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Author's note
As ever, if you have questions feel free to email me or leave a comment. Either way, I'll try to respond in a timely manner.
This is primarily an incest story, but it is also sci-fi/fantasy, and supernatural elements are not incidental to the plot. Additionally, many chapters will feature elements of other categories, particularly group sex and anal.
All sexual acts are consensual and involve parties who are at least eighteen years of age.
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"It's gonna be a girl," Mike said, wrapping his arms around Patty from behind. His warm palms rested flat atop her swollen belly. "Can't you just feel it?"
Patty smiled. She'd dreamt of her little girl many times. But other nights, it was a boy. He'd grow up to be the Patriarch of Summer. Or she'd steal Mike away when she came of age. Or he'd be the greatest lover she'd ever had. One way or another, their child would be the most beautiful the Homelands had ever known. That, she knew for a certainty.
The only question was whether she'd get to raise her own child.
It had been more than a month since they'd learned the true price of the Eternal Garden's support. The weekly trips to the temple were bad enough. If she never had to see Kurt again, that would be just fine with Patty. He'd grown increasingly nasty of late. But of course it didn't stop there. One of them would have their child ripped from their breast. Taken away and raised by strangers, brainwashed, and returned to them as a zealot.
Most of the time, she simply tried not to think about it. Other times, Patty found herself hoping that it was Annie's child. Or Veronica's or her mother's. As long as it wasn't hers.
Those thoughts made her sick.
It wasn't a fate she'd want anyone to suffer. And if it ended up being someone else, she'd probably only blame herself for jinxing them, ridiculous as that was. She just couldn't help herself. There was no easy way to cope with the grim knowledge.
Veronica's strategy was to punish Nick. Ostensibly, her goal was to convince him that they couldn't let their father force them to accept the terms he'd negotiated with the Eternal Garden. To goad her brother into rebelling against the king, rather than risk having their child taken away from them. But Patty rather suspected that her sister understood as well as the rest of them did that it would be futile to oppose their father. She was just looking for someone to take her frustration out on, and Nick was gracious enough to let her do so.
The poor guy. Sometimes she envied the two of them. Other times, she wondered why Nick put up with her.
"You think a boy?" her brother asked.
"Hmm?" Patty murmured. "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I do. You're probably right though. She doesn't kick hard enough to be a boy."
"Any thoughts about what to name her?"
Patty drew a deep breath.
"Everything okay?" Mike asked.
She patted his hand. "Yeah."
A cool breeze picked up, stirring the hem of her gauzy white dress. The smell of salt and sea filled her nostrils. Sometimes, it was easy to forget all the bullshit, to see Summer as the paradise that it should be. But those moments were far too few.
"It won't be us," Mike said. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. "I promise."
Patty looked out from the gazebo, down to the shore, and imagined two little children playing in the sand. Shrieking as the waves crashed and laughing as they ran away from them. A little boy and a little girl.
That was absurd, of course. Even if they didn't have to hand their child over to the Eternal Garden, they wouldn't raise them here in Summer. They'd take them back to the Playground, as their parents had done with them. As had always been their people's custom. The Homelands were no place for children.
Still, she could just
see
her little boy splashing salt water at his sister. Could imagine how she'd scold him, all the while thinking him the cutest thing alive.
"Don't do that," she said at last, voice small. "I'd prefer to think you're the type of guy who keeps his promises."
Her brother didn't respond.
"You should convince Troy to knock your mother up," she said.
Mike snorted.
"Improve our odds of dodging the bullet," Patty continued.
"He wouldn't need any convincing," her brother said. "But Mom's not in any hurry to get pregnant again." His voice grew softer. "You'd think we were some terrible burden."
"Maybe one of you was," she replied.
That earned her another kiss.
"I'm sorry I've been kinda distant lately," Patty said. "It's just...I don't know how you guys can take it so lightly. Every danged one of you." A flash of anger hit her, but she did her best to suppress it. She didn't want to become Veronica. It wasn't Mike's fault that he wasn't as emotional as she was. That his body wasn't pumped full of hormones. That he could barely sleep at night, between the aches and pains and cramps and bloating, the bleeding and the food cravings, the random bouts of sickness and, worse of all, the crippling fear. "Guess it's true what they say. A woman becomes a mother the moment she conceives, but a man doesn't become a father until he holds his child in his arms."
Silence reigned.
"Guess it is," Mike said, after a fashion. His tone was somewhere between apologetic and wounded. Closer to the latter, really.
"I'm sorry, sweetie," she said. "I know it's real to you too."
"Forget it," he said, smoothing her hair. "I understand."
Patty sighed. Maybe she wasn't all that different from her sister after all.
"You've been gr-"
Just then, she saw him.
Kurt was strolling across the beach, holding a pair of sandals in his hands. As ever, he had a white tunic on and wore his weight in gold. To judge by his relaxed posture, his ambling gait, you'd think he was just out for a walk. Not a care in the world. Nor any particular reason for being here, on this particular stretch of beach.
As if he hadn't all but denounced House Moody. As if the island that had been his father's every bit as much as it was her mother's still belonged to him.
"What's he doing here?" Mike asked.
For a moment, Patty remembered the dragon he'd been when she'd met him. His skin remained fair and smooth, covered lightly with dark hair rather than metallic scales.
But there was a trace of it in his voice. Fire in his breath.
"Oh, hey Pattycakes," Kurt called out. "Didn't realize anyone was here."
Right. Of course he hadn't.
Mike's arms left her. He stepped into the entrance to the gazebo, filling the empty space. "Illuminated One," he said with just a little bit of an edge to his otherwise reverent tone. "Pleasure to see you outside the temple."
"I'm sure it is," Kurt said with an amicable smile.
Patty curtsied to her cousin, trying to remember the kind, modest boy she'd once fallen in love with rather than simply seeing the cold-hearted, self-important man he'd become.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?" her cousin asked.
Neither she nor Mike replied.
Kurt laughed to himself as he stepped nearer the gazebo. His facial expression was relaxed, but Patty could see the tension in his body. Or feel it in his Libido.
She wasn't even sure which.
"Not at all," Mike said at last.
Patty laid a hand on her brother's shoulder. His skin was warm. Past warm. A fire burned within him. His skin felt like a stone that had been taken out of the fireplace and had only just begun to cool off. She hadn't felt that in a long time.
"So," Kurt said, eying Mike up and down. "This is really the guy you left me for?"
"Kurt," Patty said. "Don't."
"What?" he asked, looking innocent as you please. "Just a little surprised is all."
Mike cleared his throat but otherwise ignored the bait.
"You left Summer," Patty said. "I'd have been glad to see you return with me."
"Sure you would have," he said. "That explains why you waited a whole two days to let some other guy squirt a child into your belly."
Patty grabbed Mike's hand. "We should go."
"What's the hurry?" Kurt asked, propping a hand up on the rail of the gazebo.
Her cousin's glowing, golden eyes locked onto the silver orbs of her brother. Patty wished he'd direct that stare at her. Wished he'd leave Mike out of it. Whatever problems he had with her, there was no reason to take it out on her brother. He'd never even met Kurt until after Patty had told him that she wanted to have his children.
"Please," Patty said. "What do you want from me?"
Finally, he looked at her. It wasn't easy to meet his gaze, what with the light radiating from his sockets, but she forced herself to do so. "Nothing at all," he said. "If I expected anything more than that from you, I'd be sorely disappointed, wouldn't I?"
"I think you should go now," Mike said, inching closer to the sunlit creep.
"Don't even think about it," Kurt said softly, without so much as bothering to look at Mike. His eyes remained locked on Patty.
"You're upsetting her," Mike said.
"She can handle herself," Kurt said. "Doesn't need you to play knight in scaly armor."
"Mike," Patty said, squeezing his shoulder more tightly.
He was going to do something stupid. She could sense it. Was there any way to stop him, without hurting or embarrassing him? She didn't want to emasculate him in front of Kurt. But neither did she want to see him get hurt. Or start something they couldn't finish.
To her surprise, she felt his skin cool.
"See you in temple," Mike told Kurt. Then, with that, he gave Patty's hand a gentle squeeze and took them back to her family's villa.
"Thank you," she said, hugging him as tightly as she could now that her abdomen looked like a watermelon. "That could've got ugly."
Mike smoothed her hair back and kissed her forehead. "I'm sorry he's being such a jerk. And sorry we can't do anything about it because of his mother."
