It seemed like a moment to say I was sorry, but I couldn’t feel it. Conflicting emotions shuddered through me—disappointment, stress, guilt. And underneath, a small sliver of … excitement? “I … I didn’t know,” I said lamely.
“I know,” said the witch. “That six-year-old girl was like some kind of Svengali. You were obsessed with trying to be what she wanted. And when she didn’t want you to be a witch, you convinced yourself you weren’t. I tried to make you admit the truth so many times. Eventually I just gave up.”
I thought back to when I was five and any urge to say “I’m sorry” vanished. “You’re wrong,” I said. “It wasn’t her, it was you. We saw you. We saw you in the basement, working a spell. A really horrible spell. That’s why I didn’t want to be a witch.”
It was the witch’s turn to be surprised. “What spell?”
I swallowed. “I’ve seen you use a bunch of ingredients I think are awful,” I said. “But I’ve never seen you actually kill something yourself. Except that day.”
The witch went white. “You saw the tracing spell,” she said. “I never knew.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to be a witch,” I said. “I couldn’t be.” I had never seen Sarmine at a loss for words and I didn’t know what to make of it. “We’d better get back to the demon,” I said awkwardly, and turned, but Sarmine touched my arm.
“It was my last chance to find Jim,” she said, her lips ghastly pale. “And it failed.”
“Jim Hexar.”
She nodded.
“Camellia Anna Stella Hendrix,” I said. “But my real name isn’t Hendrix, is it? It’s Hexar. It always was.”
“The neighbors had a dog named Hendrix,” she said. She shook her head, her color returning. “I never knew you saw. When you came home with your new name and story, I aged twenty years in a day. It was like between the two of you, you put some sort of block on yourself. Witches are secretive and paranoid and hide things from each other, but you two took it to extremes.”
“Sparkle’s that kind of girl already, though,” I said. “She hides everything. Like she hates that she doesn’t have parents. She lives with her grandfather on the Japanese side, and she won’t admit that she’s an orphan and they’re broke and everything else. Like if she doesn’t mention whatever it was that happened to her parents, she can block it out, re-create her life.”
“Her Japanese grandfather—” said the witch, suddenly staring at me. “Camellia, I always thought you were the one who managed the block. But what if—” She controlled her rising voice. “What if your friend was from a witch family, too? Kari—Hikari—was also Japanese.”
“Kari?” The name was familiar.
“The witch who hid R-AB1 fourteen years ago right here in this school. Really, Camellia, don’t you ever listen?”
Shock ran through me as I pieced this together. “Did Kari have a daughter?” I said.
The witch frowned. “I don’t think so. But perhaps Sparkle is a niece or cousin.” She looked bemused. “If her grandfather is the witch-blood side, then he’s sure been lying low.”
I shook my head, bewildered but certain. “Sparkle is a witch, too,” I said. “I’m almost sure of it. That’s the missing piece, the only thing that makes sense.” I ran through the clues again but came up with the same answer. And … “Oh hells, I left the demon locked in a pentagram. If there’s a witch on the loose—or a whole family of them—we’d better make sure he’s still in that pentagram.”
The witch was bone-still, thinking. “It doesn’t quite fit,” she said. “You girls were five and six years old. Even if she saw my spell, why would she care whether or not you thought you were a witch?”
“Duh, because she was embarrassed about being one herself,” I said.
The witch’s eyebrows drew together and for the first time, I saw her honestly puzzled. “Why would she be embarrassed about that?”
I shook my head. “Sarmine Scarabouche, you do not remember what it was like to be five, or even fifteen,” I said. “Now help me find Sparkle before she throws a monkey wrench in the works.”
I ran out of the gym and down the hall, the witch clip-clopping behind me in her heels. “Where are the hundred pixies?” she said.
“Last I saw they were being squished on the rooftop,” I said. It didn’t hurt to tell her, because she wasn’t going to get to use that spell. Especially not now that there was one pixie missing.
“I’ll send Estahoth after them after we release him from the pentagram,” said Sarmine. “What about my hopes and dreams? Did he get those?”
“The proof is in the pentagram,” I said.
We skidded out the side door. The living pentagram still stood.
Standing next to the T-Bird was Sparkle.
Not surprisingly, she was dressed as a princess, in a rose gown covered in various shades of pinky-rose sequins from shoulders to train. A tiara perched on her glossy straight hair.