Page 32 of How To Take Down A Cult At The End Of The World

“Is that what the dancing was about?”

He smiles. I can tell he’s smiling because when I look up, I can see the flash of his teeth in the dark of the woods. “I’m sure it was,” he says and then he finally gives me the answer I want, “My name is Jaakobah.”

“Jaakobah,” I say, testing out the name. “Jaakobah is nice.”

“You like it?”

“I do.” Those two words make me feel shy so I look away from him. “Why did they sacrifice me to you? Is that what you were asking for when you were asking me to help you get out earlier? And why are you different now?” The last question I have for him is one that I’ve been turning over since after he put my jacket around his waist. The demon I met taunted me, spoke in sentences that felt more like a riddle at first, but gradually he’d started to make more sense, and now he seems perfectly normal.

What if Charlie’s brain wasn’t the only one that was being eaten?

He lets out a hum as he thinks over my words. “I’m different now because I’m not half mad. I was…not in my right mind before, not when you first came to the clearing.”

“But you are now? Or is it like a timed thing and you’ll go back to being, you know…”

“Go back to being what? Someone you wanted to cut the claws off?”

“You deserved that,” I remind him.

He laughs. The sound is low and sweet. My belly feels like it’s full of butterflies when I hear it and I smile with him. It’s then that there’s a flash of light that makes me freeze. It’s between us.

“What is that?” I ask, pushing back from his chest to look around us. It’s a gold light and it flickers, there one second and then gone before it’s back again. It circles my wrist, runs the length of Jaakobah’s arm and then back again to mine.

I lift my hand and give it a shake. “I think my magic is going haywire again.”

“That isn’t your magic. That is our bond.”

I look from my glowing wrist to him. He’s easier to see in the warm light. “Our what?” I squeak.

“You asked why the mages were sacrificing you to me. It was for this,” he says and gives the light a pluck. I watch as it gathers and forms into a thread. Yes, that’s what it is. A golden thread from me to him.

“I don’t understand.”

“You are my anchor now, witchling. You accepted me as the Bride of the Hell Maw.”

I swallow hard. “We got married, didn’t we?” I whisper. I have to ask, even though I already know what he’s going to say. “Like for real married.”

“Yes, we did. The bond of a demon like me to this world needed a bond. The ritual they used was a marriage covenant.”

I feel dizzy. Like all the blood is going straight to my brain which doesn’t make sense because I’m upright. “Oh my gods, do cults know no other rituals? It’s always a wedding.”

Jaakobah makes a sympathetic sound. “I understand this is troubling. You’ve been through this occasion once before.”

“If occasion means being sacrificed as a bride to a demon, then yeah. Not my first time, but…” my voice trails off and I forget that I married a demon by accident tonight. I am aware I’m wildly under reacting to it but it’s a lot to process. “How did you know that?”

“The same way I know what your family did.”

My stomach drops. “You know about that?”

“I do. I was there.”

“How?”

“In your dreams. I’ve seen your memories, I’ve walked through your days and nights, over and over again. When the nightmares came, I was there. I did my best to keep you safe but it was difficult from my place at the Hell Maw.”

“Y-you were in my dreams?”

The light that I saw. The one that washed everything in reds and golds, that made me feel soothed and comforted flashes in my mind. I used to see it at the most random parts of my dreams. When I saw that light, I knew I was safe. That means the voice in the basement was him too. All along I thought it was my mind’s way of coping, of helping me escape the night terrors but it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t all in my head. It was real.