Too late for that.
“Demons are bound by their contracts,” it continued. “Even the smartest witches have difficulty demonproofing the terms of their contracts. Demons are on the alert for any loopholes. A demon bound to a contract is obligated to continue working on it, and the only way to banish a demon is to fulfill the contract. Even this can lead to difficulties, such as in the case of Jim Hexar in 1982, when such a contract effectively prevented any chance of him winning his Head Warlock bid.”
Hexar, I thought. Was that the same Hexar as the Hexar/Scarabouche T-shirt the mannequin wore? I had no idea the witch had had real political aspirations once. All the attempts at city-running I’d seen involved spells and schemes, not rallies and debates. I suppose I’d thought the shirt was a joke. It was hard to imagine Sarmine as a Tshirted young rebel in 1982, knowing her as the ancient-looking support-hosed witch I knew now.
Though if she still acted like a twenty-year-old, it would be a lot easier to imagine it—because she’d look like it.
See, witches live a long time, often three times as long as humans. But the interesting thing about witches is that they look whatever age they feel like inside. I don’t mean they can choose, exactly, though they sort of do. Basically they look the age they feel … and most of them feel old, which is why one of the things regular humans get right is imagining that all witches are ancient humpbacked crones.
Because … yeah. I think all that paranoia gets to you, that and feeling a million times smarter than all the humans around you. Witches aren’t as a rule any smarter, as any trip around the WitchNet will show you, but they know magic, and they know they’re going to live a long time. If you know you’re going to be around to see it, you look at the fate of the world differently.
Not that that gave Sarmine Scarabouche the right to wreak havoc on my high school.
I clicked on “Jim Hexar,” but the biography was terse: “Vanished near the beginning of the twenty-first century,” it said, and then there was a smoky-smelling sign that said the article had been flagged for having virus spells attached to it. I shut off my phone before one could sneak through.
Fulfill the contract, I thought. I turned off the light and smooshed my sweatshirt pillow into a better position. So Estahoth/Devon was going to be busy working on Sarmine’s contractual list of world-taking-over duties. If Witchipedia was right, there was no way to send a demon back to the Earth’s core until its contract was up. But what about getting a demon out of a particular human? Did such a demon-getting-out spell even exist?
Well, even if it did, the witch wasn’t going to work it for me. I dismissed that option from my mind. It seemed like my best bet to save Devon’s soul was to help him complete the contract so the demon would leave.
Which apparently included destroying five people and maybe making the school burn down.
Un dilemme, indeed.
6
Sparkle This
Devon was not on the bus the next morning. I walked up and down the aisle, checking, even though Oliver the bus driver looked at me funny and made a crack about walking to school.
He was also not in Algebra II, which made me more nervous. Was the demon that in control of him that he couldn’t make it to school? I didn’t even know where he lived. What if the demon had already eaten his soul?
At lunch, Jenah stopped me at the cafeteria door. “There’s catering where we’re going,” she said.
“Where are we going?” I said.
Jenah made shifty eyes. “You remember how you said you owed me big-time for tracking down Kelvin yesterday?”
“And I stand by that,” I said. “Wait, you aren’t going to ask me to clean your half of the locker again, are you? It’s like a fake-hair factory exploded down there, and it’s only October.”
“It’s nothing bad,” Jenah said quickly.
“Good,” I said, as we set off down the hall. “And this nothing bad thing is…?”
“Very last Halloween Dance Committee meeting,” Jenah said in a fast mumble. Like very last made it better.
I stopped. “Jenah, you know I hate Halloween.”
She grabbed my hand. “Yes, but you promised. Come on.”
“I don’t know why you need me,” I said. Jenah understood dances. Parties. Committees. Today she was all in black and yellow, stripes and fishnets. Her clipped-in streak was highlighter yellow, and her eyes were winged in perfect cat’s-eye liner. I was in my second-best jeans—the ones that didn’t understand my butt and showed too much sock—and a vintage tee with a glittery rainbow.
It was obvious who should be on the HDC.
“The aura in that room is just awful,” said Jenah. “I need you to balance it out with me. You know what they can be like.”