Page 12 of Fixing the Grumpy Pumpkin King
“The modern mortal world may have different customs, my lord,” Russet said carefully, adjusting his tiny vest. “Perhaps we should… adapt.”
Adapt. Learn. Change.
After 259 years of stasis, of watching the world change through a scrying pool but never being part of it, Mabon was going to have to figure out how this new world worked.
How mortals thought now. What they believed. What they accepted.
“I like him!” Pip zoomed down to hover near the warlock’s face. “He’s pretty! Can we keep him?”
Locke slept on, unaware of the deity watching over him in his grandmother’s magically saturated bedroom.
Unaware that his accidental summoning had just changed everything.
Chapter Four
Oneweeksincehewas summoned and Lord Mabon still hadn’t gotten used to waking up wrapped around Locke like a vine strangling a trellis.
Every morning, the same thing. He’d enter his meditative state on his side of the bed. Respectable distance. Dignified. Appropriate. By dawn he was plastered against Locke’s back, arms locked around the mortal’s waist, pumpkin head tucked against the nape of his neck. Full contact. Zero dignity.
This morning was no exception.
Locke’s breathing was still slow and even. Asleep. Good. Lord Mabon carefully extracted himself, unwinding his arms and rolling away before Locke woke and they had to pretend this wasn’t happening. Again.
The bed was too small. That was the problem. Locke’s full-sized mattress wasn’t meant for someone of Lord Mabon’s height, and certainly not for a deity who’d spent 259 years sleeping alone in an enormous four-poster bed in a castle.
He’d suggested taking the grandmother’s room that first night. Although a queen size bed still wasn’t enough it was better than the smaller bed Locke owned.
Locke had looked up from the grimoire he was reading and said, “If you want to, sure. But Grandma’s space is... I don’t know. It feels weird letting someone in there when she didn’t say it was okay.”
And Lord Mabon had felt it too. The old witch’s magic saturated that room, woven into the walls and furniture and air itself. Sleeping there would be like sleeping in someone else’s skin. And after all he didn’t want to sleep alone.
“I’ll stay here,” he’d said.
Locke had just shrugged. “Cool. Fair warning, I’m told I’m a blanket hog.”
He wasn’t. Lord Mabon was the blanket hog. And the cuddler. And the one who apparently couldn’t go six hours without gravitating toward the only other living thing in the bed.
Pathetic.
Lord Mabon stood and stretched, his carved face shifting from the soft expression it wore while sleeping (he couldn’t help it, didn’t even realize it was happening until the second morning when he’d caught his reflection) back to something more authoritative. More appropriate for a deity of his standing.
And as for this apartment, it was a nice simple little dwelling. But not up to a harvest God’s standards of living of course, but he could make it so, and so he did.
Vines covered every wall, winding up from the baseboards and across the ceiling in burgundy and burnt orange. Autumn leaves clustered in the corners, never wilting, always perfect. The herbs the old witch had hung from the kitchen ceiling were now interwoven with strings of dried apple slices and acorns. Every surface bloomed with small white pumpkins, and the air smelled perpetually of rich spices.
He’d started with the living room. Then the kitchen. Then Locke’s bedroom because he’d been spending so much time there anyway, and waking up to plain pale yellow walls was offensive to his sensibilities. And of course he could just return home, but what would be the fun in that? This was the first time he had been summoned in two centuries…two and a half but whose counting…and although times had changed and it was clear the old ways had long since passed away, his curiosity still remained. Or more like he was eager to give up the warm body laying next to him every night. But he would never say that part out loud.
Redesigning the shop had been next on his list.
“Absolutely not,” Locke had said, physically blocking the door to Moonlit Mysteries. “You are not turning Grandma’s shop into an autumn forest.”
“It would be an improvement.”
“Jack. No.”
“The aesthetic is currently early-2000s purple mysticism. I’m offering you timeless seasonal elegance.”
“You’re not touching it.”
