Chapter 16
Nicholas
Nicholas woke covered in sweat. Zeke and Kai slept soundly near the bed, while Maxim guarded the open doorway.
He scrambled for his journal, feeling the details of this latest dream fade. Words danced into the next, sparsely interrupted by punctuation as he did his best to hold on to the thread.
The monster’s belly brimmed with the blood of twin gazelles, the hind parts skewered and roasting. He watched the beautiful man sleep, curled like a fetus across from the fire.
Nicholas paused to recall the monster’s conflicting emotions about the man.
He felt the interest in the monster’s gaze.
It didn’t feel as if he wanted the man intimately, but he seemed incapable of looking away.
Nicholas had been glad for it, because he couldn’t look away from the beautiful man either. He was even more appealing when asleep.
Seven moons. That was how the monster counted time. It had been seven moons since their skirmish, since the man revealed his cunning nature.
The monster reminded himself of his objective, muttering it under his breath.
Nicholas penned it word for word in English, surprised he’d retained the translation.
A trade. Coin for the man, and the names of those who sanctioned the death of my parents.
The beautiful man’s clover-colored eyes snapped open, his breath stilling.
Nicholas thought the muttered words were what woke him, that he’d heard them, but something else had jarred him from sleep. The monster placed a finger over his own lips, gesturing for the man’s silence. Nicholas could feel the touch as if he’d done it himself.
The monster stood, drawing his swords as he squinted into the darkened woodland ahead of him. He crept over to the man, taking up a defensive stance in front of him. The monster turned his nose to the air and sniffed.
Nicholas could smell whatever he smelled, so he somehow knew the scent of roasted meat had obscured him from deducing what lay in wait.
Ameen appeared next to him, huffing. The monster hissed for the horse to get back just as the first two-faced beast breached the clearing.
Its pink, hairless skin rippled; its tongues lolled from the corners of its broad mouths, saliva burning through the blades of grass at its feet.
Nicholas had shrieked within his prison-state.
His heart raced as he filled page after page, the pen ink running dangerously low.
A second beast crept through the underbrush. From the far end, more emerged. Soon, they were surrounded.
“Come on, come on,” Nicholas gritted out, his memories fading fast. He had to get to the end. The ending was important.
The monster cut through the rope at the man’s hands and feet, ordering him to take Ameen and go. The man didn’t budge.
Nicholas tried to recall what the monster had shouted at the beautiful man next, tried to spell it the way it sounded in the language he’d spoken.
“Ith’hab!”
He still didn’t move, and the monster gripped the hilt of his swords as the beasts closed in.
The man grasped the brass collar at his neck, whispering something to the monster.
Nicholas squeezed his eyes shut, trying to put himself back into the dream, trying to remember what he’d said.
“Charm,” he whispered, his eyes flying open. “He’d called it a charm.” And he’d said he could calm the beasts if the monster removed it.
His hand flew over the page again, chronicling how the first abomination leapt at them before the monster could register the man’s soft-spoken words.
The beast landed onto the sword’s wide blade, dispatching itself in its attempt to get to the monster. They seemed to be driven by hunger, not self-preservation.
Nicholas kicked the covers away, nearing his last few blank pages.
The monster shouted again for the man to leave before bravely stepping into the fray.
Nicholas hadn’t felt fear coming from the monster, hadn’t felt anything but a steady calm and courage as he’d watched the gruesome scene before him.
The beasts lowered to their bellies, hindquarters rising, jaws snapping wildly. More poured out of the forest.
Nicholas translated the words spoken by the man next, aware of them melting away in his mind. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” he ordered to himself, writing so fast, the words were barely legible.
“There are too many of them. Let me help you!”
The beautiful man appeared insistent on dying under his own terms, and the monster seemed to realize he gained nothing by advocating for his safety. If the monster died out there, he’d never get the answers he sought.
Nicholas was down to his last page, prepared to scribble along his body if he had to. Maxim hopped onto the bed, growling softly, as though sensing Nicholas’s distress.
There was no time for thought. The monster tossed the man one of his swords, then reached into his boot for a dagger. Soon, blood soaked the earth at their feet, and the fire blazed brighter as beast after beast met its end.
Howls had pierced through the night sky, and Nicholas’s ears rang as if he were still stuck in the nightmare. He detailed how both men saved each other from moments of near death, how they fought side by side, and sometimes back-to-back as their battle cries shook the earth.
Nicholas was down to the journal’s binder board, and he made good use of it.
When all went quiet, the monster turned on the beautiful man with a roar of rage, once again demanding his name and origins.
The beautiful man had managed to remain beautiful in spite of his torn clothing, feral eyes, and blood-soaked hair.
Through his anger, the monster took notice, his eyes traveling along the man’s body.
Faster than the monster could compute, the man switched his grip on the sword, grabbing it by the pummel before launching it across the clearing like a spear. The long blade whistled through the air, entering the neck of the remaining mongrel, lodging it into a tree.
The monster wheeled back to him, and they watched each other as the fire crackled nearby.
“Damn it.”
Nicholas yanked open the nightstand drawer, flipping through the journal inside, desperate to find just one blank page.
“Yes!” he exclaimed, waking Zeke and Malachi.
Nicholas scrawled what remained in his mind onto the page, writing the letters as small as possible so it would all fit. The final account read like a movie scene.
The monster grabbed the man by the neck, ignoring his wince of pain when the brass collar bit into his flesh. His flash of fangs reflected in the man’s wide gaze.
“Those beasts carry your scent, and I need to know why. What has the saahira gotten me into?”
The man’s lips thinned in defiance.
The monster asked him about the collar he wore, about why he’d referred to it as a charm. His aggression was met with more silence.
The monster released him, sending him stumbling to the ground.
The monster took a few deep breaths before lowering to his haunches in front of his heaving captive. He tried a new tactic, realizing that if he wanted something from the stranger who’d fought alongside him, he’d have to give him something first.
Down to the last vacant line on the page, Nicholas wrote the monster’s admission down, underlining it twice.
He immediately read through what he wrote, and then a third time to be sure it stuck.
That seemed to be what his brain needed to hold on to the dreams. Sometimes, just the act of writing them down did the trick.
He’d struggle to get to the finish line, only for the big stuff to come flooding back once he did.
He was starting to think that the fear of forgetting was the real issue.
Nicholas set the journal aside to type ‘saahira’ into his phone’s search engine.
Witch?
He groaned in frustration, making Maxim anxious.
“It’s okay.” He rubbed his side.
Nicholas added ‘saahira’ to the list of translations he’d been compiling in his notes app.
Zeke and Kai now whined near his side of the bed, so he helped them up, holding them close.
“When will this end?” he whispered into the crown of Zeke’s head. “When will it stop?”
He was better since meeting Gabriel, but when would he be cured of this madness for good?
Maybe he needed psychotherapy. Possibly even electroshock therapy, or a lobotomy. Anything to make this all end.
Vampires, witches, endless killing, and now hairless dogs with multiple heads… What would be next? Archangels?
Something inside him said he just needed to see the dreams to their conclusion. Maybe then his life could go back to normal. But what would normal look like? Did normal include Gabriel? The church? God?
Nicholas felt around his neck for his pendant, the one thing he hadn’t been able to part with yet.
Thoughts of Gabriel brought what happened downstairs back to him.
He’d been out of his mind, the need for sex stronger than it’d ever been.
He salivated just thinking about it, then averted his gaze from the standing mirror when remembering Gabriel’s mouth on him.
He would’ve done anything to have Gabriel’s cock inside of him.
His hand moved to the column of his throat, feeling around for… what, exactly?
He recollected falling into a vision, one where it wasn’t the monster drinking from the beautiful man, but Gabriel drinking from him.
Nicholas wanted it. He wanted Gabriel’s teeth to break his skin. He wanted to… feed him.
“Christ.” He winced at the committed sacrilege, reciting the Lord’s Prayer out of habit.
Flashes of cum striking his upper body filled his mind, and he touched his chin, vaguely remembering Gabriel licking him there.
He glanced down his chest, expecting to see a trail of cum there too, but his skin was clean.
Or at least it looked clean. After waking in a pool of his own sweat, he could use a shower.
He was naked, he realized, Gabriel’s loaned sweats nowhere in sight.
Setting the puppies on the carpet, he passed through the massive closet en route to the bathroom. Gabriel’s clothes from earlier were discarded on the floor, drawing Nicholas’s attention.