Authors: Tina Connolly
I nudged open the door. “Devon?”
Devon was up on a table, running his fingers along the ceiling. “I know the phoenix is on the property,” he said. “I can feel him. He’s somewhere cold. But when he got put here fourteen years ago, he got loose from that demon and zoomed around the school first.”
“What demon?”
Devon rolled his eyes at me. “Dragon, phoenix, and demon fell—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said hastily. “You mean, that witch who transformed the phoenix, had to summon a demon to do it for her? Just like Sarmine did with you.”
“Obviously.”
“So really, the human is kind of like the wand,” I said thoughtfully. “You can put dragon scales or phoenix feathers in a wand and use that, but to harness the power of demons you have to put them in a human. The human
is
the wand.”
“I am not a wand,” said Devon in a grouchy tone.
“Of course not,” I soothed.
His fingers traced a path along the ceiling tiles. “Ugh, there’s traces of him everywhere, which makes it harder to pinpoint him.”
“But you’ll find him?” I said.
“Sure, sure.” He jumped down from the table. “What have you got there?”
Hells.
“Nothing.”
Devon grabbed my hands and pried my fingers apart. The pixie hopped off and onto a desk.
“Devon! Don’t. Don’t let the demon get his way.” The pixie hopped over another desk. Another. Devon lunged, but I kicked his shins hard and that slowed him down. There was an open window, and I hoped the pixie had enough brains to go out it.
Devon darted up and around me, but his shoe hit a desk. I lunged for where he fell, but then he was no longer there. He appeared in a flash in front of the pixie, blocking the open window, moving with demonic speed.
The pixie levitated, blinking.
“Devon!” I shouted. “You don’t need it, remember? To fill your contract the pixies just have to be here on Friday. It’s Friday. You could let it go.”
Devon’s eyes narrowed. Then he lunged, I lunged, and then—the pixie was gone and the two of us were on a tangled heap on the floor. I looked down at Devon’s clutched fists, swallowing. I couldn’t even think about how interesting it was to be lying in a tangled heap with Devon—I was too focused on what might be in his hands.
But when he opened them, there was nothing.
The pixie had escaped.
Devon’s face was suffused with rage as he jumped up. “I almost had it.”
I seized his shoulders and shook hard. “Devon! I know you’re still in there. Believe me, you can come out. Or shove him in, whatever metaphor you need.”
This time took the longest. There was a full minute of me holding Devon’s arms while he stared past me. But he didn’t make those trying-not-to-puke faces this time as he came back. He was merely silent, and then he blinked and said, “Cam?”
“Crap,” I said. “You are not holding on very well.” That probably wasn’t the most encouraging thing to say.
“I don’t understand this, Cam,” Devon said. His green eyes were worried. “It’s not like a tug-of-war anymore. Not like I have to shove him aside. It’s like … he’s inside my brain.”
“Well … he is.”
Devon shook his head and that black hair flopped over one eyebrow. “No, it’s weirder than that. It’s like…” He swallowed. “It’s like he’s been inside me all along. Like a part of me that’s always been waiting to come out. It’s like we’re one person.”
“Wow.” Every time I thought I understood the trickiness of demons, Estahoth came up with new ways to influence his host. “So he’s messing with your mind like some kind of pulpy super-villain? Makes you want to destroy sophomore girls’ lives for no reason?” Reese’s distraught face was still very much in my mind.
Devon shook his head. “If it were for no reason, it’d be obvious.” He moved closer and suddenly I was super-uncomfortable, like I was standing in a furnace. His eyes … were they earnest or menacing? The green was lost in shadow. “It’s more that certain things seem like a good idea nowadays.”
I tugged on my T-shirt. “Certain things like looking for a phoenix here at school? It’s going to explode, you know.”
“Certain things like taking a little time out from saving the world,” he said. He put one hand on the radiator behind me and then he was leaning in. “The demon doesn’t own me, you know. The witch doesn’t own you.”
“Well, no … but we have to stop her, you see … Time is running out…”
He was very close and that electricity was jumping around between us again. This
was
Devon, wasn’t it? Devon on a very slippery slope?
He was very, very close. Low and velvety he sang, “She stands next to me, when the bad guys come around…”
I was not going to melt. I was not going to melt.
“I can control him,” Devon said. “We can do this without him eating your dreams.”
I was dying to believe him. But if I became Zombie Cam, everything was going to go to hell in a handbasket. I was
not
going to be Reese, and I was going to tell him that firmly, too. Barely I managed: “Not yet.”
“When?”
“When this is over. If you still want to. If it’s not just the demon speaking.”
“It’s not,” he said. His lips brushed my cheek and I closed my eyes, blood rushing hot and loud through my skull. That’s when I lost all my common sense. If he had decided to follow up the cheek with the lips, I would’ve been a total goner. I know, I know. I have no shame. I’m just telling you how it went down, and as often as not, how it went down is embarrassing.
I was at his mercy and he didn’t kiss me.
I don’t know if that was good or bad.
When I finally opened my eyes he was standing across the room, at the classroom door.
I hadn’t heard him move.
“That’s another chance you missed,” he said softly. He tossed a dry-erase marker at me and then he was gone. The marker slipped through my fingers and clattered to the floor. I looked down at my feet.
On the floor where he had stood was a loosely sketched red pentagram. As I watched, a breeze slipped through the open window and, impossibly, blew it into fine red dust.
* * *
“His powers are developing
and
he knows I’m trying to trap him in a pentagram. We’re screwed. How am I going to trick him inside of one now?” Jenah and I cut Sixth Hour and holed up in the second-floor rest room with my backpack of swiped books. I dosed the tiled floor liberally with unicorn sanitizer before we sat.
“Give me another of those books and I’ll keep looking,” said Jenah. “Think outside the box. What’s like a pentagram that’s not a pentagram?”
“If math were my strong suit, I’d have goat’s blood ready to go,” I said. I leaned back against a bathroom stall. The tile was cold on my back and butt and I could smell the janitor’s antiseptic mixed with my own, more powerful one. I shuffled the Tupperwares of spell ingredients around in my backpack until I found the book about demons. I set the heavy book on my knees.
“Mustard flickered in your aura right now,” said Jenah, “so I don’t really want you to explain that cryptic statement. We’ll leave our galactic jump rope tangled this time.”
“He’s really very nice,” I said. “Maybe
you’d
like to go to the dance with him tonight.”
“Say no more. I see how it all went down between you and Mustard Man,” said Jenah. She cradled a tall skinny book between her crossed legs. She had on an orange cotton skirt and red tights, and the tights went pink where they stretched over her knees. “Anyone could’ve seen it coming a mile away.”
“Well, I didn’t,” I said glumly. I flicked over several pages and wondered why I never got around to wearing skirts. “So I’m almost ready with the demon-loosening spell, but unless we can find a substitution for goat’s blood, we’re screwed. What’d you find in there?”
“Substitutions for goat’s blood,” said Jenah.
“Brilliant,” I said. “Read it off.”
“‘Cow’s blood, though your spell will be weaker,’” read Jenah. “‘Antelope blood, though your spell will be meeker. Donkey blood, though your spell will be bleaker.’ Bleaker? How can a spell be bleak?”
“Some witch was too fond of being clever, if you ask me,” I said. I shifted my butt on the cold tile. “We’re not going to find any of those any more quickly than the goat’s blood. Well, we could buy a package of hamburger, but trust me, we don’t want the spell to be weaker.”
“Do you know anyone else with goats?”
“Yeah, I finally thought of one,” I said. “The guy who raises unicorns also has goats. The thing is, he’s seriously creepy, and I really don’t want to call him except as a last resort.” I looked at the clock on my cell phone. “Unfortunately, the time is last-resort o’clock.”
“Unicorns?” said Jenah. “Unicorns are real? Are they elementals, too?”
“Nope, just the three I told you about. ‘Dragon, phoenix, and demon fell…’ Unicorns do have a lot of magic in them, though. They get used for spells, like that vodka purifier I cleaned you with. Once a witch puts the ingredients together, anyone can use that spell because it stands alone pretty well. Vodka, one drop of dragon milk, one unicorn hair.”
“I guess I’m fuzzy on the difference.”
“Unicorns may be all purifying and stuff, but they’re just animals,” I said. “They’re mortal. Unlike elementals, they can be changed by witch magic—that’s the main spell performed on them, in fact, to hide their horns so they can pass. If they weren’t full of useful sheddy bits I don’t know who’d bother to keep them. They’re not very intelligent and they’re mean as all get-out.”
“You’ve seen one?” said Jenah. “Out at Creepy Guy’s place?”
“Seen one just last month, disguised as a llama,” I said. “Nearly took my arm off.”
“Wouldn’t it be smarter to disguise them as horses?”
“A common mistake,” I said. I hadn’t told anyone witch stuff since Sparkle, when I was five. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to be the expert on a subject others found fascinating. To be able to shatter the myths they thought they knew. “Unicorns actually look a lot like llamas.”
“Unicorn llamas,” said Jenah, eyebrows up. “Fuzzy? Woolly? Soft?”
“Yup,” I said. My ingrained caution tried to stop me from saying the next part, but as long as I was going to trust Jenah, then I ought to show her some of the fun parts of being tied to the witch as well. “I’ll show you someday.”
“It might be worth a trip to Creepy Guy’s place.”
I shuddered. “No. But I’m sure he’s not the only guy with unicorns. I’ll keep an ear out.” I turned more pages of the demon book. “Okay, pentagrams can be made of anything,” I read. “As long as the circuit is complete. Many things have been used to attempt to trick demons into being caught in pentagrams, since nobody likes a demon on the loose. One unusual pentagram that caught the demon Bezerath was made of an unbroken stream of water. The pentagram was a shallow trough in the ground. The witch ran a garden hose into it while activating the pentagram. The demon was caught, along with a confused squirrel.”
Jenah shut her book with a thump. “So the question is, what do we possibly have that we can get near to him, that won’t alert him? Not to dim those nice sparkly blue bits that just appeared in your aura, but if we surround him with five brooms or try to quick-fling five streamers around him, he’ll notice real fast.”
“Ah, but we do have something,” I said. “In fact, we have five somethings.”
If the awesomeness of a dance can be judged by the number of streamers, then the Halloween Dance Committee had outdone themselves. There were black and silver ones everywhere. Starry black balloons trailing twenty-foot silver ribbons bounced against the ceiling.
Most everyone entering the gym was in costume. Lots of boys with dripping blood faces and lots of girls in miniskirt cat costumes. Witches, too. But all the witches were cute and wore stripey tights and tiny pointy hats.
None of them looked like the evil witches I knew.
Including the one stalking right through the gym doors with me in a pencil skirt and support hose. “I expect this will be quite dull,” Sarmine said. “Luckily we shall be spending most of the evening elsewhere.”
“Good,” I said. “Why don’t you start now?”
“Nonsense. I must check in with your choir teacher. I don’t want to be an unsupervised adult on the school premises.”
“Fine time to worry about that,” I said. “Why don’t you tell them what you’re up to while you’re at it?”
“Oh, there’s that interesting root beer–smelling man,” she said. “Did you doppelg
ä
nger yourself like I suggested?”
“I made up the test and improved my grade like you didn’t suggest,” I said. “Still didn’t stop you from coming to school. Are you planning to do anything embarrassing tonight?”
“I think I’ll go say hi to him,” the witch said. “It’s rather nice to talk to a man who doesn’t want to cheat me on the price of unicorn hairs. It’s been a long time since Jim.”
“Jim Hexar?” I said. “Of Hexar/Scarabouche?”
She studied me as if I were a pinned insect. “Who else?”
“Witchipedia said he disappeared in a demon mishap.”
“Jim was too nice, just like I caution you about. It got in his way again and again. I remember one time he refused to work the fortune-telling spell, simply because it used live mice. When of course, that’s what mice are
for
. I spent a long time being angry with him for disappearing on us.”
“On
us
?” I said.
I swear, the witch rolled her eyes at that point. But I couldn’t question her further because Jenah showed up. Jenah stuck out her hand to be introduced and kept her face as bland as if she had no idea that this was the woman who had rolled me up in a pumpkin patch.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Jenah.
“I suppose it must be,” said Sarmine.
Jenah shook her head. “You two look so much alike.”
“Thank you,” said the witch. “That’s quite a compliment.” She did not specify to whom.
“Ostensibly this woman is here as a school parent,” I said. “It’s the school’s lucky day.”
“Oh, there’s your choir teacher,” said Sarmine. “Talking to my root-beer man. Who does she think she is?” She stalked over in that direction.