Page 23 of Wishing Upon a Monster (Monster Brides Romance #40)

Aurora

“ I will not be able to get this shit out for a week,” I mumbled, raking my hands through my hair and watching as pixie dust fell from it. I felt like a craft project gone wrong; the rest of the night shift and I were covered in copious amounts of shimmering, multicolored dust.

“But think of how pretty it will look on your man’s skin!” Vickie cooed, floating around us as we clambered to the locker rooms.

We could hear CJ cussing colorfully from behind the closed door of the men’s locker room. He’d come back with coated fur, looking like he had run a glittery fun run.

“Aren’t the colors supposed to mean different things?” Vickie asked, floating through the door to the locker room.

Rocio pushed the door open for us, holding it until we all passed.

“Yeah, certain groups believe each of the colors can enhance different things, like fertility, virility, regulate moods...” I explained, slipping my top off and tossing it straight into the hamper .

I sucked my teeth as I looked down at all the pixie dust that managed to get under my clothes. I whipped off my sports bra too, throwing it in the trash.

“I don't even blame you,” Isla said, shimmying out of her suit. “This shit is in between my fucking scales, and unlike lamia, we don't shed. I need a fucking boar bristle brush.”

I stripped the rest of the way, throwing out my underwear and tossing my pants into the basket. Chances were those would be tossed out as well, but that wasn’t my call, and I didn’t want to be docked for doing it myself.

The showers at the reserve enforcer headquarters had excellent pressure, and while the glittery dust would just smear around my body, I could at least enjoy the pounding pressure against my muscles.

“I really wonder if this is a fucking fight ring,” Rocio said from her stall.

“Why is that?” Vickie asked, floating above our heads but facing the ceiling to give us privacy.

“Well, the red caps to start, the goblins a few days after that, that group of haints last week—they never travel in packs— then the tailypo...” Rocio explained, “All these creatures operate at night and aren’t very intelligent.

They are small, and it would be easy to pen them up and watch them shred each other to pieces.

We keep finding them loose, so either they are left over from that ring we broke up a while back and have been released because we didn’t catch everyone involved, or.

.. Maybe it’s an amateur group who doesn’t know how to contain their monsters, and they are breaking free. ”

“I mean, it could be,” Isla said from her stall, “but have we had any reports of intelligent beings being hurt?”

“Why would that matter?” Vickie asked from the ceiling.

“If they are amateurs, then the beasts are busting out because their captors aren’t being careful and don't know what they are doing. We’d have an uptick of monsters needing medical attention, wouldn’t we?”

“What if they are like vampires?” Vickie pointed out. “They heal fast and wouldn't need to chug a potion to heal up.”

“But the pixies, Vickie. Who fights pixies?” Isla argued.

“I dunno, they are kind of assholes. We rescued them from that abandoned shack, and instead of being grateful, they dive bombed us!” I grumbled, pumping out a third round of shampoo.

“I get they didn't understand we weren’t trying to capture them to harvest their dust, but we had all the doors and windows open so they could just leave.”

“Oh, so all of this was over vengeance!” Vickie chortled.

“Vengeance against the wrong people!” I said before rinsing my head under the shower’s spray.

We scrubbed in silence, all of us thinking, no doubt, of the sparkly assholes that got us in here in the first place.

Vickie floated off, letting us reluctantly dress in our pixie-dust-free clothes, probably ruining them forever. We walked as a group out of the locker rooms and out to the lobby. Olan, as usual, waited for me outside.

“Min skat, what is this?” he asked, looking me over, his amusement apparent through our bond.

“We rescued a bunch of pixies, and this is how they repaid the kindness.” I gestured to myself and the group.

He chuckled, waving a hand of glittering black smokey shadows over us. The shadows rippled across our bodies, leaving blessedly pixie-dust-free skin, scales, and clothes behind.

“That was so hot,” Isla said, rotating her wrist in the early morning light and looking at the lack of dust.

Olan snorted, a brash metallic bang that made me laugh. I jumped at him, fully expecting him to catch me, and he did, letting me wrap my legs around his natural waist. I gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thank you, skygge farmand .”

Olan looked down at me, mischief and lust in his eyes. " Skygge farmand ? Should I be your farmand , and bend you over my knee, paddling that ass until each cheek matches cherry red?”

I swallowed, feeling my face turning cherry red instead, and my clit pulsed all on its own.

New kink unlocked. I want to be spanked by my shadow daddy. A whole ass sentence I never imagined I would think.

“Well, maybe we should go home then?” I asked, hiding my face in the crook of his neck.

“F arvel damer ,” he said aloud, walking us briskly to the well.

“That wasn’t even in English,” I ribbed.

“I don’t care,” he said, leaping into the well.

“Sashimi, come on!” I hissed.

She closed her blue eyes at me, burrowing closer to Olan later that afternoon. “You get him all night. Let me have him during the day!”

She stretched her perfectly fluffy paws with light pink toe beans, her little jaw wide, and her tongue curled as she yawned.

She lay in my spot, as stretched out as she could be.

After a week of sleeping in his room, I offered for Olan to move into my room.

I ordered new whimsical sheets to fit the new monster mattress, and he bewitched my ceiling to reflect the stars of his home galaxy and accented my cottage-core bedroom with gold. Real gold, I suspect .

What I hadn’t counted on was sharing my sleeping space with her highness.

Grumbling, I dove for my spot in the bed, Sashimi yowling as I wrapped her in my arms. She let out a long-suffering huff and relaxed on my stomach, eventually purring as I gave her scritches.

“I have always been very good with small animals,” he said, running a long finger down my cat’s back.

“I believe it. They can tell your goodness behind that majestic exterior of yours,” I yawned, snuggling to his cool chest.

“ That may be true , min skat , I cherish their sweet though brief existence.” He continued to run his finger down her fur .

“Will I... be a sweet existence, something brief and wonderful?” I had been thinking on this for the past week.

“Your existence is not sweet, min elskede , it is brilliant. It is bold and funny, delicious and warm––but to answer your question, we are bound.” He lifted up his wrist, the one with my hair woven into a thick cuff.

“ You will live as long as I do; the gods would not be so cruel as to give me such a deep love for it to only last mere seconds. They did not wake me up to experience such loss again.”

“Did you love him?” I asked, thinking of his friend without jealousy.

“Trygve? I did, though not as I love you, Aurora.” he moved his hand to my shoulder, rubbing his thumb along the curve.

“He was more like a best friend or a brother? Maybe a younger sibling. It’s hard to pinpoint because I do not have anyone you would consider immediate family.

Some of the ways he acted remind me of your unfortunate brothers, if their chat is any indication of their true personalities. ” he paused, “If you are worried––”

“Do I feel worried?” I looked up, waiting .

“No, you do not. We have both had our dalliances over the years.” He sighed, a feeling of irritation surfacing. “You should know I am not jealous of Kenton, though if he died, it would be no great loss––”

I thwacked him, laughing as the irritation switched to me, “Nice deflection, but the real thing I am hearing is that Trygve taught you to love mortals, and thanks to him, you love me.”

“Hmm, and what do you plan to do with this new information? He kissed the top of my head.

“I will be thankful for your experiences and try to grasp that if something doesn’t kill me, I’ll outlive my family.”

Sashimi, having had enough of this conversation, leapt off the bed to go find something more interesting to do.

I turned over, laying my cheek on his chest. “I am having complicated feelings about that. I love them, despite the fact that they don't understand me or you, apparently, if the texts I am also getting are any indication,” I snorted, “and they never have really tried to. It’s like they don’t care enough to form something other than the expected responses to their youngest sister having a serious boyfriend.

You would think they would have checked in, come for a visit, or challenged you to a duel or something. ”

“Boyfriend? I know this is what they call me, but they need to have a better grasp of their own language. Though I do like the word serious,” he replied playfully, “You know that they would be wasting their time dueling with me.”

"You don’t have to go and be all logical.” I pouted, aware that perhaps I was being a bit of the spoiled younger sister. “It just seems like our relationship is superficial.”

“Perhaps they trust that you, out of all of them, know your path, min skat . You are one of the most self-assured adaptive beings I have met. I sometimes think beings don’t check in because they have faith in your abilities.” Olan ran his hands through my hair, relaxing me .

“So... I might be the one being superficial?” I pouted a bit, not liking that maybe I was. “ When you went to sleep, did your family not check on you ?”

“You know that my definition of family is different than yours. Br?ndmand are not birthed, they are formed. But I have beings I would count as family who did not come looking for me when I went to sleep.” He admitted quietly, “Old gods frequently sleep to pass the time. Existence is long. Beings I cared for just assumed that I was settling in to pass the time, not to embrace the Void.”

My stomach dropped out, “The Void, you said it was like heaven? Did you... did you go to sleep to die?”

“Yes and no,” he said, shushing me when I made a noise of distress, then sitting up and pulling me into a hug.

“I didn’t feel the need to be awake, and with such loss, I had accepted the idea that I might drift off eventually into that warm embrace of our afterlife.

I wasn’t seeking death by any means, but when you live so long and experience so much, you need to rest. Sometimes, your being decides to continue on that path to something new, something unknown.

If I passed on, I was okay with it, because I had lived such a full life.

I was, at the time, ready to accept oblivion. ”

Tears filled my eyes as I thought of Olan dying, of never meeting him. Big emotions I wasn’t ready to name clogged my throat, and I choked.

“ Min elskede , beloved, I am awake because of you . You pulled me back into the waking world. The gods knew better than I did that you were coming, and that is why I slept so long and so deeply. I was replenishing, healing, becoming whole in my heart again—for us.” He lifted my face and kissed away my tears.

“This is how I knew you were not to be a mere wisher, but a wife,” he said before kissing me on the lips .

His kiss was firm and tender, flavored with my tears. I had heard that one little action could change the world for someone, and I had ended up changing the world not just for myself, but for him —a god, my husband.

“I’m really glad I got my ass kicked by some red caps,” I joked, thankful for the luck I had always cursed in the past.

“Mmm, me too, wife. You were worth waking up for,” he said, laying us back down and pulling the covers over us. “I will never choose to sleep as deeply without you, Min elskede .”

“You better not,” I grumbled. “You literally signed up for this, and that means you’re mine now.”

“You won't distract me with your wiles, woman,” he quipped.

“Do you find my ownership hot?” I smirked.

He smacked my ass, “We can explore that kink later, after we rest, vixen.”

I giggled, finally closing my eyes and letting my mind drift off to sleep.