Seriously Wicked (22 page)

“Not again,” I said.

And while Sparkle was distracted, Sarmine shouted, “The phoenix is exploding!”

Which made Sparkle jump backward.

And look directly at the ground in front of the T-Bird.

Sparkle’s head shot up again and she sneered, but it was too late.

“The mouse,” I said. “It’s the mouse statue! That’s almost clever.”

“What would you know, Cash,” said Sparkle.

She was growing taller now, filling out. She was a college chick, she was an adult, she was older and older. Her waist thickened, then silver threaded her hair, then tiny creases sprouted under her eyes and on the backs of her hands.

Until at last she looked the same age as Sarmine.

Sparkle stared in disbelief at her hands. “No,” she whispered. “No, this is not me.”

“Did you really try to convince me I was normal?” I said.

“We
are
normal,” she said, voice screeching upward. “I don’t want to be Kari. I don’t want these memories. I don’t want to be evil.”

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.”

Silence.

And then rainbow light came streaming from his skin. The light was force and power and it beat me back, into the side of the pentagram, which didn’t budge. The firecracker/mold smell was strong and pungent here in the confines of the pentagram, and I sneezed but didn’t flinch. It was Tuesday afternoon all over again, except this time things were different.

This time I was letting the demon in.

Demons rush to bodies. I opened wide and let the elemental stream into me. He wailed when he realized where he was, and tried to leave.

“Oh no, you don’t,” I said. “You’re staying right here.” I kept him locked inside me, which—although an unbelievably creepy sensation, like keeping a live goldfish imprisoned in your mouth—wasn’t impossible. After all, demons longed for human bodies. Estahoth wanted to leave me and try Devon again, but at the same time I was his raincoat, his shelter from the storm. The force of my command to him worked on him somewhat, as the witch’s had on Tuesday. He cowered in me, ambivalent, huddling. “You’re still not done with your contract,” I told him. “But first we’re releasing these hopes and dreams to their rightful owners.”

The demon calmed down, coiled. The goldfish sensation lessened. I felt him lurking, felt a mental shrug. “Fine,” said Estahoth. But if he was willing to play my game for the moment, then he must be thinking of some new plan. I didn’t trust him an inch. “My part of the bargain was fulfilled by collecting them.”

And then all five dreams that he’d collected bubbled up in me. I sorted through them. Reese’s secret hope to be a kindergarten teacher and have a big family. Avery’s fierce desire to be a tennis star. The girl who liked computers wanted to design games, Tashelle wanted to build bridges, and the last girl wanted to be a librarian. I sent all the dreams back to them, and the pentagram shimmered and cracked apart as one by one they dropped hands.

Well, except Reese, who still clung to the hands next to her, even when the girls tried to push her off. “I won, I won,” she said, near tears. The glassy zombie stare was gone, but her face was crumpled and confused.

Devon wavered and fell to his knees in the mud. “I’m sorry, Reese,” he said, and there was a crack in his voice. “All of you.” Most of the girls wandered off looking dazed, but Avery slapped him upside the head as she pulled heartbroken Reese away.

“My hopes and dreams!” shrieked the witch. “How can I harness the phoenix now?”

“
You
harness the phoenix?” shouted Sparkle/Kari. Her face was distraught, but her memory must have been sorting itself into place. It seemed to be pulling her in two directions, almost like I’d seen with Devon/Estahoth. That was surely all her former Kari-self yelling, “That was
my
phoenix. I discovered it and brought it here. He’s all mine!”

“Not if I get to him first,” said Sarmine.

“You’ve got a dragon,” shot back Kari. “What do you need a phoenix for, too? Greedy, evil—”

“Guys, guys,” I said. “Nobody owns a phoenix. You can’t own a phoenix any more than you can a human.”

And I reached down deep to the coiled elemental who still had one more part of his contract to fulfill. “Ready?” I said.

“Ready,” said Estahoth.

His force running through mine, we reached down and clasped the tiny metal mouse. There was a moment where we were working in harmony, and it felt right, like we understood each other and knew each other inside and out.

And I suddenly thought, Is this something that was part of Devon that I liked, that now will be gone forever?

But under our hands the mouse was warming. It came free from its base and we picked it up, warming, growing, changing in our hands. It was red, it was orange, it smelled of cinnamon and heartbeats, it fluttered, it breathed, it grew.

It lifted from my hands, still growing. Bigger, and bigger, until it was the size of Moonfire. Then bigger still, and I saw now that its feathers were dulled and torn with age, that its eyes were pouched, that its tail was heavy. The phoenix was very old. It was ready for rebirth. It was ready to start over.

“Thirty seconds,” said the witch.

Behind the phoenix I saw a form beating toward us, approaching in invisible sweeps that blocked the stars. “Cam!” whooped a far-off voice. “Cam!”

“Come,” said the demon. “See what we can do.” And with Estahoth’s help I seemed to grow out of my body, expanding along with the phoenix, which rose and winged higher and higher. “What is it you want to do with the flame? We can do anything. You could follow Sarmine’s lead. Use it to control the city. Or use it to control Sarmine.”

Unlimited power.

Anything I wanted.

“R-AB1,” I whispered into the night. “Will you grant me the force of your fire?”

There was a strange moment as I found that the phoenix spoke not in images like the dragon, nor words like the demon, but in emotion. A pure giddy feeling swept over me that could only be agreement.

“Look what I can do for you,” said Estahoth. “You couldn’t do this without me.”

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”

And then the phoenix burst into flame.

Estahoth reached out through me and like a current we transmuted the force of the explosion. Unlike Sarmine, we didn’t use it to power a spell. We used it for another elemental. We translated that fire into an energy that we fed to the call of the approaching dragon.

Like a radio transmitter we sent Moonfire’s plaintive call for her sisters out to the world.

We stayed there, holding the current in place till the force of the explosion dimmed. It seemed to last forever; forever, I stood looking around at the world lit with a soft golden glow. Forever I kept the fire back, kept it from engulfing the town. I wondered if the town could see any of this, or if it was as difficult to see as a mostly invisible dragon.

The new phoenix, the baby arisen from the ashes, flitted out of that flame, as tiny as the mouse had been. It ringed my ghostly head for another indefinite span of time as the golden glow blackened to night. Until at last I felt the sadness of parting, and a swelling of thanks.

And then it was gone.

The demon slowly collapsed us back from the sky, back from power, back from strength. Jenah and Moonfire came to a landing down on the runway of the track. I stood on the hillside in the dark, knees and elbows shivering from the prolonged stretch. For the first time in my life I felt short.

The last bits of the phoenix’ explosion hung in the sky, like the aftermath of fireworks. There was fury on both the witch’s and Hikari’s faces, but that didn’t stop them from running around and picking up bits of phoenix feathers, and occasionally kicking each other.

It was kind of nice to know that Sparkle’s attention was going to be occupied for a while. I didn’t think she wanted to be Kari any more than I had wanted to be like Sarmine. I remembered a girl who’d stood up for me and my stolen Bomb Pop and sighed. You never really knew anyone, not even your closest friends. Maybe not even yourself.

But self-examination would have to wait—the night wasn’t over yet. Until the last bits of phoenix fire faded, the demon remained on earth.

And where he remained was in me.

Now that my adrenaline was relinquishing its hold on me, the demon’s presence inside me was the most horrible thing ever. It was no longer like a goldfish swimming in my mouth. It was more like a cockroach running around behind my teeth. “If you let me stay,” he said, and the words seemed to coil through the veins in my body, “then you could have this kind of power forever.” With invisible fingers, he stretched us to the dragon on the field. Reached inside—and pulled a salamander off its Velcro hold on the dragon’s lungs. We disintegrated the salamander. The dragon coughed, then purred.

“Am I all bad?” he said. “Look at the good we could do.”

“The good you were
bound
to do,” I said. “That was in your contract.”

“With my help you could be greater and more powerful than all the witches in the world,” he said. “Be better than Sarmine Scarabouche.”

Despite the nasty slithery clattery feeling, I laughed. The gentle thanks of the phoenix still feathered my soul and I laughed—at Estahoth, the millennia-old elemental.