Marrying a Monster

by Mel Dunay

  Rina and Vipin continued on their way. Pleasant as Rina found it to ride snuggled up against Vipin's back, with one arm around his waist and the other across his chest, they were not prepared to drive all night to get to Barleyfields.

  Rina was glad that they had brought two blankets. Because neither of them felt like rushing into a relationship, they slept a respectable number of feet apart with the borrowed motorcycle between them and a large, bright moon that had been full only a night or two before by way of a night lamp.

  The next morning, they ate the leftovers from the tiffins the aunts had sent with them, and pushed on to Barleyfields.

  Normally, the partying should have been winding down by now, two mornings after the climax of the smokeflower festival, but when they rolled into Barleyfields in the late morning, the town was as raucous as when they had left it.

  The locals all but shoved beers into Rina’s and Vipin’s hands when they showed up. All throughout the town they were hailed as heroes: one small girl even insisted on putting flower crowns on them.

  Vipin blushed and muttered, “I look ridiculous” to Rina.

  “I look ridiculous. You look rather fetching.”

  They found the main reason for the celebration in the town square, where someone had erected a large pole and tied the body of the Mountain King’s Sister to it, upside down.

  “You should be proud,” Dalna’s father told Vipin when they returned his motorcycle to him after topping off the gas tank. “All this is in honor of you.”

  Vipin stared at the body of the creature he’d killed with an enigmatic look Rina could not quite read although she thought there was an element of disgust in there somewhere.

  Rina reminded herself that he seemed to see these creatures as suspects in cases he needed to unravel, sometimes innocent, sometimes guilty, but basically responsible for their actions to the extent that a human would be.

  Rina understood where he was coming from, and could sympathize, to a point. But for her part she could not bring herself to be angry that the creature’s remains were being treated like that.

  It was not what she would have done with the body, except maybe in the heat of anger right after it had been killed. But the way it had harassed a little girl just to intimidate the adults, and man-handled Vipin for sheer sadistic pleasure, left her in no doubt that this thing deserved to have unpleasant things done to it.

  She had that discussion later that evening, at Kajjal’s family’s house, with Vipin.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help it! There are some things I can’t unsee, and you being clawed by a seven-foot-tall purple Old One is one of those. It makes my blood boil every time I think about it.”

  “Remind me not to make you angry any more often than I can help,” Vipin said. He kissed her, on the lips this time.

  “That’s a good distraction from things that cannot be un-seen,” She told him when they both came up for air.

  “Let's try that distraction again, then,” He said and then next time they came up for air they got hooted at by some of Kajjal’s cousins, who had been taking pictures of the two on their camera phones.

  That was the other reason Rina wanted to go slowly on the relationship side: there weren’t going to be too many places to hide it on Mount Snarl, especially in Barleyfields, where they were the heroes of the hour.

  She slept soundly again that night, again with dreams that might or might not be prophetic but were certainly nobody’s business but hers. She woke up to learn that the phones were working and even the buses were running again.

  Vipin had phoned in the location of Bhana’s body to his superiors. Rina had been putting off calling Kajjal.

  Partly because she didn’t want to explain everything that had happened, and partly because she was fairly sure that those pictures of Vipin kissing her had been forwarded to her business partner.

  But finally, while they were waiting for the bus to reach Barleyfields, so they could board it and head back to Rivertown, Rina got up the nerve to call her friend.

  “So, Rina, what’s this I hear about you killing monsters and kissing strange men?” Kajjal said, as a substitute for “Hi, how are you?”

  Rina sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “It’s complicated, and I’d rather tell you in person, so you’re just going to have to live with the suspense for another couple of days.”

  “Come on, you could at least give me the short version,” Kajjal protested.

  “The short version is that I was marrying a monster, and helping a monster hunter kill it. And I wasn’t kissing any strange men either. I was kissing the hunter.”

  Thank you

  Thank you for reading Marrying a Monster. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider leaving a review of the book on the website of your choice. You can find out more about its sequel, Saving The Dreamlost, on my website: https://jaglionpress.com/.

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