Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
Idon’t know how I ended up in the demon’s arms, or where we’re going but I do know we’re getting there at a decent pace. I shift in his arms and look him over. I tried walking with him but after I stumbled into a hole the demon had enough and scooped me up with a tsk.
I should be trying to run away or screaming bloody murder on the off chance that Buffy or any of the others find me but I’m not. I’m snuggled up in the demon’s arms as quiet as you please. I’m content, too. I don’t want to admit it but being here in his arms, I feel safe. Like beyond safe.
The gentle rise and fall of his steps and the rocking of his arms makes me feel like nothing and no one could ever get close enough to touch me. I’ve never felt like this with anyone before. I bite my lip and lean my forehead against his chest.
“Thanks for putting on my jacket,” I tell him.
Turns out demons run hot, at least the one carrying me does.
It took all of ten minutes in his arms before I was burning up, which called for a pit stop for me to shimmy out of the down jacket.
It was then that I came to a decision. I might be going into the forest with a demon but I wasn’t going to go with a naked one.
Okay, he was wearing my backpack with Charlie’s book in it too but that really didn’t do much for modesty, you know?
“Can you cover up?” I asked, offering him my jacket.
“Is this not pleasing to you?”
“What?” I spluttered.
He gestured to himself. “This form is from your memories. I know you like it best. I can adopt another form if that would suit your tastes better.” He raises his hand like he’s about to snap his fingers and go all magic the way Wrath does sometimes so I rushed forward to stop him, eyes carefully averted not to get any more of an eyeful than I already have.
“It’s perfect. Really, I mean you look…” I flounder for words because he isn’t lying. This really is my dream man come to life. “You look beautiful.”
“Beautiful?”
I nod and offer my jacket to him while I make a study of the trees. “Yes, you’re beautiful. There’s no need to change how you look to make me happy, an-and you should look how you want. Don’t worry about what I think.”
“I’ve been called many a thing but never beautiful,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t going to listen to me about not caring how I thought he looked. “I will do as you ask. I understand humans require patience.”
I didn’t ask what he meant about patience because he was right. We really did require patience. I hear something run through the bushes to the left of us and I press closer to the demon.
“It’s only a small thing. No need to worry,” the demon says and gives me a reassuring squeeze.
The touch works like a charm and I settle instantly.
It’s then that I realize I don’t know his name.
At least, not from him directly. The mages called him Jaak?
No, that can’t be right, it was something that ended in an M but what was it?
I can’t just keep calling him the demon. It feels wrong.
I clear my throat in what I hope is a totally normal sound to break the ice. “Um, so…I know things have been a little, you know,” I say, waving my hands in the air in front of us in a poor interpretation of our night so far, “chaotic. But, ah, what’s your name?”
“You don’t know it?” he asks.
I shake my head sheepishly. “I wasn’t really listening to the mages before they got dusted.”
“That’s a smart choice. That lot are known to be long-winded, very pompous.”
“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.
“It was you. You were the light in my dreams and the voice I heard.” It’s not a question. I know it was him. “You kept me safe.”
“I did. I was,” he tells me, “but it was not enough. I wanted to do more. I should have been able to do more.” I start to ask him what else he could have done when he starts speaking again. “That cult, those fools. I should have killed them all. That filthy half god and his human minions.”
I know who he means when he says half god.
“Lethos?” I ask. He was frightening, a mix of shadow and starlight that was nothing and everything all at once.
He looked beautiful, perfect but there was an evil in him that hollowed you out.
Or at least there was until Wrath took him apart after Charlie made him a god.
“The one and the same. If I had not been cursed by powers far greater than he, I would have ended him centuries ago for meddling in the human world. There’s no need for it. Chaos already reigns here. There are far more interesting places to bring to heel than here.”
The mage’s words come back to haunt me so maybe I was paying attention more than I realized. Lord of War, Bringer of Chaos. Jaakobah the Destroyer.
“Oh, right, you like chaos. That’s your thing, right?”
“It’s my purpose, so yes, it is very much my thing. I was made for it.”
I bite my lip and think on that. “You were made for chaos but you think there’s enough chaos here? Are we that much of a mess?”
“Oh, certainly. Humanity’s ever present and growing hunger for power ensures there is always strife and chaos. Peace will never endure in this world with the greed of men at large. My presence is not needed to tip the balance.”
I suck in a breath. The words Jaakobah just said feel so right. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Somewhere deep down inside of me, I’ve thought what he says. No matter how hard I’ve tried to be optimistic about the world, there’s no denying Jaakobah understands humans to their core.
“You’re right,” I say. “It is pretty chaotic here.”
“Low hanging fruit for the likes of a bottom feeder like Lethos,” Jaakobah growls. If he thinks the god that nearly killed everyone I know is a bottom feeder then what is he?
“You’re-you tried to save me. Why would you do that?”
“Because I was cursed by the cosmos. The fates themselves bound me to the Hell Maw, they wrote my story into the darkness between worlds and jailed me thusly, and for a millennia I was alone.”
A millennia? The fates?