Ghoulies Abroad by Julie Steimle (bts book recommendations txt) 📖

said, looking around with a wave to the city though his eyes took in all the Monkey King paraphernalia with more amusement.

The monk nodded. But then he gestured for them to keep moving. Demons would be coming soon enough and they didn’t want to drag their troubles into such a public place.

They all left, and quickly, hurrying to find a place to plan.

“But why would somebody like you need the Seven?” Semour asked, looking the monk up and down as he followed. “I mean, from those movies and those stories—they claim you fought and defeated Heaven itself.”

The monk’s face colored with embarrassment though he chuckled, shaking his head. “First of all, those are stories. And secondly—that would not be Heaven with a big H, but a heaven with a little h. It was the place where elves went and made their own community. What you call god-elves. It would be a bit like some elf taking on Olympus, if you know what I mean.”

But Chen continued to look like the wind had been knocked out of him, though he kept up his pace with the monk. He shook his head slowly, first staring ahead and then at the ground. “Why…?”

Apprehensive, the monk hesitated to answer. No one listening was quite sure of the question.

Rick guessed, “This thing with the CIA teaming up with the triads and the demons was too much for you.”

The monk nodded frankly. “Yes. If it had been the demons alone, I would have been able to handle it—mostly. But things have changed a great deal since I last fought Hun Shi Mowang. He is more powerful now, and his minions are not just demons, but angry elves.” He sighed heavily. “And I never really fought such elves all on my own in the past. I always had divine help.”

“Why…?” Chen breathed out again, still shaking his head.

They reached the curb where the monk looked around then gestured to the bus station. Rick dug through his pockets for small change, hoping these busses still took coinage and had not entirely gone towards Alipay and other digital pay systems. He didn’t have that on his cell phone.

With a peek to Chen, the monk colored more, cringing.

“Are we talking Divine with a big D or divine with a little d here?” Daniel asked, crossing the street with them toward the bus line. 

Grinning at him, the monk nodded his head. “With a big D. Angels do come to the aid of a devoted elf who is fulfilling his duty.”

“What kind of angels?” James asked, keeping up. “The ones with wings or those wingless guys who visited folks like Abraham and Lot before destroying Sodom and Gomorrah?”

With a pleasant grin for James, the monk said, “Both kinds—though battles usually require angels with wings. Wings are merely symbols of power, you see. An outward, physical manifestation of a more spiritual power so mortals can understand it.”

“Why?” Chen murmured again.

Rick peered at him. He realized then that Chen wasn’t asking why to the question they thought he was. “Why what?”

Chen lifted his eyes, first with pain to Rick then accusingly at the monk who was pointing out the bus they needed. “Why did you let them all die?”

The monk stiffened. He closed his eyes, exhaling heavily. “I had no choice. They were purging the population of the Four Olds. I am most definitely one of the Four Olds… and even an elf can be killed by a bullet. We are not that kind of immortal.”

No one understood what he meant—including Tom, who lifted his eyebrows. A purge? They? They who? And Four Olds? What was that again? Only Chen understood.

“But they were your family! Your descendants!” Chen shouted at the monk. His face looked like he was withholding the urge to become a tiger, inclined to bite the monk’s face off.

The monk cringed, ducking away from Chen. So did the others, giving him lots of room.

“Wait!” Rick held up his hands, stepping between them. He turned to his friend. “Chen, explain what you are talking about. Who died?”

His eyes resting on Rick, Chen grew immediately sorrowful. “My family.”

They all stared, eyes wider. Daniel quickly looked to the monk then to Rick to see if they understood the same thing. Then he looked to Chen who nodded. The others were a bit slower, though they also added up what Chen meant.

Rick looked back to the monk who cowered like he had been kicked in the gut and was still smarting over it. “You’re his—?”

“Yes,” the monk replied in a low breath, lowering his eyes in shame. “The Bai Nian family were my mortal descendants—and Chen is the last of them.”

They all stared more.

They hastily got into the line for the bus and quickly climbed on when it arrived, each one of them dropping in three yuan and grabbing the back seats of the bus where they all sat together.  The locals stared at their group of foreigners and the monk with wide eyes.

But as the conversation had become increasingly personal, they held off talking about it until they had gotten off at their stop—where the monk led them to a restaurant he knew.

The restaurant had private rooms where they could close a door. Their room contained an enormous round table with a huge lazy Susan in the center—one of those round glass rotating tables where the food was placed and easily moved for the feasters to sample everything with a turn of the table. Rick and the monk made the orders, having all sorts of food brought in that none of the Seven had ever really eaten before and heap load of steamed buns and these things James called pot stickers and Chen called jiaozi. The monk called them dumplings.

“Those are not dumplings,” James argued, pointing with his chopsticks to the tray full of bite-sized meat-and-veggie filled dough-skinned things. “Dumplings are these biscuit dough blobs that are floated in soup. These are like Chinese ravioli.”

“Chinese ravioli,” Chen murmured, shaking his head.

The table was loaded with food, including a celery and cashew dish, and one dark-looking eggplant entrée. Rick made sure there were dishes without garlic on the table. It was difficult, though. Chinese cooking was laced with garlic and had been his main objection to eating at such a restaurant.

While some of the group got schooled in using chopsticks (though the waitress brought in forks and knives when she saw the majority of the group were foreigners), they dug into their meal with nearly ravenous hunger. Breakfast was long ago and it was nearly dinner time. And though all of them kept an eye out for demons, they hardly detected any within the vicinity.

The monk finally told his story to Chen.

Chen sat next to the monk, staring at him as the ‘man’ explained himself. Mixed emotions were all over Chen’s face during the meal. Grief. Wonder. Anger. Joy. And heaps of confusion. His world paradigm had been clearly shattered. Rick could tell what he was feeling, having felt something similar himself when he had first discovered he was a werewolf. Chen was struggling to rebuild his sense of the universe and he was barely holding it together.

On Chen’s other side was Tom who eagerly listened as the monk explained how he—the Monkey King—had fallen in with a beautiful mortal for a short time after his supposed rise to ‘Buddhahood’.

“It was unexpected,” the monk explained with a little color to his cheeks. “I had always favored the form of the monkey, you see. It made me feel powerful and agile. But when I met her, I didn’t want to be a monkey anymore. I had even begun to envy human mortality.”

“But isn’t it against the rules to—?” Andy interjected with irritated grief on behalf of Chen.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the monk waved the idea off. “Completely and totally. Elves and mortals are not supposed to—technically—get together. But honestly, I thought it was a blessing to be with her. I never felt love like that for any other elf, you know. And it is a lonely thing going through eternity by yourself.”

Rick thought on that. A lonely thing indeed. Just going through life by yourself was hard. His thoughts went to Daisy again.

“And you had kids,” James said, peeking to Chen.

The monk nodded, replying with a yearning sigh, “I had a family.”

That word sent a ripple through all of them. Every one of them nodded, thinking about their own chaotic families, their own private yearnings aching. Each of them had a different family situation. Tom’s father was a neglectful little imp (literally) and his mother was in prison. He hardly saw either, and had never had a stable home. Daniel had two stepmothers (one who wanted him dead) and several half-brothers and sisters (three of whom were witches). Eddie and James were both only children, though their parents were vastly different yet doting. Semour had an obnoxious younger brother, and he had frequent issues with his often pretentious mother and emotionally distant father. As for Andy, whose life most people saw as ideal, he had a younger sister whom he got on with well, a mother who was patient and caring, a father who was honorable and present in Andy’s life, and his pastor grandfather lived with them. But in the last few years since his involvement with the Holy Seven his relationship with his father had deteriorated and had been rocky for a while. And as for Rick, his parents were divorced—and he had over ten half-brothers and half-sisters collectively. The older seven in France remained a secret while the other two were publicly known as was his kind stepfather. And yet Chen, who was an orphan who had been kidnapped by the witch who had killed his parent, gazed sharply at the monk as if he wanted to punch the old monkey man—his ancestor.

“I had a family too,” Chen hissed with the impression he was holding back from transforming into an anaconda.

The monk closed his eyes. “I am sorry. I had thought at the time of the Cultural Revolution if I left them alone, they would be safe. Most of my descendants had changed their name to Wang, you see. Many fled to Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.”

“Mine didn’t,” Chen said thinly.

The monk nodded, sighing. “I know. And that witch found them. I was too late in getting there.” He opened his eyes, looking only to Chen now. “I am so sorry.”

“Too little. Too late,” Chen said through his teeth.

Rick grabbed Chen’s arm, shaking his head at him. “Don’t do this.”

“And why not?” Chen snapped meeting Rick’s wolf gaze. “He abandoned them.”

“I didn’t abandon—” the monk protested, though it came out like a whine.

“You did!” Chen rose up. “You—”

“Stop!” Rick snapped, jerking hard on Chen’s arm. “You aren’t the only person whose father has made bad decisions.”

Chen met his gaze then looked at where Rick was holding his bare wrist. He blinked, as much of Rick’s recent past flooded into Chen’s mind. Rick’s eyes begged for Chen not to tell the others what he now knew about his own father’s bad decisions. Rick had told no one about the wolves in Paris yet. A shudder went through Chen, and he looked pale. Those watching them assumed Rick was talking about his father not telling Rick’s mother he was a werewolf before marrying her.

“Or always makes bad decisions,” Tom murmured, wrapping his arms around Chen, more like a hug.

Shuddering, Chen fleshed out into a tiger. His clothes pulled tight around him and his heavy paws dropped against the lazy-Susan to keep from falling.

“Hey!” The Seven rose up, trying to stabilize the table before all the dishes could fly off it and the glass got upended.

 Rick shoved Tom’s arms off Chen. The tiger-in-tight clothes was hissing at them both, twisting away from the table to the floor on all paws. The group was at least glad Chen had ended up in a smaller sub-species of tiger rather than a Bengal tiger.

Leaning toward Chen-the-tiger who was struggling to