Chapter 3 So, what can I expect…?
So, what can I expect…?
“So, what can I expect when I meet with Naomi?” I asked Sadie on the trip from her kingdom to the one of the Irish Wolves.
Two days after the ball, we were speeding down a winding dirt road in a wheel-less vehicle the Shadow King had apparently designed with god tech. It moved on a soundless cushion of air, gliding toward the Irish Wolves’ kingdom on the opposite coast.
This was the real mission. I was finally going to meet my aunt.
Meanwhile, I’d decided to throw Sadie some softball questions to hopefully warm her up to telling me why I’d been chosen over way more suitable wolves for this assignment.
But Sadie grimaced, like I’d put her in the hot seat. “I don’t know how much you remember about your aunt….”
“I don’t remember anything about her,” I admitted. “I never met my other aunt. Before I was born, my mother was taken away from her original pack to Prince Edward Island by my sperm donor.”
My stomach knotted with disgust, remembering the male who’d technically fathered me but had never treated my mother and me like anything but trash before his ultimate death.
“My maem and I came to Faoiltiarn right before you all were abducted by the Irish Wolves—and apparently, bears.”
“Oh no, the wolves did all the kidnapping.” Sadie looked over at me with a cheery smile. “My guys just paid for the whole thing and coordinated their efforts.”
Which got my da killed.
But I’d learned just enough about diplomacy not to point that out. As bitter as I was over the loss of Da in the battle we all referred to as Bloody February, the bears had no real part in it. He didn’t die in their kingdom.
Still, keeping my cool when facing Naomi was going to be a challenge. Did she know which one of her kingdom’s warriors had killed my da? Would she even be willing to tell me?
The crushing feeling returned—that certainty that the Scottish Wolves had sent absolutely the wrong she-wolf for this job.
Then Sadie sobered and added, “There’s only the Wild Princess and the Sea Prince with her now. The City Prince went to live in Dublin with his father after their parents split.”
I jolted. “Is Aunt Naomi no longer with the last remaining king?”
“They tried, for the children’s sake,” Sadie said. “But I heard you talking at that last breakfast about how your mother never got over the loss of Alban Scotswolf. Well, Naomi never got over the loss of her Sea and Wild Kings, either. And you should know that’s made her a bit…”
Sadie paused, obviously searching for the most judicious way to phrase what came next.
“…not always kind.” Sadie clucked her tongue, making the same kind of sympathetic sound Granni Claudine did when she talked about sad things. Like her life before Senair Hamish.
“I know this is a lot to request coming from the bear who hasn’t spoken a single word to your beloved Granni since my Mountain King rescued me from Faoiltiarn,” Sadie continued. “But you will have to pre-forgive Naomi for her particularly acerbic tongue.”
Once again, the Mountain Prince’s voice echoed: Good luck with that….
Before something else suddenly caught my eye.
A shining city. Like something out of a sci-fi novel, it had a skyline of pointed buildings that glinted in the sun, each one appearing to be made of green crystal.
Even more surprising, the rolling hills in front of the sparkling city were occupied.
With rows upon rows of people. All dressed in the same emerald-green robes as the maybe-druid storyteller. And staring straight at us.
“Um, what is that, then?” I asked Sadie, a thrum of alarm going off in my chest as I watched them watching us.
“Oh, that’s a… ah—I guess you could call it a hybrid third secret kingdom? Of bear and wolf shifters, but also a few other kinds from around the world.”
I scrunched my brow. “There are other kinds of shifters?” I read every legitimate news publication on the version of the internet we lupine called WolfNet, and I’d never heard mention of weres outside of bears and wolves.
“There are,” Sadie answered in the careful tone of someone standing on shaky knowledge ground. “My Shadow King calls them original experiments. It’s kind of a long story.”
Okay, well, I definitely wanted to hear that long story. But first…
“Can I ask why what feels like the entirety of this third secret kingdom is out here, staring at us?”
“I mean, you could ask,” Sadie said as we zipped past the staring horde. “But I’m not quite sure I could give you a satisfying answer. They don’t usually leave the sanctuary of their city at all, much less in these numbers.”
I craned my neck to watch the silent spectators after we passed. Not one of them looked away. In fact, the hundreds of green-robed figures turned their heads as one. Staring right back at me until they disappeared from my view.
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the wind.
We didn’t stop at the Irish Wolves’ secret kingdom. Just passed through briefly before Sadie drove to a stone tower gate that brought us back up to The Above.
“Naomi asked to meet at a neutral location in The Above,” Sadie explained, hauling the duffel I’d brought with me out of the cart’s back seat. “We’ll have to get out and hike for a bit. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all.”
After arriving in the stone circle above the wolves’ kingdom, we trekked across real life rolling green hills toward a two-story red house sitting in front of a sparkling lake.
“So… why me?” I asked as we got closer to our destination.
Sadie didn’t seem to have satisfying answers about anything. But the holoscribe in me just couldn’t let it go.
I tried asking my number-one question again, since it might be my last chance. “I was told you requested me as their ambassador specifically, even though I just moved back to Scotland after going to uni and working abroad.”
Sadie, who’d insisted on carrying my da’s old Scottish army canvas duffel bag for me, shifted it on her shoulder.
The bag was packed with enough supplies for a week-long stay in the Irish Wolves’ kingdom.
From clothes to the diplomatic gifts the bears had carefully selected themselves and encased in a large protective ruck sack composed of their poreless, seamless god tech version of rubber.
Even though it was the middle of summer, Sadie had also given me an Irish knit green cardigan before we left, insisting, “It might get quite cold on your trip.”
But now the literal mama bear hardly seemed able to look me in the eye.
“I hope you’ll understand after you meet Naomi,” she answered, her gaze stuck on the verdant green grass. “It could only be you.”
I didn’t understand, though. And the coil of unease that had formed the first time I asked “Why me?” wrapped even tighter around my gut instinct.
The neutral location turned out to be a red brick house sitting in front of a body of water that Sadie called the Three Gods Lake.
My Aunt Naomi emerged from the residence with two of her children flanking her. All three were dressed like medieval bandits in leather pants and vests, and they all radiated the same sharp, dangerous energy.
Naomi looked like my mother. If someone had shrunk Maem down and carved away everything gentle in her soft features, leaving behind only the freckles.
The first thing she said was that I wasn’t allowed in her home. The second thing she said was that we would talk beside the lake.
Having never learned to swim during my cloistered upbringing in Canada, I’d studiously avoided lakes after moving to Scotland at the age of twelve.
Da had talked about teaching me the summer after he got back from Ireland, but then he had died and that had been that.
This particular lake immediately became my least favorite kind of body of water. It was more like a massive basin than its Highland counterpart. No beach, just a grassy lip with a steep drop. Surrounded by warning signs about no swimming allowed.
Looking at it filled my heart with terror. But… diplomacy.
I dutifully followed Aunt Naomi and Sadie to the last place I wanted to conduct tentative peace talks.
The third thing Naomi said before I could even get out my list of questions was that she’d personally killed my da.
I didn’t have to ask her about it.
“It was me,” she volunteered with a tilt of her head.
Madness sparkled in her eyes. “He murdered my husbands and then dared to come to the castle to negotiate peace. But, of course, there could be none after what he did. I slit his throat with the dagger my Wild King gave me as a baby moon gift. It is important to me that you know that.”
She’d killed him. Killed her own sister’s husband. And recounted the tale with glee.
The world narrowed to a pinpoint. My vision went red at the edges. Every diplomatic question I’d meant to ask burned away like paper, leaving only a ringing in my ears.
I knew then that the Mountain Prince had been right, and that Sadie had definitely understated when she’d warned me Naomi was “not always kind.”
My aunt was a bitter bitch.
And the wolf who’d murdered my father while he was trying to negotiate peace.
The “Why Me?” question cut off then, replaced by an all-consuming need to murder the she-wolf who’d ended our happy family.
But before I could, Sadie got in front of me and looped the duffel bag over my shoulder, stringing the strap diagonal across my chest like a huge crossbody purse.
Probably her way of weighing me down. To keep me from lunging. To keep me from ripping out Naomi’s throat for what she’d said. For what she’d done to my da.
“Dorie! Dorie!” Sadie forced my attention back to her.
Despite the duffel, she pulled me into her arms and hugged me tight.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so very sorry, Dorie. Remember the poem! Say it out loud! Right now! It will save you!”
Was she kidding?
No peace would be brokered here today. The only person needing saving was Naomi, the Turncoat Queen. And there was no way I was going to recite that weird poem the bears made me memorize to my bitch of an aun—