When I finally found the head, my panic had reached its peak.
The head wasn’t a snake. It was a man, covered in scales from the waist down and bare tan skin from the waist up. His human body was slim, his power in his tail. Hands clenched into fists at his sides and a long, forked tongue slid from between his plump lips along with an inhuman hiss. Dark circles marred the skin under his eyes, which were chilling to look at. Black. Completely. No white, no colour in the iris.
He looked downright murderous.
I would have screamed, but I passed out far too quickly for that.
Chapter 3
Forthesecondtimein one day, I woke up confused.
Had everything been real? My nose ached and my neck felt like it had been snapped forcibly to one side, which matched up with how I usually felt after fainting.
That meant everything had been real.
The ghost.
The flirtatious orc.
The beastly man with the pixie man.
And the murderous half-snake.
I kept still because, as everything clicked into place in my muddled brain, I heard voices.
“I didn’t mean to scare her!” the ghost said, sounding horrified. “She was passed out in the downstairs bathtub. All I was doing was making sure she was alive and unharmed.”
A heavy sigh followed. “Most humans don’t take kindly to ghosts, Zan. You know that. You should have gotten one of us right away.”
“As if she would have responded better to one of us,” someone else said, snorting. “Kirin is four times her size, Bennett is covered in hair and can never avoid flashing his fangs, and Abraxas is horrifying to look at even if you avoid waking him up and getting the rage eyes.”
“There’s always you.”
Another snort. “Fuck off. I’m smaller than her, yeah, but humans don’t like pixies or demons. From what little I’ve seen of this woman, she’s absolutely fainthearted. There was no good way to welcome her into this house.”
I wanted to be offended, but he was right. Sometimes when I was walking at night, my own shadow startled me. I’d never been this easy to intimidate before the ghost attack when I was nineteen, but I’d never been courageous. When she’d been alive, my mother had reassured me being timid was nothing to be ashamed of. In the years since her death, I’d learned that in our society, it certainly was worthy of shame.
“She seems sweet, you shouldn’t talk about her like that,” the ghost, Zan, said.
“From what I heard, all she did was scream at you.” The orc joined the conversation. “How do you know if she’s sweet? Although, I bet she tastes sweet. Fuck, I’ve missed women. Especially pretty ones.”
I fought the way my body wanted to stiffen. The flirting hadn’t been a trick of my imagination. Horror filled me again. No way was the orc and his fangs and overall mass getting anywhere near me. Well, if he wanted to, I couldn’t stop him. But I would cry and struggle the whole time.
“Stop objectifying her, Kirin. She’s not about to try and take that giant orc cock of yours.” From context clues, I gathered that this voice of reason was Bennett, the hairy beast man. Or possibly the snake man, but I had a feeling he was quiet. “And if she wakes up to hear you talking about how badly you want to fuck her, she’s going to be scared.”
“She’s awake,” another unfamiliar voice said, farther away than the rest.
My breath hitched, and I didn’t open my eyes, wondering if they would believe me if I continued to pretend. “For how long?” Bennett asked.
“Five minutes. Her breathing changed.”
I’d given myself away by breathing? Had he seriously been paying close enough attention to me to notice that? Opening my eyes, I pushed to sit up, finding myself on a couch in the living room. Movement made my head throb, but I was better able to face the men in front of me while sitting straight. The monsters in front of me, more accurately.
The hairy beast, Bennett, was sitting on an armchair off to the side of the couch I was on, the pixie perched on his lap. The orc took up most of the opposite couch, while the snake man’s tail curled around the piece of furniture. His human torso rested against the arm of the couch. Zan, the ghost, was backing up toward the far side of the room where there was a wide, circular hole in the ceiling. Nervousness filled his expression.
Was he blushing?
Ghosts blushing sounded like a far-fetched concept, but his cheeks had more fog concentrated around them and were glowing a brighter white than they had been when I’d first seen him floating above my makeshift bed. Endearing as it was, I was still happy to have the misty figure nowhere near me. That was the only way my heart was going to avoid beating out of my chest.
