Page 13 of How to Entice a Fiend

“Because…” She folds her arms over her chest and refuses to look at me.

I don’t care enough to badger her and just pull the pillow over my head. This makes her gasp, shocked that I don’t want to play her little game of “Oh no, Rylee, what’s wrong?”

“If you evencaredabout me, you would know that I’m sad,” she declares. Like I didn’t just care about her enough to tear the city apart to find her.

Realizing that I will be getting no sleep until I appease the small monster, I cave. “Why are you sad?”

“You were going to leave me.”

“I really wasn’t,” I assure her. “I spent half the night looking for you; I wasn’t planning on leaving you. You acted likeyouwanted to leaveme.”

“I don’t! I just want to stay at the same placewithyou instead of hiding in different houses!”

“Just… go to sleep.”

“Can I sleep in the bed with you?” she asks eagerly.

“As long as you stop flopping around and summoning demons in your sleep.”

Rylee laughs at that. “I was summoning demons? Marcus is like a demon! He’s scary!”

“Sure, sure,” I say, not having the heart to tell her that most seem to find me scarier.

She climbs into the bed where she immediately falls asleep before kicking me and ripping the blankets from me. I’m left questioning every choice I’ve made tonight as she gets a solid kick in to my shin.

“I’m not going to be gone long,” I say to Rylee, who hasn’t let me out of her sight. “Sopleasejust stay here.”

Rylee is absolutely against this. Like… I’ve never seen anyone so against something in my life. She dives out of the chair where she’d just finished breakfast and latches on to my body. Her arms squeeze me tightly as she takes in abigbreath, like her main response to this will be tears.

“Don’t you dare start crying.”

“Then don’t you dare leave me!”

Orin is just merrily reading a newspaper as all of this goes on. “Why don’t you stay for a bit?” he suggests.

“Why don’t I not? Do they evenmakenewspapers anymore? And what is even worthwhile reading in there?”

“I like to read the comics,” he says.

Rylee looks up at me pleadingly. “En, you can’t go. We have school and stuff. It’s Tuesday.”

I stare at her in disbelief. She would do anything to get out of “school,” and now she’s willingly reminding me that we haven’t worked on anything today?

Seeing a blank notepad, I grab it as well as a pen and drop them in front of Rylee. “I want you to write me a two-paragraph essay about how you’re going to listen to me and never run out of the house again.”

“That sounds horrible,” she decides.

“What was horrible was me having to find you!” I say.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

I scoff. “I wasn’tsad.”

“I’ll make you feel better by showing you my amazing words of wonder. Sit, sit. I need to know how to spell everything.”

“What do you need to know how to spell? You’re a good speller,” I remind her.

“How do you spell… uh… ‘I’?”

---