Chapter 7
finnt mei tür
“Dorcas? Dorcas?”
I stood outside the castle fortress carved into the mountain and stared at a landscape that had no business existing: megafauna and bog and sheets of ice.
It was like someone had flipped a switch labeled OFF at the back of my skull. My thoughts dimmed. The scene before me blurred, and the volume dropped out of the world.
“Dorcas? Dorcas?” That name I hated again. Aengus… my possible fated mate calling out to me. Technically, he still stood beside me, but his voice sounded as if it was coming from the other end of a wind tunnel. “Are you preparing to scream or shut down?”
SCREAM or SHUT DOWN
The choice flashed, like one of those reincarnation anime where you get to choose your next adventure.
But I would not have chosen this.
Suddenly, the system got tired of waiting and chose shut down by default.
“Dorcasss!”
I think my legs buckled. I was suddenly once again cradled in Aengus’s arms, and the sliding door to the cavern slid open to let us back into the relatively warm room of solid rock.
“Put me down….” a voice demanded.
There was so much static in my head, it took me a moment to realize it belonged to me.
“Put me down!” I shrieked the words this time while twisting in his hold. “Don’t touch me! Put me down!”
Aengus did as I asked, setting me upright on my feet.
“Dorcas. We are sorry to have upset you.”
“Upset me?” I bared my sharp canines at him. “You tried to kill me. And now this?”
“We give you apologies.” As large as he was, Aengus hunched his broad shoulders. Like I was delivering physical blows, and he was attempting to shield himself from my attack. “Many apologies.”
“I don’t want your apology. I want answers!” I shouted back. “Why am I here?! Why did Sadie push me into that lake?”
Aengus just shook his head. “We do not know of whom you speak, or the specific details of how you came to fall from the sky.”
My righteous anger deflated a bit. Of course, he didn’t.
He was the one from an epoch that ended more than eleven thousand years ago. How could he possibly know what had happened in my future?
Technically, he was innocent. It wasn’t his fault Sadie pushed me into the lake. He wasn’t the one who’d given me no other choice but to say what turned out to be a fated mate spell.
Conflicting feelings thrashed in my chest with nowhere to go.
“Dorcas…” Aengus hunched down even farther to address me, like I was a tantruming child beginning to see reason. “May we hug you? Comfort you in your time of distress?”
I could only blink at him. He’d put a knife to my throat last night, and now he was offering me solace in his arms?
“No.” I pointed to the door. “I need you to leave.”
I had to think, come up with a plan to get the devil emoji out of the Pleistocene Age, and I couldn’t do that with him hovering over me.
He straightened to his full height. He wasn’t completely human—his smell told me that. But he wasn’t a robot, either. His expression flickered with something too genuine for machinery, and I knew his feelings were hurt.
“Attempting to process a temporal displacement of this magnitude by yourself is not wise. It might lead to… suboptimal outcomes.”
I gritted my teeth. “You know what’s really a suboptimal outcome?” I asked him. “Getting stuck thousands of years in the past with a knife-wielding…”
I indicated at him helplessly. “Whatever-the-answer-to-my-third-question-is.”
I rubbed at my temple. “I just need to be alone right now—please. Get out.”
To his credit, he didn’t make me ask a third time.
With a single nod, he turned and left. For such a huge being, his shoeless feet barely made a sound on the stone floor.
Much like the ones at the Wicklow gate mansion, the doors swung wide open without having to be touched and closed behind him after he walked through.
As soon as he was gone, I made a beeline for the duffel bag he’d left in the bathroom.
The journal…
My holoscribe brain was in overdrive. I had to come up with a plan. There was no way I was staying in caveman times.
I needed to check the notes I’d been taking all week with the bears. A fresh burst of resentment flared inside of me. I’d felt so guilty about the story I was planning to sell, having no idea that Sadie was plotting to push me into a lake the entire time.
Why? Had it been an act of revenge? Some kind of declaration of war? Maybe I was a virgin sacrifice of some sort.
I recalled how the Shadow Princess chided her womb brother, the Mountain Prince, for coming on to me yet again at that last breakfast in the bear’s secret kingdom.
“Read the social cues she’s exhibiting. It’s obvious she has no wish to have casual sex with you before she leaves on the most important diplomatic trip of all our lifetimes.”
I’d been so embarrassed when the Shadow Princess added, “Also, she’s an unmated wolf, and most likely a virgin. She-wolves, as they refer to themselves, often don’t exhibit sexual desire until they go into heat, which, given her childless state, she has not.”
The Shadow Princess was right about me being a virgin at the age of thirty-two. A hard thing to find in the Bear kingdom, where they celebrated every spring with what sounded like a full-on sex festival. Had the Shadow Princess been in on it, too?
I yanked open the zipper of the duffel. It was still slightly damp and smelled faintly of lake water. There had to be something I wasn’t seeing. Some indication that Queen Sadie and company were going to betray me like this.
I didn’t have to dig for the bullet journal. It was the last thing I’d packed and right near the top, center stage, in the middle of my things.
However, my heart sank the moment I pulled it out. Dingy liquid squelched out between the pages and dripped onto the stone floor. The elastic band had gone loose and sodden, and when I pulled it aside and opened the journal, I found a swollen mass of waterlogged paper.
“No,” I whispered.
I tried to turn the pages anyway.
The first sheets tore under my attempt to peel them away from the mass. The rest clung together, pulpy and blurred. Ink had bled into ink until everything was just gray soup, and my cramped little notes were dissolved into illegible ghosts.
Every conversation with the bears. Every description of their castles and perfectly rendered town. Every stupid, precious detail I’d been hoarding away like a squirrel…
Gone.
Rage rushed up my throat. Pure—but not at all simple.
The Irish shifters… they’d used me—played me for the fool, as Granni Claudine would have said. And worst of all, they had won.
Panic began to creep in at the edges of the anger, and there it was…
Despair had joined the party. I began to sob.
What was I going to do? How was I going to—hold on…
The incoming mind collapse abruptly cut off when I noticed something else. Right next to the green cardigan sweater Sadie had insisted I take with me.
That weird god tech rubber bag. The one they said was filled with gifts for Naomi, the Queen of the Irish Wolves.
Just like they said that poem was for her, too.
I couldn’t let myself hope anymore, but I sat on the floor and crisscrossed my legs to go through it. The opening was a heavy zipperless clasp that released with a small hiss of air, like it had been pressure locked.
Everything inside the bag remained dry, but I found no gifts worthy of a queen.
More like what I’d call—I don’t know exactly.
Survivalist supplies? Heavy scissors in a leather sheath, a solar-powered flashlight, a neat little bundle of rope, thermal underwear, a huge container of all-purpose camp soap, a small square of nylon labeled insTENT, that knife from the armorer that I’d tried to leave behind, and heaps of gold coins and precious gems. Exactly what you’d pack for someone you were sending into an unfamiliar wilderness with no guarantee of safe lodging.
Useful. Thoughtful.
But there was no unbinding spell to get me back to my time. No effing note to tell me why they’d done this to me.
I tipped that bag upside down, just to make extra sure.
A key came tumbling out and clanged on the stone floor.
It was huge, like it was made for a much, much larger hand.
Bronze maybe, and deeply burnished. The bow at the top had been wrought into something that looked disturbingly like the skull of some kind of spiky beast, its eye sockets flanking a single oval emerald gemstone.
The shaft was thick and heavily engraved—geometric lines and what might have been scales or armor plating or both.
And at the bottom, the bit was cut into a blocky, almost mechanical pattern.
I picked it up, and it felt heavy in my hand—pounds not grams like the one to our house in Faoiltiarn. It was unlike any other key I’d ever seen. Then my eyes caught something under the grotto bath’s low light.
Something was etched into the giant key’s shaft. Three words…
finnt mei tür
Wait…wait… My breath caught. Because I recognized these words, even though they were in a language I hadn’t seen written out since I was twelve.
My heart stuttered. Then soared.
Wolfennite. The words were written in Wolfennite.
finnt mei tür
Translation: Find my door.