Page 13 of A Very Monstrous Desire

How quickly they could start accepting things that would have been fantastic just a few months before.

But then…Theo had wondered more than once during the last three years whether everyone would have been quite so accepting of everything that had happened if the monsters had looked more like them. If they walked on two legs instead of three or seven or eleven. If they had faces with eyes and mouths and expressions. If they’d had hands that could reach out and touch you.

He knew the answer to that now.

Knew it as he looked up at the monster who had abducted him into another dimension.

A monster who was shaped remarkably and worrying like a human.

Chapter

Eight

How do you respond when someone pulls you into another dimension?

What are you supposed to do?

Supposed to say?

Theo had no bloody idea and not least because his brain was refusing to think properly. He stood there, in the middle of the alien clearing, mouth agape, looking at the monster that had taken him captive and all he could think was, how does he look so human?

The monster had to be well over six and a half feet tall, which meant he towered over Theo, who came in at just five foot ten. He was easily twice as wide, wider even than Joel, and heavily muscled to a degree that Theo wondered wildly whether this dimension pumped extra testosterone into the atmosphere as standard.

He had a head, a torso, arms, legs—all arranged in the standard human model, which was entirely impossible because those features had developed in a long line of primates, and primates were exclusive to Earth…weren’t they?

Worse, he had all the other characteristics that a human generally had, also impossible, but there they were. He had a shock of dark, silvery hair on top of his perfectly normal sized head. He had eyes which were like moonlight, grey and silver and blue all at the same time, and were the same shape as Theo’s. His mouth was exactly like a human’s would be too with wide, plump, purple lips. His skin was perfectly human apart from the fact that it too was a light purple colour and had a slightly silvery glow to it.

A glow, not a shimmer.

Everything was human-like, even his other features such as his nose and his ears. And he was wearing clothes. A top, trousers, boots.

The monster was dressed.

Almost in clothes that looked like army fatigues!

It was that which snapped Theo from his monster-induced stupor. The memory of his squadron, of their army gear, of them being attacked by the munchers, of Gill’s ear being ripped free from her head and how it felt as he tucked it into her pocket, was enough for him to remember what some of these monsters did.

They ate humans.

The monster still had his overly large, purple-silvery hand wrapped around Theo’s arm—five fingers there too! Theo looked around for his gun, but quickly released that it had not come through with him. How had he lost it so easily? He could feel his knife still strapped to his thigh, that was something at least, and it gave him a wild burst of wholly inappropriate confidence.

Without giving himself a chance to think it through, Theo dragged in a deep breath—of alien air!—and yanked himself free. He turned to where the interdimensional rip was just behind them, thoroughly intending to launch himself back into his own dimension and the village shop, but before he could even so much as make a jump for it, the rip closed.

Theo gasped.

Interdimensional rips could not be closed. At best they could be patched up with the adhesive. But this one was gone, sucked in on itself as if it had never existed, and instead of looking back into the village shop, Theo was looking at a whole bunch of dead munching monsters. They were dozens of them, and they filled the space in front of him. The one nearest to him was massive, and Theo knew immediately that it was a queen. But what was she doing here? Who had killed her? And what did that mean for his squad?

He opened his mouth to say something but a moment later realised that behind the dead munchers there wasn’t a quaint little village as there should have been, but a vast forest which covered the entire area in front of Theo. Several of the trees in that forest were covered with the familiar orange goo. Theo could see it because there were bright, silvery lights in that forest illuminating the goo.

“How…”

He swallowed around the sizeable lump now in his throat. It was true to say that he had experienced quite a bit of panic recently. When he was conscripted there had been plenty, when the army judge refused his legal challenge quite a bit more, and then again as he’d been shipped off to the army base in Somerset. That first battle with the munching monsters had been anxiety inducing but it was nothing compared to how Theo felt now. Had he been wearing his Garmin he did not doubt that his heart rate would be a hundred plus.

He was in an alien dimension.

A monster was stood next to him.

A monster who looked human!

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