I lifted my glitter-coated arm, the formerly bright sparkles now slicked with blood and gore, not just from my enemies. “Maybe shower, then sleep. And then we need to see Bence.”
“Definitely shower. And Bence,” he added, a haunted expression cutting through the weariness he also wore. “What am I going to say to him?”
“That you love him, and that he’s got us.”
“Henrik’s body, I should?—”
I put my hands on his cheeks, forcing him to focus on me before he could wander off. “Someone will bring him in, and in the morning, we’ll make arrangements for their burials. Tonight, we can’t help him. We can only help Bence.”
He nodded, sheathed his broadsword, and swept me off my too-tired-to-protest feet.
We showered first so we wouldn’t scare the little guy with the gore we wore like second skin. My knees felt like jelly as we walked down the long staircase to the bunker.
But my own needs slipped away as we rounded the last corner into the bunker itself, and an arrow of a little boy hit us both in the knees, full-body sobs as he clung to our legs.
Leigh was a few paces behind, huffing and puffing. “I’m so sorry. He’s been with me every minute, since… you know. But he’s inconsolable, understandably.”
Valens scooped up Bence, pressing the little boy’s face to his shoulder as he hugged him, whispering words of comfort as I hugged Leigh.
“Thank you for looking out for him. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
When I pulled back, her eyes were as misty as my own. “That’s what family’s for. The maidens brought Nugget with them from the enclave. I was thinking, if you were okay with it, I’d bring him down from our room so Bence could have a buddy?”
“That’s a great idea. I think anything we can do for him right now, we should.”
After that, we took Bence upstairs for dinner, bath, and bed. He fell asleep right in the middle of our bed, clutching a wolf plushie Savvy had retrieved for him from his grandparents’ room, along with his things.
I stared down at his innocent, sleeping face, more emotions than I could name swirling around in my chest like a hurricane. He was ours now. To protect and love and care for, ready or not. But when I looked up at Valens, I knew we were as ready as we could be.
We crawled into bed on either side of our adopted son, and we all three slept.
The strange battle-and-retreat pattern continued for ten days. Each day, the ODL came in the night, with some variation of attackers augmenting their numbers. Each day, we rebuffed their advances, taking a small number of losses each time, but never as many as they did. Most importantly, we kept them away from the castle, where our weaker pack mates were sheltered. Over the course of those days, our own allies began to arrive and augment our numbers.
To my surprise, the goblins were the very first to arrive.
I gaped as their delegation rode through the front gates on steam-powered war machines.
“What in the ever-loving fuckisthat?” Valens asked, mouth agape as he stared up at the rickety-looking thing that rattled past us. It was at stark odds with the front of the castle, so pristinely built even after being burned.
“You said a bad word,” Bence said from between us, where he held his wolfie in one hand and my hand with the other.
“Sorry, buddy.” Valens winced, giving me a regretful look. We’d both been working on cleaning up our language for the little guy, but it had only been a few days, and sometimes we slipped.
“Do you see that? What do you think it is?” I asked, trying to distract Bence.
He just shrugged, staring up at it with as much confusion as we felt. This… catapult—ithadto be some sort of catapult, by the looks of it—seemed to be held together with little more than bubble gum and hope.
Yet roll on by it did, with a neon-green-haired goblin riding proudly atop it, one hand on his hip, one knee on a board, as if it were the prow of a pirate ship and he the proud captain.
“If I live to be a million years old, I doubt I’ll ever see anything weirder,” Valens mumbled, watching in awe as the goblins roll-clunked past us in a raucous stream.
“Oh, that’s Grand Inventor Rivetsky. He probably built that,” Olivia exclaimed, waving up at him with genuine enthusiasm. “He apparently flew to the closest goblin clan and used local resources to build those. It’s impressive how much he got done in such a short time frame. They’ve been rolling this way under a magical glamor for days.”
I knew she had spent quite a bit of time with some of the goblins, but I’d been doing a lot of guarding at the time, and not a lot of bonding. Though now she said it, the green-haired fellow looked pretty familiar. “Are these the Canadian goblins?”
“Yes, they insisted on being at the head of the goblin procession, which caused quite a stir with the local clan, but apparently, they won the argument. Brielle asked me to be here to greet them, since we worked so closely together while regrowing their gardens.” A little green bullet darted out of the procession, arrowing toward Olivia with scary precision. Instinctively, I stepped in front of her, despite the fact that it was no longer my job.
For my troubles, I took a goblin toddler to the knees.
