The witch snorted. “You always were an idiot.” She turned to me. “Ready to release the demon? I need to finish making my spell so we can capture the explosion and use it to get enough power to run the town. I need those pixies, for starters.”
“Tough,” I said, and surprise pinched her features. “One of the pixies got away. You’ve only got ninety-nine left.”
Her face cleared. “That’s all right. I only need fifty.”
“You had the demon kill an extra fifty pixies just to make sure you had enough?”
“I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Now release the demon, please. Unless you want the phoenix to explode.” She pulled a collapsible bowl from her fanny pack, snapped it into shape, and set it on the ground. She measured off various contents of her pack into it.
“You want me to help you,” I said. “I’ve been working all week to stop you. You know what? I’m getting off this merry-go-round.”
The witch tapped a teaspoon of something blue into the bowl. “So you’re ready to be reasonable?”
“I can’t win if I play your game,” I said. “You’ve got me backed into a corner where all I can do is help you take over the city, or stop you from that but let a school full of innocent people die. I choose the third way. I choose to use the phoenix power myself.”
The witch stirred the powders in her bowl with a metal baby spoon. “You don’t have the ingredients for that,” she said calmly. “I know you don’t have the spell—I researched for fifteen years to find out how to harness something so close to elemental power, even with the demon’s help. And you certainly don’t have the power, you and that Goody Two-shoes little wand and your day’s worth of spell practice. You can’t do it.”
“I can if I use an elemental.”
16
Demon Girl
I’d never seen Sarmine look scared before. “I just reclaimed my daughter,” she said grimly. “I don’t want an embodied demon instead.” She stood, clutching her bowl.
“You won’t get one,” I said with more confidence than I felt. I knocked on the pentagram between Reese and Avery. It was solid. But the pentagram spell had hinted that the witch who made the pentagram had certain powers over it. You are mine, I told it. I made you. Let me in. The pentagram went kind of spongy around my hand.
“Sure, it’ll let you in. But it won’t let you out,” warned Sarmine. “I know pentagrams.”
“Human pentagrams have certain limitations,” I told her.
She moved toward me, but I ducked under Reese’s and Avery’s arms and wiggled inside.
“Hey! How come you—” squealed Reese, but the other girls kept a grip on her hands. I breathed a silent hope that they’d hold her down.
It was very weird being inside a pentagram. Everything on the outside was transmuted through the rainbowy glass. The girls’ faces seemed all wavery, and when they spoke, they sounded underwater. Out of curiosity, I tried to touch Reese’s shoulder, but my finger stopped that quarter inch from her witch costume.
The witch walked around the pentagram, tapping for entrance. But she had already said, “Good work,” so I tried not to worry.
“What exactly do you hope to accomplish?” Arms crossed, Devon sneered at me.
His eyes were so cold when he was the demon. I stared into them, remembering them warm and kind and full of light.
He shifted under my gaze.
“Think of your dog,” I said, “the one who likes those pig’s ears, think of him running to you. Think of the old animal shelter. Think of a day when you tried to walk six dogs at once and wrapped yourself around a tree.”
“Oh, that will tempt him,” said Estahoth.
“Think of the song you wrote about it later. Think of sitting on the school lawn with your guitar, working on your songs. You remember finding the pixies? Think of doing that again, but without him. Walking slowly along the creek, watching the pixies blink on and off. Watching bats swoop after mosquitoes. Writing a song about these things,” I said. “These are all the things you like. Estahoth doesn’t care about any of this. You let him stay and you’ll belong to him forever. How long will Estahoth play by your rules if he doesn’t have to? Will he let you keep your band? Your songwriting?” I held his eyes. “Your friends?”
Devon bent double, breaking eye contact. I soldiered on.
“Think of what he did to the pixies,” I said. “Of course you didn’t want to talk about that before. He didn’t want you to. Maybe he misjudged how much it would take to break you. We’re talking about it now. Think of ninety-nine tiny green pixies, with glowing wings. Think of squishing them to goo, think of how the bones cracked between your fingers. Think of being like someone who does everything you hate. Remember when you said that to me in the hallway?”
I touched his shoulder. He was shaking. “Think of choosing your own path. You can be you again, all you. Just tell him to go.”