Page 24 of A Single Thread Of Hope

“Come now, child. It has ended well enough for you, has it not?”

This bitch has to be screwing with me right now.

“By ended well, did you mean that I was forcibly impregnated by a piece of fruit”—apologies to Mrs. Selene from Health class, who I’d argued with in my teenage righteousness that I shouldn’thaveto put a condom on a banana, since it wasn’t like I couldget pregnant by fruit—“and then spent months running from monsters you kept sending my way?” Sucking in a feral breath, I hissed, “Youkilledthe closest thing I had to family.”

The elder Fate waved a hand. “It was her time anyway.”

Nate growled beside me, his body vibrating with the same rage I felt. “What the fuck do you want? Leave before I rend your heads from your bodies and dance in your fucking lifeblood.”

The one who looked the youngest—barely older than me—gasped at the brutality of the words, but the middle one hushed her. “Wren Mahone, I am Lachesis of the Moirai. You’ve met my sister, Atropos.” The older one smirked at me. “And my other sister, Clotho.”

“It’s not nice to meet you. I loathe you, in fact,” I grumbled, and Tryp chuckled behind me.

Lachesis rolled her eyes, as if I was being a drama queen. An annoyance. “Regardless, we have come seeking a truce. Despite our best efforts, you are annoyingly resilient, and now you have garnered more support than I would have liked from some powerful deities in our own Pantheon, and others.”

She was talking about Hades and Persephone, I knew. I sent up—or down, I guess—a silent thanks that he’d rolled the dice and come out on my side of this conflict.

Demke snorted. “No one is dealing with you. Your words are as twisted and poisonous as a tick on a great beast. You need to disappear. Leave my island and accept your own fate. You will get no quarter here.”

Clotho fluttered her lashes at Demke, and I gripped his hand, pulling him closer to me and glaring at her. She just smiled prettily at me, though it was a shark’s smile.

Atropos sneered at him. “Your island? You mean yourprison, relic. You are getting wiped this turn around, and everyone knows it. There aren’t enough people even in this backwater little village to keep your memory alive.”

I stiffened, and Demke’s fingers flexed in mine soothingly. Was it true? Would they be wiped away, even with all this effort?

That can’t be true. I won’t let it be true.

Demke shrugged. “Then I go with the satisfaction that you’ll be coming with me, Atropos.”

The smirk fell from her face as her barb didn’t reach its mark. Instead, she turned back to me. “Another downfall at the hands oflove.” She spat the word like it was arsenic. “You Minoans are nothing if not predictable, even if I didn’t know your future.” She shook her head at me, as if I was less than dog shit on her shoe. “Why you? Such a disappointment, when we have been holding this world together for centuries. The universe choseyou?”

Clotho giggled. “We did try everything to keep you from this fate. Tried to turn you so many times from this path, gently at first, but you are unfortunately stubborn. That shitty boyfriend your senior year? He was meant to get you pregnant, but as always, you were toogoodto do anything that would jeopardize your future.” She rolled her eyes. “We tugged at all the strings around you, yet you stayed stubbornly on course. Even when we cut your parents’ threads, you didn’t do what a normal teenage girl would do and go off the rails, maybe get a drug addiction or drive off a cliff. No, you had to get a job and then fall into the hands of the damn Celtic Mythics.”

“My parents?”

Lachesis sighed. “This thread really is wasted on you. You are no great mind, no great warrior. You are all tooordinary, Wren Mahone. Yes, your parents. They were meant to live long, happy lives, but your stubborn goodness meant they had to die young. Honestly, a weird parasite on a cruise? What part of that sounds natural? We couldn’t directly cut your strings, but we control the fates of all others. All the humans you know? They could all die with a snap of my sister’s fingers, and it would be your fault.”

I was shaking so hard, I could feel it vibrate in my bones. They’d killed my parents. They’d killed my parents to stop some random destiny that may or may not happen. They’d made me an orphan to keep their power.

“Why?Why go to all that effort, just to feed me an apple and do all this yourself?” I could barely remember my parents’ faces, and they’d murdered them fornothing.“I don’t understand…” I breathed.

A hand landed on my back, but I didn’t turn to see which one of my bonds was anchoring me.

“We were loading the dice,” Clotho responded, and Atropos hissed at her, but the younger-looking woman shrugged. “What does it matter now? It will end how it’s supposed to, right? You were meant to meet your soulmate at your shitty job, and you’d get pregnant quickly, and thenthey”—she waved a disgusted hand at my stomach—“would be even stronger. He had some ancient Mayan bloodline, but no one wants the Mayans back in power. So he had an unfortunate accident on the freeway, and we did what we had to do to load the board in our favor.

“We can’t kill the new Fates ourselves, but we could make sure they were snuffed out while still defenseless. Best way to do that was in your womb, while you were too stupid to know what was going on.” She gave Nate a kittenish grin. “But we didn’t prepare for the Celtic God. He was an annoying blindspot for us,” she cooed. Her eyes slid back to me, and all coquettishness disappeared. “You know the rest.”

She made it all sound so reasonable. Like my death, and the death of my unborn babies, was just another day at the office.

“Are we to believe you’ve had a change of heart?” Nate spat the words at them like bullets.

Atropos rolled her eyes. “No. But we see the future. We see where this ends without a truce, and some of the endings are notones we wish to risk.” She shivered almost subconsciously. “We see all, God of War. All the prophecies. All the outcomes.”

I didn’t see the golden knife until it slipped from the sleeve of her long dress and was flying through the air.

“Nate!”

But the knife was flying toward me, not toward Nate. I watched in frozen horror as it flipped end over end toward my chest.

---