Read Online Seriously Wicked by Tina Connolly - Free Book Online Page A

fault.” He whined and licked my fingers, but he couldn’t talk in this state. (I dunno about all werewolves, but ours is only human on the full moon. He’s three years old, so once a month is plenty, believe me.) “Tomorrow’s another day,” I said. I dumped my jeans on the floor and my cell phone fell to the carpet.
    I stuffed my featherless pillow with an old sweatshirt and tossed it and the phone on the bed. The phone landed on a printout the witch had left for me. After punishments, she frequently left directions for an antidote spell in my room. Of course, since I couldn’t work the darn things, it was basically further punishment just to see them.
    The anti-itching spell on the printout started, “Take pi slices of blueberry pie…”
    I flicked it to the floor, scratching my arms. “I don’t do spells,” I muttered.
    I put the makeshift pillow behind me and picked up my phone. The phone was still black and cold, and I hadn’t brought up any dragon milk.
    I swallowed. “I don’t do spells,” I repeated. The window cleaner I spritz on for the bus driver, the disinfectant I’d flicked on the ninth grader—that magic came from the original animal or elemental. It worked regardless of who did the sprinkling.
    Not so with real spells.
    They required thought, patience. Intention.
    Witch blood.
    “And I am not a witch, no matter what she says.” Wulfie licked my foot.
    Still, elementals were powerful, even if I wasn’t a witch myself. Perhaps the dragon on my skin would be enough to boost my phone up again. I rubbed my dragon-smelling fingers around the keypad. “Up we go,” I said, like the phone was Wulfie. “Up we go.” Then I pressed the “power” button one more time.
    This time it came up.
    “Maybe it wasn’t really dead,” I told Wulfie. He settled in on my feet and draped his head across my ankles.
    Back to my demon bookmark. Ah, there it was: “The best way to stop a demon is not to summon it.”
    Too late for that.
    “Demons are bound by their contracts,” it continued. “Even the smartest witches have difficulty demonproofing the terms of their contracts. Demons are on the alert for any loopholes. A demon bound to a contract is obligated to continue working on it, and the only way to banish a demon is to fulfill the contract. Even this can lead to difficulties, such as in the case of Jim Hexar in 1982, when such a contract effectively prevented any chance of him winning his Head Warlock bid.”
    Hexar, I thought. Was that the same Hexar as the Hexar/Scarabouche T-shirt the mannequin wore? I had no idea the witch had had real political aspirations once. All the attempts at city-running I’d seen involved spells and schemes, not rallies and debates. I suppose I’d thought the shirt was a joke. It was hard to imagine Sarmine as a T-shirted young rebel in 1982, knowing her as the ancient-looking support-hosed witch I knew now.
    Though if she still acted like a twenty-year-old, it would be a lot easier to imagine it—because she’d look like it.
    See, witches live a long time, often three times as long as humans. But the interesting thing about witches is that they look whatever age they feel like inside. I don’t mean they can choose, exactly, though they sort of do. Basically they look the age they feel … and most of them feel old, which is why one of the things regular humans get right is imagining that all witches are ancient humpbacked crones.
    Because … yeah. I think all that paranoia gets to you, that and feeling a million times smarter than all the humans around you. Witches aren’t as a rule any smarter, as any trip around the WitchNet will show you, but they know magic, and they know they’re going to live a long time. If you know you’re going to be around to see it, you look at the fate of the world differently.
    Not that that gave Sarmine Scarabouche the right to wreak havoc on my high school.
    I clicked on “Jim Hexar,” but the biography was terse: