For an awful moment, nothing happened. Then Demetri inhaled and jerked back to life with an electric shock that ran through both of them.
“No!” Demetri said. “You can’t! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Celia swallowed hard over the lump in her throat. “One of your rules is that Littles always help each other. Which I think is also what friends should do for each other. You needed help.” Celia squeezed his hand and didn’t want to think about what came next.
“I become evil as soon as you let go. I become owned and you turn into a monster,” Demetri said. The grayness faded and his skin glowed with a strange inner light. “Krawl wins everything.” His voice broke.
Celia bit the inside of her cheek. “Maybe. That’s one story.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done. You can’t know, not really.” He clutched her hand. “Oh, Celia. I’m so sorry.”
“You think I could just sit here and watch you die?”
“It would have been better.”
“I had to save you.” Celia breathed hard. She felt too warm.
“There’s nothing to save. I’m already gone,” he said.
“Maybe we can hold hands forever and neither of us will change,” Celia said. “We can live in this old house and be like conjoined twins.”
Demetri smiled and touched Celia’s cheek, right on the monster mark, with his pointer finger. “We’ll both change soon enough, Celia. There’s no other way this ends.”
She took a deep breath. “Then I need you to tell me a story about how things should have been: what our life should have been like.”
His hand squeezed hers, and his voice came out hoarse as they both shifted closer together. All she could see, her whole world, was Demetri. “We should have met in school,” he said softly. “We should have both been miserable and lonely, and not even noticed each other for a while, but then one day we would have met in the library.”
“Because we both like books. And then we’d start talking,” Celia said. “And it would feel like we already knew each other, and like everything about the other person was interesting. We’d be instant friends.”
Demetri’s sweet breath was tinged with a new scent, something smoky that filled the air as he spoke. “Best friends. And we’d go on long walks through the city, and never have a moment when we didn’t have something to talk about. We’d tell each other everything, even the boring parts of our day. We’d have so much time together.”
Celia ached for that reality. She bit her cheek to keep from crying. “We’re only thirteen, so we wouldn’t even know about the bad things in the world yet. The worst thing would be flunking a final, or getting in a fight with our parents.”
Demetri nodded. “And then years would pass and we’d get to grow older, and we’d always have each other, Celia. For our whole lives. We’d get to grow up and do a hundred different things. I’d be a carpenter, or a mailman, and you could be . . . I don’t even know what you want to be.”
“A biologist. Or a writer.” Heat rose up in Celia, like a furnace blasting within her. She started shaking harder. So did Demetri. She spoke faster. “We’d never be lonely. Promise me that, Demetri. In the way things should have been, we’d always be friends.” Celia panted as the heat burned through her.
“I promise.”
Everything was starting to go bright, and a ringing filled her ears. The heat intensified. Celia held Demetri’s hand tighter and imagined that perfect story of what her life could have been like, should have been like, because she knew she was about to lose it all forever.
“I want you to stay Demetri, no matter what. Whatever you change into, I want you to still be Demetri,” Celia whispered. She closed her eyes and imagined that as vividly as she knew how to. She imagined it from all sides until she could see it in bright detail.
A new burst of heat ripped through her, and she jerked away from Demetri, but still clutched his hand as pain flared high and bright. From deep inside she felt a pulsing change begin to rip through her and remake her into a different creature.
A creature who was good at doing magic.
“Give me your yo-yo,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Yo-yo. Now.” More pain twisted through her as Demetri pressed his yo-yo into her free hand.
She knew what she wanted—for Demetri to stay Demetri—and she had an object—his yo-yo. She had all the magic and more that she needed to make a spell. It pounded and pulsed through her. Now the only thing left to do was make her sacrifice.
Celia couldn’t hold anything back—she had to give the spell something huge: the thing she least wanted to give up. So she gave it the story of what they could have been together. The happily ever after that would never be. Celia closed her eyes and sacrificed all of it for the spell, and with it she felt her memories of every time she’d been with Demetri fade to gray. What it had felt like to be his friend, and how it had been a tiny universe opening up between them. Even though she couldn’t let it go, even though she wanted to hold on to her friend, she had to feed it to the spell to try to save him. Everything about him faded from her mind as Celia felt it flow out from her and arrow toward the yo-yo that pulsed and throbbed in her hand.
I’ll never be able to remember why Demetri was worth it, she thought as she ached and shook all over with the magic that filled her and twisted her in strange new ways. With a cry, Celia put the last of her sacrifice into the yo-yo and closed her eyes to envision the one thing, the one impossible thing that she wanted to happen. Demetri wouldn’t turn evil like every other Big. However he was remade, he wouldn’t be changed, not deep down.
Demetri gets to stay Demetri.
The boy’s hand slipped out of hers as he howled. Celia heard a matching scream and realized it was coming from her own mouth.
They fell off the couch, both of them lost and writhing in such overwhelming pain that there was nothing else.
Celia and Demetri changed.