He blinks and shakes his head. “That book is fuckin’possessed.”
I roll my eyes. “Duh, I thought we knew that.”
“No, like…there’s something in it.” He swallows and looks around the room like he thinks something is going to jump out at us and then back to me. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The Big Bad. The thing that’s after the book. They’re linked somehow. It doesn’t want to destroy the world, Meadow. It’s worse than that.”
“What does it want then?”
“It wants toeat it.”
My eyes go wide and I have to take a beat when I hear that. “What the fuck? What do you meaneat? You better be talking in metaphors.”
“It’s a-a thing. This big void. There’s nothing but hunger and teeth. Darkness. It’s eaten so many other places and things. I saw them. All of them screaming and crying. Oh gods, I can hear the way it sounded when it chewed them up.” He shakes his head and rubs his temples. “Fuck! Remember when I told you that my brain went somewhere else and I didn’t know where it went?”
I frown and nod. “Yeah, I remember.”
“It went into this thing’s memories. Its Greatest Hits of Meals. There were so many. And just now I saw what it wants to do to our world, and oh fuck- we, we might be too late to stop it, even now.” Charlie tries to get to his feet and wobbles. I leap to my feet and catch him.
“Woah, slow down. Everything is going to be okay. We can stop this. As long as we’re together we can do anything.”
“No, Meadow. You don’t understand. I think we’re too late. It’s going to feast tonight on Halloween.”
“What?”
“That’s what all of this has been leading up to.Halloween.I don’t know–I still don’t get why that day is special to it but it is and our world is on the menu for tonight. This thing is a World Eater.”
“I thought Halloween was full of ghosts and candy. I could have sworn Wrath said there would be candy,” I mutter. “Why is this happening now? Why this Halloween?”
“At this point I don’t even think the date is important.” Charlie moans and scrubs his face with his hands. “I think we really need to just accept that nothing makes sense and everything happens to us because that’s our lot in life.”
He’s right. Why does anything happen in the world anymore?
We’re standing in the backyard and eyeballing the mini-demon Jaak has been getting information out of. The information isn’t a ton from the pinched look on Jaak’s face.
“Not going great out here, huh?” I ask.
“This demon is very dumb. Too dumb to communicate,” Jaak says, leaning down to look at the demon Charlie’s rigged up on a stick. He wasn’t lying, he really had. There’s a decent sized branch that he’s tied a demon to with a sort of rope harness at one end of it. Charlie stuck the branch in the hollow of a tree and the demon dangles in its harness. I’d never seen one of the mini-demons attacking Sweet Tooth up close. I didn’t expect it to look so rat-like. The mini-pig-sized demon has four legs with clawed feet and a long tail that swishes like an agitated cat. Its head is rodent-shaped right down to its snout and whiskers. Red eyes shine brightly and even though the demon can’t talk, I know it’s pissed. I don’t blame it, I’d be ticked if I was trussed up and on a stick too. The wind blows and I have to cover my mouth so the demon doesn’t see me laugh when it pinwheels like a half-inflated balloon.
“It’s definitely not the brightest. It kept just screaming ‘feast’,” Charlie says and then he taps his chin, “or was it feet?Either way, not much of a conversationalist. He’s acting shy right now, that’s why he’s quiet.”
“How did you catch it?” I walk around the demon and check out Charlie’s handiwork with the rope harness.
“I’m fast as fuck,” Charlie says proudly. “Plus it was sleeping when I grabbed it, so kinda easy on that one. I had it in a bag but that wasn’t working too well, so I had to do a few things I’m not proud of to get the harness on.”
I don’t ask about the things Charlie’s done. I know better than to open that can of worms.
“How’d you use this demon branch to find us?”
“I used the Demon on a Stick, patent pending,” Charlie says, giving me a pointed look, “by putting the other end of the branch over my shoulder so the demon was just hanging out at the other end. It ran in place if I was going the right way and if I made a wrong turn it stopped moving. I like to think of it as a demonic compass for the adventurer on the go.”
“You think we can use it to find the World Eater?”
“I mean, it’s worth a shot. I don’t know if it's the book or power that the mini-demon is trying to get to. If it’s power then we’ve got a shot at finding the World Eater. Whatever the book is, I know that it's not as powerful as the World Eater. I don’t even know if the book still works. Its power is failing, I can feel it,” he says, looking at the book in his hands.
“There’s still some juice in it, I can tell,” I let him know. It’s true, there’s a spark to the book that’s faint but still lives. “Okay, so you hold the book and one of us will bring that demon close and see if it wants the book or tries to go in a different direction.”
