Speed Demon (16 page)

 

Do what with Levi, I had no idea. But do . . . something with him.

The memory of our kiss suddenly smashed into my brain.

Ack. I didn’t want to do that with him.

Did I?

No. No, no, no. Of course not.

Chapter Thirteen

It was amazing how long I could ignore the portal when everything was status quo. I let three more days slide by and pretended it didn’t exist. At all. Marshmallow Pants was just a fluffy white cat with a digestion problem and Levi was a real boy, à la Pinocchio.

I was not a demon slayer and I had broken my arm spraying insulation, not slipping on a growling apple peel.

It was all good.

Until the cat morphed on me again on Thursday.

I was in the kitchen trying to pretend that the fixing of the kitchen wall meant nothing and that when Mike and company strolled out on Friday at five o’clock, wall freshly painted and ready for my mother to hang her framed print of peaches back up, it didn’t mean the portal was still open and inaccessible.

Nope. Wasn’t going to think about that.

My mother had picked me up after school since her meeting was canceled and it was hard for me to take the bus with my backpack and jumbo cast. Okay, it wasn’t that hard, really, but why turn down a sympathy ride that didn’t involve hard seats, wet floors, and the off-key singing of Brad Feldman to his iPod?

I was trying to do my math homework at the kitchen island, but between final construction touches going on behind me and Zoe’s fighting with Dakota/Georgia in the family room over a Bratz doll, I was having trouble concentrating.

“Zoe! Let her have the doll. She’s your guest,” I yelled, hoping they would shut up. It was getting violent in there by the couch, with Zoe clinging to the big-lipped doll, and Dakota/Georgia stumbling around with an armful of Marshmallow Pants.

“No! She had her yesterday. It’s my turn.”

“You never share,” Dakota/Georgia accused. “I’m telling.”

“I don’t care,” Zoe said crankily. “And you need to give me my cat back.”

Mike shot me a look of amusement. I wasn’t finding it so funny.

“Trade each other the cat and the doll for ten minutes,” I said, thinking if I had to get up and go in there I was going to understand where my mother’s Mom tone of total irritation came from.

Staring down at my geometry, I didn’t wait to see if they initiated fair trade or not. Until I heard a shriek and the low wail of tears starting up.

I glanced up and immediately stumbled down off my stool at what I saw. Problem. Hair, doll, and fur were all flying in the living room.

My baby sister was in a smackdown with her best friend over a Bratz doll and our demonic cat.

“Zoe! Georgia!” They were grappling with each other, tugging and smacking and shoving. Wow. Five-year-olds gone wild and it so wasn’t pretty.

I gave up on doing proofs and went to bust up the family room brawl. They both needed to get a grip. Today Bratz dolls, tomorrow some stupid boy who wasn’t worth it. Before you knew it, Zoe would be cracking Bud Light bottles on the mechanical bull and asking for challengers.

Stomping over to them, I said, “Stop hitting each other or no one gets the doll.”

They ignored me.

But Dakota/Georgia did drop the cat in the tussle, and Otis was zipping through the kitchen and out the open garage door. Where did he think he was going? At first, as I wrestled to get the doll away from the girls one-handed, I thought he was just trying to escape the sticky, grabby little fingers of five-year-old girls.

Then I got to thinking.

Wasn’t it strange that whenever the cat was around, jealousy and selfishness seemed to ooze out of the girls? Not that they were angelic all the time, but it did seem like they were particularly bratty when Otis was on the scene. Maybe he was feeding off their envy.

Maybe he had an agenda.

Or a motive.

Maybe he was trying to use the girls somehow to get the portal open.

That would be seriously not cool.

So I handed my piece of the doll hair over to Levi, who had just come into the room after soccer practice.

“What’s going on?” he asked me, looking dumbly at the doll in his hand, his gym bag strapped across his chest.

“Cat fight,” I told him. “Gotta go.” I fast walked across the kitchen, past Mike, and out the garage door.

I didn’t see Otis in the garage and I walked tentatively, afraid of random apple peels inserting themselves under my foot. I really didn’t want to break a second arm.

“Kenzie.”

I turned, startled, and saw Otis in human form leaning on my mom’s minivan. He was smoking a cigarette.

Wonderful. I glanced back at the kitchen, grateful the wall was officially closed again. All I needed was my mother to open the door and see Tattoo Boy inhaling nicotine in what looked like a secret rendezvous with me and I would be grounded until I left for college. Not that I was going to college, but my mother didn’t know that.

“You can’t be here like that,” I told him, thoroughly annoyed. “My mother freaked when I wanted to go out with a nineteen-year-old. If she sees you she’s going to have a total cow. What are you, like twenty-four?”

“Twelve hundred, give or take a year.”

Yikes. “Which would really make it difficult to explain.”

“I’m not interested in you that way. You are definitely too immature for me.”

Well, excuse me. “That’s not the point! My mother will see you and assume you’re here for the wrong reason. You can’t exactly pass as a pizza guy since you have no pizza.”

“Did Levi tell you about Lilith?”

Of course he hadn’t. “That’s none of your business.”

Otis laughed. “It’s cute how you defend him.”

We would just ignore that.

“Are you feeding off those little girls’ envy?” I asked, disgusted by the thought.

He just shrugged, obviously feeling no shame. “I have to eat.”

“Go down the street and hit up some criminal adults for a meal. They’re five years old. It’s twisted to stir up envy in them.”

“I’m a demon, remember? I take what I can get where I can get it.”

“Are you really the prison warden? You don’t look like a warden.”

“I’m sorry.” He rolled his eyes. “I should have realized I can only look in human form what your stereotypical idea of a demonic prison warden should be.” He put his cigarette out on the floor of the garage, blowing a final stream of smoke in my face, his elbows still on the hood of the minivan.

That’s when it hit me. He had appeared to me as a human the first time in the bathtub. A portal. He had never morphed anywhere else, until now. Leaning against the minivan. Another portal.

It wasn’t the wall at all, it never had been. It was the van. That’s what I had hit the wall with. That’s where Otis had first appeared. That’s where the apple peel had been, under the front tire. Going through the hole in the wall hadn’t allowed the peel to serve as a conduit for the growling guard, the van had.

The van was where I had sprayed my Diet Coke on the radio the day the air portal opened, just like when I had dropped my acne meds in the tub drain and opened the water portal.

I stood up straighter and stared at Otis, my heart pounding. I knew I was right. But I couldn’t let him know what I now knew.

“You’re right,” I said. “That sounds really stupid, doesn’t it? By the way, was there something you needed because I have to go back in before someone comes looking for me.”

Way to sound helpful and therefore
completely
suspicious.

His eyes did narrow, but he just said, “Meet me here tonight at ten. I can tell you what you need to know to send Levi and me back. I can’t reenter the portal without your help, and I’m taking Levi back with me. That’s what you want, right?”

I hesitated, but knew what I needed to say. “Yes. That’s what I want.”

“Because after all, he’s been nothing but trouble.” Otis’s eyes burned in the dim garage, the same amber yellow they had been when he had been fighting with Levi in cat form. “He’s gotten you grounded, gotten you stuck doing laundry, babysitting . . . Your friends weren’t talking to you and you lost your boyfriend. All because of Mr. Popular, Levi, who can do no wrong, and who was guilty of the exact same thing you were, cheating on a boyfriend or girlfriend. Yet he walked away without a scratch, didn’t he, and you’re still paying the price.”

I stood still, frozen to the cold concrete in my black and hot pink striped socks, the demon’s words wrapping around me like a cold unpleasant mist. Otis was right, about all of those things, and it hurt, it burned, and stirred up anger and jealousy in me. I stared at the van bumper, suddenly feeling small and sad and violated and thinking that maybe, just maybe, Otis was right and I should send Levi back. Hadn’t I thought that myself? Hadn’t I listed the pros and cons? I had nothing to lose by sending Levi back and everything to gain.

“And why did he do it, do you think? Was it really just spontaneous, kissing you?” Otis asked softly. “Or did he think that maybe with you he could get what Amber wasn’t willing to give?”

My head snapped up. What a nasty, dirty, little demon. He’d almost had me going there with his spellbinding words and persuasive, helpful tone of voice. But it was a trick, a manipulation.

“You’re right,” I said, in a shaky voice, conjuring up a tear and squeezing it out of my right eye. Might as well put the acting skills to use, even if I had the misfortune to only ever be able to fake cry out of my right eye. The left never cooperated. “Meet you here at ten o’clock?”

“Ten o’clock. Remember to bring Levi with you. Tell him you need to talk
privately
.” Otis leered at me. “He won’t hesitate to take you up on that.”

I nodded and gave a sniffle. I stared at the ground and wiped away my fake tear with my injured arm, using the fingertips that were sticking out of the cast. Then I whirled around like I was humiliated and ran into the house, slamming the door for drama.

He he he. Not bad. I took a curtsy for my performance and laughed to myself about the fact that Otis back in cat form would be stuck in the garage until he scratched and someone let him in.

Kenzie Sutcliffe vs. Demonic Creatures, Round 2. Ring the bell.

I was so sending Otis’s butt back to hell.

 

 

At nine I snuck out to the minivan and put my purse on the front passenger seat and stuck the keys in the ignition. Using a screwdriver and keeping an eye on the kitchen door, I pried the faceplate off the satellite radio and contemplated its guts. I wasn’t sure how to disconnect it, so I figured I would just cut the wires when the time came. Ducking back into the kitchen, I grabbed scissors, then left the driver’s door to the van open, but pushed it so that it looked closed. I also opened the garage door and prayed the TV was on loud enough that no one in the house would notice, or it wouldn’t register to anyone’s frazzled post-dinnertime brains what the sound actually meant.

Back in the house, I lay down on my bed, fully clothed, including shoes, and rested my cast on my chest. Eyes closed, listening to my iPod on shuffle, I contemplated all the ways my plan could go seriously wrong.

It took a while, because there were some serious Grand Canyon-size holes in my plan. But that had never stopped me before, and I figured until a demon slayer magically appeared out of the sky and handed me a manual, I was going to have to stumble my way through this on my own. Which pretty much guaranteed a boatload of mistakes were going to be made.

I felt someone’s eyes on me, so I opened them and almost screamed to see Levi bent over me about six inches from my face. “What are you doing? Get away from me!”

“I thought you were dead!” he said, holding his chest like he was having a heart attack. “What are you doing?”

“I’m lying here. How could you think I was dead? I’m lipsynching!”

“It’s dark in here. You don’t have your light on and I couldn’t see your lips moving. You weren’t moving at all. What am I supposed to think?”

“That I want to be alone. Which I do. Go away.” I rolled on my side, hoping he’d get the very obvious hint.

“What happened with Zoe and Georgia . . . that’s not cool,” he said.

I couldn’t really see his expression in the dark, but I could feel his worry. I had never doubted that in his weird way, Levi cared about my sister. “No, it’s not. But I have it under control.”

The minute the words left my mouth, I realized I shouldn’t have said anything at all. There was a big long pause, and then he said, “Kenzie. What are you planning?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. What would I be planning?” I played with the edge of my comforter.

Another big old pause. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Who, me? Please. I’ve never done a single stupid thing in my whole life.”

Chapter Fourteen

The stupid thing I was planning to do had to take place after the kindergartner and the parents were in bed but before the prearranged meeting with the demon cat. It was tricky timing, but Zoe went to bed at nine, and my parents were in their room with the door shut and locked by nine thirty, which lead me to believe they were occupied in ways I didn’t want to consider. However, that did mean they probably wouldn’t hear the back door opening and the minivan leaving the garage.

I wasn’t worried about my brother, Brandon. He was hermited in his room most of the time—hence the need to use his shirt as a tissue—and paid attention to no one but himself for the most part. When I snuck down the hall at nine forty-five, I paused outside his bedroom door. I didn’t hear Brandon at all, and I could hear Levi talking, presumably to Amber on his cell phone, because there were pauses in the conversation and he was saying things like “I don’t care what skirt you wear as long as it’s short.”

It was pretty safe to say he wouldn’t be suggesting that to Brandon.