Chapter 12 #2
My mouth goes dry at his words and the only thing I can think to do is pat him awkwardly. “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible.”
“Horrible? Not hardly. It was torture. Penance for a wrong I did not commit, but I bided my time. I knew I would be free to walk the worlds again in chaos.” He sounds chipper.
Like he’s talking about who won the big game last night and not the fact that he was bound by the fates in a certifiable rock jail.
“Year after year slipped by and the world changed, the universe and all the worlds shifted and grew older and there I remained until I lost my sanity.”
“Seems like a lot of that’s going around these days,” I offer helpfully because it is. I make a mental note to ask about how we’re going to help Charlie when we arrive wherever it is that he’s taking me. “What happened after that?” I ask.
“You,” he says softly.
“Me?”
“Yes,” he shifts me in his arms slightly until I’m nestled closer, my head right under his chin.
“When the world vanished and everything faded from my mind it was you that brought me back from the brink. Day after day, night after night, I saw you. Your mind called to mine. In your torment, I brought you peace. Once I found you, I could not leave you to the darkness.”
“That’s how you saw my dreams?”
“Yes, at first I didn’t know where I was when I walked into the first nightmare.
It seemed like the worlds I’ve visited before, the ones destroyed and long gone but here they were in a girl’s mind.
A human’s mind.” He pauses and brushes the hair away from my forehead, it's just the brush of his fingers but it sets a spark off down my spine. Like the feeling of sinking into a warm bath after being in the cold all day. Jaakobah sets me down on my feet and it’s only then I realize we’ve stopped walking.
The gold thread between us flares brightly with light when Jaakobah takes a step closer and then sinks to his knees in front of me.
“The horrors you’ve seen alone are real. They’re memories.”
“Memories? Whose memories? I-I,” I shake my head and move to take a step back but he reaches forward and catches my hand.
“Meadow, please.”
“Whose memories?” I ask again.
“It’s hard to say,” he says and squeezes my hand, “for a time I wondered if they were mine. That somehow I’d shared them with you but that wasn’t it.
The places I saw in your mind I’d only heard of, some of the worlds were older than even me.
Long gone from memory. Just like the being that released the memory into the cosmos and then to you.
Everything has to go somewhere at the end of its life, nothing is ever destroyed. Those memories are proof of it.”
“So you’re saying my night terrors are memories of dead aliens or whatever that just mailed their brains off to whoever’s brain was dumb enough to answer?”
“Your brain is not dumb. It’s…open. You are more susceptible to the supernatural than most humans. It’s why you're a witch.”
I cross my arms and shake my head. “I’m a witch because my friend used his demon phone book to bring help for my friends and all it managed to do was make me. I-I’m not a real witch. I don’t know what I am. Not anymore.”
“I know who you are, Meadow.” The demon on his knees in front of me takes hold of the golden thread between us and pulls it to tug me close.
“You are kind, you are strong, you are clever, far too brave for your own good and funny. You hate orange soda and enjoy apple fritters. You are a good human. Far better than the ones you were born to.”
My eyes water. My parents.
“That’s not very hard to do,” I joke and wipe my eye with my sleeve. There’s still magic on it and I’m pretty sure it smears on my face from the way Jaakobah’s eyes linger on mine.
“No matter if it is or not, you are the reason I came back to myself. You put my mind back together. Each memory shared with me about you, your friends, your life in that infernal town and those bumbling cultists, all of it saved me. You saved me.”
“Is that why you saved me? With the light?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No. I would have done that even without the salvation you offered me. There is nothing more I hate to see than an unfair fight. Those worlds were no place for a girl all on her own. I could not abandon you. I would not do it.”
He’s right. The dreams I had were horrifying. I’m glad he’s holding my hands right now. I don’t know if I’d be able to think about them without hiding if he wasn’t.
I give him a weak smile. “So you like to destroy worlds and reign chaos but only in a fair fight?”
“Yes, of course. I’m civilized. I adhere to the rules of battle. I must, as an archdemon.”
“A what? Is that like Wrath.”
Jaakobah scoffs. “No, it is not like the demon that walks among you. He is far too young. His power is not even a fraction of what I’m capable of. Give him a millennia or three and perhaps then.”
He thinks Lethos was a bottom feeder and that Wrath is young.
Holy hells.
“You said I saved you, but when I got to the clearing you were…” my voice trails off as I search for a way to say scary freak nicely but Jaakobah does it for me.
“I was out of mind. Since the great reckoning of your cult it’s been difficult to see you.
I couldn’t find you, no matter how I tried.
I didn’t understand it at first, not until the mages began their visits to hex me.
They made me what I was when you first came to the clearing.
A wild beast. No more than a mindless being. ”
“They hexed you? I thought they worshiped you?”
“Humans are not the brightest and the fates are pernicious. The rituals they did to summon me were most likely presented as acts of devotion, not torment. All the progress, all the years I’d gotten back from being with you was wiped clean.”
I cover my mouth with a hand and shake my head. “That’s awful.”
Jaakobah raises a shoulder in a shrug. “That’s life. It matters not now. I’ve dealt with their kind and I’m free and sane once more. Our bond will keep my mind in one piece,” he tells me, holding up the golden thread with a lift of his hand.
I hold up a hand. “Are you saying that we are well and truly married, like that’s what we are?
You’re my husband and I’m your wife.” I know I sound like an idiot repeating everything he’s telling me but it’s a necessary evil for me to process everything that’s happened to me in the past twenty-four hours.
Just this afternoon, I had to yell at Charlie for drinking out of the carton and I thought that was going to be my biggest problem this week. Boy, was I wrong.
“Of course, we are married. The wedding was simple for what you deserve but it did the job and it will also ensure that I am able to walk this world at your side. The Fates have lost their power over me with our covenant.”
Married. He means our marriage. The marriage that I didn’t even realize was a thing until he told me.
“You could find someone better to marry,” I tell him.
I mean that. Jaakobah is attractive, he's powerful, so powerful that he blew up a whole field of mages for me. “Someone powerful and smart. Not me.”
“There is none better than you. I’ll not hear of it.”
“But-”
“I choose you, Meadow.”
As weird as it is, pleasure lights me up from the inside at his words.
It also lights me up on the outside too with the way the golden link between us glows brighter.
I like that he wants to be with me. Maybe it’s a hold over of the brainwashing I got that marrying a demon seems right.
Like it’s what I should do but I don’t think it's that. I felt safe before when I saw the light, I’ve felt safe this entire time with him and he’s been with me for so much longer than tonight.
He’s seen every part of me, the good and the bad.
He’s kept me safe through the worst of it.
I think I would want him even without the marriage ritual the cult forced on me. Maybe I manifested him.
“Do you not want me?” He asks and leans back to look at me better.
The moon is high in the sky above us, the cold light of it filters down through the trees and turns the forest into a mottled work of light and dark.
“If you wish not to be my anchor then we must absolve this at once. Earlier, in the clearing, I asked for you to free me so that I could ensure your safety. Now that I’ve seen to it, I may go.
” He picks up the golden thread with both hands and I just know he’s about to snap it in half, so I rush forward to stop him.
“No! Wait! Jaak, don’t do that! Go where?”
He freezes and looks at me over the golden thread. “Jaak?”
“I-yes, it just kind of slipped out. Like a nickname?” It’s true, it did just slip out. I like the sound of it, but maybe he doesn’t? “I don’t have to say it. Not if you don’t like it.”
“Jaak,” he says with a thoughtful look. “I like it if you call me by it.”
He smiles at me so I smile back.
I point at the thread in his hands. “Okay, put that down. I don’t want you to get rid of it because I know that’s what you were about to do, and if you did snap it what would happen to you?
Don’t you need an anchor?” I don’t really know what it means but I’m piecing it together as I go and I get that an anchor is kind of a big deal when it comes to keeping Jaak out of trouble with the Fates.
“If I snapped this, I would return to the gate. Though the one here has been damaged so I am not sure if that is where I would return. It could be any gate to the Hell Maw really.”
“There’s multiple gates to Hell? That seems really irresponsible.”
He chuckles. “There are more than a few. Demons like me are tasked with ensuring your kind stay clear of them.”
“And that’s what you would go back to doing if you got rid of our bond? You’d get sucked into a gate? Just like that?”
He nods. “Yes, just like that. I would go if you wished for that.”
If I wished that.
Images of Jaak being locked up somewhere else, where he was alone in the dark with no one for company. Like my basement. My throat goes tight at the thought.
“I don’t like that. I hate that. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life,” I tell him and then swat at his hands until he lets go of the thread.
“Look, I know this is all weird and I’m trying to process it as fast as I can but I don’t want you to go away.
I want you to…stay. Stay with me. Please. ”
“Then stay with you, I shall, wife.”