“And the fire,” Gage said as he lit the logs that had been waiting in the stone ring. The flames burst up, highlighting his face and turning it demonic.
I set my coffee down on the table beside my chair, pulled the blanket around me, and sat down. All without saying a word. When I looked at the men again, they were staring at me.
“Well?” I asked. “Do we have skewers for the marshmallows?”
As if they had been waiting for a command, the men launched into action. A few minutes later, we were hunched in around the fire, our marshmallows extended on long metal skewers to roast over the fire. It was fun. So simple, but fun to be out there doing something I'd never gotten to do as a child.
“Oh, shit!” I shrieked when my marshmallow caught fire. I jerked it out of the flames and blew it out. “Dang it. It's burnt.” I grimaced at the black flakes.
“That's not a bad thing,” Gideon said as he held half a croissant open for me. It already had a piece of chocolate on it.
I put the marshmallow atop the chocolate, and he flicked a bit of the blackened bits off the marshmallow before he closed the lid on the croissant. Then he deftly used the croissant to pull the marshmallow off the metal skewer.
“There. Try that,” he said.
“Oh, I get to be the guinea pig?” I smirked. But then I took a bite and groaned. “Oh, my God. This is amazing.”
The men rushed to make their own croissant s'mores, and then we groaned together. If anyone had been listening in, they would have thought an orgy was going on. It occurred to me that sound carried at night, especially across water, and I giggled, wondering what the neighbors across the lake were thinking.
“You like that, huh?” Gage asked. “Is it like being a kid again?”
The question was odd. I answered it honestly. “I never did stuff like this when I was a kid. What about you?”
“I wasn't a kid in this life. Hades made us fully grown. And I can't remember my last life. Although, I doubt it involved s'mores.”
Gideon snorted a laugh. “No marshmallows back then.”
“Whoa,” I whispered. “I didn't consider that you had previous lives before this one. Lives that were probably lived in ancient times.”
“Easy now,” Garret drawled. “We don't know if it wasancienttimes.”
“Well, when were you created?” I asked.
“In the eighteen hundreds,” Gage said. “I don't remember the exact year.”
“You don't remember your birthday?” I asked in horror.
“We weren't really born, Indie,” Gideon said. “And there was a lot for us to learn in the early days. We were like baby giraffes.”
“Baby giraffes?” Gage asked, then chortled. “What the fuck?”
“Baby giraffes have to walk as soon as they're born,” I said, both surprised and pleased that I understood Gideon's reference. “And mama giraffes are brutal. I once saw a video of a mama giraffe who climbed over a fence, but her baby couldn't make it over. She just kept walking. Never even looked back when it cried for her.”
“Holy shit!” Garret exclaimed. “That's beyond brutal. That's fucking cold. Callous. I had no idea giraffes were such bitches.”
I laughed. “It's just how they evolved, I guess. They have to escape predators. Those who can't keep up get left behind.”
“Even the babies?” Garret asked in a horrified whine.
Gideon motioned at him and Gage. “That's how it was with us. I mean, Hades wasn't callous, but he kind of tossed us to another Cerberus for training and took off right after our creation. We didn't see him again until we were ready to go to Earth.”
“So, you were abandoned too,” I whispered.
The men went still.
Gage reached over and took my hand. “No, sweetheart. You were a baby, while we were grown men with full lifetimes under our belts, even though we couldn't remember them. We were mature souls who had agreed to work for Hades in exchange for eternal life. He's our creator, but not our father.”
“Don't tell the OG Cerberus that,” Garret huffed.
