Because Faery Godmonster (Collector’s Edition)

“Probably so she could pick up another misfit stray. She knows if she tried to get another yeti wizard one of us would tell her no.”  He makes the strings of his lute shriek. “What do you wanna bet she comes back with a fae barbarian or a vampire monk?”

“Yeah, or something really preposterous—like a dwarven bard.”

He glares and seems about to retort when Toothy Village Wench pipes up. “You’d better scat, cockfucker. The bard here and I’ve got designs on working our breakfast off up in his room.”

I try to quell my amusement—and a sudden urge to vomit. “I only work with him. But if you decide to go through with it, I’ll be happy to tend whatever pustules you develop afterward.”

Henley puts down his lute to laugh and swings an arm around his latest conquest. “Don’t mind Goss, my lovely. He can’t help it—knobgoblins just have big mouths.”

Toothy regards me with narrowed eyes. “Never seen no knobgoblins before.”

“Hobgoblin,” I correct her. “I’m a hobgoblin.”

She shakes her head. "You look human to me."

I'm trying to decide if that was a compliment when Henley lands a cockpunch. It was a light hit, but pain shoots through me. My tusks errupt on either side of my jaw, either side of my chin, and under it. I hunch over, all tusky. The wench looks ready to scream in my face, so I don’t bother to show her the dorsal stripe of short spines running down my back. "Not quite human." I retract my tusks. "They're called tusks, but they function more like claws. I can extend them at will, but they usually only show if I'm provoked."

Henley snickers. My balls are still throbbing. I'm not amused. The wench draws back a bit, frowning, more repulsed now than scared. “Ewww….”

I give her my most courteous smile and bow slightly. “Well met.”

Henley grins ear to ear, his little waxed moustache and pointy beard enhancing the breadth of his mouth. “He’s a knobgoblin because he gobbles knob.”

I grab him by his forelock and bounce his head against the table. Henley. Bane of my existence. And also my best friend.

I grin as he holds his head and swears. “I guess," I say casually, "that makes you a bat, since you’re always flying in and out of caves.”

The wench continues surveying me with befuddled disgust. Henley rubs his head. His face is dark and fierce. Then he rears back, laughing and slurps from his tankard. He shrugs. “Caves are handy. I need a wide hole to plant my wood.”

I’ve seen Henley’s cock. It gets lost in his trousers. I’m surprised he doesn’t need tweezers to piss. Although I could have said something to this effect, I offer him a crooked, good-natured smile. I’m a polite hobgoblin. Actually, most of my kin are well-mannered despite our reputation as baby-snatchers and orphan-eaters. And even those of us who do indulge in an orphan once in a while use proper utensils.

The door’s hinges squeal like sick rats and Kiona enters with a shaft of morning light and a stranger carrying a purple parasol dripping with black lace. Henley and I rush to Kiona’s side, leaving Henley’s wench looking forlorn beside the hearth. The stranger closes his parasol—and somehow manages to do this with a rather masculine style for a man with a parasol. His eyes are stag brown and bright in the inn's gloom.

Pox.

Fully alert, with the spring morning’s chill still clinging to his clothes, he is unfathomably beautiful. It’s more than that eerie nightsprite etherealness or that typical wild fae glamour; there’s something sweet and vulnerable about his face, something hidden, something remote and lonely. He reminds me of a graveyard no one visits.

He regards me with an aloof disdain. There’s not a hint of recognition in that beautiful gaze. My heart drops to the floor. I grind it beneath my boot. It’s for the best, really.

For the best, my monster echoes somewhere within my skull. At least someone’s happy.