Page 71 of A Very Monstrous Desire

What was their tech like?

Were there aliens in their world, like actual aliens from other planets?

Did they know if there was an afterlife?

Question after question and many similar to what Theo himself had asked over the past few days. Baku answered them all in quick, clipped answers. He explained their society, their lifespans—similar to a human’s—that they had never met aliens, and that they believed in an afterlife but that it was not like what humans imagined.

Theo didn’t need to imagine it. He remembered the space between worlds. The familiarity of it. The feeling that he had been there before and would return there again.

“Julia,” he eventually said as she started to ask about their breeding practices. “I wanted to make sure everyone is okay. The squad, I mean.”

“They’re fine,” Julia replied, waving a hand as she continued to run her gaze up and down Baku. “We all got through the battle okay. Though Joel…”

“What?”

“He left not long after the clean up on the beach. Just…left.”

“Where did he go?” Theo asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“He’s army proper. He wouldn’t dessert.”

“No. He probably wouldn’t.”

They were both silent as they considered that. Had Joel met a monster of his own? Something that had slipped through one of the rips? Theo hoped it was not the rip to the new world. After all, they had no idea what or who that might hold.

“Where are they posting you next?” Theo asked after a moment.

“I think down to Cornwall,” Julia replied.

“Then I might see you there?”

“I hope so, Theo,” she replied. “Maybe I could help.”

Theo remembered Baku saying that Julia’s vibrations would also work with the serum and for a moment he was tempted to ask her to come with them, but they didn’t know the long-term side effects yet, and their upcoming missions were going to be horribly dangerous, and there were still rages in the other dimension... So instead, Theo reached out and he pulled Julia into his purple arms.

“Take care, Julia,” he said softly.

She hugged him back. “You too, Theo.”

One more hug and then they broke apart. Theo gestured to the bathroom where she followed them in. She spotted the rip immediately and gasped at it.

“You really can open and close them?” she said, and it was not a question as they had all known that cubicle three did not have an inter-dimensional rip before now. Julia clapped her hands together. “You know, Theo,” she said. “I had a good feeling about you from the very start. I’m happy to be proved right.”

“This isn’t the last time we’ll see each other,” he said.

“No, it’s not.”

She looked over at Baku who was hovering protectively behind Theo next to the rip. Though Theo was not aware of it, Julia could count the number of lovers she’d had on both hands and then need a few more hands to get to the very end, so she was very familiar with the sort of look stamped on Theo’s monster’s face. That they were fucking was not in question. That Theo was happy wasn’t either.

And was it weird? Yes.

Did it make any sense? No.

But Julia just shrugged because that was what happened when rips started appearing between dimensions and monsters came out of nowhere and fell for humans. And besides, she hoped that there might be an adventure like Theo’s in her future!

“Take care of him,” she said.

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