Page 149 of Sweet Nightmare

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.

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