5. Oona

My new pet is adorable, and I cannot wait to spoil him, if it is indeed a him. Still can’t tell, and I’m not about to rummage around in their pants to sex them.

Maybe it’s because I’ve always been alone and only had my own thoughts for company, but I’m thrilled to finally have someone intelligent around to spoil a little, so long as he doesn’t run off and die on me.

When he asked me what my name was, I panicked. Being alone for my entire existence means no one ever gave me a name, and I never had need of one until now. So, I created one on the spot. Oona. I thought it would be easy enough for the human to say, but then they disappointed me once again and flubbed that, too. Maybe humans aren’t as smart as I thought, after all. And considering he already ran from me once, I can only assume he’ll do it again, so I hold on to his hand for the duration of our walk back to my tree house.

Occasionally, he speaks, and I try to listen. Mainly to the tone in his words, to gauge his mood. He looks up at me, and when I look back down at him, his cheeks turn red and he looks away. Perhaps he is amazed by my beauty. Or maybe he’s still overheated from his earlier exertions. That snake was seconds away from killing him, and not even my healing saliva would have been fast enough to stop the toxin from turning his brain into goo.

“Are you hungry, little pet?” I ask as we come to the perimeter of my territory. My tree house took years to perfect, and I’m proud of it. There are three main buildings, all constructed from the finest wood I could gather and accessible via the ropes I put in after that mishap when I tried to climb one of the trunks too quickly. I was out of commission for three days with a sprained ankle. Not my finest moment.

My pet, Nick, stares up at the miniature houses, his jaw slack and eyes bright with what I think is awe. I beam with pride. “Come on, I’ll get you something. I have a kitchen inside and some food.”

He doesn’t understand a word out of my mouth, of course, but he must sense the enthusiasm in my tone, because he nods and follows me until we get to the rope. Then he balks and takes a few steps back, shaking his head.

“Do you need me to carry you?” I ask, and move to pick him up, but he quickly darts away from my grasp. Sigh. This nonsense again. “I can’t feed you if you keep running like that, Nick. Stop it.”

He’s slender, with a slight frame that suggests a sedentary life like most humans. I only know this thanks to the boats that zoom out here to dump the bodies of other unfortunate souls clad in suits and ties just like him. They were all skinny. Even if they were palatable, which they definitely are not, there wouldn’t be enough meat on their bones for a meal. I’ve sucked some of the marrow out of their bones, and believe me, that shit was so revolting I was laid up in my bed for days with a stomachache. There’s no way he’d be able to climb the rope on his own, I suppose. Not with those stick arms.

Nick lets out a resigned sigh and steps forward, then lifts his arms like a hatchling asking their mother to carry them. On the rare excursion up north, during the height of the fish spawning season, I’d watch the human females with their young at the beach and study them. Sometimes, I wonder if my own species was similar to humankind. If they took their young to the beaches and watched them frolic in the waves and taught them how to swim. How to fish and build sandcastles.

I shake my head and crouch down, pointing to my neck to indicate he needs to climb on to my back. Nick hesitates for a moment, and I’m scared he’s going to dart off again, but then he latches onto my neck and squeezes. He can’t actually hurt me. It would take more pressure than that to squeeze my trachea. But it’s unpleasant, and I tap his thigh with my claws to get him to loosen up a bit.

He doesn’t. Fine. I’ll make this quick, then.

Letting out a growl, I hoist myself up onto the rope and start the slow ascent. Carrying the extra weight means I take an extra five minutes to make it to the top, but when I’m finally up there, I feel like a bad bitch who just single-handedly took down a grizzly.

Nick releases my neck and slides off my back to immediately put space between us, and when I turn to look down at him, he’s trembling.

“You can’t be serious. It’s not that high up,” I say, looking down at the ground. “We’ll be safe from predators up here. It’s why I made it.”

Nick looks around the tree house, popping his head into the other small rooms that took me months to build. No, there is no reason I had to make my living space so damn big, but I did anyway. He finds the kitchen and looks inside my larder, then gasps when he reaches inside to pull out a glass jar filled with pickled newt eyes. My favorite snack before bed, or when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m feeling peckish.

“What?” I ask, moving toward him and taking the jar out of his hands before he does something stupid like drop it. “Do you want one? You can have some if you want.”

His pale skin turns green as he shakes his head vigorously.

“Wow, okay. You could have just said no. I understand that word,” I rumble, then shove the jar back into the larder. If he won’t eat the food I have on hand, what else will I feed him? Plants? I have no clue which plants are even safe to eat because I’m a carnivore.

Nick hovers nearby, his presence feeling like an anxious botfly flitting around. I turn and snatch his face in my claws, and he lets out a panicked little yelp as he tries to pry himself free from my grasp. Then I jam my claws into his mouth and try to force his jaw open.

“Stop that, I need to look. Let me look,” I say, and run my claws across his back teeth. Just as I suspected. Flat. He’s got mostly flat teeth and a few pointier ones in the front, but they’re nothing like my incisors. This little asshole is an omnivore, which means I’m screwed unless I can figure something out.

I release him, and he rubs his jaw while glaring at me.

“Oww,” he groans, then says something to me that I can’t understand. It sounds angry, though. Oh, well. He can be mad if he wants, but I don’t know what I don’t know, and without a shared language between the two of us, we’re going to have to keep playing this game until we either figure out a better way or die from old age.

He mutters something else, and I stare at him blankly.

“What? I know, it’s a pain in the ass that we can’t communicate,” I say, sighing. “I’m going to need to teach you how to speak my language. You can make the sounds, right?”

Clearly, I understand nothing about human biology. I should probably take him back home to the humans, but that’s many miles away, and on foot, it’ll take us a couple weeks. Weeks of travel in the lagoon? No. Nope. Uh-uh. We’d both end up dead by day two, if we’re lucky.

I open the larder up again and pull out another jar and open it. The sickly-sweet smell of coagulated snake blood wafts into the air, and Nick runs to one of the windows to empty his stomach. Okay, so this isn’t to his taste, either.

I put the lid back on and call out, “Thank you for not doing that inside!”