He blinks at me and his tongue rolls out to wet his full lips - lips that I only just now realize are bloodied and cut up like he’s been in a particularly nasty bar fight. What a weird detail for my brain to conjure up. Am I about to have a sex dream? Because even the split lip is kind of hot to me right now and the chemistry this dream-man is throwing my way has me giddy.
My dream-man drops his arm and presses his palm to the glass - and that thing is huge. Honestly, I think he could hold a giant watermelon one-handed. Blindly, I reach up to press my hand - tiny by comparison - to the glass too. It’s then that I see it. A tattoo on my arm that I don’t remember getting. There’s numbers and writing. I furrow my brow and try to focus on the ugly ink. At first I can’t read it, but it kind of morphs right in front of my eyes.
Purchased by Mama Z’rykby… Catalogue Item… Translator Installed… Payment Completed… Order Fulfilled…
What the?
“You are…” my gaze rips away from the weird tattoo to see my dream-man’s purple eyes bounce around my face as he takes me in, “the most beauti-”
“Sweeeee-t… meeeeea-t.”
Chapter 4 - Polly
Someone else is here in my dream.
Scratch that - somethingelse is here in my dream.
I peer out of my glass-case coffin, past my dream-man, to see a silhouette at an entranceway I hadn’t noticed before. It’s an odd, bulky shape and definitely not human. The thing takes a step forward. “Sweee-t-” it starts, gurgling.
“Stay back, scum,” dream-man snarls, turning his back on me to face this new nightmare-monster. On his back there is something black. At first, I think it’s a cape of some sort, but then I realize it is a pair of huge drooping wings. And… There’s a tail flicking this way and that, too.
Ok, I want to wake up now. This is getting too weird.
The monster comes closer, hissing something through yellow teeth. It has a smile made for horror movies and seems to be missing an eye - although, the one it has left is terrifying enough.
“I don’t like this,” I murmur to myself. That thing is hideous. “Ireallydon’t like this.”
Frantically, I begin pinching the skin on my forearm -hard.
It’s not fucking working.
I’m still in this box. There’s still a hot guy out there, and for some reason he has wings and a tail. And he’s apparently about to fight something that just crawled out of a mad scientist’s monster lab.
“I want to wake up now!”
The winged man reaches for some sort of glowing knife. “You cannot have her,” he growls as they face one another, the man never leaving his stance in front of where I’m trapped in here.
I slam my palm, and then my fist on the inside of the glass, the water that’s up to my chest sloshing with the movement. “Hey!Get me out of here! I don’t like this dream anymore!”
More of the hideous creatures appear and my panic begins to spike right through the roof. I start pinching all over; my arms, stomach rolls, cheeks, neck - whatever I can reach. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!” I think there’s five of them out there now and they arehuge.
One leaps onto the back of my dream guy but promptly gets thrown off, landing in a pile on the dark floor. Next, another approaches, hissing and gurgling. That one gets a swift stab in the chest and crumples to the ground screaming. Horrified, I watch as two of the monsters turn on their own now that it’s on the floor, taking the still screeching creature and… andpulling its limbs from its bodybefore they begin eating the flesh of their fellow‘mimic-ah’.
I think I’m going to be sick.
I’m still trying to process what’s happening when the original one - the one with only one eye steps forward. “I want to wake up now!” it says to my dream guy. Except… it said it usingmy voice. A chill races down my spine.
My dream-man raises the glowing blade, pointing it at the creature. “Don’t youdareecho my Polly’s voice!” he snarls before leaping forward.
And all hell breaks loose.
All I see is limbs and wings and chaos. I can hear cries of pain, whooping and hollering - all nearly drowned out by my own screams. I nearly jump right out of my skin when one of those monsters is suddenly right in front of me, its eyes buggingout of its horrifying face as it smiles an evil smile and bangs on the glass, trying to reach me.
In an instant, my dream-man is there. He has more blood splattered on his handsome face as he locks the monster’s head with his powerful arms. In one swift jerk, he snaps its neck with a sickening crunch sound before shoving the now lifeless body away. I’m frozen in place as I watch him breathing hard, his muscled shoulders rising and falling as he stares back at me. Suddenly, a rock whizzes past him and hits the glass right by my face. I rear back but it hasn’t done a ton of damage. There is a chink in the glass that wasn’t there before though.
And then the creeping reach of a crack appears.
That horrible whooping sound that reminds me of excited apes cranks up again and suddenly there are black clawed hands, grabbing and scratching at my man. Another rock hits the glass, and the purple-eyed man looks more worried about that than the fact that there’s monsters quite literally at his back.
