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

asked, wishing he had studied more Chinese folklore in school.

Chen laughed, almost manically. “There is hope! That was Fei Lian! The god of the winds!”

Rick blinked at him, sure this Fei Lian was probably another kind of elvish being. But he decided not to argue.

“I thought he was dead,” Chen murmured. “He would never have allowed such air pollution that has been in China. He must have been trapped all these years. It all makes sense now!”

Rick and Tom exchanged yet another look.

Tom cleared his throat. “Okaaaay… so… um, we ought to still go find this factory.”

“We ought to find the others,” Rick said, looking around before grabbing clothes from the backpack also. He was freezing.

Chen agreed with him on both counts.

After some dressing and deliberation as to where their friends would go, they stumped along the path towards the pagoda they could see in the distance.

“Duobao baota,” Chen said as he walked toward it.

“What does that mean?” Rick asked, following him.

“A baota is a pagoda,” Chen said. “They’ll see it and come here.”

“Can we go up in it?” Tom asked, gazing up at it several levels.

Chen shot him a look.

“You know, to get a lay of the area,” Tom explained. “I hate waiting.”

Rolling his eyes, Chen just shrugged. “Go look if you want.”

Tom ran ahead.

Rick and Chen hiked at a slower pace. Both of them were achy exhausted. Strictly speaking, neither of them ever really used their abilities for combat. The last real battle they had was when they fought off the one New Year demon who had come to Gulinger High when they were still teenagers, and that was ages ago. And both had come away scarred.

When they arrived at the pagoda, Tom was already up to the fourth level, leaning out on the rooftop. Rick wondered if he had climbed up or had flown up.

“Do you see them?” Rick cupped his hands around his mouth and called out.

Tom nodded, pointing. “Over there! They’re coming this way, fast.”

Good, Rick thought. They can regroup and tell the others what they had found out.

“There you are!” Daniel jogged up the steps to the pagoda three minutes later.

“We saw Tom,” Eddie said as the others followed.

Rick noticed the others walking a little heavier behind them. Andy was bleeding from a scrape, James looked like he had rolled in something with a smear across his face, and the Sun Wukong was all out wild with his fur sticking here and there—and it was fur. He was more monkey now than man, which despite his previous rejection of those movie depictions of him he actually looked like one of the most recent Monkey King portrayals. He just wasn’t wearing that golden circlet around his head which had been in the stories.

“You freed Fei Lian,” Chen said, following Sun Wukong immediately.

Shouldering his long staff, Sun Wukong nodded, marching beyond the pagoda to head back out of the mountain. “I did. Something more nefarious is afoot.”

“We know,” Chen said. “We found out in Lianyungang the demons are making dirty bombs at a—”

“They’re what?” Semour exclaimed, rushing up to him while Daniel paled.

Rick nodded. “Dirty bombs. Chen got it out of a demon that they are making them in a factory. Part of a global destabilization plot involving—”

Tom dropped to the ground between them. “The Unseelie Court.”

Everyone pulled back.

Daniel swatted him. Andy shoved him off. “Don’t do that!”

James stumbled backwards, grabbing his chest then going around Tom who was cackling out of pure enjoyment.

Sun Wukong paled. “So the Unseelie Court really is meddling in China?”

“You knew about it?” Eddie came in closer, openly upset.

Shaking his head, Sun Wukong looked like he was getting a headache. Rick watched him intently, sure the guy had not told them even half of what he knew. 

“Suspected,” Sun Wukong said. “I had seen signs of foreign demons within China, but I had always assumed it was because so many foreigners had been coming to China. It’s happened before.”

“When?” Andy asked, more curious than accusatory.

Meeting his gaze, Sun Wukong said, “During the Opium Wars.”

The Seven stared. The Opium Wars had been nothing more than a short two paragraphs in their history text books back in high school, and none of them were history majors at college—even Daniel who focused on folklore and mysticism. To be honest, they hardly knew anything about China except what had come from the mainstream media and a few random kung fu movies. Daniel looked the most upset about, feeling woefully ignorant with a deep frown. Many of them peeked to Rick who had at least traveled to China with his father and mother when he was a child, Michael Toms included among them.

“The Opium Wars,” Sun Wukong explained, “Was part of a European strategy to mess with Chinese politics for their own political and financial gain. China had been, for the most part, a closed society for an extremely long time. Distrust of foreigners—and for good reason—is not new for my people. We hated yangguizi. During the time of Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China, when he was a boy, when the dowager Empress Ci Xi truly ruled, the Chinese people suffered much. We eventually were bullied by foreign powers into giving up parcels of land within our own country to them. They were known as—”

“The foreign concessions,” Rick said, nodding.

Sun Wukong smiled at him. “That’s right. You are familiar with them?”

Rick nodded. “Ages ago, before my parents’ divorce, we visited Tianjin’s foreign concessions on a tour. We went to the Astor Hotel and Ma Lu and other places. The houses are now locally occupied and owned, but these areas have different architecture—European—that the Spanish, British, and Italians brought in, changing the face of the Chinese city. These were given up in a period of unequal treaties. I heard it also happened in Qingdao and Shangha. It’s in the movie Empire of the Sun by Stephen Spielberg.”

Their stares started to make him feel uncomfortable as he explained this.

He shrugged. “It was educational—and a real good movie.”

“Anyway,” Sun Wukong said with a nod to him, “Around that time a lot of foreign demons flooded into the nation beside the foreign businessmen, most incognito but some as rats on ships. They also battled it out over the opium, as some of those demons wanted to promote the damage opium caused to humans.”

They shuddered. Some of them had heard rumors about other groups of people in their modern age who were also guarding poppy plants in the Middle East for opium production. It occurred to them that that also might be demon related—because only greedy human beings and demons would want to promote a drug which harmed others.

“About our current problem, though,” Daniel prompted, looking to Chen. “You found out where this factory was?”

Chen nodded, grateful that Daniel kept them on task so they could get moving, “Yes. Back in Lianyungang. And I have the address.”

“Good,” Andy said. “That will make this easy.”

Agreeing, Chen said with a firm nod, “We need to burn it to the ground.”

Sun Wukong closed his eyes, but he nodded.

“Just as long as it does not set off any dirty bombs,” Semour interjected.

They hurried together back toward the main road. They cut through sites such as the Waterview Wooden footway to Peacock Hollow and over the Nine Dragon Bridge. Dead birds were still here and there—more here than up the mountain actually. Tourists were staring at them and complaining about them, poking them with sticks while park caregivers gathered them up for disposal, loading them into carts. The phenomena of the event was still being talked about around them. Their group hurried past the line for the carriage way through the Nine-Dragon General Temple and back through the China Mist Tea Expo Park to the Wind Pavilion where all of them caught their breaths. There no demons to stop them. All truly had fled. Their group wondered if those demons had regrouped somewhere else or had truly scattered.

“This is not… the most… efficient way to travel,” Eddie panted, leaning on a near tree. Semour urged him on as they still had the hiking path to go.

But Tom looked around and said, “Agreed,” and immediately told the air something.

“No.” Andy went after him, finger raised. “No. No. No. No. No!”

But Tom whipped a set of keys out of the air and dangled them. “No worries. We won’t be taking this one out of the park.”

He then scampered off to a bus parked on the side of the road where the driver was in a panic… searching everywhere for his keys. As all the riders were being told to get off and take the next bus which was coming, their ragged, dirty, blood-smeared group hurried up to it. When their group approached—mostly following Tom—a number of people screamed, pointing at them and rushing away.

Though admittedly, they did not look like normal tourists anymore as most of them were bleeding from various scrapes and battle wounds—people were fleeing because they had already run from them up in the battle in the mountains above. Also, Sun Wukong did not bother to mask his identity and he looked as real as real could be. He sprang after Tom—not to stop him, but to get on top of the bus to ride it while the others just pushed Andy to a seat rather than letting him be the Boy Scout and prevent Tom from committing yet another felony.

Tom started the bus as everyone else squeezed into the seats. The same moment the driver ran back to the bus. He shouted at them in rapid Mandarin. But they tore off the curb into the road, plowing up the pavement at the fastest speed Tom could manage up the winding road.

This bus trip rivaled the best amusement park ride any of them had ever been on, though it lacked loop-de-loops. Taking sharp turns alongside sheer cliffs in addition to other cars flying around the same route, everyone’s hearts were pounding with hope that Tom was not going to get them all killed. Tom, Chen, and Sun Wukong were the only ones who could fly after all. Eddie was clutching his seat, white faced. So was Andy—though when he turned to Rick to complain, he saw that Rick was laughing hard, clutching the top of his head and the roof of the bus out of nerves. It was so like Tom to freak everyone out while getting them exactly where they wanted to go the quickest way possible. The entire group was soon staring at Rick, including Chen who had shrunk into small chicken, with claws dug into the seat in front of him while his wings were flapping—just in case he might need to fly.

But Tom veered into the parking lot, skidded sideways to a halt like in the Fast and the Furious, jerking to a breathless stop then turned around with a smile. The main gate stood just to the south of them.

“Are you crazy?” Andy shouted once he caught his breath.

“Yes!” Tom said and winked at Rick before hopping out of his seat. He left the keys in the ignition.

Sun Wukong slid off the rooftop, his hair windswept and his face looking uncommonly refreshed. Much of his previous agitation was gone and he seemed more mentally stable. That wild ride was more his style.

“Ok, we go to the factory!” Eddie said marching down to the bus stop.

“We should get cleaned up first!” Chen called after him, pulling back on his clothes from his loose-chicken fit.

Several of them stared dryly at him, though Sun Wukong looked thoughtful—and so did Daniel and Rick. Tom merely shrugged.

Eddie rolled his eyes. “We have no time—”

“No.” Andy held up a hand, looking to Rick. “Is there something we are missing?”

Rick nodded. “Yeah. Chen never got to explain it earlier. But these guys have been prepared against Chinese police. We can’t just charge into the factory and take it down. They’ll see us coming, especially with us looking like this.” He held out his arms to the