A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon by Hannah Reynolds

Author:Hannah Reynolds [Reynolds, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2026-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

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“You’re distracted,” Daziel said a few hours later, probably not for the first time. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry.” I returned to slicing the pears I’d picked from the pear tree in the corner. They weren’t seasonal, but they were very sweet. “We’re trying something new. We’re coming up with words that might have stayed the same for thousands of years—ancient nouns.”

Daziel looked confused. “Ancient nouns? Like what? Why?”

I brought the pear slices over to the couch, very aware of the space between us as I sat. “If a word was pronounced the same way millennia ago as now, we could match our version to Language X’s and extrapolate which Language X characters phonetically correspond to ours. So we’re looking at ancient cities, stuff like that.” I snagged a library book I’d left on the coffee table, flipping to a map of the world from three thousand years ago. “Not tons of places have been around that long, but Aolong has, and Tzorybium. If the scrolls mention a noun we still use and match it, it could be a game changer.” I sighed. “Of course, we’d have to be able to match them in the first place.”

“Huh.” He leaned forward, his shoulder almost brushing mine. If I tilted slightly to the right, we would touch. “You need a word that’s…distinctive. So you can recognize it.”

I munched on the crisp pear. As I licked the juice off my fingers, I caught Daziel watching and looked away, flushing. “Exactly. But what’s distinctive?”

Daziel looked as intrigued as I’d been a few hours ago, but his brain was still fresh tonight. “You’ve made a list of unchanged proper nouns?”

“That’s what we started, yeah.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Are any of them…different? Unique?”

“How do you mean?” I rubbed my forehead. More than anything, I wanted to lean against Daziel’s shoulder and have him rub my head. Why was it so hard to figure out if he liked me? This was driving me mad. I’d thought he might, but hadn’t I obviously shown my own interest, going to his game? If he knew I liked him, and he also liked me, why wouldn’t he do something? “My brain hurts so much.”

He took a pear slice. “Hyphenated? Like ‘Ena-Cinnai.’ ”

Leah had told me going to his game wasn’t the clear indicator I thought. I supposed I could say something, but if he rejected me we’d be trapped in these tiny rooms and it could ruin our entire friendship, and there’d be no way I could focus on the scrolls. “ ‘Ena-Cinnai’ isn’t old enough.”

“I mean something that looks different. Something you could recognize without needing to know the characters themselves. By recognizing a pattern. Something with four O’s in a row or whatever.”

A pattern. I racked my brain, willing to entertain this because it wasn’t like I had any better ideas, and I needed some distraction from my yearning to press my body against his. I thought through the proper nouns we’d written down so far. The tribes. Ancient royalty.

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