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OH YES, YOU COULD.
I was hungry. Restless.
I watched her for a while longer, resisting the impulse to nudge aside those legs and slip inside her. I’d liked it when she’d struggled while pinned under me.
That little cry...
PIN IT. TIE IT. FUCK IT.
I drew a long breath through my nose. I had to get out. Go for a short walk. I couldn’t think here, not with her warm body inches away.
With the Nightmare King talking.
The streets of Wichita were still busy. Nighttime only woke a new, rowdier side of most cities. You saw people at their funniest and happiest moments, as well as their weakest and darkest.
I ventured down alleys I’d have avoided if in a better, less unsettled mood. I was back to hungry, back to looking for something I wasn’t sure I’d recognize if I saw it.
A crazy itch crawled under my skin.
It was the Nightmare King, of course.
He was getting more insistent.
But there was something else...I felt them at the fringes. Kindred. Nightmare creatures—shadows sifting against the lonely dark of night. They weren’t following me.
So I sought them out.
Rounding an alley at the back of a nightclub, I found two men fighting, a drunken brawl of dull fist thuds, and they had drawn a crowd—imps. Their spindly limbs reached like corpse sunflowers toward the violence as they scuttled at the edges. Malevolent. Undetected.
Blood sprayed through the air as the blows grew heavier. Once again, the scent of an iron-sweet tang filled my mouth. I stepped closer.
The smaller man reeled from a slug and stumbled, bumping into me. The man turned aggressively then froze, mouth open as he stared up into my face. Violet energy crackled up my neck. The small man turned and ran.
The larger man, maybe drunker, dumber, stepped closer to glare—Darwin Award material at its finest.
“Go, asshole,” I hissed. “Before something bad happens.” I didn’t bother taking my hands from my jacket pockets, the seething in my mind enough. The energy flared.
The man flinched. His first steps were backward then panicked as I stepped closer. Then he was gone, sprinting in the direction of the streetlights.
The imps shrieked at the end of their show and scurried off.
Silent, I trod onward. Through the leather of my shoes, the teeming masses communicated their despair and hunger until I looked at the world through a veil of red.
This time, I was being stalked—something large. Some other creature that had been drawn by the fight? Perhaps it saw me as prey. I wasn’t sure of the motivations and needs of these creatures, but for the first time, I was beginning to understand them. I’d found their wavelength.
Nauseating.
Their thoughts, if that’s what they were, churned with every kind of wrong—poking, scratching, vomiting, teasing as they sucked you into their web.
I halted. Oh yes. There.
Crooking a mental finger, I tweaked on the strand of connection, slowly reeling it in, as cautious as a fisherman with a shark on the line.
Bit by bit, I inched it into the light.
It was only another imp. Wrong fish.
Disappointed, I let the connection unravel, aware that even more imps were gathering beyond where human eyes could detect. I’d brought them sniffing.
