Running with Rogues

CHAPTER 21 - LLECHI

Hello lads. I've been meaning to ask, how are you all coping with the characters? I appreciate there's a lot of them. Would it help if I made a glossary or something?

"Would you stop glaring at me?" Rhodri snapped under his breath. "You're making people suspicious."

Hannah's glaring only intensified. She made a sudden turn into the frozen aisle, forcing him to follow. A moment later, she came back to dump a microwave meal into my shopping basket.

"And how the hell are we going to cook that, flockie?" I demanded.

"Oh," Hannah muttered. "Shit, yeah, never mind."

She put it back, making sure to yank Rhodri with her. He started to growl, only to stop when one of the nearest old ladies turned around and squinted at him.

"Now who's making people suspicious?" Hannah laughed.

I sighed to myself and grabbed a few packets of bread rolls. I shouldn't have volunteered for this. It had been a good excuse to escape from Bryn, who'd been sat next to me for the entire car ride over here, but these two knuckleheads were worse, somehow.

We were prowling around a modestly sized ALDI, shopping for a picnic lunch to take to Llechi. Rhodri had brought Hannah so she could choose some food for herself. Our campfire stews weren't the easiest things to calculate insulin doses for, apparently. She'd been dining on mostly cereal and fruit these last few days, since the evening meals had been sending her blood sugar levels all over the place. She was probably low right now.

The only problem was ... Nia hadn't trusted Hannah to behave herself in the shop, so she was handcuffed to Rhodri, and they were having to hold hands to disguise that, much to their mutual disgust. I'd been treated to a solid ten minutes of bickering already.

I managed to tune them out for nearly a minute before I felt a weight drop into the shopping basket in my arms and looked down. Hannah's latest deposit was dark green and oblong.

"We're not buying an avocado," I told her in no uncertain terms. "We're broke, remember? Don't you have, like, the slightest bit of self-awareness?"

She snorted. "You're holding me hostage, so I don't feel too awful about spending your money. Money that was stolen in the first place. You took nearly eighty quid off Hayden. Spend that."

Oh, that ungrateful shit had been snitching, had he? I'd saved his ass when I'd taken his wallet. I rolled my eyes to hide my annoyance. "That's gone to the Maggie Tax."

"The what?"

"You'll see this evening, if you're lucky," Rhodri told her, dumping the avocado into a tray of oranges. The moment he turned his back, I picked it up and replaced it properly, if only because I felt sorry for the shop attendants. Almost as sorry as I felt for myself.

***

Ninety minutes later, we parked on a tiny verge of grass in the middle of nowhere. All fourteen of us Haven kids were loaded into seven-seaters, with the littlest ones sharing seats to make room for the two flockies. Lily and Sam had driven - they actually had licences.

"Where are we, exactly?" Hayden asked blearily. He'd been napping since the shop, and he still sounded half asleep.

I resisted the urge to growl at him. We hadn't wanted to bring the flockies. They had been the condition to Mam letting us come here. She was going to have a meeting with Hayden's dad and the Fletcher boys, so she needed Hayden gone for the day, and Llechi was far enough away to stop him mind-linking his pack.

We were currently unloading the cars. Our shopping would be loaded into a barrel and then tied in the nearby river to keep the meat cool. Once that was done, we could lounge around in the grass until lunchtime.