It's well below freezing, a storm on the near horizon. Your car is a burning mess of metal and smoke, your phone still where you left it inside. The nearest town is too far for you to walk in these conditions, but there is a large mansion just a few minutes away. Surely, you can find refuge there.

Starward Matchmakers™ (owned by Abraxas Corporations™) have been bringing people together for almost a century! Their success rates at finding the perfect person for someone is unprecedented. Anyone who can afford it does it. They find their soulmate, and live happily ever after, and are one more success story under Starward Matchmakers' belt. You made the mistake of trying your luck with them. It's only a test, after all, and a small DNA sample, so you thought that, in the worst case, you wouldn't be paired with anyone. You were wrong.

You have a new friend. Or, more accurately, a fox you found while outside in the unforgiving frozen landscape won't leave you alone.

"You can either marry the man who you claim is a monster, or you can marry an actual monster and see how that goes for you." Your throat closes, fear boiling in your blood. "Anyone but him." Your father laughs, turning his head away. "Then leave. Go to the beast who lives in the next village over and offer yourself to him. Don't ever return to me."

You know what you saw, just before drowning in the shallows of the sea. A boy that was once a seal dragged you from the frigid waters and onto land, where your family found you shivering, babbling of magic. Maybe you are crazy, you muse, standing in the exact spot where it happened. All in your head. A hallucination from a near-death experience.

It must have only been twenty minutes into the walk when you hear it. It's a melody that halts your body like a spell, a voice so inhumanely flawless it brings tears to your eyes, coming from the water. Fear and adrenaline fail to develop, and so you feel nothing but calm as you turn to face the source of the song. The words are ancient, their power resonating into your very bones, tangled with desperation and promise. A man, half inside the water, back and head covered in the green moss that clings against the rocks and trees holds out his hand to you, mouth quirked into a lusty half smile. His eyes shimmer different colors like opals, shifting from green to blue to violet by the slightest twist of your neck.

Monsters make the decision to reveal themselves to humanity and live among them. They will have to contend with racism, hatred, and bigotry.

A collection of stories about life and times in and around a large metropolitan city where monsters are commonplace. Each chapter is a new story, (with only one exception)