Page 55 of The Monster at the End of This Courtship

"Shh. No more talking, or you'll wake the eggs."

I let out a snort, and then he moved, stealing the rest of the thoughts from my head.

Days and weeks felt like months. We slept in four-hour shifts, as Punky had recommended. I spent a few hours each day in my compression shorts. Priestess Alma even approved after she saw the slick collection spell in action.

During that time, I hammered out the schedules for the next recreation league sessions. My beta assistants had done a fantastic job of setting them up for me. We had enough teams to schedule eight-week sessions instead of six. The teams would play each other twice and still have one week off.

We expanded our magic nets and magic play-calling to all fields, too. We no longer needed referees or base coaches for the adults, but we kept them for the youth leagues. Our spells were great at enforcing rules, but they couldn't explain the rules to a child who had never seen a baseball game.

I didn't venture past our porch to watch the games, though, and only for fifteen minutes at a time. Then, I returned to feeding our eggs.

Axel worked on the house when he wasn't stuffing me with food and making sure I bathed and slept. With both magic and lumber, he constructed four new rooms for us. One would be my home office for the days I needed to stay home with the kids. The other three would give each child a special place to call their own. I was so excited to meet them.

The eggs had grown so fast. They were already bigger than Priestess Alma's largest expectations, but the shells were too thick to see through in the sunlight. I wanted to see them, but I could wait. We would meet our little kobolds when it was time.

Our bed was a mess of blankets and stuffed animals. We'd started with bears, but then I found the World Wildlife Federation. We didn't have access to the Earth website, but one of our betas in IT had mirrored their site on Ignitas. I pointed out the stuffed creatures I wanted, and Axel made special trips to Earth to purchase them for me. We had one for each child, or a set of triplets for one, depending on what our kids liked. Snow leopards, orcas, pikas, and lemurs decorated the headboard, while lions, elephants, and giraffes danced along the footboard. Each animal came with a storybook, so I read to the eggs between feeding times.

I was also getting more emotional, the closer they came to hatching. When I finished reading the story about snow leopards, I started crying. Earth was dying, and while I was grateful to be happy and healthy on Ignitas, I was still sad that my home for twenty-five years would never be the same as it had been when I left.

"Are you all right?" Axel brought me a sandwich he'd snagged from the kitchen. "I heard you sniffling."

"I don't know why I'm crying," I said. "Everyone I loved on Earth is already gone." I meant my parents, but that reminded me of my high school and college friends, none of whom deserved to die in a fire or flood. "That's a shitty thing to say. I'm sorry. Your parents are still there."

He sat down beside me and rubbed his fingers down my arms. That small display of affection filled me with desire every time.

"Humans are resourceful," he said. "They'll find a way to fix Earth, just like Punky found a way to make peace with the dragon."

I was too congested from the tears to snort, so I settled for a strangled, "Hmph. Sure they will."

"Hey. Did you see that?" Axel pointed at the egg closest to my knee.

"See what?" I asked, but then I saw it, too. A tremor. The egg moved.

"Babies!"

My body seemed to understand the stress our babies were under and created even more slick than before. Instead of growing bigger, the eggshells seemed to be getting thinner with each spread of slick. In the sunlight, I could almost see through the shell.

Finally, a tiny crack emerged, and the other two eggs started wiggling.

We were about to be parents!

Chapter 24

Axel

At first, Tuft seemed as delighted as I was to welcome our baby kobolds into the world. Then, our gazes caught, and his sniff sounded suspiciously like a sob.

"What is it?"

"I wanted to give them the names I'd picked out for my first babies, but now that doesn't seem fair to you."

We'd talked about the names, so it also wasn't a surprise. I liked them. "Statler, Waldorf, and Aster are wonderful names."

"Astoria, if we have a girl."

I laughed. "Exactly."

"But …"

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