Page 59 of Monster Married
“Shush. That only applies when I point out to your father how he was wrong about certain things,” Kinnek said.
“Can you…make them stop?” I asked Inkiri.
“Oh, sweetpea, of course he can’t!” Kinnek took a step toward me. “Let me have a look at you. Hmm. Good teeth. Clear eyes. Shiny hair. If you were a horsie at market, I’d buy you.”
“My mate is not…a horsie,” Inkiri, my hero, said.
Vergis nodded. “More like a donkey.”
Vergis was the worst. I’d missed him, and I was so effing glad the cola ash people hadn’t gotten him, but he was also the worst.
Kinnek clicked once. “I was joking, clearly. I do not wish to buy your mate. However, he does look like a healthy human should.” He sniffed me. “I assume, Rory, you asked for your mate to have sex with you?”
“Uhm, yeah?” I was wondering what it would take to go back to being catatonic. Maybe I could fake it.
“That’s good. Also something that makes me think you definitely are a Loathly Lady, which is so interesting, considering you’re a man.” He clapped his hands. “But that’s myths for you. They get details wrong all the time. Anyway, Inkiri, you should feed this mate of yours. Vergis and I are going to take care of that monster.” He pointed, and I looked over Inkiri’s shoulder to see a purple jaguar-monkey thing, the same kind of beast that had almost eaten me in a women’s changing room.
It was prowling near some brambly blackberry bushes that sat nestled in fog like much of the rest of where we were.
“Oh, shoot.” I put my arms around Inkiri’s neck.
Kinnek whistled. “Don’t worry about it. Those aren’t that smart to begin with and they’re pretty easy to hunt. Head inside for some food. Donna makes a wonderful breakfast companion.” He pointed at a small farmhouse with a barn next to it. The chimney was trailing white smoke, and the geraniums that were on their last leg in flower boxes outside the window made it look somewhat bucolic.
I cocked my head. “That’s where Donna lives? It’s so small.”
Vergis pulled his knife from its sheath, and his eyes were already tracking the purple monster when he said, “It’s bigger on the inside.”
“Oh, okay. I guess I best…get carried to meet her.”
Vergis rolled his eyes and snorted, but Inkiri seemed to take my words as a compliment. We started walking away from the tent and toward the building.
“Hey, by the way,” Vergis said, “do you remember doing anything to me? Back in Esaka? Thing is, I can tell that beast out there is about to die, and that’s new.”
Kinnek tossed his hair back over his shoulder. “Yes, it’s a very unusual thing. You really need to look at it as a gift, muffin, I told you.”
I sucked in a lungful of air. “They were going to take you. The cola ash assholes—I mean the Koa Esher. They wanted to hurt you. You know. Hurt you.”
Kinnek’s eyes narrowed, and all humor evaporated from his demeanor. “My darling buttercream pie, did I not specifically and repeatedly tell you that you are not, under any circumstances, to let any of the Koa Esher near you? That you are not to let your guard down when you are fighting one and are to use lethal force only? Excessive lethal force if you’re ever in doubt? Which part of that, my sweet chocolate tart, do I have to explain to you again?”
Vergis deflated as much as Vergis could deflate. “I wasn’t?—”
Kinnek hissed. “I’m inclined to believe the Loathly Lady here. We will go over it once that beast is dead, my caramel cream pie, and I’ll tell you again how to handle the Koa Esher.”
“I am not—” I said.
Inkiri clicked at me. “I suggest you don’t get involved in this, Sadir. Maybe we should find food.”
Vergis looked at me like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Kinnek turned away from the beast. “Wait. You said the—what did you call them?—the cola ash assholes…mmh, the cola ash-holes were about to touch my son. What happened then?”
“Right.” I cleared my throat. I was feeling exceedingly awkward having this conversation while being carried in my mate’s arms and wrapped in a blanket, but play the hand you were dealt, I figured. “Nokim was about to die, and that voice in my head was telling me it could save my knight if only I told it to.”
Kinnek tilted his head. “Knight? That’s knight with a ‘k’?”
“Yeah, right. So then it healed Nokim, who gets hurt a lot of the time. Like, too much I think. Anyway, then the voice almost left, but I just knew Vergis was getting so furious about Nokim. He must’ve seen how badly he’d been hurt, but he couldn’t have known he was going to be okay, so he went a little smashy, only he was out of bullets. I knew one of the Koa Esher would get an opening and grab him, take him back across the border.”
Vergis’s jaw dropped.
