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I held a packet of frozen peas to my face and gulped down water. A nasty purple bruise had already begun to form. I was tempted to use the Book again to heal myself, but I knew now that it probably wasn't just me thinking that, and I held back.
Eva started a fire. I can't count the amount of times I almost told her to stop, so I could use the Book just one more time, to heal myself, to get the money for Troy's car. I didn't. If I got the money, I would also get extra for my phone. If I healed myself, I would probably hurt myself again and once again need the Book to save me. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I don't know who said that, but they got it about right.
Kate shook her head. "You know what gets me? Why nobody ever thought to try this before."
"Simple. The possessor gets an urge to protect it." I replied, taking it out of my pocket and tossing it on the table.
"If I try to stop you, just throw it in the fire as fast as you can."
Kate and Eva nodded in agreement.
"You're right, you know," Eva said. "This is the right decision."
I was surprised to hear her say that - after all, if I expected anybody to be the literal devil's advocate, it would be Eva, but she seemed different after the crash. I had been too preoccupied with my own thoughts to notice, but she wasn't wearing her skull earrings, and her eyeliner was much softer than before. How ironic - I was being corrupted and Eva wasn't the one corrupting me.
The fire quickly reached a steady burn, and I started to have more and more second thoughts. What if Sebastian had been lying? He was a demon, after all. All demons did was lie. Maybe the Book wasn't evil. Maybe it was just powerful and he had wanted it for himself. Yes. The longer I thought about it, the more it made sense. I should get it. If I used it, I'd be able to protect myself...
I found myself reaching forward for it almost without meaning to, but before I could touch it, Kate snatched it up and threw it into the flames. Panic surged through me, and I leaped forward, about to plunge my hands into the fire to pluck it out, but Kate and Eva held me tight.
I watched with growing horror as the flames flickered and curled around it, shouting out for Eva and Kate to let me go, but they just held me more and more tightly.
After a while, we realised that the book wasn't getting blacker. The pages weren't curling and burning. It wasn't even charring. After a few minutes, the fire died down to nothing, leaving a completely unharmed black leather-bound book. My outburst faded, and I calmed down and realised that the Book had been influencing me once again. I promised Eva and Kate that it wouldn't happen again, but they kept a close eye on me after that.
Since the fire had failed, we tried putting it in the sink and filling it up with water. It didn't even get wet. Then we tried tearing the pages. The pages wouldn't tear, and even when we borrowed Eva's parents bolt cutters we still couldn't cut them. Drawing on the pages was useless - they just absorbed the ink. Gluing them together did nothing. As a last resort, we threw it out onto the closest busy street. A few cars drove over it. Once the coast was clear, we darted over and picked it up again.
There wasn't even any dirt on it.
Eva sighed. "Look, this isn't working, and it's getting dark. How about we just trap it? Throw it in the Mariana Trench, or a volcano?"
Kate gave her a funny look. "You do realise that we don't exactly have ready access to the Mariana Trench or, for that matter, a volcano, right?"
"Oh," she said, "yeah, well, you know what I mean. Maybe we could try concrete?"
I nodded. "That could work. I don't see how it could escape concrete."
We ended up just pressing it into some wet concrete at a construction site while nobody was looking. Just as we were about to dust our hands of the whole affair, a man in a suit walked up.
"Alright, boys, we've made a mistake. Sorry to tell you this so late, but you're going to have to bucket all of this out while it's still wet."
The builders looked at each other defeatedly, and so did we, remembering what Sebastian had said about the Book's ability to manipulate reality. I grabbed the Book before some poor builder picked it up and got trapped under its curse. It was clean, again. The only dirt that seemed to have any ability to collect on it was dust.
"I give up." I moaned, stuffing it in my pocket as we walked back home. "I'll just bury it in my backyard. Actually, you know what, Kate, you can bury it. That way I can't get it."
Kate rolled her eyes. "Wow, thanks, what an honour. I get to bury a book."
"I'll bury it." Eva offered.
I blinked at her. It wasn't that Eva was particularly lazy, but actually offering to do something for me? The Eva I knew would have just made a sarcastic comment and gotten Kate to do it. It seemed she'd changed more than I'd thought.
"Who are you and what have you done with Eva Halson?" Kate asked jokingly.
Eva shrugged. "Look, we need to get rid of it somehow, and if you won't do it and Cassie can't, then I will."
I nodded. "Just don't take too long. I think you have to actually do a spell in it for it to have too much effect on you, especially if you know it's cursed, but don't take any chances. Whatever you do, don't keep it."
She nodded, looking more serious than I'd ever seen her. "Cassie, I know. I'm not an idiot."
"You did suggest we drop it in the Mariana Trench..." Kate commented. Eva rolled her eyes and snatched the book out of my hands.
"I'll run ahead of you and bury it before you get there," she said, adding, "Just so you don't have any second thoughts."
I forced myself to nod, even though I found it hard to distinguish my thoughts from the Book's thoughts - and part of me wondered if it was really having any influence at all.
Me and Kate walked in silence for a while. I could tell what she was thinking. She wanted the truth.
"You know," she said finally, "You lied about Sebastian."
"I didn't know what to tell you." I replied softly.
"You've never lied to us before." she said.
It wasn't a question - it was a fact. I had never lied to my friends. Kate and Eva had been the two people in the world who I'd trusted with everything - we'd pretty much been family. I supposed that was why I hadn't been able to let them go.
"You're keeping something else, aren't you, Cassie? It's more than just the demon. It's more than the Book. You're holding something back, and you won't admit it, not even to me."
I was silent.
"Remember that time when we were thirteen, and we were sleeping over at your place?" she asked.
I nodded.
"When I went to the toilet, I went into the wrong room by accident. I saw something I probably shouldn't have."
I looked at her. "You've never told me this before."
"No. I still won't tell you what it is, though."
"Why not?"
She stopped and turned to face me. "So you can know how it feels, to have a friend know something, something that involves you, and not tell you."
I opened my mouth to say something, a wave of guilt and curiosity falling over me, but before I could tell her anything, she dropped to the ground.
I screamed, and kneeled down next to her, shaking her, slapping her in the face. She wouldn't wake up. Her pulse was faint.
I looked around, screaming for somebody to call an ambulance, but everybody else was starting to drop as well. One by one, everybody around me was falling to the ground all at once, everybody except for me. The cars just kept on going, and I just barely managed to drag pedestrians out of the way. I ran from street to street, but it was exactly the same. At last, I gave up. I couldn't save every single pedestrian I needed a solution, and I needed it fast. More people would be dying in the hospital than on the streets, if it had spread that far.
I didn't waste any time deliberating. I ran to my house and circled around to the backyard. I could see a patch of ground that looked freshly upturned. My hands tore frantically at the dirt, digging until finally they found soft leather - black leather. I wedged my fingers around the edge and heaved it out, flipping it open. Once again, it opened to exactly the page I required. Waking From a Deep Sleep or Coma, the page was titled. The neatly written, clear instructions detailed the instructions for the spell.
I started to panic. It could only be used on one person at a time. Everybody I'd seen had fallen asleep, and I had every reason to believe the entire population of Toronto - or even worse, all of Canada - was under the spell.
I couldn't wake roughly 2.6 million people, one by one.
For the second time in the same day, I wished I hadn't driven away that blasted demon. He was, once again, the one person who could help me. It was more important than me or my beliefs now. People were dying. There would be housefires, and nobody to stop them. So far, the only person who seemed to be awake was me.
If I could sell a part of my soul for three friends, I could pray to a demon for hundreds of strangers. I closed my eyes, and wished, as hard as I could, that he was here, that I hadn't left Sebastian in a church, that please could he help me. There was no reply. For all I knew, he was still in that church. Maybe he would be trapped there forever. Maybe he was dead. Could demons die? I realised I had no idea.
I grabbed the book and ran to Eva, first. She was in my lounge, on the floor. A glass had fallen from her hand and was lying, shattered, in a puddle of water on the floor. Her long black hair was spread out on the ground, mingling with water and glass. Her eyes were closed, and her skin seemed pale, but when I cautiously put two fingers to her neck, she, like Kate, had a pulse, and I could see her breathing. It was as if she'd just fallen into a very deep sleep.
I made the sign shown in the book with ink on her eyelids, my fingers shaking. When I whispered the chant, the sign shone read, and her eyes flew open. She sat up with a gasp, colour returning to her cheeks in a flood.
"What happened?" she asked, looking around her, and then at the book in my hands and the ink that stained my fingers with proof of my crime.
"No..." she breathed.
"I had to," I said quickly. "Eva, something really bad is happening, and only this can stop it. Everybody's fallen asleep. Just like you did now. Everybody, all at once, Kate, everyone in the street - I don't know if it's the entire city or if..."
The severity of the situation began to dawn on her. Fear crept into her eyes.
"It could be the entire country."
"Eva, people are dying, and Sebastian... I prayed but he isn't coming and for all I know he could be stuck in a church. What do I do?" I pleaded, my eyes staring into hers as if the answer would lie there somewhere. Eva had always been the ringleader of the three of us. She had been a star and we the planets that revolved around her. She just stared back at me hopelessly.
My answer did come, but it didn't come from Eva.
The TV turned on by itself, showing a blue screen. Noise blared from both it and Eva's phone. A voice that I soon recognised as belonging to my kidnapper.
"BRING US THE BOOK AND THE PLAGUE WILL STOP. EVERYBODY CURRENTLY DEAD BECAUSE OF THE PLAGUE WILL BE RESTORED. THE DEAL IS OPEN UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. IF THE BOOK IS NOT RETURNED BY MIDNIGHT, EVERYBODY DIES."
645Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLbkxWFsdsC
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