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“It’s okay. Things were getting too quiet around Grimdale.”
Bjorn collects Father Maxwell in his arms and – with a final fist-bump for Pax – trudges off toward the train station.
The rest of us trudge back to the festival.
Everything is a mess. Stalls are overturned, flags and banners burned and torn to shreds. As we wander around, surveying the damage, people crawl out of their hiding places, clutching wounds.
Pax picks up the giant yellow duck and the lion from where we dropped them and inspects every surface. “You are strong, little friends. You survived. You are worthy of coming home with us.” He tucks the plushies under his arms.
I look for signs of the demon’s poison – the black mist that attacked Björn. But I don’t see any, except for the bodies of those killed in the Giant Vegetable tent.
I want to heal them all, but I don’t dare. I can still feel the demon licking my skin. Hell is closer than I could have imagined.
“Bree, is that you?” It’s Maggie. She’s clinging to Pax’s neck as he carries her toward the green. She’s bleeding from a head wound, but I don’t see any black mist near her.
“Maggie, are you okay?”
“Nothing a little bandage and a kiss won’t fix. Besides, it’s long been my dream to be manhandled by such a fine specimen,” she says as Pax carries her off to where the village doctor is performing triage. People lie on the green, moaning and talking softly as they tend to their injuries and discuss what ghastly being attacked the festival.
“I’m telling you, it was aliens,” says Dani’s mother. “They were attracted by our giant vegetables, which they require for their mating rituals. I think we just narrowly avoided being probed.”
“It was some kind of freak weather pattern,” says Frank, the village mechanic. “That’s all it is. My granddaughter has been warning me that climate change will be the end of us. I just didn’t know the climate was quite so…malevolent.”
“Maybe it’s a gas leak?” suggests Maggie. “I saw it on the telly once – a town in America had a gas leak and everyone started hallucinating strange monsters—”
“No, I’m teling you that there’s something dark and sinister going on in this village,” another one of her friends shoots back. “I bet it’s witches. Black magic. Why else would that nice Father Bryne have ran out without even saying goodbye…”
I don’t know how we’re going to explain this, or even whether anyone in the village saw Pax and Björn battling the demon, and me and Father Maxwell and Ambrose banishing it with our vegetable demon mark. Can we pass this off as a gas leak?
But that’s a problem for another day. Right now, I need to make sure…
“I see your parents,” Edward says quietly. “They’re over by the Giant Vegetable tent. They’re unharmed. Your dad is helping Alice’s father out from beneath a large avocado.”
“Thank you.” With Ambrose’s arm resting firmly in my elbow, we head toward the Giant Vegetable tent, when someone tackles me from behind.
“Argh!” I whirl around, my fists raised, my heart leaping in my throat. But then I smell Dani’s signature perfume, and she wraps her arms around me and squeezes the life out of me.
“Bree?” Dani’s breathless voice croaks. “You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“I was so worried,” she whispers. “I saw Pax and that Viking guy attacking thatthing, and you and a priest on the hill with all those cucumbers. And Ambrose, you were sobrave.”
“Thank you.” Ambrose takes a bow, although I notice that his legs are still trembling. “It is a pleasure to serve.”
“So what was that, anyway?” Dani narrows her eyes. “And if you tell me it’s a gas leak, Iwillkill you.”
“It’s…” the words dry on my tongue. “I’ll explain, but away from everyone.”
Dani’s grip tightens on my arm and she drags me over to the duck pond.
“What isthat?”Dani jabs a finger at the singed circle in the grass. “Apart from the village beautification committee’s collective heart attack?”
I swallow. “That was caused by a demon.”
“Excuse me?”
It pours out of me, everything Father Maxwell said about demons being attracted to our magic, and how we opened that black hole and sent it back to hell, and how Ambrose and I almost fell in after it.
