Speed Demon (17 page)

I rolled my eyes at the piggish comment. Ten bucks said Amber was giggling on the other end.

Moving as silently as I could into the family room, I paused to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. A white cat shouldn’t be too hard to find in the dark, right? But I stood there for a good five minutes scoping out the room and I didn’t see Marshmallow Pants aka Otis at all. I was about to get seriously annoyed when I felt a telltale rub against my ankle.

The stupid demon had strolled right up to me. I didn’t even hesitate.

With a speed I didn’t even know I was capable of, I bent over, snagged Otis with my good right arm and tucked him against my chest and cast as I dashed across the kitchen. In one minute or less, I had him out of the house, in the garage, and into the waiting minivan.

And straight into the animal crate my mother had bought for him the week before.

He resisted as he realized what was happening, but I had the element of surprise on my side, and I crammed his furry butt in and slammed the door shut. I slid the van door closed, hopped into the open driver’s side, and turned the key in the ignition as quietly as I could. Not that you can start a car quietly, but I was hopeful. I shifted gears, eased off the brake, and backed up. It was difficult to switch into reverse while holding on to the wheel since I had a big honking cast in the way, but I figured once I was in drive, I wouldn’t need to shift gears anymore since it was an automatic.

Otis meowed and snarled and swatted at his crate door.

I wanted to tell him to shut up, but frankly I was too freaked out and pumped up on adrenaline. Cruising down the street, I tried to go fast enough to get where I was headed before my hair went gray, but not so fast that I would get pulled over.

I was rolling up to the stop sign at the entrance to our neighborhood when I heard Levi’s voice.

“What are you
doing
? Are you insane?”

Ack! Why was he in the van? I whipped my head around. “Me? What are you doing here? You were just on the phone with Amber!”

Levi was climbing over the crate from the backseat. He plunked down on the passenger seat, tossing my purse to the floor. My lip gloss rolled out onto the floor mat and he didn’t even bother to pick it up. If he lost me a ten-dollar lip gloss I was taking it out of his demon bank account.

“I faked the phone call because I knew you were up to something. Don’t you dare pull this car out onto the main road,” he said, his finger coming up. “You have a broken arm.”

“My right arm works.”

“Kenzie Anne. You cannot drive this minivan with that huge cast.”

He had no right to trot out the middle name like I was his kid. “Levi, I have something to do. If you want to drive me, fine. But you have two seconds to agree and get into this driver’s seat or I’m hitting the gas pedal. Your choice.”

“You’re insane,” he repeated. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“No. You’re either in or you’re not.” I eased my foot a little off the brake.

“Fine!” He stuck his hand out. “Put it in park. I’ll drive wherever you want—just don’t be stupid enough to drive yourself.”

I parked the car but waited for him to get out of the passenger seat. He didn’t. We both stared at each other. “Get out,” I said.

“No, you get out.”

“How stupid do you think I am? I’ll get out and you’ll just drive the car off,” I said.

“Same for you, chica. I’m not getting out of this car.”

“So we’ll have to switch inside the car.”

Which meant we wound up crawling all over each other, tangled legs and arms and cast, sweat dampening my hair as we jostled around. Finally we both flopped into our switched seats and Levi glared at me. “This is nuts. Where are you taking this cat?”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you where to turn.” It took nine of the most agonizing and cat-complaining-filled minutes of my life to get to the field that was my destination. Fortunately, Levi didn’t ask me any more questions, though he did say something in Latin to Otis, who hissed at him. I had Levi pull into a parking lot, then jump the asphalt and park on the grass under the giant tower that hosted the local radio station. There had been controversy about leaving the tower after suburban development, but it was still there, still broadcasting, and still sending out radiation or whatever the issue was into our child-thick residential community.

The plan was to tune the radio in the car to the station the tower belonged to. And then rip the radio out of the minivan. With my limited knowledge of science, I was trying to go on pure logic. I had opened a water portal with acne meds down the drain and had closed it by destroying the plumbing that ran to the shower. So the theory was that if opening the air portal had occurred with the collision of Diet Coke and radio waves, destroying the signal the same way should close it.

Sucky plan? Yes. But what else did I have going on?

Nothing, really. Might as well risk further parental punishment by stealing their minivan, driving with a broken arm and without a license, and busting up Dad’s satellite radio that had become like his fourth child. Okay, technically Levi was driving, but we hadn’t gotten permission to take the car or the cat, and it was ten o’clock on a school night. Oh, yeah, and I was still grounded.

Fast track to trouble. I was so good at it.

“Why are we in a field?”

“Why didn’t you tell me the minivan was the portal?” I shot back.

Levi had the decency to look guilty. “I couldn’t, you know that! But hey, you’re brilliant. I knew you’d figure it out.”

Flattery would get him nowhere, but I did suddenly realize what having Levi in the car meant. “This is a radio station. I’m going to close the portal by tossing soda on the radio as we get the signal from right above us. You know what that means, right?”

He shot me a totally undecipherable look.

I turned on the radio and started searching for the right station. If this worked, Levi would get sucked back in right along with Otis. I knew it. He knew it.

I hit buttons harder, my heart pounding. I couldn’t find the station in my panic. Levi wasn’t saying anything and I knew he was going to let me decide whether to send him back or not.

I just couldn’t do it. There was no way. “Get out of the car, Levi. Run behind the bus shelter over there. Now, I’m serious!”

“You want me to stay?” he asked, giving me a searching look.

“Yes, moron, go!” I was having a hard time breathing and the screeching sounds Otis was making were wearing my nerves down to nothing. “Don’t make me regret it! Go!” If he didn’t get out, I was going to shove him out or just let him get sucked up. Either way it wasn’t going to be pretty.

But Levi shot me a grin, leaned over and kissed me full, long, and hard, then jumped out of the car. I could hear his feet pounding as he ran across the pavement. I finally found the station and some weird polka music came blaring out of the speakers. I cranked it even louder, wincing at the enthusiastic accordion riff, and closed my eyes for a second to collect my mental strength. Then I popped open the can of Diet Coke in the cup holder, turned and undid the latch to the cat crate, and opened my passenger door in rapid succession.

The next two minutes happened so fast, if I had had time to think I probably would have freaked and screamed, but there was no time to even suck in a breath, let alone let a shriek rip. Even before I had the passenger door open, Otis came flying out of the crate at me with his claws out and teeth bared. I raised my cast to block him, and with my right hand I splashed the radio with my Diet Coke and cut the wires. The scissors got knocked to the floor when I found myself with a human Otis on top of me, both of us piled into the passenger seat.

For a split second he was in front of me, crushed against my chest, liquid dripping from his shiny pointed teeth inches from my eyes, his face so close I could count the hairs in his goatee, his eyes burning bright yellow, angry and venomous.

Then I felt a sucking sensation, air swirling all around me, and heard a horrible moaning that reminded me of the first time I had closed the water portal. With shaky fingers, I pressed back against the seat and clicked my seatbelt in place, fighting the urge to push Otis off of me. Better to just leave him alone and see what happened.

That was a mistake.

He grabbed onto my cast and I felt a piercing pain rip through my arm that made me yelp out loud. I looked down, trying to wrestle my arm away from him, and saw a white light shooting off of his fingertips and racing over my cast. I had no idea what he was doing, but it was agonizing, tears instantly pooling in my eyes, panic rising in my gut.

I pushed weakly at him with my right arm, but he wasn’t moving.

Suddenly Levi appeared next to me in the open door, standing outside the van, and he punched Otis in the face, hard, loosening the demon’s grip on me.

“Levi, let go!” I shrieked, aware even through the pain that the portal was closing. I could hear the grind and twist and turn, feel the air sucking backward in the van.

But Levi hit Otis again, knocking him back against the windshield and forcing him to drop his hold on me. I undid my seatbelt, wiggled out from under him, and catapulted myself back toward the cat crate, stumbling and falling, but getting out of the way. My first instinct was to get out of the van, but somehow I knew I had to be there, inside, for the portal to close.

Levi had paused to see that Otis wasn’t reaching for me, and then I saw his face drop down and disappear, like he had crawled under the car. The passenger door slammed shut. Otis looked at me and opened his mouth to speak, his hand reaching out for me. His fingers got within inches of my throat when he was suddenly ripped backward, the wind swirling inside the car. It stung my eyes and I closed them, clinging to the seat behind me for support. It felt like my hair and clothes were going to be torn off by the force of the air sucking past me, and I braced my feet against the back of the driver’s seat.

When the wind died down thirty seconds later, and I pried my dry eyes open, there was no Otis in the van with me. The cat crate was on its side and everything from my purse was rolling around on the floor, but there was neither cat nor human Otis. I blinked at the tampon and the gel pen cruising my way between the seats. The silence after the noise was strange and I just sat there, frozen, breathing hard, processing. The radio had gone dead.

Levi’s head popped up in the passenger side window and then he pulled the door open, checking out the inside of the minivan.

“Dude,” he said with a big grin. “He’s gone. You did it again, K-Slay!”

I had. And the nickname was starting to grow on me. I sat up. “All in a day’s work.” It would have sounded blasé and tough except I kind of squeaked it out and sounded like I might burst into tears at any second, which I thought I might.

My arm was throbbing and I had a runny nose from the wind.

Levi reached out a hand and helped me up from the floor. When I was settled in the passenger seat, he scooped up everything rolling around and shoved it all back into my purse. “We should probably take you back to the ER,” he said. “He twisted your arm hard, didn’t he?”

“Yes. It does hurt, but can’t it wait until tomorrow? It’s already broken. What could he have done to it, right?” At the moment, I just wanted to savor my victory and then go to bed.

“We can do that.” Levi clicked my seatbelt in and smiled at me. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

How was that news? “I know. But have you looked at my father? I come by it honestly.” I rested my head back on the seat and sighed. “Man, I deserve new jeans after this. And I think I need to change my hair dye again.”

“Blue tips?” he asked.

“Purple.”

“With your coloring?” He raised an eyebrow, but there was a look in his eye that said he was teasing me. “But whatever, it’s your hair.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Purple.”

He came around the front of the van and got into the driver’s seat, belted himself, and put the car in reverse. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”

He said it with such seriousness and so out of nowhere that I couldn’t even make myself scoff at him because there was a big lump in my throat, and the tears that I had thought were gone suddenly came back tsunami-style. I swiped at them, annoyed. God, I was such a girl.

No clue what to say, I settled for a strangled, “Thanks.”

“And the new jeans are on me because you rocked tonight.”

“Demon bank going to let you withdraw enough to cover my taste?” I asked.

“I’ll work it out.” He glanced over at me, serious. “You could have sent me back. You didn’t.”

“No.”

And neither of us said anything else about it the rest of the way home.

When we pulled into the garage, my father appeared in the doorway in his flannel pajama pants and a navy blue T-shirt. “Where exactly have the two of you been?” he demanded, loud enough that we heard him through the closed doors of the van.

“Uh-oh,” I whispered. “Not good.” And I was so glad Levi was driving instead of me. That probably would have been like signing my own death certificate to roll into the garage driving illegally wearing a cast.

“No problem.” Levi reached out and squeezed the fingertips of my broken arm. “I’ve got your back.”

My heart did a funny weird flip-flop in my chest. “You sure?”

“Yep.” Levi got out of the car and said, “Hey, Mr. S. Didn’t mean to scare you, but the cat ran away. Kenzie and I saw him and we decided to see if we could snag him by following in the car.”

“The cat ran away?” My dad looked kind of excited at the prospect of losing Marshmallow Pants. “Why didn’t you come and get us?”

“We knocked on your door,” Levi said as we went into the house. “But you didn’t answer.”

“Oh, ah, we were sleeping.”

Ohmigod, was my dad blushing? If I hadn’t been so grossed out, I would have laughed.