Page 52 of Mortis

But I endured.

Arlo was awake in his room. Even if he was asleep, Teddy warned me he wouldn’t stay that way for long. Apparently, he disliked sleeping alone. Most nights he wandered into the kitchen in search of snacks before reluctantly returning to bed.

I had offered to sleep elsewhere so Teddy and Arlo could resume their usual arrangement, but he refused. He insisted I continued sleeping in his room, where I could comfortably return to my true form without fear of discovery. And every few nights, Teddy quietly slipped into Arlo’s room so his best friend could enjoy a proper night’s sleep with Teddy at his side.

Meanwhile, I still slept on Teddy’s bedroom floor.

Exactly where I wanted to be.

“I am not a ghoul, Teddy,” I complained, squeezing the cushion tighter. “Ghosts don’t exist, remember?”

Teddy laughed. “They’re not ghosts, Kael.”

Just as it always did, hearing my name in his voice lit something warm inside my chest.

“They’re ghouls,” he continued. “A humanoid species that survives by eating human flesh.” He pointed towards the television. “Like you.”

“I am nothing like this Kaneki person.”

I frowned at the screen. The young man was screaming, crying, desperately trying to stop himself from attacking his best friend.

“He’s tiny,” I grumbled. “And he cries far too much.”

Teddy snorted.

“Nah. He’s way more complicated than that.” Teddy rested his chin against the back of the sofa. “He goes through loads of awful stuff. And his whole philosophy is that it’s better to be hurt than to hurt someone else.”

He turned on the couch to look at me fully. A gentle smile rested on his lips. “Sounds a lot like another self-sacrificing monster I know.”

Words caught somewhere inside my throat.

I wanted to argue.

To deny it.

But I did neither.

“Is he happy?” The question escaped before I could stop it, and my voice came out barely above a whisper. “At the end of his story. Is he happy?”

Teddy’s smile widened. Without saying anything, he leaned gently against my arm. His warmth seeped through the sleeve of my shirt, and I found myself wondering whether kindness itself had a temperature.

“Yeah. He’s really happy.”

For a brief moment, I allowed myself to imagine that ending.

Then Teddy leaned away again. The empty space he left behind felt strangely vast.

“The ghouls have eyes like yours,” he said brightly, his attention returning to the television.

I looked back at the screen just as one of Ken Kaneki’s eyes transformed. Black sclera and a crimson iris, almost identical to my own.

I frowned.

Perhaps the creator of this story had once seen a demon.

Or maybe the supernatural had always found little ways of slipping into human imagination.

Arlo’s bedroom door burst open, and he sprinted into the living room, skidding to a stop in front of the television. His shaggy black hair was pushed back beneath a fluffy headband, while his face was coated in some sort of dark green mud. It looked remarkably like wet moss scraped straight from the forest floor, covering everything except his eyes and mouth.