what they do?” he asks, trying to troubleshoot.
A’Fei does not look enthusiastic about this. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Xie Yun is starting to get a headache.
“I won’t know until I see them,” A’Fei grumbles to the wall, as though he’s the one being unreasonable and refusing to help with the present issue in favor of glaring at things.
“How do you not know this?” Xie Yun asks before he can stop himself. “You speak it, but you can’t read it? What do they teach you in demon school?”
A’Fei’s eyes flare, some of that red glow coming back. “Hey!” she protests, shoving his shoulder so hard it almost sends him sprawling off the couch. “This is human shit! We don’t take Advanced Demon-Summoning or whatever, because we don’t summon demons! I’ve never been summoned before, how am I supposed to know how it works?” She clamps her mouth shut immediately after saying that, the red in her eyes fading as she avoids eye contact. Is she… is she embarrassed? About what? Xie Yun runs back her words and tries not to grin when it sinks in.
“This is your first time being summoned, Hell Princess?” Oh, it’s a terrible idea to tease the demon with a sword sitting on his couch, but Xie Yun absolutely can’t resist.
“Demon summoning isn’t as common as it used to be,” A’Fei says with a snobby little ponytail toss that doesn’t quite distract from her flushed cheeks. “Most demons in my generation have never been summoned.” She looks really embarrassed about it, actually, and Xie Yun wonders if being summoned is like having sex—that is, it’s not actually a big deal whether it happens or not, but people make a big deal out of it anyway.
“Well, I’m sorry your first was a botched one,” he says honestly, choosing not to continue the teasing, just in case it is some kind of virgin thing. “Do you think you’d be able to tell a working array from… from a decorative one?”
A’Fei stops looking embarrassed and starts looking thoughtful. “I could test it,” she says after a moment, wiggling two fingers and making a little lick of red flame hover in the air, then eyes him sidelong. “How many arrays do you have ready to go?”
Xie Yun looks at his many, many notebooks and back at her. “A lot.”
A’Fei seems to notice the piles of research materials for the first time, and her eyebrows go up. “You did all this work and you really didn’t mean to summon me?”
“I really didn’t,” Xie Yun confirms. Six months of careful planning down the drain because apparently he has to worry about his historical research summoning a fucking demon. “You said something earlier about a demand as part of the summoning?”
“It’s the usual way it goes, and it’s in your array.” A”Fei waves a hand dismissively. “I’m pretty sure you’re the only person in history to summon a demon without a demand in mind.”
“Okay, but if I come up with a demand, or give you a—a task, and you fulfill it, you’ll be able to go home?” Xie Yun wants to be very sure he understands all the angles they might be able to work, because he doesn’t want to have to spend another six months researching an array he won’t even get paid for.
Okay, that’s a bit of a lie—Xie Yun will absolutely spend six months or longer researching arrays he won’t get paid for just for fun. It’s a different energy when you’re doing the research because you accidentally kidnapped someone and are keeping them from their home, though.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work.” A’Fei shrugs and takes another swig of baijiu. (She doesn’t seem even a little drunk. Maybe demons just drink alcohol like water.)
Hm. Hm. Xie Yun finishes the last of his sake and considers. “How large of a task does it have to be?”
A’Fei shrugs again. She’s very helpful that way.
“If I ask you to do something for me,” Xie Yun starts carefully, very aware of exactly how weird and gross this could get, “would you be willing to do it to see if that ends the binding and you can leave?”
“It’s worth a shot.” A’Fei sets the bottle aside and squares her shoulders before she meets his gaze. “What do you want?”
Xie Yun considers that. He’s actually pretty satisfied with his life, as much as he can be, so many of the things he wants are more abstract, world-changing things (an actual plan to tackle global warming, access to healthcare for everyone regardless of ability to pay, no more fucking racism). He’s figured out a way to make enough money to live on that can accommodate his occasional flares and allows him to afford the freelancer healthcare that covers his acupuncture and his meds, so he doesn’t really need money, even though he feels like maybe he should ask for the traditional ten million dollars. It’s not like having more money wouldn’t be helpful, but he doesn’t care that much about it for its own sake.
“How do you fulfill the requests?” he thinks to ask, suddenly remembering every folktale about djinn he’s ever read. “Is this a monkey’s paw situation?”
A’Fei squints at him. “I don’t know what that means. Don’t monkeys have hands?”
That is actually an excellent point. Why do they call it a monkey’s paw? Xie Yun has literally never thought about monkeys as having paws—they have thumbs! Those are obviously hands! “If I ask for something, are you going to make sure I get it in a way that carries some kind of ironic punishment?” he clarifies, refusing to be distracted by the vagaries of colloquial language. “Like, if I ask for a drink of water, are you going to flood my apartment so I drown?”
“Oh.” A’Fei grimaces. “No. That seems like a lot of extra work.” A pause. “Also, if you drowned, I’d die.”
Right. She can’t harm him. It’s a reassurance he can’t seem to make himself remember, what with the glares and the sword and the deeply intimidating presence she has even when she’s not actually trying to be scary.
“Okay.” Xie Yun considers every story about wish fulfillment he’s ever come into contact with. “So if I ask you for, say, ten million dollars, where does that money come from?”
A’Fei opens her mouth to say something dismissive, and then closes it before any sound comes out. Her brow furrows, and she glares at nothing for a long moment. “Huh.” She turns back to him, looking vaguely annoyed. “I don’t actually know. Do you want ten million dollars?”
Xie Yun doesn’t not want ten million dollars, but not if it gets transferred into his account due to a bank error and then gets repossessed the next day, or if it ends up in his account by nefarious means that get him arrested for wire fraud or something. He really wants to ask how she can somehow be so ignorant of this entire process, but it’s her first summoning, and also it’s not like he knows any better.
“Maybe we can start smaller?” he suggests. “What if I ask you for twenty dollars, and you do your best to grant it, and we see what happens?” Xie Yun may not have majored in science but he understands the basics of the scientific method, and right now they still need to gather data before they can do anything else.
A’Fei gives that some consideration. “Might as well,” she agrees with a shrug.
Great. A plan. Xie Yun extends his hand, palm-up. “Will you please give me twenty dollars?”
A’Fei’s eyes glow briefly, like someone flipped a power switch and the fuse immediately burnt out. “Nope,” she says, shaking her head. “I think you have to ask it more formally than that, it didn’t go anywhere.”
“How formal do I have to be?” Xie Yun asks, both bewildered and curious. A’Fei (somewhat predictably) shrugs in response, and he supposes that demon summoning seems to be all about the ritual. Might as well go all in.
“Zhou Fei; First Daughter of the Ruling House of Hells’ Ximo River; Heir to the Blade of the South,” Xie Yun says in the archaic form of Chinese they spoke earlier, as dramatically as he possibly can (and since he’s friends with a troupe of theater lesbians, that’s pretty damn dramatically). “I implore you to fulfill my desire for twenty American dollars.” (There is no word in archaic Chinese for “American,” nor one for “dollars,” so he says those in regular Mandarin.)
A’Fei’s eyes light up properly this time, the red glow unearthly and unsettling. Her horns visibly grow, as do her wings, and the aura of power hanging around her pulses against his skin like sitting in front of a cheap electric space heater. (As Xie Yun is usually cold, he finds this as appealing as he does intimidating.)
“The pact is set,” she says in a voice that echoes strangely, then flicks her fingertips through the air with a lick of red flame that materializes (hilariously) into a crisp twenty-dollar bill. The power and the glow both wink out immediately, and A’Fei’s horns and wings return to their previous dainty size. She blinks at him, then at the bill held between two of her fingers.
“This money is extremely ugly,” she comments, holding it out to him.
“You are not wrong,” Xie Yun agrees, taking the bill and examining it closely. It looks correct, and when he holds it up to the light he can see the watermarks and little security strip that mean it’s probably not counterfeit. “Do you have any idea where this came from?” It feels new. He doesn’t know if that’s better or worse than if she’d managed to summon an old ratty one.
A’Fei shakes her head, seeming just as interested in the question as he is. “It’s not mine, so I don't know.”
“Not yours?”
A’Fei nods and grabs a small dagger out of nowhere in a burst of flames. “This is mine,” she says, turning it so he can get a good look. His fingers itch to examine it more closely, because the workmanship looks amazing, but 1) it’s rude to grab things out of other people’s hands, and 2) it’s suicidal to grab weapons from people as well-armed and obviously deadly as A’Fei is.
“And where did you get it from?”
“It was in with the rest of my stuff,” she says, like it should be obvious.
“Which is where?” Xie Yun would be annoyed at how much coaxing it takes to wring explanations out of her, but he loves a mean woman and a challenge both.
A’Fei looks at him like he’s a particularly incoherent toddler. “Slightly outside of your dimension.”
Okay, Xie Yun is starting to get a little bit annoyed by this. “Forgive me, Hell Princess, but I spend all of my time within this dimension, and I had no idea leaving it was an option in anything other than extremely theoretical physics, so I hope you can understand why I’m a little surprised and confused to see you summon something out of the air.” Xie Yun does sleight-of-hand, so he knows how to fake pulling a coin out of thin air, but he also knows what it looks like to fake it, and A’Fei isn’t faking it—she’s not misdirecting his attention, she’s not palming anything. She’s actually pulling stuff out of nowhere, and apparently confirming the existence of other dimensions? Xie Yun seriously considers getting a headache.
“It’s not my fault you don’t know this stuff!” A’Fei says defensively, making the dagger disappear again. “I don’t know how to explain it in human words! I just do it.”
Xie Yun bites his lip on a rejoinder. They’re getting off track. “So this wasn’t in with your stuff?” he asks, waving the twenty.
“No.” She rolls her eyes. “Why would I need human money?”
Would that they were all free of their need for human money. “But it was from this dimension? Mine? The one we’re in?”
A’Fei nods.
“And you definitely can’t tell where it came from?”
A’Fei takes the twenty back from him and frowns at it intently. “It came from within a kilometer,” she says when she’s stopped frowning. “That’s all I can tell.”
Hm. Well, if she doesn’t actually know where it came from, Xie Yun is definitely not asking for ten million dollars. He doesn’t even want to ask for a hundred dollars. It might come out of someone’s wallet, or the cash register at a store and totally fuck up some poor cashier’s day. If he knew it was coming from a bank he’d be pretty comfortable with the ethics of that, but a bank probably doesn’t open a criminal investigation over a missing twenty. He doesn’t want to get arrested for secret, unintentional bank robbery!
Oh, also, there’s something else they need to test. Xie Yun holds out his hand for the twenty and A’Fei sets it politely in his palm. “Now that you’ve, uh, fulfilled my request… Can you leave?”
From the look on A’Fei’s face, she had forgotten this was the point of the exercise. She stands, shakes out her wings decisively, and skirts around the coffee table to stand in the slightly less open space that previously held the (now ruined) array. Power swells around her in an increasingly-familiar way, hot on his skin like sitting near a campfire, and her horns and wings expand to their original size. Glowing-eyed, terrifying, and incredibly attractive (Xie Yun has learned so much about himself today!), her wings flap once, right before she flashes entirely red and winks out of existence.
She winks back into existence approximately a half-second later and six centimeters to the left, only gone long enough for Xie Yun to be simultaneously excited and disappointed.
“I’m assuming that's a no?” he asks, just to confirm.
“The way is closed to me,” she says sulkily, tromping over to the futon and dropping onto it in a huff. That sounds like an overly fancy agreement, in Xie Yun's opinion.
“I'm sorry you're stuck with me,” he says truthfully. “I'll try to be a good host.”
“Whatever,” grumbles his new demonic roommate, swigging directly from her bottle of baijiu again.
Great. Cool. Promising start.
Xie Yun sighs and levers himself off the couch. Someone needs to make dinner, and it’s clearly not going to be her.