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. Out 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.