Terra's Victory (Destiny's Trinities Book 7) by Tracy Cooper-Posey Read Free Book Online

they’re out among trees. The dryads won’t leave their trees, so there aren’t any here.” He dropped his hands and looked at Octavia’s beautiful face and Remmy’s clear-eyed gaze. “I feel as if Octavia and I are the only simple humans in the room.”
    Octavia shook her head. “Seaveth is human.”
    “None of you is merely human anymore,” Remmy said, his voice low and rumbling in his chest. “Or you would not be here.”
    * * * * *
    Alex had to search to find Mia and when he did, he realized why it had been hard to find her. She was talking to her trinity and all three of them towered over her. Alex had met them only briefly. Hades was a six-hundred-year-old vampire with old-fashioned ideas about a woman’s place in the world. Barrett was a third generation human hunter with odd ideas about the superiority of hunters. Ekota was the son of a full-blood demon and a human woman and with that pedigree should have been the most unstable of the three. As it turned out, though, he was the thinker, corralling the other two and giving them a direction.
    It took all Mia’s energy to keep them focused. She was talking to them now, her tone quiet but furious. Alex extended his hearing as he approached them, sorting out her voice from among the hundred or so others in the room.
    “…don’t give a shit what other demons think of you, Ekota. You’re in a trinity now and that comes with responsibilities they don’t understand, so tell them to shove their sensibilities up their ass. Better yet, tell them to come see me and I’ll deal with them.”
    Ekota smiled. “Can I quote you?”
    “Knock yourself out,” Mia told him dryly. “Barrett, if I hear you talk about simple-minded humans one more time, this simple minded human is going to knock you into next week.”
    Barrett’s gaze flickered the short length of her, from the low-heeled pumps to the pretty dress she was wearing, to the sable-colored tangle of hair around her shoulders.
    “Do not test me,” Mia added. “Hades, I think you can guess what I’m going to tell you.”
    “I imagine you’re going to tell me to put up with it.”
    “No, you idiot! Enjoy it! There are all sorts of pleasures and compensations that come with being bonded in a trinity, that your Elizabethan sensibilities should appreciate. All three of you, go talk to the others. Find out for yourselves and stop bitching to me about how hard this is. Go on. Go!”
    Alex put his hand on her shoulder and she glanced up at him. She was hopping mad.
    Her trinity hesitated, glancing at one another.
    “Do I have to move you with a cattle prod?” she demanded. “Go and mingle. Go on.”
    The three turned and moved away, only not as a threesome. They scattered, going separate ways.
    Alex shook his head. “They still resent the bonding. I don’t know which is stronger, my admiration for their stubbornness, or my desire to bang their heads together.”
    Mia turned to him with a sigh. Now he could see the definite bulge of her pregnancy, showing beneath the elegant drape of the dress. He resisted the urge to put his hand on her belly, as he did often when it was just him, Wyatt and Mia. “I still don’t understand why you, out of all of us, got three recalcitrant men.”
    “Because I’m more stubborn than all three of them,” Mia said, with a snap in her voice.
    True . Alex held his teeth together to stop himself saying it aloud. Mia wasn’t in the mood to take that truth well.
    She was still scowling. “When are you and Wyatt going to stop coddling me, anyway?” she demanded. “I’m only pregnant, not disabled.”
    “Any one of them could tear your limbs off without breaking sweat, even as strong as you are. It’s nothing to do with you being pregnant,” he said carefully, wishing Wyatt were here. Wyatt could always ease her back into a better humor.
    Mia tilted her head, her eyes narrowing dangerously. “You think I couldn’t take any one of them on?”
    Intellectually, he knew