Perdita only grinned, her canines lengthening. “Ooh, prickly. I like it. Want to go howl at the moon? I promise not to chase you too hard.”
“Right you are, my lord,” Baldrick would say, picking something unspeakable from his fangs. Baldrick was a ghoul. A simple ghoul. “Though I did have a turnip once. Felt a bit wobbly about it.”
This last event caused Edmund a moment of profound horror. As her laugh—a genuine, warm, lupine roar—echoed off his granite walls, he felt something stir in the desiccated raisin of his chest. A thump. Then another.
“Baldrick!” he shrieked later, pacing the throne room. “I think I have a… a feeling .” Blackadder Monster Sex 05
Baldrick, watching from the shadows, nodded sagely. “See?” he whispered to the stuffed raven. “Told you. Even monsters need a turnip.”
“No, you imbecile. It’s soft. Warm. It makes me want to do something unspeakable, like… smile .”
When the Duke’s minions dumped the “poison,” nothing happened. The pack drank deeply. Perdita, in her towering wolf form, lifted her head and sniffed the air. She caught Edmund’s scent—ancient, dusty, and laced with expensive cologne—lingering by the stream bank. Perdita only grinned, her canines lengthening
Baldrick looked alarmed. “Shall I fetch the priest, my lord? Or the vet?”
“Count Blackadder!” Perdita boomed, clapping him on the back so hard a century of dust puffed from his velvet coat. “Heard you’ve been moping in that crypt for a generation. Cheer up! Eternal damnation doesn’t have to be so glum.”
Over the following weeks, Edmund found his existence invaded. Perdita would appear at his castle gates with a freshly killed deer (“Thought you might want the blood, darling. The rest is for my pups.”). She challenged him to races through the thorn forest (she won, but claimed his complaining about a torn cape was “adorable”). She even laughed genuinely at one of his sarcastic remarks about the local zombie peasantry’s work ethic. Want to go howl at the moon
The problem was twofold. First, Perdita was a werewolf . Their clans had a truce, but a romance? It was taboo. The Vampire Council would have him exsanguinated. The Wolf Pack would have her de-tailed. Second—and far more terrifying—she didn’t seem to care about his status, his fortune, or his carefully cultivated aura of menace. She liked him for his wit .
He thought of Perdita’s laugh. Her terrible table manners. The way she’d nuzzled his cold hand once, her wolf form’s rough tongue surprisingly gentle.
They did not marry. That was for humans. Instead, they entered a “mutually beneficial territorial and emotional accord.” The Vampire Council was appalled. The Wolf Pack was confused. But no one dared challenge the couple who had, in a single night, outmaneuvered Duke Malvolio and his mosquito hordes.
His unbeating heart had just given a very inconvenient lurch .
When they broke apart, he was dizzy. “Well,” he said, straightening his cravat. “That was… deeply unsanitary. And yet. I find myself not entirely opposed to a repeat performance.”