Page 1 of Monster's Melody
PROLOGUE
Vorzak
“Ow!Since when do you guys biteme?”I couldn’t believe it.The little bastards had actually nipped me!
Bad enough they refused to communicate with me, now they were biting me too?
“Oh, don’t be such a baby.”Yukiko laughed.“Besides, you probably deserved it, didn’t he, my darlings?”She crooned to my snakes, who lapped up her attention like the little bastards they were, nuzzling and petting her while sending me smug looks.
I don’t know if all serpents have expressive faces like mine do, but The Hissies, as I call them, have a highly developed superiority complex and their eyes alone tell a thousand tales.
Add the ability to move their jaws independently of each other and my snakes can express a whole lot of human emotion with just a tiny shift in their jaws and the glint of their eyes.
Right now, basking in the glow of Yukiko’s adoration, they radiated smugness.
I deliberately took a step away from Yukiko and by default, pulled my snakes with me.“I definitely did not deserve to be bitten,” I belatedly protested.
Yukiko cocked her head to the side in that way she had when my snakes were talking to her.
I’d forgotten how annoying that was.
Every time I came home for the holidays or summer break, I was confronted with the bond my snakes had developed, not with me, but with my twin sister.
That I couldn’t communicate with my own snakes had been an irritation my entire life, but that they often chose to communicate with Yukiko instead was a slap in the face.
I blamed our parents.
Both monsters with monstrous abilities, they should have avoided procreation at all costs.They didn’t and we were the result.
The powers we inherited from them split in uneven, disastrous ways and the result was a head full of serpents for me and the ability to communicate with them for my sister.We could thank our gorgon mother for that disaster.
Our father’s snow beast powers were split as well, leaving me with the unrelenting cold that came of being a snow beast, a cold that made The Hissies irritable and quite often, maddened with pain.
Yukiko, however, got the short end of the stick on that one.She ended up with the powers of the snow beast, a literal snowstorm waiting to happen.Worse, our mother’s stone gaze got melded with our father’s wintry powers and Yukiko risked turning people to ice should she stare at them with intent, or lose control of her gaze.
Truth was, Yukiko and I were a muddled mess of genes that shouldn’t exist at all.
I was a gorgon, one of the few males in existence, who couldn’t communicate with his snakes, and Yukiko was a snow beast without the unrelenting cold that kept her emotions in check.
That wasn’t the worst of it for Yukiko, though.
She was the first girl born in several generations on my father’s side.This meant she was the Ice Princess, heir to the Snow Beast Throne that our great–great–grandmother had held for centuries.
This was horrifying to Yukiko, who wanted nothing to do with ruling our kind, but was a huge relief for me, because as a male and a gorgon, I didn’t qualify at all.
Yukiko felt this was terribly unfair, but considering she was able to communicate with my snakes when I couldn’t, I considered this to be just a little bit of justice.
“Really?”Yukiko murmured, making me roll my eyes.
They were still communicating.What could my snakes possibly have to say that would take this long?“Stop telling tales,” I admonished them.
They ignored me and continued weaving and waving between us, their movements pulling on my scalp in ways so familiar I’d long since stopped registering the tiny pinpricks of pain.
Their movements got so elaborate and excited after a few moments that they completely blocked my view of Yukiko’s face, so I only had the sound of her voice to tell me how incredulous she was when she exclaimed, “You met your mate?”
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Jasmine