“You have half a mind, period,” said the witch. “A transfigured phoenix is still a phoenix.”
The wind sent a chill down my spine. “You mean it’s still going to burst into fire?”
“It will explode on Halloween,” said the witch, “whether we’ve found where Kari hid it or not. Uncontained phoenix fire will disintegrate your entire school and anyone unlucky enough to be inside the building at the time. I suggest you and your delicate little morals consider that.” She pulled a small packet of dried pepper from her fanny pack and sprinkled it over one of my pumpkins. The wind tickled my nose, along with the pepper dust. I knew I was supposed to ask the witch what spell she was creating, so she could impart some sort of “valuable” lesson about the properties of dried pepper or whatever.
“I have a dragon to tend to,” I said coldly. I pushed past the witch and stalked toward the garage.
“At least I’m doing something with my life,” said the witch from behind me. “You should’ve seen me at your age. Able to work complicated spells, already creating new ones. Causing chaos from here to the Pacific Ocean.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“And my sister Belarize was even faster. When she was eight and I was four she decided she was sick of being ousted as the youngest. She planted a monster under my bed that almost took my foot clean off. Mother refused to believe my sister had done it. She had a blind spot about Belarize’s lack of morals. You don’t turn on your family.” Sarmine harrumphed at the memory, then rounded on me, throwing up her hands. “I just don’t know how to get past your blind spot, Camellia! I give you spells, you reject them. I show you counterspells, you don’t even try. Your attitude toward witchery keeps me up at night. Don’t you know what happens to weak witches? Don’t you understand how cruel the witch world is?”
“I’m not a witch!” I turned and shouted. “Why does everyone keep saying I am? I’m not like you. I’m not like the horrible way you behave. Nothing at all. I’m not!”
“You stubborn, blind—” Sarmine breathed out. Her face calmed. All cold and stoic it got, and her hands were steel on her wand. “There’s going to be a punishment for this … for this algebra mess.” It seemed like she’d wanted to say something else, but no. Only mean-just-because Sarmine would say in the same breath that algebra was useless and then punish me for it. “Not for failing your test, but for putting me in the annoying position of having to talk to this Rourke character.”
“No!” I shouted, stomping through the grass, bearing down on her. “I’m sick of your punishments. You have no right—”
“Half an hour mummified by the pumpkin plants ought to do it,” she said.
She plucked one hair from my head, and while I said, “Ouch, what the hell?” she doused it with a spray bottle from her fanny pack, dropped it on the peppered and god-knows-what-else pumpkin, and tapped it with her dragon-milk wand.
Instantly the vines spiraled up, reaching for me. One vine lassoed my arm.
“Oh hells,” I said. I yanked my arm out of the tightening pumpkin noose and ran, but a vine coiled around my ankle. I thunked to my knees. Another vine plonked over my shoulders, and its leaves thumped on top of my head. “Let me out!” I shrieked.
“If you’d studied your self-defense spell, you could stop me now,” Sarmine said.
I clawed and tore, but more vines coiled around my limbs, rolling me into the middle of the pumpkin patch. My shoulder hurt where the demon had kicked me. A small green pumpkin bonked my nose. “Get back here!”
I think she said something like “It’s clime you faced up to da tooth,” but I couldn’t hear very well with the giant pumpkin leaves stuffing my ears.
My flailing hand struck an overripe pumpkin and smashed into pumpkin guts. “Sarmine!” I shouted, and then a huge wad of leaves stuffed my mouth, and I choked and stopped yelling. At least I had an airhole for my nose, or I’d really be in trouble.
The vines rolled me over one more time and my nose smashed into dirt. I arched, stretching my neck out of the dirt to breathe, snorting out compost and probably bug bits. I tried not to panic as mulch clung to my nose with my inhaled breaths. Why did my life suck so hard? Flunking algebra, falling for a demon-boy, and finally, smothered to death by a rabid pumpkin.
I wasn’t going to save the world from the witch. I couldn’t even save myself. And who would slop out poor Moonfire’s garage now? Catch the witch doing it. Oh, she liked having the dragon milk and scales around, but what about the dragon herself?
I loved my dragon. I was the one who took care of her. We were going to fly away some day and find both of our families, by hook or by crook—
At this point I realized I was getting light-headed. But the image of me flying dragonback grew stronger and more appealing. Flying through the air, just flying, flying, flying. Air. Blue sky. Abyss. So … pretty—
Hands grabbed my ankles, dislodging my nose from the dirt. I sucked in great snorts of air, and then coughing, muffle-shrieked through the leaves. I kicked, and then whoever was grabbing my ankles sat on my shins. A shearing sound, and then my arm was free, and then I realized that someone was letting me out, so I stopped trying to kick whoever it was and concentrated on that lovely stuff called air going in my nose. I tensed my fist, just in case.
The leaves stuffed into my mouth pulled apart and I spit bits of chlorophyll and gasped whole mouthfuls of lovely, lovely air. “Who—?” Choke, sputter. “What—?”
“Sssh,” said a familiar voice, and then the leaves blinding me were cut away and I saw it was Jenah, holding a pair of hair-cutting scissors, now dripping with green.
“Jenah. Thank goodne—I mean, I told you never to come here,” I said. “Why didn’t you listen to me and go home?”
“Ohmigod, seriously?” Jenah said. Her chic black haircut was straggly around her face, clumpy with pumpkin leaf juice. I had never seen it untidy. “I was walking down the street, unloved and unwanted, when I felt a sudden shift in the world, like a magnetic force drawing me back. I looked through the fence and saw the mother of all great pumpkins rolling you up like a veggie wrap. And then I had to duck behind your stupid thornbushes until your aunt drove off before I could climb over the fence and cut you out of the squash. My favorite shirt is stained with pumpkin pulp, my fishnets are torn and!—I think your fence tried to eat me. At the absolute-most-subpar least you are now going to say: ‘Thank you, Jenah.’”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m very grateful. Now will you get out of here before Sarmine comes back and catches you?” I brushed prickly bits of vines and leaves from my jeans.
Jenah folded her arms and eyed me. “No,” she said.
“Funny. Get.”
“I’ve been chill long enough,” said Jenah. “Whatever’s going on here is different—I mean different—and it doesn’t have anything to do with the color of your aunt’s bedspread. You are straining our friendship, Camellia.”
The walls of my privacy were tumbling down around me. “Can’t I have my space? What does it hurt you?” I backed away from the patch.
“Friends help each other when they have big troubles. If you can’t trust me—”
“If you weren’t so nosy! Who watches their friends through the fence?” I was being so unfair but I couldn’t stand the thought of explaining my life, sharing the secrets I’d protected for so long.
“—then you don’t think I’m really your friend,” Jenah finished. She brushed back sticky strands of hair, and her eyes were reproachful. “Nosy? Really? I mean, obviously I am. But am I really off base here? Something’s wrong and I want to help you.”
And you’re nosy, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Jenah did want to know everything about everyone. But … she also meant it when she said she wanted to help. I knew that.
I just didn’t know if she’d still mean it once she knew the truth.
But it didn’t matter. Sometimes you reach the breaking point, where you have to spill everything that you’re holding back. O
ut of all the people in the world, Jenah was the one I could most trust.
“Please,” she said.
I squinched my eyes shut and forced it out: “My aunt is a witch and Devon is possessed by a demon.”
“Is that poetic description?”
“Aunt Sarmine summoned a demon to help her take over the city. It was supposed to go into a mannequin, but when Devon interrupted the spell, it went into him, and now if I don’t come up with something clever it’s going to eat all of Devon’s soul and be inside him forever.”
I could tell that Jenah wanted to believe all this. It wasn’t the same as all that aura stuff, but it wasn’t like she was totally unprepared for the idea of mystic unknowns, either. Not to mention that she’d just seen a pumpkin try to eat me. She wanted to believe.
I cut to the chase.
I took that vial of unicorn sanitizer out of my backpack and flicked three drops on Jenah.
The air sparkled around my best friend. The pumpkin juice disappeared from her yellow-and-black shirt, the sticky sap fell from her hair. In a moment she was clean and pressed and sparkling around the edges, as if she were an anime princess.
“I can’t do anything about your torn fishnets,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Oh. My. God,” said Jenah. She boggled at her shirt. “This is going to take lots of re-sorting along the astral planes.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. I fiddled with my shirt hem. “You see why I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jenah touched her shiny clean hair, marveling. “So next you’re gonna stop the demon with witch magic?”
I shuddered. “In the first place, I am not a witch, so don’t even think it. Anyone can use unicorn sanitizer because that stuff is powerful. Sarmine and I are not even related.”
“I thought she was your aunt.”
“I call her my aunt because the long story is too complicated to go into. It’s easier to say I live with my aunt than to say I live with a witch who stole me from my real parents. Anything that causes fewer questions, that’s what I go with, okay? When I was really little and didn’t know any better I thought she was my mom.” I turned on the hose and washed my hands and face. No point in wasting valuable sanitizer on me.
“Mmm,” said Jenah.
“And secondly, not even Sarmine can work magic on the demon.” I gargled and spat out pumpkin-leaf water. My mouth still felt prickly. “A demon isn’t human or animal. It’s an elemental. Only elementals can affect other elementals.”
“What the heck is an elemental?”
“Well, a witch does magic, but an elemental is made of magic. There’s three types of elementals, and there’s a witch saying about them. ‘Dragon, phoenix, and demon fell; these three a witch cannot bespell.’” I toweled myself dry with my hoodie. “Normally demons don’t live among us, or we’d have bigger problems. They’re the earth elementals and they live, like, in the molecules of the core of the Earth, where they swim around in the fire and annoy each other. They’re trapped there, unless a witch opens up a passage for them. Dragons are right here on earth, and phoenix are air creatures, though apparently one is transfigured and imprisoned somewhere in the school…” I stopped, because Jenah was looking at me funny. “Which part was too much for you?”
“Dragons,” she said, and she looked all swoony. “Are dragons really real?”
“Yes. Though they’re endangered. I dunno how many are left.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
I grinned. A strange and marvelous feeling swept through me. “Would you say I owed you something for saving my life from the Great Rabid Pumpkin?” I said.
10
Jenah Hearts Dragons
Relief at sharing my life with someone made me feel all giddy, like I’d just gone whooshing down the slide at the water park, or like that feeling when you suddenly know your crush likes you, and you light up from head to toe.
Joy. Ridiculous joy. Relief.
That’s how I felt now as I watched Jenah’s face light up at the sight of Moonfire. “Do you really see her?” I said.
“Of course. Why not?”
Which made me wonder if maybe Jenah really did see auras, or if there was more magic in regular humans than the witch claimed. Either way, remove one more thing that had made me feel different. Jenah could see the dragon, and Jenah knew about my life.
I mean, it’s not like her knowing was going to measurably help the situation of living with the witch or of stopping the demon in Devon.
But that didn’t matter. I still felt like my whole messed-up life had more hope than it did half an hour ago.
After I checked to make sure Wulfie had made it back inside, I told Jenah the whole story from the beginning while I slopped out the garage and she petted the dragon’s warm hide. Moonfire purred, and before long Jenah got comfortable enough to drape herself along the dragon’s translucent side, in full-body contact with the thrums.
When I got to the part about crashing into Sparkle in the hallway, I pulled out my phone and showed Jenah the picture of ol’ Right-Angle Nose.
“Spooky,” said Jenah. “I don’t understand it.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But I’m hanging on to it. Anything that helps me balance out what she knows about me … What?”
“Not to put mustard in your aura,” said Jenah, “but you could’ve photoshopped it.”
“I didn’t. Sparkle knows it, too.”
“If she thinks about it, she’ll realize that’s an easy way out for her.”
I surveyed my phone glumly. “Photographic proof ain’t what it used to be.”
“Not when images can be anything you want,” said Jenah. “Change reality with a mouse click. Pretty much like magic, isn’t it?”
“It is not,” I said. “Magic is evil.” The memory of the fight with the witch overwhelmed me with rage. “And Sarmine keeps wanting me to work evil spells like her, which is doubly stupid, because she knows perfectly well I don’t have witch blood.”
Jenah cradled her fishnetted knees. “Have you tried any spells?”
“No.” I glared at her. “And don’t start with that maybe-we’re-really-related thing. I told you we aren’t. You don’t know what I saw when I was five.”
“You found out you were stolen?” said Jenah.
“Let’s just say that Sparkle and I saw her perform one of her particularly nasty spells,” I said. “That’s when I knew we weren’t alike. At all.”
Jenah pondered this. “Okay,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I was going to say. You mentioned several times that witches are paranoid and hide things from each other and the world, and honestly, probably from themselves, too. Right?”
“So?”
“So maybe the thing about having to have witch blood isn’t strictly true,” Jenah said. Moonfire arched her neck and Jenah resumed her scale skritching. “Maybe that’s one of those paranoid lies witches spread to keep their secrets safe.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Though it doesn’t seem totally off base, either.” I picked up the bristle brush and began scrubbing sheep bits off the garage wall. (You try tearing into a whole sheep with dragon jaws.)
“You were surprised I could see Moonfire,” Jenah pointed out. Suddenly she sat up straight. “Holy cow,” she said. “Is the dragon talking to me?”
“Did you see something?”
“A dragon flying over a mountain range. Settling in a cliff high up. Looking out to sea. Is that her?”
I put down the scrub brush and looked at Jenah with renewed admiration. “I don’t think everybody can understand her,” I said. “I mean, I can, but I’ve grown up with her.”
“And I know I don’t have witch blood,” said Jenah. “It’s like when I sense auras. Except a trillion times clearer and more obvious.” She settled back against the dragon again, closing her eyes. “I think she’s glad to meet me. I get a sense of … lonely?”
You’ve probably realized I’m not perfect by now. (I know, right?) One
of the traits I hate more than anything is jealousy. But every so often it tries to sneak in. I stomped on the twinge that tickled my belly, hard. I was glad Jenah could commune with Moonfire. I was glad it came naturally for her, and apparently clearer and better than for me. At least, I was determined to be glad. I attacked the sheep stain with firm scrubs.
“She is lonely,” I said. “She misses her kind. The last few female dragons.”
“It’s probably hard being imprisoned here,” Jenah said, not pointedly, just thinking out loud.
“She’s not…” But then I stopped. I mean, I’d always thought of her as sort of a pet. But she couldn’t be, not really. Elementals had human intelligence, and humans couldn’t be pets.
Wulfie was an abandoned cub that the witch rescued. One of her few good deeds, though we’ll have a heckuva time figuring out how to send him to kindergarten, with him being human only once a month. I was unfairly and maliciously bartered for. Wulfie and I would have a hard time leaving till we were eighteen and legal in the human system, but other than that we weren’t slaves and we weren’t pets.
But what about the dragon? Was she free to go?
I leaned against the wall, flipping the brush back and forth between my hands. The wall was cold on my back, but the dragon’s heat was warm from the front. Like a campfire. “Ask her.…” I said slowly. “Ask her if she likes it here.”
Jenah was silent, listening. “She says the garage is as good as a cave,” she said, “And also she has one friend here. That’s you.”
Warmth flooded me. “Tell her I love her, too.”
“She likes being with you, especially when you understand her pictures. But…”
“What?”
“She misses her friends. She’s sad not to know if they’re all dead or not. She thinks about them every day.” Jenah paused. “Every time she shows ‘them’ it seems to have ‘female’ associated with it?”
Seriously Wicked Page 10