Chapter 30
The girl was everywhere. In the halls, by the pool, on the laps of my best friends. In a few short weeks, she’d taken over the compound, and worse, over our lives. Like an icon of fertility, she was round and beautiful, and my dick betrayed me every time she walked past.
She was snuggled between Erus and Tryp outside, and I was watching them creepily through the window, like a ghoul in my own home.
“Doing some research, brother?”
I jolted, turning to see Teron, my oldest and best friend. Trying not to look guilty, I fixed my face into its usual mask of apathy. Teron had that small smirk on his face that told me he knew me better than I would’ve liked in that moment.
“Yes, I’m trying to work out how to break the soul bonds, if it comes to that. There must be something in these dusty old tomes.” The library was Teron’s pride and joy. He’d gathered each of these texts lovingly over the years.
He moved toward the large wooden table that sat in the middle of the room. “I’m afraid that even if you did find a way to break those bonds, none of them would choose to take the path. They are quite enamored with the little human.”
They weren’t enamored. They were obsessed. “If she falls, I won’t lose them.” It was a declaration. I vowed it to the universe, the words flying in the face of the Great Weaver themself, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t take any more losses.
Shaking his head, he gave me a sympathetic look that set my teeth on edge. “Demke, if she falls, it won’t matter if you break the bonds or not. We are all screwed. Us, them, the world. I believe we all hinge on her and those babies.”
He sat beside me and picked up one of the books I’d been reading. It was on the Fates and the turn of time by a hermit heretic several thousand years ago. The pages were fragile and beginning to crumble, but the information inside was still legible. The fact that some of these texts still existed at all was a testament to Teron’s care—and the fact he made us all use gloves to read anything older than 1956.
Pointing to the pages, he raised an eyebrow at me. “But you know that, don’t you? You know she’s important to us all—not just emotionally.” There was gentle chastisement in his tone, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
We’d always been like this, Teron and I. While there’d been a certain amount of reverence from the others at one time or another, as their Goddess’s Consort, or as a God myself, Teron had never genuflected to a single person in his life. He had held himself apart, not quite my equal, but not my subordinate either.
He had loved our Goddess, but he hadn’t worshiped her. He loved and respected me, but as a man, not as a God.
“I understand she’s important, Teron.”
He was still shaking his head. “She’s more than important, brother. She’s our final chance at retribution. She’s the world’s chance for a fresh start.”
“She isn’t—the infants are,” I argued. Semantics, but if I put Wren on a pedestal now, I worried she’d never come down.
He gave me a disappointed expression and sighed as he turned to the books in front of me. “I’ve never heard of male Fates. Do you think they are something else?”
“Or nothing at all,” I protested, but I didn’t believe that. Not really. It was all too coincidental. There was something Mythic about them, of that I was certain. I just didn’t know if they were the Fates, as suggested, or something more.
There were so many unknown factors. I hated it. I’d become complacent in our exile, and this much uncertainty was driving me crazy.
Teron grabbed another book from the stack I had in front of me. “We both know that she isn’t nothing.” With that, he pulled on some gloves and gently opened the book in front of him, leaving me to chew over the problem once more. We sat in silence as we searched book after book for answers.
The Oracle had sent her here, and we wouldn’t make the mistake of ignoring an Oracle again. I needed to work out how to protect my friends, and yes, that meant protecting the girl.
“You know, you could always reach out to?—”
I shook my head immediately. “No.” I shut down the very idea before Teron even whispered it onto the wind. There was only one God who was as pissed at the Fates, and the Greek Mythics, but I would cut out my tongue before I asked him for help.
Teron snorted. “Stubborn.” But that was it. He didn’t argue or contradict.
We went back to work, and I got progressively more annoyed by the lack of information we possessed. One thing was becoming increasingly obvious, though: there were no male Fates. Not since the first recorded turn of the wheel. That didn’t mean that there never could be. Occasionally, the power was even vested in a single deity. But that deity was always a woman.
I sighed and closed the book. It was hard to predict the pattern, and it wasn’t for a nearly obsolete God like me to know. “It’s going to come down to a fight, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t a question, not really. As soon as she’d walked into the building, the signs were there. She had altered our destiny as soon as she’d swooned at Tryphone’s feet.
Closing his book too, Teron met my eyes. “Yes, my friend. It will come to a fight. Perhaps the most important fight of our eternal lives. Are you okay with that?”
Surprisingly, I was. We’d had an eternity of nothingness. A purpose was already doing us good. However, I wasn’t a warrior God. Teron was a warrior. Milonos. They were built to defend and defeat. I was created for what came after.
I nodded. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that things will change. My head knows that this is our chance. This is a cause worth fighting for.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And what does your heart say about the pretty human?”
My heart? I was purposefully ignoring it. And my body? That traitor strained toward her every hour of the day, like it knew that my only purpose was to protect her and then fuck her into the next century. I couldn’t let myself get close, though, because it would spell the end of me. One of us had to keep a cool head when it came to the human.
“My heart is firmly locked away in the prison of my chest where it belongs,” I told Teron, the sound of the chair scraping on the wooden floorboards making me wince as I stood. “I will be the faithful hound that destiny has cast me as, but I won’t fall in love with her like the rest of our brothers. I will keep a clear mind for us all.”
Teron had the audacity to chuckle at me, and I glared. Striding out of the room, I stomped down to my quarters like a petulant youngling. Wren’s laughter drifted up through the open windows, and I gritted my teeth.
She was everywhere, except one place. I opened the heavy door to my quarters, moving through them sightlessly. They hadn’t changed in a thousand years. The same heavy wooden furniture. The same coverings. The same tapestries on the wall and copper wash bowl in the corner. It had been the same for centuries upon centuries.
The broken pieces patched, but never changed.
Walking to another heavy door, I stepped out to the walled courtyard beyond my rooms and sighed as the warmth of the earth surged up to greet me. Surrounded by the small copse of fruiting trees, I let my toes sink into the soft clover grass. I spent a lot of time tending this garden, and it had become more of a shrine than a courtyard at this point. A place I could escape from the constant temptation.
Removing my clothes, I knelt down in the grass and let life seep back into my bones. I might be a forgotten God, no longer worshiped by many humans, but the townspeople were sometimes enough to rejuvenate me for a moment.
The energy of the nature around me, the soft budding of the trees—it all meant something to me. And yet my body still strained toward Wren. My dick throbbed as I thought about her, making me grit my teeth. She called to me; I could admit that to myself, even if I couldn’t admit it to Teron. She was so beautiful, with her open face and plush lips. Full breasts. The curve of her fruitful body.
Growling at myself and my hard dick, I reached down and gripped it, biting my lip hard in annoyance. I could hear the soft music of her voice, even though her words were lost in the distance.
I let my hand travel up and down my cock, and I groaned, throwing my head back and closing my eyes. I imagined it was her hand around me, gripping me just right, sliding along me with the perfect amount of speed and pressure.
My moans echoed off the stone walls, and I pumped faster. In my mind, it wasn’t her hand but her tight little body sucking me inside her as I thrust, wild and free for the first time in so long. I imagined her whispery little moans, the way those puffy pink lips would wrap around my cock like an embrace. The hooding of her eyes as pleasure made it hard to keep them open. Her mouth opened in a little gasping O.
Fuck.
All too soon, my balls were pulling up and I was shooting my seed across the clover lawn, feeding my release back into the earth. Slumping back onto my heels, I grunted angrily at myself and turned my face to the sun. Cold air whipped off the mountains, making goosebumps spread across my overheated skin.
Slowly, I stood, pulling on my clothes. This was as much as Wren could take from me, because I’d meant what I said to Teron. I wouldn’t give her my heart. I’d given that away once and almost died for the pleasure.
I wouldn’t hurry to make that mistake again.