“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?”
“Male dragons were apparently very nasty,” I said. “And more visible. We’re pretty sure they’re all dead. Elementals don’t die of old age, but they can be hunted and killed.”
“She doesn’t have a way to call them. Her—something like radar?—won’t go far enough. There could be more sister dragons farther away that she doesn’t know about. She can’t—boost her signal, I guess it is—any higher.”
“Let me listen,” I said. I settled in next to Jenah, and got images I was familiar with, of a dragon’s-eye view in the sky, of Moonfire soaring and looking for someone like her. But as usual, the images were faded and flickering for me, whereas Jenah seemed to feel aloft. Her eyes were closed in wonder as the dragon dipped and flew.
“One by one, she lost contact with her friends,” Jenah narrated, in longer sentences now as she grew more comfortable with the dragon’s mode of communication. “More people settled here. Most of them couldn’t see her, but sometimes people could. Witches, of course. And other people, too. They hunted her. This went on for a long time. Then one night, exhausted from a flight from a man who was hunting her, she flew straight into a storm. Her wing tangled on a power line and broke. She sent out a distress signal, and that’s when she met Sarmine. Sarmine offered her a safe place to stay in exchange for her milk and discarded scales.”
I saw that image crystal clear, with a young Sarmine, almost as young as me, in a T-shirt and a ponytail. Another house, one I didn’t recognize. A man raking the yard while a smiling Sarmine painted that other garage a familiar shade of sky blue.
“Sometimes she wants to leave, but she gets worried about being chased by men with guns again. So she stays. Because what’s out there anyway to look forward to?”
“Poor Moonfire,” I said. I toyed with the brush bristles. “Stuck here in a witch’s garage, nothing to look forward to but two more centuries of giving the witch her milk, till the witch kicks the bucket. I haven’t even gotten the demon to come look at her lungs.”
“The not knowing, that’s the worst,” murmured Jenah.
Tears splashed into the glass jars hung around the dragon’s face.
“See, that would be cool,” I said. “If I were a witch, I could do awesome spells like trying to help the dragon find her friends. Working toward good in the world. Like Alphonse, but without the breaking and entering. That’s what I’d do.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t,” said Jenah. “If you were a witch, of course. Or if spells worked for anybody. Then you could do them.”
If I could do spells. The thought sent strange shivers up my spine, and for the first time since I was five they weren’t shivers of horror. What if I could do good things with spells? Use them to help people, to help animals? What if I could do things that were the opposite of Sarmine?
But no, that’s not what real witches did. I’d seen that often enough. Being a witch corrupted you just like having a demon inside you did. Power ate away at your soul. “Did you see Sarmine’s trick with the pumpkin patch?” I said. “That’s what real witches are like. Conceited paranoid monsters, who’d as soon punish you as look at you.” Devon was just dying with that horrid thing in him and there was nothing I could do about it as a plain ordinary human. Help him with the tasks, stop him from the tasks, it didn’t seem to matter. I couldn’t do a darn thing to stop Devon’s soul from getting eaten. I smacked the floor with the brush. “This sucks.”
Jenah stroked the dragon’s hide and considered. “You said that when the spell went wrong, the witch tried to shove Devon in the pentagram to trap him. Is there some way you could trick the demon into a pentagram?”
I scrambled up. “Hey! That’s not a bad idea. I trick him into a pentagram and that contains both of them. But then what?” I paced the length of the garage, kicking the straw. The demon was going to be around till the phoenix explosion on Halloween, regardless. If I captured Devon and the demon in a pentagram, that would stop the demon from doing bad things. Which might help Devon … or, it might not. Being stuck in a pentagram would stop the demon from things like squishing pixies, but it wouldn’t stop the demon from whispering things into Devon’s mind, poisoning his soul.
“It’s not just a little spell I need,” I said slowly. I remembered my Witchipedia research, and the idea I had dismissed before. “I need a really powerful spell. I need a spell to get the demon out of Devon. If a spell got him in, there must be a spell to get him out. If I can find it.” That would be something good I could do, something right. “That doesn’t solve the exploding phoenix, though.”
“Well, you have till Friday for that,” said Jenah.
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Trying to be helpful,” said Jenah. “How easy are spells? A matter of tapping something with a wand?”
“God, no. Even if you’re right that I can do it, I still have to track down a spell and then puzzle it out.” I thought of the rooftop again. Of banging a boot against the trapdoor while the demon made Devon kill that little pixie so horribly. How many had had the demon made him squish? I plonked the bristle brush into my palm. “I’m going to try. The witch wants me to work a spell? Fine. I’ll figure out how to save Devon. That’s the kind of spell I want to do.”
I swallowed hard at the thought of trying spells, but it had to be done. “Time to step up the game.”
* * *
After Jenah reluctantly left, I checked to make sure the witch was still gone. I didn’t know where she’d gone, but she despised normal people too much to ever stay out for very long. I checked on Wulfie—he was curled up with his tail over his nose on the living room couch.
And then I snuck into the witch’s study, accessible only from her bedroom. Honestly, I was surprised that she didn’t have any spells to stop me from going in there.
Well.
No spells that I saw, anyway.
The witch had already been gone longer than I expected, and I didn’t want to push my luck further, so I hurried. I tugged book after book from the shelf and thumbed through them, scanning for something obvious. A lot of the books seemed not to be spells at all, but boring political treatises about ecology and the Witch Government. I shoved those back, and also ignored the stacks of trashy witch romances. There was a media tie-in with Zolak the demon hunter in a ripped-up shirt on the cover. After I finished being squicked that the witch had the same crush I did, Zolak’s black hair and knowing look reminded me of demon-infused Devon. I wished yet again that my phone would phone real-world phones or connect to the real-world Internet. Devon must be at home and miserable while the demon planned his next round of attacks. I wished I could tell him I was thinking of him. Reluctantly I shelved the book, though I thought when all this was over, I might sneak it out sometime.
In contrast to the romances, the spellbooks were covered in layers of dust and cobwebs. I was kind of surprised, because the witch is such a neat freak about important things. I wondered if she was getting lazy, ignoring this library of information—or if she already knew everything in these books. Or, if she’d already judged which books were useful and which were heaps of lies, like the Web sites of silly egotistical witches all over WitchNet.
I shut down that worry. I had enough unknowns with this trying-to-do-a-spell thing without wondering whether or not the witch’s books were accurate. Maybe I didn’t know as much as Sarmine did, but I knew Sarmine, and she would not have books around that were heaps of lies.
I took one book that had general information on phoenix, and another about dragon history. An antique one called The Young Witch’s Handbook to Building a WitchRadio (useless for the demon problem, but I thought it might have something about dragon communication in it). I stacked them both on top of a couple of encyclopedic-looking books.
<
br /> And then I saw the book I needed.
From the looks of it, it was a very well (and recently) read book on demons, but when my fingers came near, it jumped to another shelf. I grabbed again—and it jumped again.
That might be enough to stop an ordinary book browser, but it wasn’t going to stop me. I read the spine of the book next to it out loud: “Witch’s Passion: A Fiery Tale. That sounds promising.” I focused my thoughts and my left hand on Witch’s Passion. The demon book twitched a little as I neared it. I grabbed Witch’s Passion’s spine … and then with my right hand I pounced on the demon book. “Aha!”
It struggled, but as soon as it was off the bookshelf it went limp. “You’re mine now,” I told it.
I nudged the other books on the shelf closer to each other, wiped away fingerprints in the dust … and then I saw a small black wand behind a glass door in the bookcase.
Of course.
If I wanted to work a spell, I needed a wand.
But was the witch going to miss this one? It was behind glass. It must be important. I glanced around the study to see if she had any others. I only ever saw her use her slim aluminum one. I had no idea she had other wands at all.
That’s when I heard the garage door click.
I swear, it was like she had radar, like the dragon.
I grabbed the wand from the shelf and closed the glass door. Then hightailed it back to my room and shoved it and the books under my bed, just as her heels clicked down the hallway. They went past my room to hers and I breathed a tentative sigh of relief.
I was dying to look at the books, but I still had the second half of The Crucible to read, a chapter of biology, and two work sheets for French I. Not to mention that stupid algebra. Boldly, I decided to do algebra first, and started off on problem four of the study guide for the test I hoped Rourke would let me retake. Now what had Kelvin said? He’d said I could do it if I went slow, right?
Laboriously, I wrote down all the things I knew. Crossed out all the things I didn’t need. Then arranged the problem into the equations I needed, using my finger as a placeholder.
By problem six I was starting to think that Kelvin was right.
I’d thought of algebra as something requiring great intuitive leaps and an inner aptitude, because that’s the way Rourke had been doing it. But all this was step by step. Anyone who figured out how to slot all the witch’s bizarro demands into one streamlined schedule and then check them off could do something that was step by step.
Thank you, Kelvin, I thought. I was going to have to tell him tomorrow that I appreciated him.
I started on problem seven, and then there was a sort of ringing noise in my backpack. Everyone else in the entire world would have known what it was immediately, but do you know why it took me forever to figure out what it was? Because I’d never had a single solitary phone call on my cell phone before. Because—as you probably remember—my phone was hooked in only to the witch system. Sarmine hated talking on the phone, so she only texted me those awful BRING ME A BIRD sorts of messages, and like, what, was I going to give the number to the creepy witch guy who raised unicorns and once drooled on my shoe? I thought not.
Big surprise number two: It was Devon.
“How on earth are you able to call this phone?” I said.
“The demon arranged it,” Devon said. “He had some charming doublespeak for his new strategy with me but basically it’s carrot and stick. He does something awful, then he gives me something I want. Back and forth. He said he’d go to sleep now but he hasn’t yet. Maybe we’ll have to bore him into it.”
I laughed, warmed at the idea that calling me was something Devon wanted. Then sobered. “How are you doing since the rooftop?”
Pause. “All right,” he said.
He clearly didn’t want to talk about the pixies, so I changed the subject, even though I didn’t know if it was better for him to ignore it or not. “Did you have a lot of homework?”
“No,” he said. “Estahoth did it. It was one of his carrots.”
“Are you sure it’s right?” I said.
“Yes, because the interesting thing is, I remember doing it. I have all that information in my head. It just didn’t take time. About five minutes to do everything assigned, and then I could get back to my music. I have to admit I could get used to that.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said.
“Joking, joking.”
That left an uncomfortable silence, and then I added to the awkwardness by saying, “So what else did he help you with?”
“Got me to my band practice an hour away,” Devon said. “I was going to take the bus but he moved me there in the space of a heartbeat. Pretty cool.”
“Public transit is cool, too,” I said. “Extremely cool.” The demon’s favors were worrying me.
“Um, right,” said Devon. “Well. I was there an hour early, so I had time to work on the new song.”
“The butter one?”
He laughed. “You have to remember, we’ve been playing a lot of schools and churches,” he said. “Emo songs don’t make it past the review committees. So far this year I’ve written one song about Saturday afternoons at the dog park, one about unicycling giraffes, and one about a mopey Batman in love with Superman. Well, that one is kind of emo. Anyway, this one isn’t about superheroes or giraffes or anything else. It’s simply about a girl.” His voice dropped down into that velvety thing it does when he’s singing.
“Is that so?” I managed.
“A plain ordinary girl.”
“Oh.”
“Well, maybe not very plain at all.”
“Oh?”
“And maybe not very ordinary in the slightest.”
“Tell me more.”
“It was going to be about a girl who tamed demons, but demons never make it past the censors.”
“So what does this not very plain, not very ordinary girl do?”
He sang, soft and in my ear.
“She’s a cool stick of butter
With a warm warm heart
The Serengeti loves her
’Cause she takes their part
She shoulders up her tranqs
To put the humans down
She stands with the lions
The bad guys hit the ground
She’s a lion tamer, a lion tamer
And she’s on their side
She’s a lion tamer, a lion tamer
And she’s one of their pride
When she finds me at the bus stop
I’m a loner with a mane
The world wants to cage me
’Cause they think I am insane
But she shoulders up her tranqs
To put the whole world down
She stands next to me
When the bad guys come around
She’s a lion tamer, a lion tamer
She’s on my side
She’s a lion tamer, a lion tamer
And I’m one of her pride.
“Good night, Cam,” he said.
“Good night,” I whispered back.
Homework not done. Spellbooks not researched. I had to be up at five-thirty for my regular chores.
But oh … my silly, fluttery heart made it hard to care.
I set the alarm an hour early and plunged into lovely demon-free dreams.
* * *
In the morning, it was pouring rain. The garage was leaking onto Moonfire, sizzling where it hit her scales. I ran around nailing tarps and stacking up pans, and my extra hour didn’t buy me a bit of time. When I finally got to the ten minutes I was supposed to spend on deciphering that spell for self-defense, my mind was elsewhere.
I suppose that’s why, when I looked down at my sheet of scratch paper, I realized I had started by carefully writing out the list of things I knew.
“Hells,” I breathed. Spells really were just like a big word problem.
I studied the spell further. It certainly wasn’t like any algebra proble
m I’d worked last night, because of all that stuff about ingredients higher than nine starting with P and so on. But if you considered that that part was like a logic problem … and that other parts were like crosswords or anagrams … I started lining up the things I knew about the ingredients. Turning them into equations. Crossing off things as soon as I knew I didn’t need them.
And then I had it.
Two and a half tablespoons chopped pear, two tablespoons water, three tablespoons maple syrup, and one pinch each pepper and paprika. The only necessary gesture was to make sure you chopped the pears with both hands. It even sounded tasty.
The witch had said it was a beginner’s spell, and I’d never believed her.
Now that I’d figured it out, I almost wanted to try it. But the bus was already coming down the street. I stuffed the self-defense spell and the witch’s books in my backpack, and ran through the rain to the bus stop.
“Almost didn’t make it,” said Oliver as I climbed aboard.
“Then you wouldn’t have this,” I said, and handed him a tiny mister for his windshield.
“Whatta girl,” said Oliver as he accelerated. “I’ll put it on soon as I make up the time I lost. That stuff’s magic.”
“Yup,” I said. I wiped rain from my frizzing hair, looking over his shoulder for Devon. After last night, I was dying to see him in person. To see what his face would reveal when he saw me. But yet again, no Devon on the bus. I hoped the demon wasn’t making him walk the four miles to school in the pouring rain.
“I already saw your friend this morning,” Oliver said. “He got on when I swung through here an hour ago.”
I looked quizzically at him.
“You know, your friend that poured water on my nice dry bus,” he said. “I saw him.”
“How’d he look?”
“Dry,” said Oliver. “I particularly noticed that. Everyone else looked like they’d been through a car wash, but not him. I almost didn’t recognize him. You know I recognize people by the tops of their heads as they come up the stairs, and now his hair’s changed color…”
Seriously Wicked: A Novel Page 11