Page 10 of Monster Whisperer
“What would you feed a monster if you were bringing them a treat, Cerberus?”
“For future reference, you can win my love with dog appropriate cookies. I like the kind with icing in the middle like little sandwiches of goodness. Pavlina is a predator. She only eats meat. If you bring her a nice, half bleeding steak, she’ll be your best friend for life. Kimon has a pretty fucked up diet. He likes cakes with ground meat, soybeans, and canola oil.
“Demos is a colossal snob. Phoenix are rare, and he likes to bring that up in almost every conversation. Demos pretends to like expensive pâté and caviar, but you can slip him cat food and tell him it cost five thousand drachma for the can, and he’ll rave about it.
“Tryphon eats wicked people. I wouldn’t even try to cook for him. He’s not going to touch it unless it’s a person and he’s done the tentacle test that they are an evil person.”
Well, shit. I knew how to cook a lot of different cuisines, and I had an entire recipe board on Pinterest, but out of all of that, the most I could manage was a steak for Pavlina.
They wanted the company and someone to talk to. Maybe they could tell me how to cook for them, though getting Tryphon wicked people was way out of my scope.
“Care to go keep some monsters company, Cerberus?”
“No way. Pavlina has been known to wrap dogs in her web to eat if she can’t find a man that night. I see how she looks at me sometimes. She’d love a nice, tasty dog with three heads.”
“Come on, Cerberus. Hades would never let her eat you. I won’t let her eat you either.”
“I will stay in this nice comfy bed where there’s no chance of a big fucking spider eating me, and I don’t have to listen to Demos.”
“Hades never had you neutered, Cerberus. Your hypothetical balls don’t match what I have to look at when you turn around.”
“That human practice is barbaric. One day, I will meet a female dog like me, and we will make beautiful puppies.”
“I hope you meet your soulmate, Cerberus. Try to keep those balls off my pillow. I will talk to my patients.”
“You’ll see. Pavlina will threaten to eat you, and Demos is an insufferable twat. Kimon isn’t bad, but Tryphon is always hungry and begging for people to eat. He’s a picky eater.”
“They still need my help, Cerberus. All the monsters in the Underworld do.”
“I want to give you a pep talk, River, but until we figure out how to get those collars off and determine where Demeter is hiding, we can’t end this.”
“I might not be a God, a monster, or a three-headed dog, but I’msomething.I can hear all of you for a reason. Maybe I can do other things as well.”
“You probably can. For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for you, River.”
“Thanks, Cerberus. Since you’re scared of giant spiders, I will go talk to my patients now.”
Chapter 8
River
C
erberus needed to work on his pep talks. He basically prepared me to walk in on a giant Black Widow who wanted to eat me and a phoenix with an attitude problem. I didn’t know the first thing about spider monsters, but maybe we could find a middle ground on the whole eating me thing, and apparently, Demos could be bribed with cat food and the right lie.
I strolled back into the jail with my head held high like I knew exactly what I was doing and I wasn’t scared of ending up in a web. It was like they could smell me. As soon as I crossed the threshold, they were pressed against the bars, and I could hear them.
“Welcome back, baby bird,”Kimon said.
“You’re a lot more interesting than the previous doctor they had in here. A lot prettier too,”Pavlina purred.
“The pretty ones always cause trouble. Do you even know how to treat a phoenix, legs?”
I’d dealt with egos like Demos before. I just needed to put him in his place.
“I don’t need to treat you. I can just kill you, and you’ll come back good as new. Problem solved.”
Pavlina started giggling.
