Seriously Wicked

by Connolly, Tina

  “It’s not it,” said Sarmine.

  “What?” I saw shock on Devon’s face, too. The T-Bird made so much sense.

  “I can’t be positive, but … it doesn’t have that elemental feeling. It feels like plain metal.” Sarmine looked at Devon, bound in the pentagram. “Well, there’s one way to find out. Time to get the demon out of there. He knows.”

  “No!” I said sharply.

  “No?”

  I pointed to the bowl inside the pentagram. “He’s not tied into Devon right now. You want him loose?”

  The witch’s face went rigid. “A loosening spell? Why would you do that? What kind of idiot—?” She composed her face. “We have to let him out regardless. He has to transfigure the phoenix and harness its power before it explodes. The power can only be contained safely if the phoenix is in its proper form.”

  Devon shook his head wildly. There was fear on his face as the demon realized he had failed one of his tasks. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “That’s your third task,” Sarmine said. “You must.”

  “I was so sure it was the phoenix. I know it’s near. I can feel its presence here in the school. It’s lonely and cold and hard.”

  “It’s got to be the T-Bird,” I said. “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sarmine. “What else would it be, Hikari?”

  Sparkle backed away from us. “How do you know my real name? Are you a teacher?”

  “I didn’t recognize you when you were six,” said Sarmine. “But you can’t hide anymore. Tell us where the phoenix is. You’re the one who summoned a demon to hide it. You’re the one who knows.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Sarmine whipped out her dragon-milk wand, scattered a white powder in front of it, and flicked it at Sparkle, slamming the girl backward. “Tell us,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” I rushed toward the witch, but she forestalled me with a flick of the wand.

  “You stopped me before. You won’t stop me this time, Hikari,” said Sarmine.

  “Stop calling me Hikari!” shouted Sparkle. She clutched her cameo necklace as she fought off Sarmine’s force.

  “What do you have in that charm? Dragon scales glued to the back? You were always a scaly sort of hag.”

  Sparkle was staying upright only by a huge effort. We all saw her nose suddenly flick back to its crooked form.

  “Ha!” cried Sarmine. “It’s keeping your nose job on, isn’t it? How’d you figure out that spell?”

  “Envelope to me … said not to open till I was fifteen … then I could have the nose I always wanted…” Sparkle’s eyes darted, and the words were an effort. “Followed the weird algebra problem with rhubarb and horsehairs and then suddenly this happened.” She gestured at her straight nose.

  “So her mom left her a spell?” I said.

  “Not her mom,” said Sarmine. “Considering the source it was vaguely clever. All Kari had to do was an amnesia spell on herself. Ten years ago after she transfigured the phoenix and had to hide until its rebirth, she made herself forget almost everything. Made herself think she was six. And then—”

  “Because witches look on the outside like the age they feel inside…” I said.

  Sarmine nodded. “For all practical purposes she was six.”

  Sparkle was pale. “It’s not true,” she said.

  “Probably dropped herself off at her grandfather’s with a note from ‘Mom,’” said Sarmine. “‘Take care of my daughter’ et cetera. Is that right? You live with your grandfather?”

  “I do…” Sparkle shook her head wildly and I admit I felt kinda bad for her. “It’s not true! I’m not old. I’m not!”

  “Oh yes, you are,” Sarmine said grimly. “And I bet you have another note that you were supposed to follow today, to summon a demon to control the phoenix. Did you balk at that spell?”

  Sparkle looked at me, and I think in that moment we both remembered tiptoeing halfway down the basement stairs, curious. Holding on to the cold railing and each other. Watching pretty red smoke curls, watching silver stars. Then watching Sarmine sacrifice a ferret in a pool of crimson blood.

  “The spell called for goat’s blood,” Sparkle whispered.

  Sarmine looked at her bracelet watch. “Six minutes till the explosion.” To me: “Get your wand out.”

  “How did you know I’ve got—” She glared and I shut up. “Right.”

  “You never were a very clever witch, were you, Hikari?” Sarmine was needling Sparkle, throwing her off balance. In a low voice she said: “To find the phoenix, I have to lift the spell so she remembers everything.”

  I could tell from Sarmine’s posture that she was braced. Hikari might not be the best witch in the world—and she probably didn’t have a store of ingredients close to hand like Sarmine did—but she was about to have all her power and memory back, and she wasn’t going to like us very much. I gripped my wand.

  Sarmine’s free hand was rummaging through her fanny pack. “A sprig of parsley,” she muttered. “Three alder leaves … we’ll substitute elm. Four faux gems…” She ripped off the two pearl buttons on the high neck of her shirt. “Cam, six elm leaves and two more things like gemstones. Now.”

  Of course you know where the gemstone-like things were. In what I supposed was irony, I tackled Sparkle, who was busy watching the witch root through the fanny pack. “I’m sorry,” I gasped out. “But otherwise the phoenix … will incinerate … us all.” I grappled for her tiara, but she wouldn’t let it go.

  “You’re as bad as she is,” hissed Sparkle, which made me lose the sympathy for her I’d just had. Honestly, she was as aggravating as Sarmine Scarabouche. Why couldn’t people be all good or all bad? This business with feeling sorry for someone who could turn around and be obnoxious the next minute made things so complicated.

  The witch pulled off her shoe and pulverized her ingredients in it. “Counterfeit money would work, too,” she said. “Something that imitates something valuable.”

  “Oh, that’s you, all right,” I said to Sparkle. She bit my arm.

  “Humans invest belief in fakes,” the witch lectured. “We agree to regard Hikari’s tiara as imitating something expensive. And the expensive item itself is something that’s only expensive because we believe in its value. A gemstone rarely has intrinsic worth, except for diamonds, which are used to cut things, and opals, which will keep all insects from biting you.”

  Sparkle shoved me off and I fell, cradling my arm. One last ploy to prevent that phoenix explosion. “I’ve got my phone in my pocket,” I told Sparkle. “You want your picture back? So you can go back to pretending your nose didn’t straighten out magically?” I held it out, and when she brought the tiara up indecisively, I grabbed it and dropped the phone into her hands.

  I tossed the tiara at Sarmine, who caught it. With her wand she poked two jewels from it and they fell in her shoe.

  “Press seven-oh-four to unlock it. Then scroll and delete,” I told Sparkle.

  Sparkle’s fingers flew. I don’t think she even cared as Sarmine threw the contents of her shoe at Sparkle and traced the air with her wand in a star pattern.

  The air whirled around Sparkle. For a moment, she lost all color, like she was a sepia photograph. “Whoa,” said one of the zombie girls. Then Sparkle colorized, in pieces, and as she did her head jerked up as if she was remembering things, great gallons of things, all at once. The phone dropped to the ground and blinked off, dead.

  “Not again,” I said.

  And while Sparkle was distracted, Sarmine shouted, “The phoenix is exploding!”

  Which made Sparkle jump backward.

  And look directly at the ground in front of the T-Bird.

  Sparkle’s head shot up again and she sneered, but it was too late.

  “The mouse,” I said. “It’s the mouse statue! That’s almost clever.”

  “What would you know, Cash,” said Sparkle.

&
nbsp; She was growing taller now, filling out. She was a college chick, she was an adult, she was older and older. Her waist thickened, then silver threaded her hair, then tiny creases sprouted under her eyes and on the backs of her hands.

  Until at last she looked the same age as Sarmine.

  Sparkle stared in disbelief at her hands. “No,” she whispered. “No, this is not me.”

  “Did you really try to convince me I was normal?” I said.

  “We are normal,” she said, voice screeching upward. “I don’t want to be Kari. I don’t want these memories. I don’t want to be evil.”

  The witch snorted. “You always were an idiot.” She turned to me. “Ready to release the demon? I need to finish making my spell so we can capture the explosion and use it to get enough power to run the town. I need those pixies, for starters.”

  “Tough,” I said, and surprise pinched her features. “One of the pixies got away. You’ve only got ninety-nine left.”

  Her face cleared. “That’s all right. I only need fifty.”

  “You had the demon kill an extra fifty pixies just to make sure you had enough?”

  “I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Now release the demon, please. Unless you want the phoenix to explode.” She pulled a collapsible bowl from her fanny pack, snapped it into shape, and set it on the ground. She measured off various contents of her pack into it.

  “You want me to help you,” I said. “I’ve been working all week to stop you. You know what? I’m getting off this merry-go-round.”

  The witch tapped a teaspoon of something blue into the bowl. “So you’re ready to be reasonable?”

  “I can’t win if I play your game,” I said. “You’ve got me backed into a corner where all I can do is help you take over the city, or stop you from that but let a school full of innocent people die. I choose the third way. I choose to use the phoenix power myself.”

  The witch stirred the powders in her bowl with a metal baby spoon. “You don’t have the ingredients for that,” she said calmly. “I know you don’t have the spell—I researched for fifteen years to find out how to harness something so close to elemental power, even with the demon’s help. And you certainly don’t have the power, you and that Goody Two-shoes little wand and your day’s worth of spell practice. You can’t do it.”

  “I can if I use an elemental.”

  16

  Demon Girl

  I’d never seen Sarmine look scared before. “I just reclaimed my daughter,” she said grimly. “I don’t want an embodied demon instead.” She stood, clutching her bowl.

  “You won’t get one,” I said with more confidence than I felt. I knocked on the pentagram between Reese and Avery. It was solid. But the pentagram spell had hinted that the witch who made the pentagram had certain powers over it. You are mine, I told it. I made you. Let me in. The pentagram went kind of spongy around my hand.

  “Sure, it’ll let you in. But it won’t let you out,” warned Sarmine. “I know pentagrams.”

  “Human pentagrams have certain limitations,” I told her.

  She moved toward me, but I ducked under Reese’s and Avery’s arms and wiggled inside.

  “Hey! How come you—” squealed Reese, but the other girls kept a grip on her hands. I breathed a silent hope that they’d hold her down.

  It was very weird being inside a pentagram. Everything on the outside was transmuted through the rainbowy glass. The girls’ faces seemed all wavery, and when they spoke, they sounded underwater. Out of curiosity, I tried to touch Reese’s shoulder, but my finger stopped that quarter inch from her witch costume.

  The witch walked around the pentagram, tapping for entrance. But she had already said, “Good work,” so I tried not to worry.

  “What exactly do you hope to accomplish?” Arms crossed, Devon sneered at me.

  His eyes were so cold when he was the demon. I stared into them, remembering them warm and kind and full of light.

  He shifted under my gaze.

  “Think of your dog,” I said, “the one who likes those pig’s ears, think of him running to you. Think of the old animal shelter. Think of a day when you tried to walk six dogs at once and wrapped yourself around a tree.”

  “Oh, that will tempt him,” said Estahoth.

  “Think of the song you wrote about it later. Think of sitting on the school lawn with your guitar, working on your songs. You remember finding the pixies? Think of doing that again, but without him. Walking slowly along the creek, watching the pixies blink on and off. Watching bats swoop after mosquitoes. Writing a song about these things,” I said. “These are all the things you like. Estahoth doesn’t care about any of this. You let him stay and you’ll belong to him forever. How long will Estahoth play by your rules if he doesn’t have to? Will he let you keep your band? Your songwriting?” I held his eyes. “Your friends?”

  Devon bent double, breaking eye contact. I soldiered on.

  “Think of what he did to the pixies,” I said. “Of course you didn’t want to talk about that before. He didn’t want you to. Maybe he misjudged how much it would take to break you. We’re talking about it now. Think of ninety-nine tiny green pixies, with glowing wings. Think of squishing them to goo, think of how the bones cracked between your fingers. Think of being like someone who does everything you hate. Remember when you said that to me in the hallway?”

  I touched his shoulder. He was shaking. “Think of choosing your own path. You can be you again, all you. Just tell him to go.”

  Silence.

  And then rainbow light came streaming from his skin. The light was force and power and it beat me back, into the side of the pentagram, which didn’t budge. The firecracker/mold smell was strong and pungent here in the confines of the pentagram, and I sneezed but didn’t flinch. It was Tuesday afternoon all over again, except this time things were different.

  This time I was letting the demon in.

  Demons rush to bodies. I opened wide and let the elemental stream into me. He wailed when he realized where he was, and tried to leave.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” I said. “You’re staying right here.” I kept him locked inside me, which—although an unbelievably creepy sensation, like keeping a live goldfish imprisoned in your mouth—wasn’t impossible. After all, demons longed for human bodies. Estahoth wanted to leave me and try Devon again, but at the same time I was his raincoat, his shelter from the storm. The force of my command to him worked on him somewhat, as the witch’s had on Tuesday. He cowered in me, ambivalent, huddling. “You’re still not done with your contract,” I told him. “But first we’re releasing these hopes and dreams to their rightful owners.”

  The demon calmed down, coiled. The goldfish sensation lessened. I felt him lurking, felt a mental shrug. “Fine,” said Estahoth. But if he was willing to play my game for the moment, then he must be thinking of some new plan. I didn’t trust him an inch. “My part of the bargain was fulfilled by collecting them.”

  And then all five dreams that he’d collected bubbled up in me. I sorted through them. Reese’s secret hope to be a kindergarten teacher and have a big family. Avery’s fierce desire to be a tennis star. The girl who liked computers wanted to design games, Tashelle wanted to build bridges, and the last girl wanted to be a librarian. I sent all the dreams back to them, and the pentagram shimmered and cracked apart as one by one they dropped hands.

  Well, except Reese, who still clung to the hands next to her, even when the girls tried to push her off. “I won, I won,” she said, near tears. The glassy zombie stare was gone, but her face was crumpled and confused.

  Devon wavered and fell to his knees in the mud. “I’m sorry, Reese,” he said, and there was a crack in his voice. “All of you.” Most of the girls wandered off looking dazed, but Avery slapped him upside the head as she pulled heartbroken Reese away.

  “My hopes and dreams!” shrieked the witch. “How can I harness the phoenix now?”

  “You harness the phoenix?” shouted Sparkle/Kari. H
er face was distraught, but her memory must have been sorting itself into place. It seemed to be pulling her in two directions, almost like I’d seen with Devon/Estahoth. That was surely all her former Kari-self yelling, “That was my phoenix. I discovered it and brought it here. He’s all mine!”

  “Not if I get to him first,” said Sarmine.

  “You’ve got a dragon,” shot back Kari. “What do you need a phoenix for, too? Greedy, evil—”

  “Guys, guys,” I said. “Nobody owns a phoenix. You can’t own a phoenix any more than you can a human.”

  And I reached down deep to the coiled elemental who still had one more part of his contract to fulfill. “Ready?” I said.

  “Ready,” said Estahoth.

  His force running through mine, we reached down and clasped the tiny metal mouse. There was a moment where we were working in harmony, and it felt right, like we understood each other and knew each other inside and out.

  And I suddenly thought, Is this something that was part of Devon that I liked, that now will be gone forever?

  But under our hands the mouse was warming. It came free from its base and we picked it up, warming, growing, changing in our hands. It was red, it was orange, it smelled of cinnamon and heartbeats, it fluttered, it breathed, it grew.

  It lifted from my hands, still growing. Bigger, and bigger, until it was the size of Moonfire. Then bigger still, and I saw now that its feathers were dulled and torn with age, that its eyes were pouched, that its tail was heavy. The phoenix was very old. It was ready for rebirth. It was ready to start over.

  “Thirty seconds,” said the witch.

  Behind the phoenix I saw a form beating toward us, approaching in invisible sweeps that blocked the stars. “Cam!” whooped a far-off voice. “Cam!”

  “Come,” said the demon. “See what we can do.” And with Estahoth’s help I seemed to grow out of my body, expanding along with the phoenix, which rose and winged higher and higher. “What is it you want to do with the flame? We can do anything. You could follow Sarmine’s lead. Use it to control the city. Or use it to control Sarmine.”