Chapter Eighty Way Too Hot to Handle
He’s right. It’s not. Because, less than a minute later, Ember asks, “What are those things?” She sounds more curious than afraid, which is proof that she’s never had to deal with the evil little monsters before.
“Chricklers,” I answer, my heart dropping to my toes as what looks like an entire army of the assholes scampers up the walkway toward us.
“Chricklers?” Mozart repeats. “Those tiny, fluffy little creatures are what you keep complaining about?”
“They’re evil,” Luis tells her flatly as he starts to back up, a horrified look on his face.
“Don’t move!” I bark at him, and he freezes instantly.
“No way! They’re adorable.” Mozart crouches down so they can get to her more easily.
“They’re the devil incarnate,” Luis corrects her, though he’s obviously heeded my warning about not to move seriously because he’s talking out of only the corner of his mouth. “They each weigh less than five pounds each, and the wind hasn’t been able to move even one of them off course. What do you call that if not a direct line to Hell?”
“But what should we do here? Should we run or…” Simon asks as he starts backing away slowly.
“No! Whatever you do, don’t run!” I tell him. “They respond to movement.”
“Like a T-Rex,” Luis adds.
The others laugh, but he’s not wrong. It’s why feeding them and cleaning their cage is always so hard.
“Can’t you just portal us all out of here?” Izzy asks Remy. “Get us to the gym and away from those things? Or better yet, portal us the fuck off this island.”
He shakes his head, looking grim. “I’ve tried several times. The portal block has supposedly been lifted, but every time I try to open one to somewhere off the island, it doesn’t work. The door slams in my face.”
Izzy rolls her eyes. “Remind me why I keep you around again?”
But when she starts to shift her weight, I warn her, “Don’t move!”
“So what? We just have to stand here, hope the wind doesn’t blow us away, and hope they don’t notice us breathing?” Ember asks incredulously. “Or does that not count as movement?”
“Oh, it counts,” I tell her.
“Fuck that.” She starts to turn, but I reach out and grab her wrist to hold her in place.
“Stop!” I hiss.
“How bad can they possibly be?” Remy asks, eyes wide, but at least he has the good sense not to move.
“Give me a break. You aren’t bad at all, are you?” As they get closer, Mozart coos to the chricklers the same way she would a puppy or a baby. Something I’m pretty sure she’s going to regret very quickly considering she’s got the little black-and-white ones with the floppy ears—which look precious but make a really big bite. “You’re just misunderstood. That’s all. Just misunderstood and completely adorable.”
She’s right about one thing. All chricklers are adorable—and every color of the rainbow. Some have big paws and fluffy ears. Others have long tails and the sweetest, biggest googly eyes you’ve ever seen. And still others have long, sparkly whiskers and the softest, most glittery fur imaginable. Not to mention they all have the absolute cutest faces in existence.
But they are also total and complete devil spawn. Every single one of them.
“I’ve got this,” Jude tells us as he moves in front of Mozart. “You guys go ahead.”
“Are you sure?” I ask doubtfully. “There’s a lot of them.”
“They’re fine. They’re just baby nightmares,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “And I already told you, the monsters don’t hurt me.”
Logically, I know that’s true. I saw for myself when the nasty squidzilla ran the moment he walked in the room. So maybe he’s right. Maybe we just leave the chricklers to Jude.
“I guess we could head to the dance hall while you deal with these,” I tell him as I loosen my death grip on Ember’s wrist.
“Yeah, why don’t you—” He breaks off as the first chrickler reaches him. It scurries straight up his leg and sinks its very large, very sharp, very pointy teeth directly into his biceps.
“What the fuck!” he growls, shaking it off and sending it flying right about the time a bunch of its siblings swarm the still-cooing Mozart. And bite every single piece of her they can manage.
“Ouch!” she yelps, jumping to her feet, trying to swing them off. But they’ve got a piece of her now—several pieces of her—and they’re in no hurry to let go.
Jude tries to pull them off of her, and they respond by turning around and biting him, too. Several times.
He looks shocked but honestly more insulted by their betrayal.
“Get them off!” Mozart screams, whirling in a circle and flinging her arms up and down like she’s trying to take flight.
A whole group of the hot-pink chricklers have definitely caught sight of Ember now, too.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she exclaims, and as the first one leaps at her, she shifts into her phoenix and takes off. But two of the chricklers aren’t willing to let her go so easily and leap after her, each managing to grab onto her bird feet.
As they chomp down, the phoenix screams and tries to fly higher in an effort to make them let go. But the violent wind sends her slamming back to earth, right in the middle of another pile of chricklers.
She shifts back just as the rest of us rush forward to help her. But that alerts the chricklers to our presence, too, and the ones racing toward her switch course, their oversize paws eating up the short distance between them and the rest of us.
“Oh God,” Simon whimpers out of the corner of his mouth. “They’ve found me.”
An all-black chrickler is on his foot, several orange-and-white ones are on his back, and an industrious silver one is perched on his neck, way too close to his jugular for my liking.
This time it’s Izzy who joins the fray, yanking the chrickler off his neck and throwing it as far away as her vampire strength lets her—which is, admittedly, far. But it’s also the last thing she does—before she’s swarmed, and unlike Simon, she doesn’t stay still when it happens.
Instead, she lets out a very un-Izzy-like shriek and uses her preternatural speed to yank them off herself and hurl them into the wind—which only pisses them off more. More are biting and scratching her until even her vampire speed isn’t enough to keep up with them.
Remy tries to come to her rescue, darting forward and tearing away several of the little beasts who are caught in Izzy’s hair. But they don’t go without a fight as they turn to snap at Remy.
Mozart is fighting her own battle as she lets loose a stream of flames meant to keep them at bay.
It’s dragon fire, so it takes the rain at least a minute to tamp it down. Miraculously, they’ve lost interest in us for a moment as they watch the blaze—before jumping straight into the fire, one after the other, only to emerge seconds later at least five times bigger than when they went in.
“What the hell, Clementine!” Luis snarls. “You didn’t tell us they evolve like fucking Pokémon.”
“Sorry, but it’s not like I’ve ever set them on fire before!” I shout back.
At that moment, one of the now Great Dane–size chricklers—a blue one—turns to face me, its giant fangs dripping a noxious combination of blood and spit.
And fuck this. We are way too outnumbered to do anything but, “Run!” I yell.
So we do, all of us taking off in the direction of the old dance hall. But, impossibly, the wind and the rain have gotten worse, so that every step feels like we’re slogging through quicksand.
One of the largest ones—who now happens to be the size of a Great Pyrenees—jumps straight at me. I juke to the left, but the wind is too strong, and it slows me down. The thing lands on me and goes straight for my jugular.
Jude, who is running right beside me, grabs onto it and tears it off right before it sinks its teeth—each one now the size of a large pizza slice—into my neck.
Jude manages to fight it off—and slam the thing into the nearest tree.
But something about the attack—maybe being in such close proximity to a bunch of condensed nightmares—activates his tattoos, and they start glowing in the dim gray of the storm.
The second they start moving, the chrickler attached to his back lets go with a yip. When it lands on the ground, its whole body is shaking like it’s just been zapped by electricity.
Jude looks as surprised as I feel, but now that the monster isn’t in the way, I watch the tattoos swirl restlessly on his back, up his neck, and up and down his arms through the tears in his hoodie. It looks like they’re trying to get free, trying to help him fend off the attack.
Jude suppresses them with a quick clench of his jaw and touch of his hand against his exposed skin so that the glow fades as quickly as it came.
But the second the glow fades, the chricklers are on him again. Dozens of them swarming him at the same time.
“Go!” he yells to us as they start dragging him to the ground.
He breaks off as even more pile on, smothering him beneath their sheer weight and numbers.
I watch in horror as Jude falls to the ground.
His tattoos start to move and glow again, but there are so many chricklers on him at this point that the outer layer can’t see or feel the tattoos and keep burrowing, and the inner layer are screaming in fear as they try to get away. They are in a total frenzy.
Simon, Mozart, Remy, and I rush over to him—or do the best we can to rush when we’re dragging our own chrickler accessories along with us.
“Can you charm them or something?” Mozart asks Simon as we work together to try to tug a couple of the vile beasts off of Jude.
“I’ve already tried,” he tells her, and he sounds as panicked as I feel. “They aren’t really sentient, though, just nightmares in an organic form.”
“So what do we do?” Mozart sounds near tears.
But no matter how hard we try to pry them off Jude, nothing works. I look around for something to do, some idea I haven’t tried yet, but before I can find anything, Izzy stabs her knife into one of the chricklers trying to bite her leg.
The second the blade enters the monster, it hisses—then instantly condenses into one of the dark, wispy nightmares that Jude wears on his body.
Now that she’s figured out she can kill the chricklers by stabbing them, she’s in her element. With a knife in each hand, she starts hacking away. Seconds later, a dozen nightmare ribbons are spinning through the air.
I watch in astonishment as the wind catches them. “Give me a knife!” I yell to Izzy, but she’s having too much fun taking on the next layer of chricklers attached to Jude to listen.
So Remy takes things into his own hands and reaches up the back of Izzy’s shirt to get a knife—and almost loses a hand for his effort.
“The fuck?” she asks him as she turns to look at him, wide-eyed. And somehow, she still manages to kill two purple polka-dotted chricklers—one after the other even though she’s facing in the other direction.
“We need knives!” he tells her urgently.
“Why do you always have to take the fun out of everything?” she pouts. But then she pulls a giant knife out of her pant leg and hands it to him.
One of these days she is going to tell me where she gets them. Because there is no way that any person carries this many knives on her person. No way. I swear, this one is almost as big as she is.
Remy turns around and starts hacking away at the chricklers, too, wielding the knife like a scythe.
“What about the rest of us?” Mozart calls desperately.
Izzy rolls her eyes and pulls out the tiniest dagger I’ve ever seen. She lobs it at Mozart and says, “Knock yourself out.”
“Seriously?” Mozart looks totally offended.
“Yeah, well, next time think before you fire.”
I lean over and try to pull a chrickler off Jude—apparently, I’m not blade-worthy—and get a pair of teeth in my hand for my trouble. But, on the plus side, I can actually see part of Jude’s leg, so I feel like we’re getting close.
Izzy must feel the same way, because she gets a little too enthusiastic and cuts a massive swathe through a bunch of chricklers—and, also, Mozart’s forearm.
“Ow!” Mozart shrieks, dropping her knife. “You’re as big a menace as the chricklers.”
“Please,” Izzy scoffs. “This is me with the child locks on.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Mozart doesn’t look impressed.
Since she’s currently bleeding and can no longer use it, I pick up her knife. I’ve never stabbed anything before, and if you’d asked me ten minutes ago, I would have told you I’d be quite happy living the rest of my life without ever stabbing anyone or anything.
Refusing to give myself a chance to think too much, I plunge my knife into the nearest chrickler. Then nearly recoil, not because it’s gross, but because it isn’t.
It’s the strangest feeling. The monster is nowhere near as solid as I’d expect it to be. It feels almost…empty. There’s no resistance once the knife slides in, and the moment it’s buried to the hilt, this chrickler does exactly what the others did. It condenses into a black plume and blows away in the wind.
I take aim at a second one, then freak out because a whole new horde of chricklers is racing up the path toward us. And they all look loaded for paranormal.
Simon, who has been behind us with Remy, Ember, and Luis trying to keep the other chricklers off us so we can help Jude, groans. “Damn, Clementine. We can’t fight them all.”
“I know,” I answer grimly as I brace myself for what may very well be a bloodbath.
When all of a sudden, a loud shriek fills the air—followed by the sound of teeth clattering to the ground.
“Oh, fuck no,” Luis says, voice dripping in horror.
But he and I aren’t the only ones to hear the battle cry of that hydra snake monster thing we had to fight in the dungeon. The chricklers hear it, too, and their heads come up in alarm.
Ears pricked, eyes straining through the rain, they freeze for several seconds. Then with howls of terror, they abandon the fight and scatter in all directions, leaving the eight of us to stare after them.
“So, dance hall, anyone?” Luis asks.
The rest of us don’t have to be asked twice. We take off running straight for the run-down old building.