Once in a while I thought of attempting to slip one of the special pages into my pocket. But my mother knew me too well. Not once did she take her eyes off me. She watched me fill up the sack, she followed me down the yard, step for step, and stood by while I upturned the sack, picking up those pages that had cartwheeled away from the others and tossing them back onto the main pile.

"I don't have any matches."

"Step aside, child," she said.

I knew what was coming, and I stepped away quickly from the pile of pages. It was a wise move, because as I took my second step I heard my mother noisily hawking up a wad of phlegm. I glanced back as she spat the wad towards my precious journals. If she'd simply been spitting on them that wouldn't have been so bad, but my mother came from a long line of powerful pyrophantics. As the phlegm flew from her lips, it brightened and burst into flames, dropping with horrible accuracy into the chaotic pile of journals.

If there'd simply been a match tossed onto my young life's work it would have burned black from end to end without igniting a page. But it was my mother's fire that landed upon the journals and as it struck them it threw out streamers of flame in all directions. One moment I was looking at the pages onto which I had poured all the anger and the cruelty I had cooked up inside me. The next moment those same pages were being consumed, as my mother's fire ate through the paper.

I was still standing just a step and a half away from the bonfire, and the heat was something ferocious, but I didn't want to move away from it, even though my little mustache, which I'd been carefully nurturing (it was my first) shriveled up in the heat, the smell making my sinuses sting and my eyes water. There was no way in Demonation I was going to let my mother see tears on my face. I raised my hand to quickly wipe them off, but I needn't have bothered. The heat had evaporated them.