Page 150 of Sweet Nightmare

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.

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