Page 62 of Tangled Threads Of Fate

I led Wren over, holding her elbow gently. Demke remained where he was. “I am going to see Stavros.” With that, he turned and left.

Stavros was the unofficial leader of the town, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t an elected role. He was just an elder, and I was fairly sure he was related to at least seventy percent of the island’s population. However, he was respected, and the people listened to him. That was good enough for us.

Tryp pulled the seat out for Wren, and we all found our places around her. Néit sat beside her, though, glaring at the rest of us, daring us to argue about his right to be beside her. As if we ever would. We’d learned to share a long time ago.

Teron didn’t take a seat. “I am just going to speak to Eladio—he’s the village doctor,” he added for Wren and Néit’s benefit. “I need a few things that can only be obtained through traditional means.”

He meant drugs. He needed drugs, in case something happened to Wren and he needed to medically intervene. The idea of her going into labor scared the shit out of me. I was tied to her now, as was Tryp, and childbirth in humans was a dangerous endeavor at the best of times, let alone when there were multiples.

As if she sensed my anxiety, she reached beneath the table and wrapped her fingers in mine. She smiled up at Teron. “Do you want us to order you anything?”

I didn’t need to be one of his closest confidantes to know that Teron was becoming more and more smitten by Wren. The smile he gave her was one filled with tentative warmth. “No, thank you. I don’t know how long this will take. I’ll order if you’re still here when I get back.” I saw his fingers flex against his side, like he was desperate to lift his hand and stroke her face. Instead,he turned to Milo. “Walking around town is fine, but if she is tired or uncomfortable, straight home, okay?” he said sternly, before softening his features as he looked back at Wren again. “Exhaustion is a real factor at this stage. I don’t want you to push yourself too far.”

She shrugged. “Okay.” She was a beautiful, amicable soul, and so far hadn’t told us all to go screw ourselves. She definitely had the patience of a saint, with all the overbearing supernatural beings in her life.

With that, Teron left, and she leaned against Néit’s bulging bicep. “He isn’t wrong about the exhaustion. It’s nice to be out, though.”

Helena appeared with a bunch of food and laid it all around the table, including a glass of milk for Wren. She was stiff and kind of wary, which was okay. We had that effect, even without Demke here. Milo was still a huge guy, and a lot of humans found him physically menacing. I mean, he was basically a marshmallow if you knew him. But coupled with his “otherness,” it was disconcerting. I was fairly sure that Tryp and I, with our sometimes synchronized movements, could also be unsettling.

Wren was the only one here who was just sunshine and happiness. Or at least, it felt that way to me.

Milo pushed the food toward Wren. “Eat. We still have places to go after this.”

She picked up some bread and nibbled it. “We do?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, smiling widely, looking at her with a look that could only be blind love. That would have worried me a week or so ago, but now, I totally understood. Fate had pushed us into her arms, but it was Wren herself that had me enamored.

We talked about other things while we ate. Normal things. Things Milo had read in baby books. Stockpiling formula, just in case pumping wasn’t enough, or Wren decided to mix feed. Fencing the pool. Baby names.

An hour passed, and I could see Wren start to flag a little. We needed to move if we were going to finish our errands and not risk exhaustion.

Full and content, I walked into the cafe to pay Helena. Pulling out an even hundred, I passed it to the woman who was still eyeballing us. She pushed it into the cashbox, but met my eyes directly. She had some balls, I’d give her that.

“She is safe, yes?”

“From us? Yes. I would protect her with my life. From others? No. She is being hunted. You need to be safe too. Maybe tell the boys to stay on the mainland for a little while?” Helena had two sons, who each had large families that came to visit occasionally. We didn’t need any collateral in a war I knew was coming. “Maybe you and Stavros could go visit them?”

Helena nodded once, frowning, and I walked back outside. I tried not to think about what could be coming, and the effect it would have on the village, or even the island as a whole. I wasn’t going to borrow trouble just yet. The wards could hold.

Wren was cuddled into Néit’s chest, and he looked growly, though he was tolerating Milo running his hand up and down her back.

I pointed to the left, and we all wandered further down the dirt sidings of the road. Wren looked around. “I haven’t seen Cy. You think he’s okay? You don’t think he’s been hit by a car or anything, do you?”

I snorted. “I doubt being hit by a tractor would hold him down. But I saw him earlier napping beneath the trees at the top of the hill.” There were even more strays with him now.

We stopped outside a warehouse made of repurposed tin that looked about as rundown as it could possibly be while still standing. Milo knocked on the tin, and a tiny woman in dirty overalls appeared. She looked warily out at us, but not in an unwelcoming manner. Like Helena, she just wasn’t used to usall at the same time, and definitely not with a heavily pregnant human in tow.

Tryp grinned at her, his affable face enough to put anyone at ease. “You can put down the hammer, Sophia. We’re just here for the things we ordered.”

She looked between us. “Did you bring the truck?”

He frowned at her. “We can’t carry it between us? We’re very strong,” he said, winking at Wren, making her roll her eyes.

Sophia snorted, leading us through to the back. Whenever we needed things shipped to the town, Sophia and her husband, Myron, let us use their warehouse. They were builders, but there wasn’t a huge call for it out here, outside of patching old places and making furniture. Occasionally, they’d do a whole new place, but most of the time, people who weren’t locals would get one of the bigger firms from the city to do new construction.

So acting as a halfway point for us let them bring in some extra passive income. It also exposed them to us a lot more than the average townsperson.

Sophia threw open the door to the storage room, and I gaped. It was packed full. Tryp turned to stare at me, like I was the one who’d gone on a shopping spree, but I just shrugged. It hadn’t been me.

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