12. Chapter 12
Chapter 12
JASON
B athroom break first, then I was joining Ricky in his room, since Kai was asleep in mine. Fucked up as some of the day had been, I felt pretty good about things at the moment.
Until, after I’d washed my hands and was stupidly checking my phone like the habitual response it was, I saw a new notification from the Monster Match app, and upon checking it, I saw that it was not a message from Cael or Teracht.
It was a notification that my profile had been updated.
Name: Jason Bosco Species: Monster (Uncategorized)
They must have learned about my visa, but because that very unhelpful delineation was all they’d had to use to register me, that’s all the Monster Match app knew too. They hadn’t closed my account, but the message that had come with the update was almost worse.
We apologize for the mistake with your profile! The Monster Match App recommends that you update your Species and other specifics as soon as possible to better reflect your nature. The more we know, the better we can help you meet your match!
Only I didn’t have anything to put in place of Uncategorized. At least all my old chats were archived, but now I had a slew of new match requests from humans with messages like:
Dude, what are you really?
You look human. Is this a fake pic?
Come on, show us the REAL you.
Thank goodness the app didn’t allow for unsolicited pics without first accepting a match, because these assholes would definitely have shown me the real them if given the chance.
I had updated my Looking For to Friendship the other day after meeting Kai, and some of these creeps were still messaging me like I’d put Sexual Fantasies instead. How had Cael and Teracht navigated this bullshit? Because sure, if you wanted a hookup, more power to you, but some of these weirdos were definitely treating monsters like a fetish more than people.
Treating us like a fetish. Maybe I wouldn’t mind as much admitting I was part of that us if I knew what type of monster I was.
It was time to delete the app. It wasn’t the escape it had been before, more just a sour reminder now. I could text Cael and Teracht later to explain. I hovered my finger over the DELETE MY ACCOUNT option just as another notification came through. Another match request. An actual match.
From username frosRsexy.
frosRsexy: At least you finally set it to friendship.
brOmance2021: ricky?
frosRsexy: Check out my profile.
I clicked into it. This was definitely Ricky, with a photo posted that he’d also used for his resume—smiley but professional, and no fro.
Name: Ricky Ruas Species: Human Pronouns: He/Him Age: 22 Orientation: Gay Likes: Solving puzzles, animals, listening to vinyl, cuddling watching movies Dislikes: Absolutes, bullies, too hot summers, scary stories Looking for: Friendship
I heard a shuffle outside the bathroom door. Faint, but my ears were attuned enough to know that Ricky was out there.
brOmance2021: cuddling watching movies huh? u make this today?
frosRsexy: Nope. Had it the whole time, probably before you made yours. Mine was just always set to Friendship. Although I may have updated my username tonight. I noticed your profile flipped sometime between Hellboy I and II.
brOmance2021: u dick!
frosRsexy: I couldn’t resist! We make a pretty good match, don’t you think?
brOmance2021: sorry i have enough friends
I heard him snort through the door.
I waited a second to see if he’d send another message, but instead, a folded slip of paper was pushed under the door. I set my phone on the sink and bent down to pick it up. I had a pretty good suspicion of what it said.
“Get in here,” I hissed aloud.
The door opened. I hadn’t bothered to lock it.
Ricky stood there with hair unbound, utterly fro-ified.
I stifled a laugh.
“Hey,” he whispered with a put-upon pout. “I thought someone said this was sexy?”
“It is. It so is.” I gripped the front of his T-shirt to pull him closer.
“Read the note first,” Ricky said, folding his hand over mine.
I looked at it in my other hand. “I’m guessing: YOU WILL DO BETTER? Meaning me , not you. Like, you put—”
Ricky covered my mouth to stop my rambling. “Just read it.”
I opened the note and written twenty-five times was:
I LOVE YOU
I snapped my eyes to his.
He had put his phone away too and slid both arms around my neck. “One of the best parts about dating a friend is that we are way past the ‘getting to know you’ portion of a relationship. So I already know I love you, Jason. Human. Monster. It doesn't matter to me. You are always still you.”
Tears sprang to my eyes pretty much immediately, that jerk. “Geez,” I sniffled. “Could you be any lamer?”
Ricky shoved me against the sink with a smack to my chest. Then he tightened his arms around my neck. I didn’t want to let the note go, so I crushed it against his back as I held him. Kissing Ricky… kissing Ricky would never get old.
As the heat in my eyes cooled, Ricky moved from kissing my lips, to my cheek, to my ear, and whispered, “Now come downstairs and give me that knot.”
“Fuck yeah.”
We couldn’t exactly be loud with Kai in the next room, but having to stay quiet almost made it hotter. Our clothes were off in less than a minute. The urge to shift came just as fast, but having Ricky reach between my legs to give my cock a firm pull while saying, “I can handle the beast,” made it easier to give in.
I didn’t know if there was sense or order to how I shifted anymore. The scales spread like a wave, and tufts of fur followed it, but everything else was a jumble. The antlers sprouted again, whatever they were supposed to be from, meaning I had to be on top or worry about bonking them into the headboard.
I didn’t mind that part. I had Ricky beneath me. Ricky . And the way he touched me in this weird, shifted form of mine caused more and more monstrous features to manifest. Including the thick knot halfway down my dick.
Ricky squeezed it like last time, and all I wanted was to get it inside him. I wanted him to take it this time. All of it. But I also didn’t want him to stop rubbing his other hand up and down my chest. Having fur or scales touched was each a little different than when he touched my skin.
The fur sent shivers through me like getting goosebumps. The scales were somehow more sensitive, like rubbing off through tight underwear, even when the scales he was touching were just on the backs of my hands.
This time we had lube. I could have nutted right then when Ricky started coating me with it. Getting in up to the knot was the easy part, and when I did, Ricky moaned, before muffling the sound against my throat. I started thrusting slowly to see what he could handle. The lube helped part of the knot slip in almost immediately, and feeling that tighter squeeze made my antlers feel like they’d grown larger.
Ricky’s eyes widened as he looked at them.
“Wait, did they really just grow?”
He nodded. The more I started to press my knot inside him, widening his entrance, the more his eyes widened too. “They look… sort of like tree branches with—ah!” It popped fully inside, and he cut off with a whimper.
Which meant he squeezed tighter around me too.
Fuck .
“I-is it okay?” I asked. “Is it… am I … too weird?”
“Always.” He grinned. “But not too weird for me.” Even panting slightly as he adjusted to having my knot there, his eyes may as well have been sparkling with how he looked at me. “However you look… however you're changed or shaped… to me, you're perfect.”
Well, that was bullshit .
But I knew he meant it.
“If you can believe that… then I guess I'm shaped to be yours.”
I kissed Ricky as slowly and as deeply as I started to rock inside him.
I could see the tense concentration in his beautiful brow, curly hair all sweat-slicked. I held his hips, gently but my claws were still leaving little pricks in his skin as we moved. There was enough of me past the knot that I could still slide in and out of him without the knot popping free. And on every thrust, Ricky let out a fresh whimper.
Because he loved it.
He loved me.
The coil of something new and foreign wound down from my arm and wrapped around Ricky’s waist. A tail? No. That looked like my antlers. That looked like vines from a tree.
“Jason—” Another wound down my other arm and wrapped around one of Ricky’s wrists, pinning it to the bed. He moaned, rocking harder and harder to take my knot deeper.
“W-wait, I… I’m not trying to—”
Another vine and another shot out from somewhere on my body to wrap Ricky up like Shabari bindings. Which was hot, fuck , he looked amazing trying to fuck himself on my cock while he was being made more and more immobilized. But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t doing this.
Was I?
Ricky kept moaning and writhing as my new vines engulfed him. He wasn’t afraid. But he should be. He should be. I couldn’t control this. Yet even in the pocket of fear I felt, there was so much pleasure continuing to fuck him. He felt so good, despite how I was being twisted into something new all over again, something monstrous.
“J-J-Jason–”
Some of the vines had started to wrap around Ricky’s throat.
I had to stop.
More vines erupted out of my chest, completely covering Ricky like he was being buried alive, drowning him and pulling him somehow into the bed, as if it was the portal in the woods.
We were in the woods and the portal was taking him!
The monster was taking him!
“Ricky!”
Then the monster within the awful darkness of the portal took me too.
“Jason, wake up!”
RICKY
“Jason!”
He wasn’t rousing. He seemed to be… squeaking? As if, in his sleep, he must be screaming but he couldn’t get the sound out for real. Some level of sleep paralysis was preventing more than soft, plaintive noises from leaving him. Weirder was that his body was changing into something completely new again.
He had fallen asleep human. I was certain he had. While still in his mixed form, he had come with a great gush inside me, so warm, making everything within me feel full. I’d been pretty sure he was stuck there for a while, at least until his knot calmed and shrunk. Micro movements from Jason while he had still been inside me had felt so good that I’d come from little more than the grazing of my cock against his stomach.
His monster features had dwindled after that. When he rolled off me and snuggled up behind me to make me the little spoon, I was content to doze right there, even as a sticky mess.
I woke hours later to him convulsing.
“Jason!” I didn’t want to be too loud and wake or worry Kai and Sandy, but he was still squeaking, still changing. Monster features had manifested in his sleep before, but this was different. This was so much more. It had started as what I knew, like wolf ears, cat whiskers, scales down his cheekbones. But that weird shimmer had returned, not only across his face this time but everywhere.
Vines burst from Jason’s chest, and I yelped and tumbled backward off the bed. Striking my tailbone hurt, but I tried to keep even that response to barely a grunt. I scrambled to my feet to still see what was happening. It almost looked like something was tearing Jason apart from the inside. Vines and branches like the time lapse of a willow tree growing were wrapping around and becoming him. And yet, beneath and between where he was like a part of nature, was shifting muscle tissue, reconfiguring into cat stripes and wolf fur and scales and… bone.
His face was bone, not just textured that way, but like a deer skull with fangs, and black hollow eyes. Then glowing orbs sprang to brightness as if those hollow eyes had opened.
“Jason…?” I asked.
He swung upright like Dracula rising from his coffin and looked right at me. The glowing amber orbs pulsed. Jason’s mouth opened, with lipless, fanged teeth, and his voice boomed with a whole new resonance, “What… the actual fuck ?”
All my tension fled me.
He was still Jason.
“What the actual fuck is right.” I flew back to his side to sit next to him. He was even taller than in his previous forms with this new skull-like head, that still somehow had silver fur-like hair and wolf ears. He was even more of a mix of everything, like some god of nature, life and death, flora and fauna. “I have no idea what you just turned into, but I think your antlers are growing flowers.”
Jason stood, but he had to hunch to keep from hitting his head on the lower ceiling of the basement. He was taller because much of him was stretched. It was as if a skeleton was wearing the hides of monsters it had killed, and wearing over those a suit made from Groot or an Ent.
“Don’t panic,” I said as soon as I realized how wide Jason’s glowing orbs had become while he stared at himself in the mirror above my dresser. “You’re not in pain, are you?”
Jason shook his head several times before saying, “No, but… what even is this? I saw this thing.” He turned to me, and the skull face could still somehow form expressions as if it was flesh. “I saw this in my dream. It took you.”
“I’m fine.” I went to him again and grabbed hold of his bark-like hands. Only they didn’t feel like bark. It was smoother. It felt like skin where there wasn’t fur or scales.
“It… it took you,” Jason said again, lifting one hand to cup my cheek. The hand was massive and could have cupped my whole head. “Then it took me, even though I was it. I am it? And then… then I saw what really happened. I saw the night my dad disappeared.”
“You did?” I placed a hand over his on my cheek. “Are you sure it wasn’t just overlap from the change—”
“No. It’s not only that I saw it. I remember now. I remember what happened.”
“Okay. Come here. Sit.” I drew him back to the bed. The mess between us was dry on my skin now, but I didn’t care. I sat us down, though he was still so tall even when he leaned on his knees. “Tell me everything.”
Jason stared forward, while I rubbed soothing circles into his back. “That day, playing outside with Dad, I felt something pulling me. Calling to me. Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave the backyard, I followed it, drawn into the woods. I followed it all the way to the clearing with the portal.
“I heard my dad calling after me, but before he could reach me, the air cracked open like lightning had struck the clearing. Something that looked just like this —” he looked at himself with a tremble in his arms “—was inside it, beckoning to me. It must have done something to me, because I felt that pull increase like I was literally being dragged inside.
“Dad grabbed me. He caught me and kept me from being sucked in. But he moved in front of me to block my body from the pull. This thing —” he snarled at his new body “—sucked him in instead. I don’t know how it infected me. Maybe it didn’t, maybe not until the attack last summer, but it changed me, it took my dad, it took all those people, and now I am just like it.”
“Jason.” I hugged him, tight around his middle, as hard as I could.
He started to sob, but no actual tears spilled down his bony cheeks. Slowly, he brought his long arms up to hold me back. Little by little, the vines started to unwind from him. When I felt fur and scales recede too, I looked, and Jason’s human face was staring back at me.
I kissed him, so he’d know there was nothing that could ever make me want to stop kissing him.
It was too early to get up, but neither of us could go back to sleep, so we held each other until we heard Sandy leave for work. That meant we were technically late, but I’d messaged the team to expect us late. I understood that Jason couldn’t face running into his mother this morning.
I don’t think Kai even realized we’d snuck over to the other room. When we finally went in to wake him, his swollen eye was already almost back to normal, and the bruises weren’t as bad. His species were incredible healers.
He still wore his cloak when we left the house. On our way to the facility, I received a message from Beck.
“Oh no.”
“What?” Jason was driving today. Before I could explain, he was already turning into the parking lot, and we saw for ourselves.
A full protest was happening in front of the main entrance. The dozen from yesterday was two or three dozen now, with everyone shouting and most carrying picket signs.
“Monsters are Mayhem!” they chanted, which was the primary message on the signs too.
“Oh no. Oh no…” Kai sat between us in the front seats of the truck and pulled his hood over his head to hide his face.
“Hey,” Jason said as he parked. “You got us, and we’re not going to let anyone touch you. Ever again.”
Kai’s eyes blinked at us from within the hood with such heartfelt thanks, I slid an arm around his waist for a sideways hug.
“Why don’t they call the police again,” Jason grumbled.
“They did,” I said, nodding toward the lone squad car keeping watch. “The facility probably doesn’t want to make things worse, so they’re allowing it as long as no one gets violent. Police presence yesterday and the arrests only riled people up more.”
“But they—”
“Deserved to be arrested. Yeah. They broke the law and were completely in the wrong. But repeating the cycle won’t change anything.” I hated it, but I knew it was true, just like Whitmore kept trying to instill in us. I’d hated the first time my abuela said the same to me. I was second generation and still had to hate it, because growing up in Nevada, growing up anywhere these days, meant this type of protest happened for more than just monsters.
I think Jason got that, because his usually short fuse when the protesters swarmed us and practically screamed their rhetoric in our faces, showed only as a grinding of his teeth.
We protected Kai between us as we moved through them. Thankfully, there were a few security officers outside this time to help monsters and personnel get in and out safely.
Zinnia and Beck were right inside the doors, waiting for us.
“ Mi jhavi .” They took Kai from us and hugged him.
“You are okay?”
“No one touched you?”
“I am fine,” Kai said, nuzzling into their embraces. “I had Jason and Ricky with me. And we had much fun last night watching movies. I even bonded with their cat!”
“Thank you both,” Zinnia said. “But where is Bina?”
“Bina?” I questioned. “She’s not with you?”
“She went out this morning with friends,” Beck explained. “The protest made us nervous. We asked for her to come home. We thought she would beat you here.”
Jason and I exchanged a look like we might have to brave our way back out there and search for her, but just as we turned, the front doors opened again.
“I am going to change my middle name to mayhem!” Bina called through the protesters, waving as her friends drove away—all human. “Then you’ll just be calling me the badass I am. Thanks for that.” She made a motion like flipping non-existent hair and continued forward to join us.
“Badass is right,” Jason said. “Go Bina.”
“Who are you?”
Rather than inform her that he was “snake-man,” Jason just patted her on the shoulder and said, “Better get to work. I have something new to show all of you.”
The process started again, conducting tests in the lab of Jason’s newest and unidentifiable form. Kai and Bina stayed to watch this time, since Whitmore was absent again.
It was about half an hour in that Bina exclaimed, “Is this snake bae from the other day?”
Jason’s force of nature form, while even wilder when we tried to compare results to his other forms, finally gave us a breakthrough.
“I have seen imagery of such monsters,” Zinnia said.
“You have?” Jason was finally allowed to shift human and peeked out from behind the partition while he was changing. “What is it? What am I? Tell me.”
“I do not remember the name,” Zinnia explained, “but the rook — look —of that form I have seen. There is an incubus we have been in contact with in another newer tester town to the south, Gilmer Rock, who studies and collects data on various species from our realm. Such voices those monsters have. Very, um… sensual."
"Mom!" Bina complained.
Zinnia waved a hand in dismissal, and Beck merely chuckled from across the room. "He was vexed when we explained your other transformations to him," Zinnia continued, "but he sent some imagery of more obscure monsters that have been known to shapeshift. Let me see…” She pulled out her phone to scroll through emails until she found the one she wanted. “Ah, here it is.”
Jason, dressed in normal clothes again, joined us just in time for our eyes to land on the monster together.
It looked exactly like him. Like something made of plants and animals with a skull-like face and antlers.
“That’s it. That has to be it,” Jason said. “Does it say the name in the email?”
“No, but I will follow up with him immediately for every scrap of information he has.”
“Thank you.”
“You will have to do so along the way!” Beck called. He was sitting at the results monitors, one of which fed in data collected from the portal in the woods. “We need to get to the research site immediately.”
“Is it showing signs of activity?” I went to him.
“Mildly for now, but yes.” Beck showed me a steady change in stability in nearly every reading. “Similar readings occurred not last night but the night before, late in the evening, and minimal enough that the guards reported only a flicker of light. We cannot be sure if it will remain minimal today.”
Then he tapped his phone beside him on the desk, where I could see a string of incoming messages.
“More importantly,” Beck continued, “the guards in the woods are requesting backup. Like the protest here, people are gathering near the DO NOT ENTER signs outside the trees.”
“What?” Jason exclaimed. “By my house?”
“Oh whoa,” Bina said, looking at her phone. “I think it’s getting kind of, like, worse everywhere.” She propped her phone on the nearest table in view of everyone and started playing a live streaming newscast.
“Is that the school?” Jason rushed over.
“This footage from only a few minutes ago proves the stress the new tester town of Elder Ridge is under, as citizens gather to express their dissatisfaction with the town opening itself to monster immigration. Here at the elementary school, one parent had this to say.”
The footage switched from the newscaster to a recording of a fairly average looking man, maybe early to mid-30s, in a business suit and no tie.
“McDickhole again?” Jason growled.
“Who now?” Bina laughed.
“Think of the turmoil this decision has already caused because of deceit, on both sides. We do not condone what those arrested yesterday partook in, but we understand their fear. We feel it too. We want to know our children are safe.”
The man lifted a maybe ten-year-old girl to rest on his hip.
“He’s the asshole who started shit outside the coffee house the other day,” Jason said, “and who’s been harassing my mom. Now he’s using his daughter like a prop?”
The camera panned to a middle-aged woman with text beneath her listing her as Principal Greystone.
“Mr. McPherson, please, there is nothing we can do for you if the board—”
“You are our last line of defense!”
The camera panned back to McPherson, who’d interrupted her.
“You are the ones protecting our children when we can’t. If we can’t trust that they’ll be safe in your care, what can we trust? Who can we trust? What aren’t we being told about these monsters and the experiments happening right inside the woods behind your secretary’s house?”
“Fuck. I’m going.”
“Jason, wait.” I intercepted him. The report had returned to live footage as the newscaster recapped events. “It’s dispersing, see? And you can see Whitmore and your mom heading to their cars. He was there. She’s okay.”
That seemed to calm Jason though not by much. “They must be sending everyone home and closing the school for the rest of the day.” His phone buzzed before he could say more, and when he checked it, he looked even more calmed. “It’s Whitmore. He says he’s glad his spy app wasn’t wrong that I wasn’t at the school, because he’d half expected to find me in the middle of it.”
Jason probably would have been if we’d known about this sooner.
“Mom’s headed home, and he’s headed into the woods to be part of the backup. But if they need backup,” he spoke as he typed back to Whitmore, “how bad is it?” Jason stared with a pinched brow until an answer came. “He can’t say until he’s there, but he wants us to stay here. Yeah, fuck that!” He clearly sent that line to Whitmore too, and also, “Meet you there!” before he shoved his phone away and looked at me. “We need to go. Right now.”
“I’m with you,” I said.
Zinnia and Beck were already gathering equipment to head to the research site.
“Except for you two,” Jason said to Kai and Bina. “Stay inside the facility.”
“But Jason,” Kai argued, “I cannot stay if you and our parents are going into the fray. I want to help too.”
“And me!” Bina jumped on the bandwagon.
“Fine. Then help them if they’ll let you.” Jason pointed at their parents. “It’s more dangerous for everyone if the portal sucks in new victims. I need to meet up with my mom at the house first to make sure she’s okay. Ready?” He looked at me.
“You better believe I’m not getting left behind,” I affirmed.
Jason offered a grateful nod, and when he jogged off toward the exit, I was right on his heels. “This powder keg is about to get lit.”
I hated how much he was right.
But we had no idea how right until we saw that the people outside the facility were dispersing too, and clearly not to go home. Everyone was headed to the woods, and most of them had a huge head start.