Wicked Hungry

I recognize the voice just as the door shakes and rattles on its hinges.

“What,” asks Nye, “is that?”

“Rewsin,” I say.

“Rewsin?”

“WHO DARES SPEAK MY NAME?”

The door shakes again as it is pounded from outside.

Chapter 35: OUT INTO THE DARKNESS

“So, we’d better go,” Blaine says.

Nye nods nervously. “After you, then, my friend.”

“Why don’t you open the door, Stanley?” Blaine asks.

“Me?” I ask. “Are you crazy?”

“The demon knows you. It may give us an advantage.”

There’s more pounding on the door, and plaster falls down from the ceiling.

“Gatekeeper,” Nye says. “Move aside. I’ll open the door.”

But before he can reach out and touch the handle, I grab it and pull the door open.

Pandemonium greets us.

The dog-demon Rewsin stands on Whelan’s front porch. Around him are a lot of disassembled partly decomposed body parts. The stench is horrible, but I can’t see a single ghoul that is in one piece. Nye’s guards and the werewolves are still here, too — alive, it seems, but hurting. Behind them are my friends, waiting for me: Jonathan, human but foxlike, ready to change; Enrique, pacing like a cat; and their brothers with crossbows ready to fire.

But the ghouls are finished.

“GATEKEEPER!” Rewsin calls out again, then turns to look at me.

“You’re not the gatekeeper,” he says to me. “You’re that boy who was there when he called me into this stupid body. I was going to eat you—”

“He had nothing to do with your calling, demon,” Blaine says, stepping out from behind me. “He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“We have that in common, then,” the demon says. “I want out of here. This body itches.”

He scratches idly at his stretched out skin, and a strip of dog hide falls to the ground. “It felt good, though, to stomp on those ghouls. What a romp! What a party! I haven’t had this much fun in ages.”

Then he looks at us again.

“You are the gatekeeper,” he says to Blaine. “I have a question for you.”

“Speak, demon, I’m listening,” Blaine says.

“Why can’t I get through the gateway?”

“You can’t get through the gateway?” Blaine asks.

Rewsin shakes his enormous dog head. “It’s blocked somehow. Things are coming out, but nothing can go back in.”

Blaine exchanges a look with Nye, who shrugs. Everyone is silent for a moment, but I can smell the tension in the air.