Page 25 of Goblins Don't Count
Try licking him. He doesn’t taste that bad for a green beetle. Once I found liver outside the chop shop, a week old, but still good, and there were so many beetles.
I got a flash of image, sound, texture, all of eating a raw, rotting liver, filled with so many different kinds of bugs, including maggots.
I pressed my face against the goblin’s throat, trying to breathe him instead of those incredibly potent memories I was picking up from the raccoon. I was hearing his thoughts, but they weren’t a common raccoon’s thoughts. No. He was a familiar, taking on some of the reason and longevity of his witch. I didn’t have enough witch blood to have a familiar, but his thoughts had been in my head!
The stone door swung open with a crash almost as loud as mine, bringing me upright, still fighting down the nausea from the raccoon’s incredibly potent memory.
The goblin girl at the door had long dreadlocks, and was looking up from a pile of papers that didn’t go with her leather pants and cropped top. Wait a second. I knew that girl from the goblin city, the one who had told Magga that I was bound to Corcarn.
Corcarn. What kind of name was that? Goblin, obviously, but if you look at the root, Cor was like a center, the axis on which a world hung. Carn was people if my grandfather’s book was correct. The people’s axis. Center. King. Corcarn was the Goblin King. Lieutenant Joss had called Sashimi Corcarn.
The girl broke off her staring at us and blinked a few times and cleared her throat. “Sorry. I didn’t realize that I’d be interrupting snuggle time.”
That’s when I realized that I was still sprawled over Sashimi, but not like that first moment, no, because I’d shifted around with the chair’s slide towards certain doom as well as trying not to be sick when the raccoon put all those incredibly graphic images in my head.
“Yes, well, that’s why there’s a knocker,” Sashimi said with a cool politeness that made my hair stand on end.
She scowled at him. “Yeah, and there’s also a lock. If you don’t want to be interrupted at the office, during office hours, you should use the lock.”
“It’s after office hours,” he said smoothly, brushing his fingers over my wrist, his arm draped around me like he’d intentionally ended up in that position.
Her brows rose dramatically, and she put her hands on her hips, crumpling her papers. “If you’re in your office, it’s office hours. You never spend all day in your office. Everyone’s nervous about it.”
“Yes, well. I was waiting for my girlfriend to show up and claim what’s hers.”
She gasped, looking shocked. I also gasped and probably looked shocked, but I had come here to try and convince the Goblin King to date me. The Goblin Authority. Whichever. Still, being called someone’s girlfriend when I was caught snuggling on said person’s lap was on the far side of shocking.
I pointed at the raccoon. “Mr. Raccoon is my familiar. That’s what Sashimi meant. He’s been waiting for me to get my darling little liver-beetle.” Ew. So much ew. My stomach churned again, and I took careful breaths through my nose.
Her brow rose. “So, you aren’t his girlfriend?”
I hesitated and glanced at Sashimi. He’d told me to try and convince the Goblin King to date me. If he told me to do that, but he was the Goblin King/Authority, that meant that he’d already said yes. No, he’d told me to ask him, which meant he’d asked me. Maybe. But what was the other side of the bargain that he hadn’t mentioned? He’d said that the Goblin King would use me, but for what?
“Excuse my sister’s rudeness,” Sashimi said, giving me a polite smile, which was strange because I was on his lap. There was nothing polite about sitting so close to someone so dangerous. “You’ll have to meet her another time when she isn’t so busy.”
The girl, Sashimi’s sister, snorted and left, slamming the stone door behind her, leaving me sitting in the Goblin Authority’s lap with a raccoon’s voice in my head. Maybe this was all a mass hallucination. Yes. That’s what it was. An epic, grand, horrifying hallucination that involved goblins and raccoons and terrifying offices with too many windows.
“You aren’t talking,” he said after a few minutes of me sitting there, trying to work through everything and failing miserably.
“You’re the Goblin Authority?”
He nodded, silky hair brushing my cheek. “Yes.”
I brushed it back behind his pointed ear and just stared at that ear for a long time. It was green with a little bit of rose on the tip. I should probably stop staring at his ear. I blinked and met his eyes. My brain was officially in overwhelm. “I wrote to the Goblin Authority for years.”
“Yes.” His slight smile was not helpful.
“Why do you want me to date you?”
He blinked at me, all innocence. “Do I?”
“You wouldn’t have told me to try and get you to do something if you didn’t want me to do it. You’re not that crazy. So, why? You refuse to be the Goblin King, but now you’re willing if I date you, because me dating you has something to do with why you wouldn’t want to be the Goblin King normally. It’s not that having a goblin king is unenlightened. It’s actually something else, isn’t it? Does it have to do with Goblin Kings stealing humans away? Did you steal one who caused too much trouble and so you’re…” I shook my head and then gripped his jacket lapels. “I’m fumbling around in the dark here, Sashimi, but I can’t see in the dark, colors or not. What’s the deal? Why do you need to date me?” I searched his eyes, his aura, everything, but there was only a warm, glowing nimbus around him, showing his power, his energy, his strength.
He spoke low, soft, careful. “Yes, the Goblin King is cursed to fall stupidly in love with a human girl and die along with her. Being bound to you will make me impervious to any other humans I meet. At least it has ever since I took you under my protection.”
“Took me under your protection? But why…” I winced when I remembered the warning on the book to never reveal knowledge of the goblin tongue to a goblin. Of course, that warning hadn’t been legible to me when I used the book to craft my first letter. I’d only read it years later, after the Goblin Authority had coached me through more vocabulary, including all of his warnings about contacting goblins, talking to goblins, consorting with goblins.
“Your life was forfeit the moment you handed that letter over to a goblin. Happily, he delivered it to me, after removing the goblins who were torturing your brother, leaving it as my privilege to do with you as I saw fit. I could have taken you and your family and enslaved all of you, or I could have killed you. Those were the two rational options.”
