Page 14 of An Invocation of Monsters

There was a sound like a derisive snort. “So do you. Should I be surprised?”

My heart rate was finally calming, but the rest of my body hadn’t caught up yet. I sat shivering in a mound of dead leaves, watching the red lanterns of the monster’s eyes flicker.

But he didn’t come any closer.

“I suppose not,” I said faintly. I was vaguely ashamed of myself for acting like a fainting damsel in distress, but the monster, even crouched on the ground, had been almost my height. Standing up, I doubted he would be less than eight feet tall.

There was a scratching sound, and the primitive part of my brain that very much wanted to walk out of here alive recognized it as the sound of talons on stone.

The red eyes blinked and vanished.

“Where are you?” I asked, tucking my phone in my pocket and wrapping my arms around myself. I got to my feet slowly, every sense but sight on red alert.

“Here.” The eyes reappeared, exactly where they’d been before. They shuttered, as though the monster were narrowing them at me. The deep voice suddenly sounded cajoling. “Why don’t you let me out, woman?”

“Let you out of what?” My curiosity was piqued, a fatal flaw.

The monster sighed. “Come closer and look. You may use your light.”

The ember-like glow of his red eyes vanished. I stood stock-still for a moment, then pulled out my phone again.

This time I was a little more prepared for the sight of the monster. I shined the light on him, the pool of luminescence shaking.

He was humanoid, that much was certain. The general shape of his body was male, with heavy musculature under the charcoal skin. There was a velvety sheen to that skin that made me wonder if it would feel like mine.

He’d squeezed his eyes tightly shut against the light. I looked at the planes of his face, flatter and broader than a human’s, with slit nostrils and two feathery, moth-like black appendages growing from his forehead to sweep back over a spill of dark hair.

His thick arms ended in razor-sharp claws, and my hand shook again when I took in the tattered wings folded against his back: massive and shimmering, shades of ink and moss and amber slipping across them like an oil spill…

I jerked my head, realizing I had been staring at those wings for longer than I’d meant to. My head felt oddly fuzzy as I pulled my gaze away and looked down.

A blush rose in my cheeks as I looked past the heavy cock between his thighs, not allowing myself to examine the odd shape of his pubic region too closely, and continued downwards.

His clawed feet rested in a broad circle inscribed on the ground. Someone had drawn on the ground with chalk—a star within the circle, strange runes between the points of the star.

And where the monster’s feet touched the chalk lines, he was bleeding. His blood was not red; it was an indescribable color, much like his wings.

Like the blood of the forest itself.

I saw his hands were covered in glistening splotches of that same color. Was the circle somehow toxic to him?

I turned off the light again, allowing darkness to encroach once more. “I see. You’re trapped in the circle.”

The monster’s red eyes opened in tentative thin slits, then wider when he saw the flashlight was off. “A filthy trick,” he growled. “Let me out, and I will reward you.”

“How did you get trapped in the first place? Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to wander into strange circles in the woods?”

The moth-like monster blinked at me. “I have no mother. I was born from an egg.”

A slightly hysterical giggle bubbled out of me. “Well, that explains that. How am I supposed to get you out of there?”

“Break the lines. I cannot touch them.” The monster let out an angry snarl. “It is… painful to me.”

Yeah, I could imagine, as it was making him bleed all over the place.

I took a few deep breaths and surreptitiously pinched myself. Surely this was a stress dream.

But when I opened my eyes to darkness and smelled pine, and another, much more appetizing scent—like incense and spices, which I realized with another flush was the monster himself—I knew I wasn’t dreaming at all.

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