Chapter 20
Iwoke up sweating. My body felt both hot and cold, chilled by rivulets of sweat that felt like ice as they slid down my forehead into my dampened hairline. My legs were tangled in Nate’s, but our torsos were as far apart as I could get.
Every part of my body felt like it was vibrating. My heart felt… weird.
“Nate,” I whispered. “Nate, wake up.”
He was on his feet, his ax in his hand, before his eyes had even opened. “What’s wrong?” he rumbled, his eyes searching the dark corners for intruders. But there was nothing here that wanted to harm me, except my own body.
As I shook my head, I realized some of the moisture on my face was tears. “I don’t know.”
“The babies?”
They felt fine, and I couldn’t even explain how I knew that. The pain was definitely coming from my limbs, not from my womb. “I think they’re fine. This… I don’t know.” I made a keening noise, getting to my feet and moving toward the door. As I walked over to it, the pain eased. “We need to go back.”
“Back where?” Nate asked, sounding more rattled than I’d ever heard.
“Amourgeles. The compound.” I groaned, my shaking hands fumbling with the door lock. “I need to go back. It’s like I’m being dragged back there by my insides.” I slammed the flat of my hand on the door. “Please, Nate. Please, I need to go back.”
He was nodding, throwing on his clothes. “Okay, little one. Okay. Let me just pack our shit up.”
He rushed around the room, his face worried. Luckily, we hadn’t really unpacked, so it only took minutes for him to gather our things from the bathroom and stuff them in our bags. But those minutes felt like an eternity as I leaned back against the wall and groaned. Every muscle in my body ached. Nate’s shirt clung to me, sticky with sweat.
With the bags in one hand, he ushered me out of the room and down the darkened hallway. I felt like I was suffocating, and as we stepped into the warm night air, I sucked in a deep breath. We hurried to the car on silent feet, the light breeze drying the moisture that was filmed on my face.
The sea air soothed something in me, but not enough. My muscles felt rigid as I climbed into the front seat, while Nate quickly tossed our bags in the back. He peeled out of the parking lot and onto the darkened roads of Heraklion.
“Are you sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?” he asked, like we hadn’t been there only hours earlier.
I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that the only thing that would help was going back to the compound in Amourgeles, because I really didn’t understand it myself. I just knew. I felt like a junkie who needed a fix, like there was a fist wrapped around my heart, squeezing.
So I shook my head. “Just take me back.”
A part of my brain that wasn’t feverish knew this was unfair on Nate, especially when I saw the tense line of his jaw and the strain around his eyes.
I curled into a ball on the passenger seat and breathed through the ache as we drove slowly toward Amourgeles. Even though I wanted Nate to go faster, I knew he wouldn’t. It was the middle of the night, and the roads were unfamiliar. I wasn’t so far gone that I’d put the babies at risk by suggesting it.
Still, every minute of that trip felt like torture.
There were no other cars on the roads, and the village was completely dark. The large wall loomed in the distance, and finally, I could breathe slightly easier. My body eased its giant cramp, but the anxiety in my chest doubled.
I tried to get out of the car, but my legs felt weak. Nate scooped me up in his arms, striding to the door at the base of the wall and thumping on it so loudly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d woken the whole village. He pounded on it until it sounded like distant thunder.
I wriggled in his arms, and he lowered me to my feet, his arm tightly around my waist so I was propped against his body, just in case I did anything as audacious as to topple over.
Finally, the door was wrenched open by one of the two guys who looked similar, but different. Erus, I think. Definitely not the one who’d opened it the first time.
“Nate? Wren? What’s wrong?”
With the door open, something came over me. It was like something else had possession of my limbs as I pushed past Erus and climbed the stairs two at a time. I ran down the halls, though I didn’t know where I was going. I only had a feeling that pulled in my chest. I needed something, and I knew it was this way.
So close.
I already could feel the yanking sensation easing, like the world’s most uncomfortable game of Marco Polo. I ran past the shocked face of Tryp, hesitating slightly beside Teron’s rooms. Another set of stairs had me going down, down, down.
Close. Close.
A huge door stood in front of me, and I knew it was there. Relief was behind those doors. Pushing it open with strength I didn’t know I possessed, I launched myself into the darkness beyond. It was a bedroom coated in shadows, no windows, just a huge four-poster bed in the middle of the room. There was a lump in the center of the bed, gently snoring, and just the sight made me sigh with relief.
Almost there. Almost.
I climbed into the bed, shifting around the blankets until I could find skin. Only touching would help ease the fever that was wracking my body. I knew it in my soul.
Milo rocketed up in bed, his naked chest almost colliding with my face as I climbed up his body. “Wren?”
The first touch of my skin on his was like the best painkiller in the world flooding my body. Muscles that had been pulled taut in my body relaxed, and I sagged. My jaw cracked as my teeth unclenched. But still, not quite right. Needed one more thing.
“Shift. Please shift. Change. I need…” What? What did I need? This was craziness.
Milo stared at me with wide eyes, but he dropped his glamor, and then the bull was in front of me. I climbed up his body, curling up on his huge chest like a cat, tucking my face beneath the huge line of his blocky head.
I sighed as the rest of the tension left my body. As endorphins flooded my veins, my brain crashed, and I let go of my last grip on consciousness.
Voices filteredin and out of my hearing, making the swirling darkness of sleep slip away.
“Tryp woke up the doctor from the next town over and raided his practice. I’ll get what I can get shipped over from the mainland as soon as possible.”
Something squeezed around my arm, and I opened my eyes, blinking slowly, because wading out of sleep seemed harder than usual right now. I looked directly into Teron’s golden eyes.
“We have to stop meeting like this, Wren Mahone.” His smile was soft and reassuring, and I found myself smiling back.
I looked over at the blood pressure cuff wrapped around my bicep. “I feel good now. Probably don’t need that,” I slurred. I was on my side on the warmest bed ever, even if it was a bit hard.
Actually… it was too hard.
It all flooded back to me, and I realized I wasn’t on a bed. I was on a broad, inhuman chest. “Oh shit.”
Embarrassment had me trying to move, but two big hands landed on my hips, keeping me in place. “It’s okay. Stay until the blood pressure machine finishes its reading.”
I looked up at Milo, my cheeks flooding with heat. I’d basically assaulted this guy. I’d climbed his body like a tree and just gotten comfy. I hadn’t even given him an explanation, just forced him to drop his glamor.
His face was still that of the bull, the soft puffs of breath from his nose displacing the sticky hair that was hanging lankly around my face.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It was like I was on drugs or having a mental breakdown or something. You can, uh, shift back if you want.”
“If that would make you more comfortable,” he murmured softly, shifting back to his human form, although his chest was still wide enough that I didn’t really move at all. “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s been a long time since a beautiful woman has barged into my room and climbed into my bed,” he joked, and I flushed even redder, if that were possible.
Teron tsked at us. “Stop. You’re messing with the blood pressure reading when you tease her like that.” Finally, he unwrapped the cuff from my arm. “Now that you’re awake, I’d like to check you out properly, if I could.”
Milo was currently human-sized, which meant he was slightly shorter, so when I climbed off him, my thigh moved across, uh, certain parts of his anatomy that it probably shouldn’t have. Hard parts of his anatomy that made him hiss through his teeth when I brushed against it. I chanted an apology while trying to look anywhere but at the people in the room, quickly scooting to the end of his bed.
Teron’s eyes sparkled with amusement. I tried to focus on his lips and not his eyes. No, wait, that didn’t help, because he had such a pretty mouth. A cupid’s bow top lip, and a slightly more plump bottom one. He had lips made for kissing.
I’d look at the center of his forehead instead. Yeah, that’s much better.
He held up a pen light and shone it in my eyes, humming softly as he tested whatever it was you tested with a blinding pen light. “Your responses all seem good.”
“Are you a doctor?” Man, if he’d been my general practitioner, I’d be out there licking doorknobs and doing adventure sports, in the hopes I’d break something.
He chuckled. “Not officially.”
Milo snorted, a definite bullish sound, even in his human form. “Only because you can’t go to school and get a piece of paper.” He stood up, his body uncurling until he was standing just there, wearing nothing but tight boxers and a hard-on. My eyes went wide, and I looked back at Teron, hoping he couldn’t read the dirty thoughts on my face.
“What Milo is trying to say is that medicine is a passion of mine, and I have stayed up-to-date with the latest research and practices, as a hobby essentially. Sometimes, I will help the villagers if they can’t make it down to Heraklion to the hospital.” He raised a single dark eyebrow. “I have a lot of time to fill with many hobbies.”
I met his golden eyes, and a little part of me longed to know every single one of the things he was passionate about. How old was he? Did he have a wife? Could he fly?
The door creaked open, and then Milo’s room started to fill with huge bodies. Too many bodies. Nate came in first, his face completely unreadable. Erus and Tryp came next, both shirtless and disheveled, and finally Demke, his expression completely blank.
Milo snorted again. “Guess it’s a party in my room today.”
Demke stepped forward, his eyes skating right over me to look at Teron. “Is she healthy?”
The big Gryphon stretched up to his full height, rolling his shoulders. “There’s no medical reason for last night’s episode that I can find.” He looked down at me, as if he realized it was rude to speak about my health like I wasn’t even here. “Your temperature, blood pressure, your cognitive responses—they’re all fine. Milonos said you felt chilled when you, er, entered his bed, but that might have just been the night air. Perhaps it was something more. I have ordered equipment from the mainland to monitor the fetuses better, and it should arrive in the next couple of days, but I think they are fine. Physically, you are in good health.”
I looked between him and Demke, then over at Nate. He looked both relieved and worried simultaneously, which shouldn’t be possible, yet there he was.
Demke, however, looked stormy. “I was afraid of that.” I was perfectly healthy; how could that be a bad thing? “Come. We have a lot to talk about.” Demke looked past me. “This affects you too, Milo.” There was barely restrained anger in his tone, and I couldn’t understand what I’d done to offend him so badly.
Broke into his house.
Kind of assaulted his friend.
Okay, maybe I’d be pissed too.
Milo gave the God in front of me a quizzical look. “Me?”
Demke’s eyes dropped back to mine, and there was a coldness in them that made me shiver. “It seems that the human has bonded you.”
What the fuck did that mean?