Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mateo leans over the toilet and retches salty black demon-goo into the bowl, amazingly glad that he just cleaned the bathroom. It takes ten minutes for the gag reflex to subside, the feel of hot meat sliding down his throat vivid under the harsh yellow light of his tiny bathroom.
He searches the black film on the surface of the water for flesh or bone that isn’t his.
The dreams aren’t new. They started as grotesque flashes of feasting at the edges of his sleep, a hazy memory of salty richness on his tongue. Disturbing but easily dismissed.
By the time he was a teen, the dream found him every few weeks. Never the entire eating, but some section of the act.
And the need.
The details change—and by details, he means the victims. He stays the same. His hunger. The pleasure. The thrill of every bite.
Lately, he’s had the dream every night. It encompasses the entire meal and persists in high-definition detail when awake.
The sound of the jaw cracking fills his brain, starts the back of his throat salivating again, and his stomach tries to empty itself of something that isn’t there.
Or, at least, something he really hopes isn’t there.
Flushing, he gets unsteadily to his feet but catches his pale, blurry expression in the mirror.
Eyes wide, skin sheened in sweat, hair pressed flat on one side and sticking up on the other.
Hot, he thinks of Ophelia saying and has to fight the urge to go to her bed, curl up behind her, press his face to the back of her neck and hold on to her until he feels like himself again.
It’s a dangerous thought, teeth sharp in his mouth.
He stares too long, and the shadows come. Tendrils of pure black, seeping from his eyes and mouth, out of his hair, and off of his skin. If he asks anyone but Ophelia, they don’t see them. But they’re getting worse. Everything is getting worse.
And just like Ophelia won’t talk about that night, he won’t tell her it’s escalating.
That if he stares too long in the mirror, he can’t see himself.
That the dreams come every time he sleeps.
That he’s calling them dreams, but he’s pretty sure they’re real.
That he’s going to spend the next hour on the internet searching for the douchey guys from the truck the other day—an impossible search, too soon, not enough details, and there wouldn’t be a body to report anyway.