Downpour by Kat Richardson Page B

chest and abdomen protesting as if I’d been the one to haul the car out of the lake myself and my stomach rumbling hunger even louder.
    Clouds had rolled in once again while I slept, and getting food meant a trip in the downpour. It was cold rain that sliced in on the wind through the Strait of Juan de Fuca like a million tiny daggers. By the time I was back in my room after dinner and some quick shopping, I was feeling as miserable as Chaos had looked coming out of the lake. The already-wet velvet scarf had been useless, and even the baseball cap I’d snatched out of the Rover had only slowed the penetration of water to my head. I took a hot shower and lurked under the duvet to save my toes from predation by ferret while I made another phone call to the Danzigers.
    Ben answered the phone. “Danzigers’ House of Paranormal Pancakes.” I could hear Brian chanting in the background, “Ghost, ghost, ghost! ”
    “What?”
    “Oh, hi, Harper. We’re having potato pancakes with dinner and the boy wants them ghost shaped. We’re having some trouble disambiguating latkes from flapjacks.”
    It took me a second to puzzle out “disambiguate” before I could reply. “At least you aren’t trying to explain the difference between blintzes and the Blitz.”
    “Oh God, I fear the cream-cheese-filled barrage balloons. . . .”
    I laughed. “So, did Mara ask you about monsters?”
    “Oh, your elemental white apes? Yeah, but I haven’t had a lot of luck narrowing that down. Technically a lot of things fall into the ‘elemental’ category, from brownies to the yan-gant-y-tan.”
    “A what?”
    “It’s a Breton creature of evil omen—it has candles instead of fingers. Your monsters didn’t have waxy hands, did they?”
    “No, they had black claws. But I have another clue. I met another . . . thing that seems to be related, same kind of coloring and horns, but no fur. It’s an intelligent monster, essentially human in shape and size, male, but it can project a human form over its own. This one looks Asian when he’s pretending to be human, has red hair on his head, and he called the other ones—the smaller, dumber ones—‘gwhy’ or a word that sounds like that. Any bells?”
    “Gwhy . . .” he repeated. I could imagine him staring at the kitchen ceiling and thinking, going through his mental catalog of monsters until he asked, “Could that word be . . . guai?” His tone had the same odd rise that Jin’s had had.
    “Yes! That’s what he called them.”
    Ben paused. “Ah. That’s Chinese. I’m not so good with Chinese—I don’t read either of the text forms, so what I know comes from translations and broad-stroke references. And the Chinese myths got around along with the rest of Chinese influence and conquest. For instance, a lot of Korean and Japanese demonology is based on the Chinese legends and myths that came with Buddhism—though of course it’s impolitic to say that in some company. They have a bunch of demons and ghosts in common but for the name-change, such as the kitsune, the kumiho, and the huli-jing, which are all the same shape-shifting fox-demon, essentially. The three mythologies get tumbled together a lot, and it’s sometimes kind of hard to pick out which version is which.”
    “Hey, Ben,” I suggested, “could we just go back to ‘guai’ ? What’s that? Because that seems to be what I saw, if Jin was speaking truthfully.”
    “A djinn?”
    “No. The articulate, manipulative one calls himself ‘Jin.’ He’s also vain and kind of greedy.”
    “Oh . . . Interesting . . . I think that’s the word for ‘effort’ or maybe for ‘gold’. . . . I should learn some Chinese. . . .”
    “Getting off track here, Ben.”
    “Oh. Sorry. Chinese is tough. It’s contextual and tonal and it’s easy to mistake one word for another—it’s a great language for puns and jokes and embarrassment—but in this case, I’d think he meant it as a bit of an insult. See, the word I think