Authors: Tina Connolly
I slowed to a walk, trying to remember what I had read about demons. A tank of rabid sharks was one thing, but real demons were a nightmare. I knew that from the WitchNet.
You wouldn’t think it, but witches were very early adopters of the Internet. Like I mean by 1990, every single one of them was on, so there’s a huge network of information with everyone putting up their How I Made Some Dude Fall in Love with Me spells and so on. It’s not the same as the regular Internet, though. Witches are paranoid, and so just like their spellbooks, their sites have warding spells, attack spells, spell programs that change the spell recipe to be wrong if the site decides not to share with you—fun things like that. Digging for information on sensitive topics can be dangerous if you get far off the beaten path.
The witch won’t get me a normal-person cell phone—mine only connects to other witches and the WitchNet so I can learn more about True Witchery, blah blah. I would have to spend some time looking up demons today to figure out how to stop the witch this time. It seemed like I’d read something on Witchipedia about demon-stopping once.… All I could remember about demons was that, A) they were fire elementals, and B) they didn’t like being fire elementals. Their entire goal in life was to take over a human and warp them to their wicked will so they could stay on earth, and yes, I learned all that from the witch’s favorite show about demon hunters.
The boy at the bus stop did not look up as I approached. I still didn’t recognize him—perhaps he was a junior or senior I’d somehow missed. He had earbuds in and was muttering something, then scribbling furiously. It sounded vaguely like “cool stick of butter,” which seemed unlikely, unless he was trying to remember his grocery list. I got all the way to the stop before he glanced up—and right through me. He hummed as he looked back down.
I’m not super-vain, but I have to admit I felt a little miffed at that. I mean, he was tall and all—probably taller than me, which was nice, and somewhat rare. And okay, he was cute. But he wasn’t
my
kind of cute. He looked like he belonged in a boy band, with floppy blond hair and a sweet face. I like them dark and brooding, like Zolak the demon hunter, who wears leather pants with zippers all over them.
The bus was coming up the street. If I pulled out my algebra study sheet, I could get ten minutes of cramming in on the bus.
And then I saw a small yellow thing zip down the sidewalk and go right past my head. The finch.
Behind it was the flaming feather.
The witch had let the finch go, as promised. But she hadn’t bothered to catch the feather.
The finch zoomed around us, going right past the boy-band-boy’s face, and the boy even looked up at that. He pulled out his earbuds, searching for the dive-bombing bird.
I had to catch that feather. The bird streaked past us again, diving and dodging. I swung and missed.
“Is that your pet bird?” he said. “Can I help you catch it?”
“Not exactly,” I said, grabbing at the feather again.
“What—wait, is there something chasing it?”
I lunged again, and this time I caught the feather. Turning so my back was to the boy, I blew on the feather until the flame went out. Smother it, I thought, and shoved it into my back pocket. I whirled around to find the boy looking at me with a puzzled expression.
“That looked like a flaming feather,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It was a bumblebee. I didn’t want it to sting the bird. I’m against that sort of thing.” When you’re enslaved to a wicked witch, you end up thinking fast to keep all the weird witchy things a secret. Not always
good
fast, but fast. “Look, isn’t that our bus?”
I hurried past the blond boy to where Oliver the bus driver was opening the door for us. Oliver waved at me as I put my foot on the stair. He’s a good guy. He waits for me if he sees me running, and I bring him the witch’s secret windshield-washing formula when it’s sleeting. (Vinegar with three drops of dragon milk; he always says it’s just like magic, but he doesn’t know the half of it.) I like Oliver, and also I feel you should be extra-pleasant to someone if you plan to bring goat’s blood and turtle shells and live roosters onto their nice bus.
“Hi, Oliver,” I said, waving back.
“Behind you, Cam,” he said. “I think that boy’s trying to get your attention.”
I turned around to find the boy-band boy making wild fanning gestures at my rear end. “Excuse me?” And then I realized that my butt was really quite warm. A thin trail of smoke was coming from my back pocket.
The feather.
Oh hells.
I fanned my rear end desperately, but the smoke only thickened.
“Sorry about this,” the boy-band boy muttered. He uncapped his water bottle and doused the rear of my jeans. Water soaked me down to my ankles. I gasped.
He looked both hopeful and apologetic, the same expression Wulfie the werewolf cub gets when he tries to bring in the newspaper and chews it to bits.
It is not often that my wits completely desert me, but they did then. There is no appropriate thing to say to someone who has just emptied his water bottle on your rear end to save you from going up in magical flames. Well, “thank you,” I suppose. A very squeaky sort of “thank you” came out as I tottered past the wide-eyed gaze of Oliver and sat down on the next-to-last seat left on the bus. Humiliation and anger at the witch warred inside me. How could I keep people from finding out about my weird home life if the witch insisted on sending flying flaming feathers to my bus stop?
Unfortunately, the very last seat on the bus was right next to me. That’s where boy-band boy sat. He looked down at me cautiously, like he wasn’t sure if I was pleased or upset with him.
Inanely I said, “Very hot bumblebees they have this time of year. Liable to burst into flame at any moment.”
He looked at me, and I honestly could not tell if he was as stumped for words as I was, or if he just thought I was the craziest person he had ever met. I mean, really, what
do
you say to that?
Slowly, he reached up and put his earbuds in.
Embarrassment flooded me and I stared out the window all the way to school. I didn’t even remember to look at my soaking-wet study sheet for algebra.
* * *
Jenah found me in the girls’ locker room, drying my butt under a hand dryer and flipping like crazy through my algebra textbook with the other hand. “Oh, honey,” she said, beelining to me. Jenah is my best friend and lockermate, and she would be my confidante if I dared have one of those. She’s tiny and trim and Chinese, third generation. Her parents fancy themselves rebellious punk-rocker types, and they encourage her to express herself, whether that means changing the colored streaks she clips into her hair or obsessing about the auras she claims to see around everybody. She says the auras help her tune into the universe—sure, whatever. When you’ve got a dragon in your garage, you’re in no position to judge.
Today Jenah was all in black and pink and bracelets, and her black, asymmetric, partly shaved bob thing had a clipped-in pink streak. She is so chic, so
herself
, it hurts. My hair is kind of nutmeg, my eyes are kind of blue, my nose is kind of shapeless. Whereas Jenah looks like the epitome of Jenah, someone so perfectly who she is that she’s untouchable. One of those girls whom everybody already knows, even if we’re only in tenth. Jenah would never end up with crispy jeans, witch or no. She commandeered a mini-hairdryer from a freshman on the swim team and turned up the heat on my butt.
“Back to your blush brush,” she ordered the Freshman. “I’ve got news,” she said to me, over the dryer.
“Well? Spill.”
“Happy to,” said Jenah. “Just as soon as you share some information with me.” She flicked back her pink lock of hair. “What color is Aunt Sarmine’s bedspread?”
Seven years of best friendship and Jenah had never once seen the inside of my house or met the witch. I told everyone I lived with my aunt, because it was easier than explaining the truth about how the witch tricked me out of my loving parents’ arms before I was even born. Once when I was eight I looked up all the Hendrixes in the phone book (there were four) and spent the next month of Saturdays taking the bus to each house to ask politely if a witch had stolen a daughter from them—an adorable baby girl with nutmeg hair and a smudge of a nose.
Three of them laughed and one sicced his chihuahua on me.
Anyway, it was one of Jenah’s goals in life to see inside my house and meet Aunt Sarmine. I told her she needed better goals, but she went on about keeping our friendship aura tuned by understanding my living space. Or something.
“Her bedspread is white with embroidered golden bumblebees,” I said. That was true. For a megalomaniac witch who made spells with goat’s blood, Sarmine could be pretty particular. “Now spill.”
Jenah clicked off the hair dryer and tossed it back to the ninth grader. “New boy in our grade,” Jenah said to me. “Quiet. Has potential. I think you could nab him if you move fast.”
“Not interested,” I said. “Too busy. I’m over the whole boy thing. I only date college men. I only date hot-dog vendors. I only date aliens from Neptune.”
Jenah laughed appreciatively.
“Do you know if Kelvin’s back from his bout with the pig flu?” I said. Kelvin was a total 4-H nerd—and an excellent goat’s blood supplier.
“Ew, I do not keep tabs on mustard-aura Kelvin,” said Jenah.
“You have him in drama! He gets up and recites monologues about milking cows or whatever. How can you not know?”
“Mustard-aura,” repeated Jenah. We left the locker room, and strolled down the hall to First Hour Algebra II. Except we were running late, so it was a fast stroll. School had been back in session long enough for the walls to be well papered—fliers for clubs, posters for some school play, and the ubiquitous school-spirit banners in our stunning colors of orange and forest green. Outside the algebra room, a flyer for Blogging Club was papered over with one for Vlogging Club, and over that, one for the Halloween Dance. “So you’ll be okay with going solo to that on Friday?” said Jenah.
“Yuck,” I said. “Why do we have a Halloween dance anyway? Who wants to celebrate that?”
“Halloween is super-important,” said Jenah. She flicked back her hair as we neared the classroom. “It’s a time when you can commune with spirits. Ghosts. Demons.”
I shuddered. “You wouldn’t be so fond of demons if you thought they actually existed,” I said. “Just like it’s real easy to think witches are cool if you haven’t actually met them.”
“Witches?” she said, with an eyebrow.
“Or whatever. You know.”
I pushed open the scarred wooden door and Jenah hissed behind me. “There he is. Go get him, tiger!”
’Course, you all know what happened next.
Sitting in the desk next to mine was a sweet-faced boy-band boy who, at the sight of me and my dry jeans, blushed red-hot pink to the tips of his perfectly shaped ears.
It wasn’t the fault of the red-eared boy-band boy sitting next to me during Algebra II. I flunked the algebra test all on my own merits.
Okay, maybe I didn’t flunk, but there’s no way I did better than a 70, which was practically as bad. As long as I maintained my A’ s, teachers didn’t get too upset when the witch didn’t come in for parent conferences. But a C-minus? If I went downhill in algebra, then good old Rourke would be calling Sarmine Scarabouche on the phone, and wouldn’t that just go over well. The witch had never come to a single thing at school my entire life and I planned to make sure it stayed that way.
The others streamed out the door as I pushed my way to Rourke’s desk in the back corner. “Mr. Rourke?” I said. He wore way-too-thin button-down shirts that’d been washed too many times. Jenah called him Mr. Visible Undershirt, sometimes too loudly.
“What is it, Camellia?”
“Mr. Rourke,” I said again. Here’s where Jenah would study his aura and see how to butter him up, but for good or bad, I was a straight shooter. “I know I sucked on that test. Can I do some extra credit to make up?”
“I don’t give out extra credit willy-nilly,” said Rourke, nudging the tests into a perfect stack. His four red pens were horizontal at the top of his laminated desk. A full two-liter of off-brand root beer stood capped on the corner, and an empty one fizzed off a faint sarsaparilla smell from the plastic wastebasket. I thought he must be lonely.
“Okay, what else could I do?” I said. “Could I study more and retake it? I know I’m not hopeless at math. I had A’s in Algebra One and Geometry. Algebra Two is just kinda … mysterious.”
Rourke scratched his whiskery chin. “You could come after school and work with our tutor. If I see improvement, I
might
consider some extra credit.”
“Awesome,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow.”
“Today,” said Rourke. “He only comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“I can’t today,” I said.
Rourke flipped through the tests till he found mine. Without even needing an answer sheet, he went through, x-ing out my work with a thick red felt tip.
“Er. I thought we got credit for showing our work?”
Rourke drew another set of red
X
’s. “If it’s good work,” he said. He flipped back to the front, capped his first red pen and chose a different one from the lineup. This one was a lurid red-orange and smelled like rubbing alcohol. In slow motion it wrote a very decisive “61%” next to my name. “You know, I have been looking forward to meeting your aunt,” Rourke said. “I hear she is a very striking woman.”
Cold dread iced my spine. “I’ll see you after school,” I said.
* * *
With Mr. Visible Undershirt commandeering my after-school hour, I was going to have to sneak out at lunch to get the witch’s errands done.
That is, if I should
do
her errands.
I spent all of Second Hour French considering that conundrum. Usually when the witch ordered items, I jumped. For example, once I failed to find elf toenails for her. (I still haven’t found anybody who supplies them, for that matter. The witch refuses to admit that certain ingredients might be mythical.) For punishment the witch turned me into a solar panel salesman and made me go around to every house in a half-mile radius and lecture about alternative forms of energy.