“All right,” I said, warmed by the invitation. Devon talking about animals was an entirely different person than Devon talking about bras. I wanted to say he had a similar sort of confidence to what the demon displayed, though, duh, of course he wasn’t using it to try to make girls swoon, so I didn’t really know how to describe what I meant. Maybe it was just tough luck for Devon that he was an animal geek—and songwriter—born into a boy-band-boy body.
Devon tugged a pencil pouch from his backpack. “I found some spiders during gym,” he said, and tipped the crawly contents of the pouch into the box. “I wonder if pixies are amphibians like frogs.”
“I think so,” I said. “Sometime I’ll show you the witch’s taxonomy. It adds in the creatures regular humans don’t know about.”
“They don’t separate them out by the creatures with magic? Maybe they should be their own kingdom.” He picked out a tiny frog-pixie of his own and cupped it in his hands.
“All organisms have magic in them,” I said. “Plant, animal, human. Pixies have more than frogs, but they both have magic. Like you can use frog hops for bouncing, but it takes several hundred frogs, and how often do you want to be good at bouncing? But pixie wings can be used for buoyancy or for secrecy. Or sometimes you just use their light. Their light’s often used in spying spells. Capture one, get three blinks, and let it go. Witches combine ingredients through trial and error and add their own abilities to it. Scientific, really.”
“You’ve used their wings?” said Devon.
I could hear what he thought of that in his voice. I was sure he was imagining me pulling the wings off pixies, and I almost leaped on the attack and said, “Well, you give your dog pig’s ears to chew!” But then I pulled myself back from that paranoid response and said calmly, “Pixies die with the first snowfall. Their wings slough off. You gather them in the snow.”
“Could the demon use these little guys for spells, too?”
“I dunno if he’d bother,” I said. “Elementals don’t work magic, they are magic. Unlike witches, they don’t need ingredients to perform magic, because it comes from within. But I don’t know what the rules are right now, while he’s inside you. Witchipedia was vague on that part. And by ‘vague,’ I mean the article had been edited a whole lot, back and forth. I guess demons don’t like to have too much written up about them.”
Devon nodded. “He said he didn’t have any power, but I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “He already showed me pixies that I couldn’t see before. Who knows what else he can do.” His pixie blinked on and off in his palms as he gazed out over the city.
“Friday,” I said firmly. “You just have to make it to Friday.”
He nodded. “Just resist him, over and over. Not let him find my weak spots.”
“You think you can?”
“Sure,” he said. But his eyes told a different story, I thought. “He’s not going to get the best of me. He’d have to know—” He looked around like someone might be coming up behind him. “Stupid of me. I know where he is and he can hear everything. He knows anything we plan. He’ll be able to recall anything I say to you.”
“Anything?” I said. My heart went patter-thud.
That needed no answer, I guess. Devon didn’t say anything. We sat on the edge of the rooftop together and watched the red and yellow trees sway against the blue sky. I could see small figures walking around in the park across the street. The box of pixies blinked.
“He thinks he can seduce me by making a hundred girls fall for me. I don’t care about that. Who’d want to be clung to by ordinary everyday girls?”
“Not I.”
“But then sometimes,” Devon said softly to the trees in front of us, “he’s got the confidence to say the things I maybe wanted to say, but didn’t have the guts. It gets very confusing.”
“Um, really?” I said. His hand was very close to mine on the rooftop. Our arms were so close that when we breathed out at the same time, my sleeve touched his jacket. There seemed to be electricity jumping that gap, from his arm to mine, heating my side. I wondered if he could see me breathing. The more I thought about the way our breathing made our sleeves touch, the more I seemed to mess up my own breathing patterns, making my breaths seem irregular and hugely obvious. Surely he could see the uncool way my chest lurched, just from our stupid sleeves.
Why couldn’t I just enjoy sitting on the school roof with a rather nice boy who had a few demonic issues? Why did I have to be thinking about my stupid breathing?
I blamed the witch.
“Hells!” I said as my pixie made a dash for it. I lunged and caught the little guy, placed my finger gently between his wings and held. He blinked faster, upset with me.
Devon yawned. “I haven’t been this beat-up since I tried to walk six dogs at once.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Got my arms and legs wrapped around a birch tree,” Devon said. “Sat there with six dogs licking my face while Dad untangled me. I got a song out of it, though.” He sighed. “We’d better get off the roof while the gettin’s good. Pack these pixies up.”