I sigh. “Just tell me what you want in exchange for your help.”
He tips his face to the moonlight. His eyes and lips are as red as his cloak. “All right.” Yù’chén exhales, and his throat moves as he swallows. “I want you to stop looking at me as if you’re afraid, or suspicious, or disgusted. As if you’re thinking of what I am instead of who I am.” His voice turns raw as he faces me. “I want you to look at me and seeme.Can you do that, Àn’ying?”
“I…” I want to sayYes, I can,anything to get him to take me to Méi’zi and get the infection out of her body as soon as possible.
But the truth is, I will never see him the way I see Hào’yáng, or Lì’líng or my other friends, or the rest of the candidates and immortals here. Yù’chén holds, within him, half of the type of being that has ravaged my realm and brought the Ten Hells upon my people. They have destroyed my family and my life.
And yet. He has defied my expectations in every way. Despite the front of cruelty he puts up, he has never hurt me, only helped me.
I try to think of the Yù’chén who showed me the midnight sea. Who taught me to walk on water and dance on waves beneath the moon.
So I swallow and give him what I can. Half of a promise: “I can try.”
21
A n ordinary candidate may have had trouble with the guards posted around our quarters, but Yù’chén makes it look nearly effortless. He wraps us in a charm of his dark magic, and I hold Shadow tightly as we make for the moongates. None of the guards even blink as we pass by.
I loose a breath only when we’re deep enough into the Celestial Gardens for the patrols to have thinned out. “Nowwill you tell me what your grand plan is?” I hiss. He’s been irritably elusive.
I make out the flash of his red cloak in the night. “Patience, little scorpion.”
At the sound of rushing water, I realize we’re making for the waterfall at the edge of the Celestial Gardens again. “Are you going to open another gate in the ward?” He’s silent. “Because if you are, I need you to close it as soon as we’re out, then open it for us when we’re back.” More silence. “Yù’chén, answer me—”
“Do you know how much effort it takes to create a gate in the immortals’ wards?” he replies.
“Then how do you plan to help my sister?”
We’ve reached the stream. Just beyond the willows, the wards shimmer into the night, iridescent, powerful, and impenetrable. Yù’chén turns and holds his hand out to me.
I don’t take it. “Tell me what you plan to do, Yù’chén.”
He hesitates, and then sighs. “I closed the gate, Àn’ying, but…I can reopen it.”
Ice cracks through my veins. “You just said you couldn’t create another gate.”
“Not create. Reopen,” he says, and walks to the edge of the wards. By the waterfall, growing in the grass, is the scorpion lily I saw last time. Yù’chén kneels and touches a hand to it…and it begins to glow. “Dark magic leaves signs behind. Unnatural growths of flowers, birds and animals that don’t belong, strangely shaped terrain.” His voice is amplified, beautiful, and his eyes flash red as he turns to look at me. Behind him, the scorpion lilies are blooming in the glimmering ward, once again forming the shape of an archway. The gate—the one he told me he closed.
The one that might have let in whatever demonic beast attacked me and killed the other two candidates.
“Creating a gate and reopening a gate are two different things. In this case, I left behind a door that I could open and close at will.” The scorpion lilies unfurl their long red petals, and the archway through the wards gleams, growing more and more transparent by the second.
But my teeth are chattering, and I’m backing away from him. “You told me you closed the gate last time.”
“Idid—”
“But it’s still there!” My voice rises in panic. “Could something have gotten through? Two candidates havedied,Yù’chén—I was almost killed by the same beast that murdered them—”
“You were attacked?” Yù’chén’s expression is tight, inscrutable, but he suddenly moves toward me. I take the equivalent steps back and he stops himself, though his eyes dart over my face, my chin, my shoulders, my body, as though looking for my wounds.
“By a creature of the Kingdom of Night,” I confirm. His gaze follows my hand as I instinctively touch my side, where my bandages cover the claw marks. “I saw it.”
“Whatever killed those candidates didn’t come through my gate, Àn’ying. This I know.”
The ice has spread to my heart, freezing my limbs, making my teeth chatter. “But you kept it,” I whisper. “You lied to me.”
He cuts me a cold look. “Shall I destroy my gate, then? I have no problem returning to my chambers and sleeping well tonight, Àn’ying. It isn’tmysister dying one realm away.”
I flinch.
