Page 6 of Demon of Dreams

Which was to say nothing of the fact that my demonic sex nightmare had led to the kind of wet dream situation I hadn’t experienced since age thirteen. So I was crazyandI was having the world’s weirdest sexual orientation crisis. It wasn’t enough to suddenly be getting off to gay stuff. No, it had to be gaymonsterstuff. I could only imagine what my dad would make of that.

I bit down on a skittering laugh, but couldn’t quite keep it from escaping into the night air. Yeah, I was definitely losing it.

I shoved myself to my feet, lurching so fast that the raven flapped back in surprise and let out an angry squawk. I didn’t wait to see if it was going to say something else. I just ran inside and into the small bathroom in the motel lobby. I barely made it to the toilet before I hurled.

When my insides finally stopped heaving, I stood up and regarded myself in the mirror above the chipped porcelain sink. God, I was pathetic. My brown hair was slicked dark against my forehead, and my face dripped with so much sweat, it looked like I’d been swimming. My eyes—the same steely gray blue as my father’s—were lost-looking. I hated how they made me resemble my dad, but surely he’d never looked this sunken, this caved-in on himself.

I was still wearing my winter jacket, but my gray hoodie underneath it was as wet as if I’d used it to mop the floors. The faint odor of fryer oil from the diner kitchen still clung to me, and my mouth tasted terrible.

What self-respecting sex demon would evenwantto fuck you?asked a little voice in the back of my mind. My reflection didn’t answer.

The fact of the matter was, until now, I’d never worried much about who I was attracted to, because no one was ever going to be attracted to me. My stomach swirled at that thought, but I pushed the feeling down. I wasn’t going to puke again.

All the girls I’d gone to high school with had better options than a guy who barely scraped the bottom edge of 5’8” and who probably weighed less than they did. And if Neil was any barometer of what gay guys were into, they clearly weren’t into me either.

Which had been a relief, frankly. The thought of sex had always given me a vaguely panicky feeling. It made my face hot, my breath rushed and shallow. Not that different from how I felt now, if I were being honest.

I’d just never understood the guys I heard in the locker room, their easy confidence when they talked about the girls they were hooking up with. How sure they were that they knew what they were doing.

Girls to me were…it was like they were some sort of shiny, glass statue that I was afraid to touch. Beautiful, but also a little distant. They left me feeling cold.

But when I thought about guys, and sex, and me in the same sentence? My stomach knotted. My breath didn’t come rushed and shallow—it didn’t come at all. If I tried to picture myself with a man, it was like my brain shorted out.

Surely those weren’t signs of attraction. Surely if I’d been into guys, I would be having normal sex dreams about them, not turning those guys into monsters.

Right?

What does it even matter? whispered the little voice again.It’s not like guys of any type are beating down your door.

I pushed away from the sink. I didn’t want to go back out to the lobby, but since I was on shift for another hour, I kind of had to.

You arenotafraid of a raven,I told myself.It’s a bird, and you’re a human, and even if it can talk, it’s too small to trigger the automatic door. It’s out there, and you’re in here. You’re safe.

For another hour, anyway.

I took a deep breath, then winced. Fryer oil and sweat did not make for a pleasant mix. I bent my head and gave my armpit a questioning sniff, then heard a loud thump outside.

I froze. The sound came not from the lobby, butoutsideoutside. A thump like two linebackers crashing into each other. Or possibly two elephants. Followed by another. And another.

What the fuck? It didn’t sound like a car crash, but I couldn’t think of anything else big enough to make that noise.

The trouble was, I didn’t hear any voices, and surely if there’d been a crash, there would be people yelling. Oddly, I didn’t hear any other noises either.

That was normal enough for a Wednesday night, but suddenly the silence felt sinister. Had it been a truck backfiring? Some kind of accident up on the highway? What the hell would make a thump that big and then—

Bang. There was another thump, louder than the ones before, and it was accompanied by glass shattering. It sounded like someone had crashed into the sliding doors, and the raven definitely wasn’t strong enough to do that.

What if someone was hurt, and I was hiding here in the bathroom? What if someone needed my help? I threw the bathroom door open, took two steps out into the lobby, and wished I hadn’t.

Three…beings…stared at me from the entrance.

I didn’t know what to call them. Human-shaped, but taller and broader than any human could possibly be. Dressed all in black, or at least, I thought they were. It was hard to tell what was clothing and what was swirling black smoke.

Their faces were hidden behind black masks, but the one on the right had… Were thosehorns? The left-hand one was either holding some kind of whip with a spike at the end, or—oh lord, was that atail? And the one in the middle…

The one in the middle had wings.

It was the middle one, the one with wings, who spat out a word in a guttural language that sure as hell wasn’t English. It wasn’t too hard to figure out the gist of what he’d said though, because he pointed at me with a black metal glove that ended in spikes, and all three of them advanced towards me, glass crunching underfoot.

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