The thing before me is Méi’zi. It looks like Méi’zi, but it also doesn’t—because my little sister’s flesh is peeling from her face, her eyes are replaced by dark, bleeding hollows, and her lips are gashed. She’s shivering in her favorite nightgown, the plain cloth one I clumsily sewed as a birthday present for her. I recall each stitch of plum blossom, pinks and fuchsias and the green of leaves.
My mind blanks. It’s not her—itcan’tbe her, my little sister, whom I left safe and sound in our village back home. But as she steps toward me, I see that she’s clutching the blade I gave her, Shield, to her chest.
Her gaping hole of a chest, where her heart and lungs and organs should be.
“Jie’jie.”Her voice is a rattle that somehow reaches me through the roar of rain.“You…left me….”
I bite down on the scream welling up in my throat as my pendant heats again. I grasp at it as if it is a lifeline. My fingers shake so hard I can barely read its words:
Painted skin.
I’ve read about these creatures. A huà’pí, a painted skin, is a shapeshifting monster that appears in the form of its victim’s nightmares. It takes your deepest, darkest fears and turns them corporeal. Unable to stand sunlight, they lurk in the mountains in the mortal realms, hiding in caverns or the thickest forests.
“Help me, jie’jie,”the shape of my little sister begs me, wheezing. She staggers forward, and in spite of all logic, I nearly take a step to catch her.
There’s a searing heat against my skin, and I jerk back instinctively.
My jade pendant glows like coal with a command so unlike the gentle, guiding messages it has given me throughout my life:
Destroy it.
The jarring message cuts through the fog of my mind and emotions. I swap Heart for Striker and widen my stance, planting my feet in the mud and grass. The creature stalking toward me in the rain is not my sister. My sister is safe, in Xi’lín, where I have poured my blood and spirit energy into the strongest wards I’m capable of creating to protect her.
I raise Striker as another streak of lightning zigzags across the sky, and that’s when I seeheragain: the illusion of my father’s murderer that always finds me in my moments of fear. She’s just a blur in the rain, a figment of my imagination, yet as always, my mind fills in the details: the red of her lips, of her eyes, of the garnet at her throat and her long flowing dress and billowing sleeves, the utter perfection of a timeless face worn by a Higher One. Reminding me that, after all this time, I am still not good enough, not strong enough, not powerful enough.
The illusion’s gone in a blink, but the moment of distraction costs me.
The painted skin slams into me. The world tilts off balance as I’m thrown to the ground. This time, when I look up, Méi’zi’s face is full and healed, her brown eyes wide, her pretty cherry lips widen in a horrific, drooling grin as she claws at me.
“Jie’jie,”she shrieks, and her voice turns guttural, like something else is speaking through her.“Jie’jie, you left me…so let me eat your flesh!”
This close, I smell the decay of the creature’s breath, the stench oozing from its pores. I’ve read that painted skins are so named because they collect the skins and body parts of their victims and wear them until they rot off.
I lash out with Striker. The creature screams, Méi’zi’s face contorting, as my blade splits its forehead and eyes, where I’ve read such creatures’ cores rest. I grit my teeth against the image of my crescent blade plunged into my own sister’s face, reminding myself that this isn’t Méi’zi but a monster of nightmares.
Still, I hesitate for a heartbeat.
The monster wrenches away from my blade and leaps back, snarling. Its form ripples, dividing into two distinct silhouettes. When I blink again, it’s Ma who’s gazing back at me. She’s lying on the forest floor, and bent over her…bent over her…is…
The Higher One lifts her head, her face as lovely as the day I saw it nine years ago. Unlike in all my visions, I can see her clearly, her teeth bloodstained as she smiles at me.
Terror turns my mind blank. A very distant corner of my mind whispers that this is my own fear turned against me bythis monster of nightmares, but I can’t think, and all I know is that it’s happening again, the event of nine years ago that I was powerless to stop, that took my parents from me and tore my life apart.
“Àn’ying!” my mother cries feebly. She reaches a hand toward me. “Àn’ying, help me….”
I’m shaking. My blades feel like foreign objects in my palms. “Ma,” I sob, but I can’t move. My limbs are frozen, my feet rooted to the ground, ice in my veins.
The Higher One lifts my mother’s face to her lips, and that’s what finally breaks me.
I’m screaming as I charge, and as I raise my blades and fall upon the Higher One, she looks up at me in a flash of alarm. I plunge my blade into her face, and this time, I do it with all the pent-up fury of nine years. I feel the crunch of bone and sinew give way to fleshy pulp, hear the creature’s shriek as its form ripples and it shifts again. It’s now my father’s body that the Higher One holds: Bà, bleeding, barely breathing, his eyes faint as he gazes at me and mouths my name, my dagger driven through his throat.
I don’t remember what happens next. There’s screaming in the distance, and then I hear a voice filtering through, calling my name.
“…Àn’ying!Àn’ying!”
Pressure on my wrists. Hands at my shoulders. A face swims into my vision, beautiful and made even more so in the rain. Wide, dark eyes, long lashes, full lips.
“Àn’ying,” Yù’chén repeats. He’s holding my shoulders.
