“Sorry,” one of the men who had been standing around watching apologized sheepishly as he pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “They tend to do that.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be service animals eventually, Fletch?” I called, mostly teasing as the man helped Bat get up by picking up the toddler and holding him out of reach of the surrounding ponies.
“Supposed to be is the key word, Gwen,” a lilting British accent—very much like the ones of my own alphas—said drily from behind me. “They are selfish beasties on the best of days. I fear the day one of them has to lead a blind person through a busy street.”
Eleanor was emerging from the house with a fresh tray of cookies and a little girl dancing around her legs. “Espie, darling, you will get no cookies if I drop them on the floor.”
“Then I’ll eat them off of the floor!” the little girl replied without missing a beat, answering Eleanor as if it was a completely obvious conclusion for her. “Uncle Clint said god made dirt and dirt don’t—”
She was cut off as the alpha in question swept her off of her little feet. “Don’t tell Aunt Eleanor that, little one, or I’ll be sleeping outside tonight.”
There was a chorus of chuckles from the onlookers who were posted up around the yard.
This was the fifth time we had flown in from the UK in order to visit the two other omegas who had been pulled from time by Merlin.
The friendship had formed surprisingly easily—probably because there wasn’t anyone else living on this Earth that could understand us better than each other—and I always enjoyed seeing them.
It also didn’t hurt to pull Arthur from his busy days back in England. I thought the alpha was a workaholic in pre-medieval Logres, but modern day Arthur had him beat.
Even now I was pretty sure he was off somewhere with Eleanor’s alpha Cassian and Juneau’s alpha Doc plotting some business venture or another. The three were like birds of a feather in more ways than one and usually spent most of their time together during our vacations to Cascadia, the ranch the Calloway brothers owned in Colorado.
Fletcher, seemingly having decided to leave Bat to the circling ponies despite the alpha’s calls for help, deposited the now smudged toddler back into his mother’s arms.
“I couldn’t save the father, but I did save your heir,” he told her with mock-solemnity before turning to head into the house.
Juneau just chuckled and snagged one of the cookies off the plate for the little boy.
“Bat,” she called, raising her voice over the snuffling of the ponies. “If you can make it back to me can you grab Alex’s diaper bag from inside the house?”
“If I don’t get eaten by these demon ponies, then sure,” Bat replied easily, pushing down the seeking nose of one of them as he tried to make his way out of the throng.
“Sweetling,” Bedivere said, materializing at my shoulder with a sleeping baby in the crook of his arm. “I finally managed to get her down.”
I accepted the baby, my heart squeezing the way it always did when her face scrunched in her sleep, making her look grumpily adorable.
Addison King was the absolute light of our lives in every possible way. She had round cheeks, bow lips, and wispy dark hair that made each and every one of her fathers obsessed with every movement the little girl made.
We had briefly considered naming her Adelaide after my mom, but in the end chose to go with something close and use my mom’s childhood nickname instead. I had learned the hard way about living up to my name and I wanted Addie to be able to have something that was just hers.
“Gosh, I swear Alex never slept that well in the first year,” Juneau said enviously as she smiled down at Addie, her hands moving automatically as she wiped stray bits of chocolate off of Alex’s face.
“Bedivere is like a straight shot of melatonin for babies,” I told her with a grin as I snuggled Addie close and took a deep inhale of her clean infant scent. My favorite scent in the world right now.
“Really?” Juneau remarked, holding the toddler up to Bedivere. “You try it with him then.”
“I’m fairly sure it only works with my own children,” Bedivere murmured softly as he and Alex stared suspiciously at each other. “And I don’t think this little one likes me very much.”
“And that’s my cue,” Bat said as he scooped the little boy from Bedivere’s arm. He’d reappeared out of thin air much like the animal he was nicknamed after with a dark blue diaper bag draped over his shoulder.
The heavily tattooed alpha lifted Alex up and gave him a little sniff, his nose scrunching with distaste at whatever scent he found. “Phew, you must be biologically related to Rex, no one else makes shit smell quite so foul.”
“I heard that,” Rex’s voice came from the house as he and the rest of our packs came to gather on the porch, arms laden with food. “And we don’t knowwhoAlex is related to, remember?”
“Besides,” Storm said as he and Podcast put plates of food out in front of Juneau. “If anyone has stinky shit it’s definitely you Bat. Who was the one who blew up the airplane bath—”
“All right!” Merlin said, clapping his hands together. “That is quite enough talk about what leaves one’s body. Mayhaps we can talk about what goes into our bodies instead? This feast looks marvelous!”
Despite being awake in the future for nearly a year now, Merlin still spoke in the stilted cadence that I had grown familiar with during my time in Camelot.
