“This is all my fault.” Zhong sank to her knees in the grass. “The moment I learned that the bridge spirit was strong enough to steal mortal souls into the Spirit Realm, I should have called Master Bo and turned the matter over to an experienced shaman warrior. I just…”

“You didn’t want to give up. You wanted to prove yourself,” I said, still glaring after Yeng.

Zhong nodded. “I can’t stand the thought of not being a shaman warrior. I don’t want to be anything other than”—she waved a hand at herself: the shaman sword, the bottomless backpack with all her supplies, the buttons like badges of honor on her jacket—“this.”

I understood. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway if she had called her mentor. Even a shaman master wouldn’t have been enough to face the bridge spirit—Shao had said as much. Once I’d felt the bridge spirit’s power for myself in that tunnel, I knew he was right.

No one stood a chance without the lightning ax, and since I was the only one who could wield it, this was no one’s responsibility but mine. It had to be me.

Except I was stuck on the top of a mountain, far from where I needed to be, and my brother was running out of time. I rubbed my eyes. There was no use crying.

I reached down and hefted the ax. It was a good thing it wasn’t heavy, because I had a feeling we weren’t going to find a village with an equestrian-rental agency anywhere nearby. We had a lot of walking ahead of us. I couldn’t just sit here and give up, not when Matt was still waiting for me.

There was a flash of movement at the edge of my vision. I turned to look and caught a glimpse of someone with stringy black hair and a dingy yellow dress before they disappeared behind thick branches.

“Hey!” I yelled, and began running after it. I heard Zhong shout and follow me.

I leaped over roots and skirted around branches so thick they might have been trees themselves. Luckily, the light from the white cloths was enough to see by. I held the ax at my side, careful not to cut off my leg as I ran.

The poj ntxoog was having a hard time navigating the banyan tree’s root system with its backward feet. Suddenly, a crossbow bolt shot past me and buried itself in the demon’s calf. It fell, crashing into a snarl of roots.

Within seconds, Zhong and I were on it. Before Zhong could take off its head, though, I shouted for her to stop.

“It’ll know where Miv is,” I explained.

Sometime between our fight in the garden and now, the sundress demon had tried to run a plastic yellow comb through its stringy hair. The comb seemed to have gotten stuck, because it dangled next to its face. The gash on its arm where I’d cut it still leaked smoke but had begun to heal.

“Where’s my friend?” I demanded, smacking the handle of the lightning ax against my gloved palm. In movies, people do that with baseball bats when they want to look tough.

“Taken to camp with the others,” the demon said, wincing and examining its leg.

“Then why are you here?”

“B-because of the tree. It feels…weird.” The demon looked up through its hair at the forbidding banyan. Its hollow black eyes were wide with something that I might have called awe if it had been anyone else. “But not a bad weird.”

“What are you talking about?” Zhong asked impatiently, but actually, I thought I understood.

“The demon used to be mortal,” I explained. “Its spirit should have ended up here at the Tree of Souls, but it never got that chance. And somehow, the banyan still calls to it.” I stepped back from the poj ntxoog. “I thought you said demons couldn’t remember what it was like to be mortal.”

“They shouldn’t be able to….” Zhong sounded uncomfortable with the idea that she might have been mistaken.

Come to think of it, the demon hadn’t tried very hard to capture me in the garden. Maybe this demon was different from the rest?

“What’s your name?” I asked it.

The poj ntxoog looked surprised. Then it winced as it tried to move its leg. When it spoke, its voice was thick with pain. “The others call me Hluas.”

I repeated the name, a little clumsily with my poor Hmong. “Huh…Huh-loo-uh?”

“It means young,” Zhong translated. “Is that just a name, or are you the youngest in the group?”

“One of the youngest. C-can you remove this?” It gestured to the crossbow bolt.

“We will if you agree to take us to your camp,” I said.

The demon shook its head quickly. The comb stuck in its hair smacked its cheek. “I can’t do that. The others will kill me if they think I helped you.”

“We’ll kill you if you don’t,” Zhong said. She had her shaman sword in one hand and her crossbow in the other. She pointed both at Hluas.

I didn’t argue with her, but I didn’t like it. The idea of killing the poj ntxoog bothered me now that we knew it had a name and it felt a connection with the Tree of Souls. Could it ever turn mortal again?

I put my hand on Zhong’s arm so that she’d lower her weapons. Yeng had said I couldn’t get anything in this world without giving something up. Like I’d been telling Zhong this whole time, threats weren’t always the right answer.

I reached up and tugged the clip from my hair. I felt Hluas’s eyes on me, confused, as I ran my thumb over the P and the few remaining rhinestones. It was scuffed and ugly, but still, something tightened in my chest.

I held it up. “If you take us to the camp, you can have this.”

“Pahua, your mom gave you that,” Zhong said. “You can’t give it to a demon.”

“I can if it helps us get Miv back. Back in the room with Shee Yee’s statue, Hluas said my hair clip reminded it of something. I’m betting it has to do with when it was human.”

Zhong glanced between me and the hair clip, looking torn. “Just because you’ve figured out what it wants doesn’t mean you have to hand it over.”

“It’s okay. My best friend is more important than a piece of junk.” It hurt me to call it that, because it was much more than an old plastic hair clip. It was the first gift my mom had given me after Dad left. She’d never been good with words, so I think it was her way of telling me that she wasn’t going to leave as well.

But right now I didn’t have a choice. I held it out and waited.

The demon looked like it wanted to snatch the hair clip out of my hand. “I…I can’t be seen helping you.”

“Then we’ll be sneaky about it.” To be honest, we really couldn’t spare the time for a side quest. Matt’s hourglass was running out. But I couldn’t just turn my back on Miv, either. They were the only two people who’d always stuck with me, and even when they’d teased me, they had always been on my side.

Hluas’s fingers twitched eagerly. “Okay.”

It swiped for the hair clip, but I pulled it out of reach. “You can have it when we get to the camp.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“We don’t have to prove—” Zhong began, but I cut her off again. She glared at me.

“To prove that we’ll keep our word, I’ll help you pull out that bolt.” I handed the hair clip to Zhong, who tucked it into the pocket of her T-shirt dress. Then, with my gloved hands outstretched like I was approaching an angry stray dog, I slowly lowered myself to the ground beside the demon.

“Try anything and you’re smoke,” Zhong said to Hluas. She raised the crossbow again while thrusting the sword beneath the demon’s jaw.

My nose wrinkled at the demon’s smell. It reminded me of that time our teacher volunteered me for cleanup duty after a field-trip lunch and I had my first close encounter with one of those big metal dumpsters. The greasy, rotting food stench had been stuck in my nose for days.

Holding my breath, I gripped the crossbow bolt. The demon whimpered in pain. I counted to three in my head and then yanked it free. The demon howled in my face. Its breath was so bad that it made me long for the frog backwash. Smoke curled into the air from the wound.

“Do we need to bandage it?” I asked.

Hluas groaned, long and pitiful, and then shook its head. “It’ll start healing on its own.”

“That’s a cool power to have,” I said appreciatively.

“Okay, demon, now which way to your camp?” Zhong asked.

It gestured behind us, toward the gradual downward slope of the mountain. “I came here by storm spirit.”

I realized Hluas wasn’t gesturing at the landscape, which was too dark to see. The poj ntxoog was indicating something in the sky. It was hard to make out at first, but what might have been a mini thundercloud churned in the air just past the branches.

“Is this a trick?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” came a rough voice. We all turned to find Yeng reemerging from the Tree of Souls, her garden hoe resting against her shoulder. “I do my best gardening at night, but I’m never going to get anything done with all the racket you’re making.”

I stood up and tossed the crossbow bolt to the grass. “We found—”

“I know what you found, foolish child. I’m looking at it, aren’t I?”

“But the demon says it got here by storm spirit. I thought nature spirits were good.”

“Then you’re an idiot. Spirits are just like anyone else—good or bad or both. Their nature isn’t determined simply by what they are.”

“Storm spirits won’t carry us, though,” Zhong pointed out.

“I wouldn’t want them to,” I said. I was afraid they would either drop me to my death or carry me off to their masters.

“No, a storm spirit won’t. But it did just give me an idea for how to get you off my mountain.” Yeng nodded to two wind spirits playing tag in the banyan tree’s branches. She let out a piercing whistle that made my ears ring. “Wind spirits are cousins to storm spirits. Not as wild, but just as strong.”

The wind spirits blew toward us, lifting the hair off my shoulders. Zhong looked uneasy about being carried by literal air. I reminded myself that Spike had gotten help from the wind spirits as well, and she was way heavier than two kids.

Hluas limped to its feet and made a gesture at the sky. The storm spirit approached with a low rumble.

“Remember,” I said. “No tricks if you want that hair clip.”

The demon nodded eagerly. It looked relieved to get off its injured leg as it dropped onto the storm spirit. I half expected the demon to fall through and hit the ground again. But of course, it didn’t. The little storm spirit was like a roiling gray beanbag chair.

“Go on, then,” Yeng said, making a shooing gesture at us. “The wind spirits will carry you as a favor to me, but don’t expect them to make a habit of it. They can be fickle.”

That was reassuring. The wind spirits twirled around us in the shapes of sea turtles, rustling our clothes.

“How?” I asked.

Yeng gave a dramatic huff. “Shee Yee was never this slow on the uptake.”

My face went hot. Shee Yee had also had the guidance of his godly family, whereas Zhong and I were figuring all this out on our own.

Without a word, Yeng made a large root lift out of the ground. “Climb up. That might help. Then just fall, and they’ll catch you.”

I wasn’t sure I liked this idea. Still, it was our only option, so we had to try. Zhong and I clambered onto the root. It wasn’t any higher than my kitchen counter, which I’d climbed onto plenty of times to get to the top shelves. But I’d never intended to fall off.

Once we were on the root, I had to close my eyes or I’d lose my nerve. Just fall. I could do that. I clutched the lightning ax to my chest. This was like the group exercise my gym teacher had made us do last year where we had to fall backward and trust our classmates to catch us.

My classmates had caught me. But then they’d let go before I got my feet on the ground. I’d flailed and taken down Hailey Jones with me. I’d accidentally elbowed her in the face.

“Aren’t you on a tight deadline?” Yeng asked, sounding annoyed.

Right. I drew a deep breath and let myself fall. It was like dropping onto a mountain of the softest sofa cushions in the world. I opened my eyes, amazed to see the wind spirits twisting around my legs. Then one of them changed into the form of a donkey, large enough for me to ride. Sitting on her own wind spirit, Zhong looked just as dumbstruck.

“Is this okay?” I asked Yeng. “You helping us, I mean?”

“I’m not helping you,” she said. “I’m just getting you off my mountain. If you happen to go in a direction that benefits you, that’s not my concern.”

I smiled. “Thank you. I won’t forget this.”

“See that you don’t.”

“Okay, Hluas,” I said. “Show us the way.”

The demon wiped snot from the corner of its nose and nodded. Our wind spirits followed the storm spirit as we slowly rose into the dark sky. My stomach dropped, and I had to close my eyes again.

“Hopefully their camp isn’t too far,” Yeng mumbled as she turned away. “Those wind spirits won’t hold you for long.”

“What?!” I asked, my eyes popping open again in alarm.

But it was too late. The arborist had disappeared beneath the branches of the banyan tree as we flew ever farther into the night.