Page 7 of How To Take Down A Cult At The End Of The World

“I’m not here to compare bovines to books, Meadow.” He turns away from me and starts pacing now, he walks out of my room and down the hallway to the kitchen.

“I think you mean porcine.”

“Don’t Steve Irwin me right now, Meadow.”

I sigh and rub my forehead. “Who’s that?”

Charlie turns to give me a horrified look. “An angel. He was an angel.”

I walk past him and put on a kettle of tea. “I’ll make us tea. I feel like this is gonna be a long night.” I take a seat on the couch while Charlie paces and mutters to himself.

He points a finger at me. “How magical are you on a scale of 1-10?”

I freeze up at his question. How does someone even measure that? There’s no real metric for this, is there? It’s not like height or the ability to eat cheese.

“Uh…a four?” I say. Four seems good. I like four. Four is enough, when I’m not even supposed to be magical in the first place.

Charlie hums. “I thought you would be more magical but the book is jacked right now so maybe you're as good as it could do. Or maybe I’m a pretty shitty god. Why would I make you with so little power? That’s not what I wrote when I asked for magical backup for Buffy.”

I gasp at his words. “I’m plenty magical.Full of that mystical feminine or whatever, okay?You take that back right now or I’ll…I’ll…well, I don’t know what I’ll do but you’ll see how magical I am, and you are not my god, creator, or maker. You’re myroommate.”

“Potato, tomato.”

“Charlie. The.Book.” I say the last word through gritted teeth and it’s the closest I’ve come to not smiling when I’m mad sinceI’ve tried to break my smile. That fact alone cheers me some while Charlie launches into telling me all about the book.

“My book is bad. It’s…I don’t know, it’s broken.”

“Broken how?”

“Every time I used to write things they came out perfect. If I wanted anything, and I mean anything, all I had to do was be as detailed as I wanted it to be and I’d have it. A double decker club sandwich with extra mayo? Easy. An epic campaign the likes of which explorers have never seen and will never see again? Light work. Hell, I even made Wrath a god, remember that?”

I nod because of course I remember that. Everyone in town remembers that, from the top to the bottom, we all know that a god walks among us. Which is not much of a change when you think about it because we did actually worship Wrath as a god for centuries. Maybe things are more normal than I thought.

“But then, things started to go wrong. Just little things at first. I wanted that sandwich toasted? It came out burnt. I asked for a sunny day for us to get some work done rebuilding last week and it snowed.”

“That was you?”

A week ago we had a freak snowstorm. We all just wrote it off as one of those things, or maybe even something connected to the mini-demons that were testing our boundaries.

Charlie nods. “Yeah, that was me. I thought I was going to help us get ahead and what did I do? I made a freaking blizzard in the middle of September, which just set us back from the timeline we were on to get the area by the greenhouses clean. On top of that, I had a complete psychotic break.”

“I’m sorry? A what?”

“A psychotic break. My brain went like this,” he says, bringing his hands together and pulling them away from each other with a‘poof’ sound, “my brain felt like it was turned insideout and to be honest, I think I went somewhere else. Somewhere dark.”

“Oh my gods.”

“Don’t worry, it was just for a few hours.”

“Oh my gods!”

“I bet in the grand scheme it's the same as eating magic mushrooms, so what’s a little trip? Tonight was okay, the voices were only with me for a teeny tiny bit. You didn’t even notice.”

“Mushrooms are magic? Like in a potion?”

“Remind me to say less around you, I feel like I’m corrupting you and that’s really weighing on my conscience as of late.”

“Okay…” I lean forward in my seat and try to think of a moment when I felt different tonight. When me turning into a witch could have happened and I can’t think of a single moment that was off. “When did you do it? You said you did it tonight.”