Page 44 of A Very Monstrous Desire

“Where’s the rest of your squadron?”

“There is only me.”

“Well, frankly, Baku, that seems like a failure in planning!” Theo snapped. “Who sends just one person for a job this important?”

“There are dozens of us being tested in this phase but there are hundreds of rips, and we cannot cover them all.” He shook his head. “The situation is becoming increasingly dire, Theo. If we are not able to stop it soon then we are all in peril.”

“Peril has been the name of the game for the past three years!” Theo said. “And it’s not just the munching monsters. Dozens of monsters from your damned dimension have come into ours. God knows what they’re up to, but people are dying!”

“Dying?” Baku said, and his voice changed and for the first time since he had dragged Theo into his dimension, Theo was suddenly scared. Baku looked like a monster.

“The fatalities in your world are nothing, nothing compared to how it has been in mine,” he said, his voice low and hard. “We have lost millions upon millions! The nightmares came, and we thought they had destroyed us but then the rages arrived and…” he shook his head. “They have done so much worse.”

Theo took another step back, one that Baku quickly matched. “But…” Theo shook his head. “Why didn’t you do this when they were destroying your world? Why wait until they have started on ours?”

“Because we didn’t realise before just how dangerous they are,” Baku said. “And how important it is that we stop them once and for all!”

“I don’t?—”

“The nightmares didn’t come from our dimension,” Baku said. “They came from another through to ours and now into yours. Some of their queens are eating their way through dimension to dimension and as they do so they are destabilising the boundaries between our worlds. If we do not stop them, then it is possible that our worlds will collide and everything within them as well!”

“They’re responsible for the rips,” Theo breathed, and it was not a question, but Baku nodded anyway.

“Every time they eat through from my dimension to yours, they cause rips to form. It is almost like a cascade affect. We think that for every rip they create when eating through dozens more are created elsewhere.” He growled his displeasure at that. “And there’s no pattern to it. They eat through in your Italy but corresponding rips form in your France. They eat through in Germany and a rip appears in London. Worse, the rages followed them here through those rips.”

“They’re disrupting the fabric of the dimensions…”

“Yes. There used to be very few queens who could eat through dimensional walls, but they have increased in recent years. We do not know why.”

“How many are there?”

“At this point, hundreds.”

“And they…eat through…what? Space? Time?”

Baku shook his head, waving the words away. “You cannot eat through space and time. It is a very specific substance that separates the dimensions. They consume that.”

“They’re not from your dimension…”

“No. We do not know which dimension they have come from or how many they ate through to get here.” He paused. “It is possible they entirely consumed their own world and that forced a shift in their evolution which allowed them to then eat through to our worlds.”

“That’s why you call them the nightmares…”

“A being that can eat through dimensions is entirely a nightmare.”

“And you think we can stop them?

“If not us then who?” Baku asked. He paused, and his next words hurt Theo in a way that he had never experienced before, not even when the rages had called for him. “A being from my world and one from yours, joined together to stop one that would consume us all. This is how heroes are made, Theo.”

Theo thought about how he felt when his conscription papers came through, the long legal challenge to try to stop it, even the morning in the classroom when their mission was being described and how angry he had felt. “I’m no hero,” he said softly, almost sadly, and Baku smiled.

“The moment you came through the door to my world you became one,” he said. “There is no choice in it anymore. I am not sure there ever was. It is you and me now, Theo. This is how it is meant to be.”

Chapter

Twenty-One

Theo sat back down on the side of the bed where he and the monster had pleasured each other so very thoroughly just the night before. He still held the vial of serum in his hand, and he looked down at it, heart thudding dully.

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