Page 37 of Beware of Hodags

Guests are clapping, and our parents step up, ready to take over the cake cutting for the guests. Shepard leaves my side to step behind my sister and brother-in-law. He slices off one of the spider cake’s legs.

Mirk disentangles from Adrian and sends Shepard a disgruntled look.

It’s a humongous piece, but under Mirk’s furious stare, Shepard grins and stuffs basically the entire spider leg confection into his mouth and chews it with relish.

A muscle in Mirk’s cheek jumps. His eyes narrow threateningly.

“Shepard,” I start in exasperation, still holding our plaid cake slice.

Adrian pats Mirk’s chest and offers him the hodag cake’s head.

The Lycosid clan whoops as Mirk eats it.

With a sigh, I lean against the table and eat all the frosting off our slice.

When Shepard returns to my side bearing another cake slice, I take it and I hand him our denuded one.

Smirking, he eats his frostingless plaid piece without complaint.

Once finished, he sets his plate on the table, looks at me, and his mouth quirks. “C’mere once.”

“Why?”

He catches me by the unresisting wrist and tugs me to him. Stretching around me, he snags a napkin off the table and brings it to my chest, dusting me off. “Crumbs,” he explains—but under the cover of cleaning me off, he takes the opportunity to feel me up.

I assume he’s teasing and this is all an excuse to touch me until I see a green crumb swiped away by his marauding fingers. I gasp. Then I’m pulling at my dress to check for more. “How did I even get crumbs on me? I ate mostly frosting!”

“I noticed that,” Shepard says wryly.

I make a distressed noise.

He tosses the napkin to the table and tugs me into his arms again. “It’s all right,” he soothes. “ There’s no harm done.” He gazes at me, his eyes so tender my heart squeezes. “And don’t worry, I’ll keep you away from truck doors.”

I want to press my face into his shoulder, but I don’t want to smudge my makeup or smear his tux so I settle for ever-so-lightly resting my forehead against his. “Thank you.”

“I’ll keep you safe from hot dogs today too,” he adds. “Although that one’s going to be more difficult since you are a hot dog. ”

I pull back from him and give him a slow blink, but it only makes his grin wider. “That was so cheesy you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Let’s open presents!” Kayla shouts. And my mom (yes, Adrian’s mom too) holds up two presents like she’s been waiting for this. She brings Shepard and me a gift, and then takes the other to Mirk and Adrian.

To my surprise, our first gift is addressed to me. The giver? My new husband.

Smiling over at him, I open it. It’s a gorgeous leatherbound book with a stamped title. My head tips to the side. “Aww, Lord of the Rings.” I give Shepard wide eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

He nods. “Be informed.”

Something bumps the toe of my shoe and I look down. “Oh gosh! Look!” It’s a cute little tree frog. Biting back a smile, I shift my book under my arm and start to hunker down to grab the frog for a relocation mission.

Shepard’s hand locks around my arm and he drags me behind him.

“What the—” I start.

Dylan dives into the spot I was standing. He snatches up the poor frog and shoves it into his mouth—with the help of chelicerae that burst out on either side of his lips.

Yuuuck.

The Bruiser family barks in surprise. This nearly drowns out the growls erupting from all the hodags.

A couple of the Lycosids take hold of Dylan and drag him back into their throng. All of the shifters who are not spiders murmur, casting Dylan looks of horror, revulsion, and pity.

Despite how terrible everyone knows his plight is, Dylan seems really happy.

Weirdly besotted with Saenathra, but then he was always obsessed with the supernatural.

Now, thanks to his potentially murderous spider mate, he's part of it. And boy is he ever geeked that he’ll be able to hunt wendigo like a fiend .

He and Saenathra are already making plans to hunt them together, like some terrifying supernatural power couple.

Pasting on a discomfited smile, I look over to see what Adrian and Mirk opened, but they’re nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Adrian?” I ask.

Our mother is covering her cheeks and grinning. “Mirk started dancing for her. It’s the Lycosid courtship dance. She and Mirk are taking a short break from wedding festivities.”

“Public ones,” someone calls out suggestively.

They aren’t wrong. Fifteen minutes pass, and Shepard and I have already opened all our presents when Mirk and Adrian return, smiling wickedly at each other and looking suspiciously disheveled.

Shepard growls in my ear. “I want to take a break from the public festivities.”

“I know,” I agree. I take his hand. Weddings are usually short and sweet events in the shifter world and that’s fine by me. I’m ready to be done. Or at least ready to treat ourselves with a happy break.

Before we can escape, Kayla shrieks excitedly, “And now it’s time for the bouquet!”

I don’t know why bouquet throwing is even a tradition shifters have since none of us get married unless we find our mate.

(Although maybe the Lycosid clan is different since they turn humans.) But catching flowers guarantees that the catcher will get hitched next about as much as…

Well, I’m not sure why humans have this tradition either.

But Adrian throws a bunch of black roses.

Bruisers and hodags body slam each other to get it, snarling—

And as if she’s able to calculate the perfect, precise trajectory of the sailing flowers, Saenathra raises her hands and launches a web strand out of… somewhere, snagging the bouquet in mid-freaking air. It comes to rest perfectly in the crook of her arm.

All of the Bruisers and hodags go dead quiet .

Saenathra looks back at Dylan and she looks so happy. You'd never know that it was just a scant sennight ago when she lured Shepard and tried to feed him to her dead mate.

Well, not her dead mate (zombie spiders are perhaps the only way the concept of giant spiders could get more terrifying).

.. Corey was obviously alive at the time of Saenathra’s attempt to feed my mate to her mate.

But then Shepard killed him—obviously defending himself.

Though we’ve all decided to let bygones be bygones, so this is all water under the bridge and I really need to stop thinking about it.

It goes without saying that everybody else has let it go.

I glance at Shepard and see he’s sprouted horns.

I grab his arm.

He shakes himself, making the air whistle slightly as his horns swing, and tries to blink the red out of his eyes.

Thankfully nobody seems to notice Shepard’s natural defenses emerging. Everyone is focused on Saenathra and Dylan, who looks at her like he’s starving—but not for food.

“We are NOT going to her wedding,” Shepard states and he doesn’t whisper it.

Saenathra ignores him and keeps beaming a smile back at Dylan.

Pedipalps have spontaneously sprouted from behind his jaws.

It’s not fair to say that they’re worse to see on a human than a pair of chelicera but the fact that they’re sexual organs gives a certain implication that’s extra disturbing. He crooks one at her.

Beside me, Shepard shudders.

“Where did the web come from?” someone whispers, but of course we all hear it. “Don’t webs come from their…”

“Forget that. Who in their right dogbaned mind would marry a black widow Charlotte?” one of the hodag guys asks. He doesn’t whisper. He also doesn’t say it nicely. At all .

I’m glad he specified black widow, because my sister is now a Charlotte. She is, however, not in any danger of going crazy and eating her mate.

Saenathra is. She has the potential anyway. As much as she's enamored right now, at any second she could experience a switch flip and eat Dylan just like Mirk’s grandma ate her mate.

Dylan, whose stare was fixed on Saenathra’s rear end, snaps his head up. Several Lycosid guys make a grab for his tux, trying to restrain him again.

They fail. The fabric of Dylan’s tux shreds into smithereens as he erupts into a spider the size of his GMC. He launches onto the hodag who disparaged his woman and a shifter brawl ensues. Screams, snarls, and shouts drown out the handful of more rational voices of reason who attempt to intercede.

Shepard has positioned himself in front of me, his arms held out in a nicely defensive forcefield.

Yet watching spider-Dylan tackle grown men makes me so nervous that I back into the table behind me.

The table that holds the punch bowl, where someone has helpfully filled about a gajillion plastic cups with red punch.

Half a gajillion of the cups rock and tumble over, spilling onto my dress.

The red splash spreads over my white fabric, staining it with glee.

At my howl of dismay, Shepard whirls around, his saber teeth sprouting.

It takes him a second to see that the only thing harming me is my luck.

As he reaches for a stack of napkins, he shakes his head.

“Seriously. What is it with you and white?” He grabs me and begins to mop at the hopelessly ruined fabric.

“I don’t know!” I moan, covering my face with my hands.

I don’t see it but my mom is hovering nearby, silently offering assistance. Shepard sends her a smile and a shake of his head. She returns to my dad and Pretzel .

Balling up the sodden and friction-shredded napkins, Shepard tosses them in the waste basket beside the table and tugs my hands away from my face.

He greets me with a smirk. “We’re made for each other.”

I stare at him miserably. “Are you saying you can’t be trusted to wear white either?”

“No, I’m good with white.”

My forehead furrows. “Then what about this specific situation is prompting you to declare our made-for-each-otherness?”

“Well, see,” he tugs me closer, “there are white things I have to avoid too.”

Pretzel chooses this moment to bark, and Shepard’s smile curls up even higher.

My lips purse. “I’m going to wax the ends of your mustache if you’re going to insist on making a villain smile like that.”

He swoops in and kisses me.

When he breaks away, he hugs me to his side and turns us to my parents, who are positioned near the far wall of the barn by the cakes. “Better take care of our pup,” Shepard says.

Pretzel is really barking now, upset at the ruckus.

Before we reach them, my mom hands him to my dad to hold and help soothe him.

And just like when I was a kid, my dad’s strong arms make Pretzel feel safe enough that he quiets—although he sends a fabulous stink eye toward the squalling shifter scrum happening on the other side of the barn.

Kayla is unaffected by the melee. She bounces up to me expectantly. “Well, Rach? It’s your turn to throw the bouquet! Come on!”

Letting go of Shepard’s hand, I walk to the food table, reach under it, and pull out mine. “I forwent the traditional bouquet. I thought this one might appeal to my new hodag family more.”

I hold it up for everyone who is not roughhousing to see. All the hodags, even a few who are in the middle of wrestling a spider shifter, cheer .

My bouquet is a bag of mustard pretzels.

When I throw it, Shepard knocks two men out and trips his own sister to catch it.

When he reaches me with his prize, triumphant, I pluck the snack bag from his hands and toss it aside.

(Kayla snatches it.)

Then I grab Shepard by his tie and drag his mouth a breath away from mine. “You can’t have that,” I tell him. “Didn’t you just declare that I’m the only mustard pretzel-flavored delicacy you’ll be eating from now on?”

“So I did,” he murmurs, lids going heavy. “And I’m getting really, really hungry.” He buries his fingers in my hair and seals his mouth over mine.