Alban #2
“That’s an order from your Kingdom Defender,” I told the two of them before they could finish. Then I climbed back up into the Land Rover.
As a former Kingdom Defender, my father understood and was respectful of the Faoiltiarn order of rank. He immediately backed down from all arguments with me and squeezed Dorie’s shoulder before she could open her mouth to protest again.
And I settled into the driver’s seat and restarted the car.
As happy as Dorie had been to see me earlier, she looked small and miserable as she watched our caravan drive away.
Guilt washed over me as I put her and Da in my rearview. Yes, it had been a cold three weeks in hell searching for the kidnapped she-wolves. But none of this situation was her fault.
Only mine for not being able to fulfill my duty the one time the town needed their Kingdom Defender.
Nae …my father was wrong—dead wrong about my chances with Leora.
I didn’t look back, and after we pulled up to the castle, I told Gavin to take the wheel of the Rover. “Get her parked around back. I’ll go in and tell the King what happened alone.”
“Aye-aye. Right away, sir,” Gavin agreed, making moves to climb out of the back seat.
But Malcolm asked, “Shouldnae we go in with ye?”
“No reason for us all to get chewed out,” I answered.
“Are you sure, Alban?” another older member of the search party asked from his still-open window after Gavin called my order down the line. “It’s all our faults. Not just yours.”
“I’ll go in alone,” I repeated.
And that was that. Without giving them another chance to refute me, I walked toward the castle doors to tell our king and queen the story of just how badly I’d bollixed Ireland.
“What do you mean they disappeared the same as last time?”
The king sounded about as happy to hear my tale of why we’d returned empty-handed as I was to tell it.
I wasn’t a man familiar with failing to complete a mission.
Also, I didn’t love the sense of five-hundred-year-old déjà vu that tingled up my neck as I relayed to King Magnus and Queen Tara a story that sound eerily like the one passed down through over village for centuries.
Only this time the Irish wolves had advanced technology.
A large non-descript lolly to transport their human cargo, along with a back-road route to a private airfield.
“They didn’t take to the channel as they did last time,” I told the king and queen. “They somehow got their hands on a private jet. Still, with the help of some old military friends, I managed to sort out where they landed—another private field, belonging to Declan McMahon.”
“That cheeky Irish bastard who just announced he was buying the Edinburgh Rovers?” Magnus exploded from his seat to ask, “Is he a wolf, then?”
“Not that I kent. He traveled to the Far East for an extended business trip on the last full moon. And it wasn’t one of his corporate jets the Irish Wolves used.
For all we ken, he has nae a clue what happened in his own backyard.
But we caught their scent from there, and we managed to track them to a location about one-hundred kilometers outside the Cliffs of Moher—the exact same place we followed them to in 1503.
We believed we were getting closer—a kilometer or two away at most. But then, their scent trail just … ”
I shook my head, then gritted my jaw to finish confessing to the king and queen, “It just stopped, along with all tracks and other identifying marks of their movement. It was as if the lot of them disappeared into thin air. There’s no other way to explain it.
The other males and I spent weeks trying to re-establish the trail to no avail.
Believe me, if we hadn’t scoured every inch of the hidden parts of Southern Island looking for them, we wouldnae have come back. ”
Queen Tara slumped back in her seat, and a thunderous look came over her king’s face.
But then, to my shock, Tara took his hand and said, “We knew there was a chance of this happening. I think … I think we’re going to have to trust what their leader told Alban—and what the one guy in the raiding party told me before he left me behind.
That they won’t hurt them. That they’ll send anyone who wants to come back at Easter if they don’t want to stay. ”
Magnus shook his head at her. “Are you serious, then? This is the same as last time. They raided during a royal wedding feast, stole across the channel, and disappeared without a trace. We never saw the she-wolves they took five hundred years ago again. What makes you think it would be any different now?”
“Last time, the king lost his new queen forever. But this time, they let me come back to you, and they didn’t have to do that,” Tara pointed out. “Unlike back in the 1500s, they left me and every other mated she-wolf behind.”
“Because they’re not stupid,” I countered on Magnus’s behalf. “They probably reckoned that taking any of you lot with wolf ESP would make it easier for them to be tracked.”
“Maybe, but they also only threatened to steal Milly’s baby—they didn’t actually take her.
So those are two huge differences between now and 1503.
” Tara’s voice took on a desperate note.
“Please, Alban, just let me have this, okay? I need to believe that I will be getting my little sister back, no matter what, at springtime. Because this is all my fault! If I hadn’t come here, brought them here with all sorts of shiny promises about how good it would be, how much better than Canada where they didn’t have many choices … ”
Queen Tara’s voice cracked, and she lost her battle with tears.
“Please don’t blame yourself, mo leann.” Magnus looked as if he was on the edge of crying himself. He reversed the hold on their fingers and kissed the back of her hand. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”
“No! No!” Tara gave her head a woeful shake. “I promised them a year-long exchange program, and I got them kidnapped by Irish wolves instead.”
“Aye, because I should never have agreed to go weaponless for the reception!” Magnus said. “It didn’t matter that the last Irish invasion was five hundred years ago. I should have known not to ever drop our guard.”
“You’re both wrong,” I insisted. “The blame lies solely with me.”
It was true. I’d been so intent on leaving town that I let Tara enact this Bridal Exchange program without thought to what would happen if enemy wolves found out we had a surplus of technology-free females in residence.
And I’d been the one so caught up in my mountain drama that I let them plan a weapons-free reception to appease a bunch of she-wolves who were so sheltered they didn’t even truly ken how dangerous the outside world was.
“It’s not about assigning blame,” Magnus decided for all of us in the end.
“I’ll call Iain and see what he can tell us about this Irish billionaire.
He might not be a wolf, but last I heard, the Irish Wolves weren’t exactly rolling in gold coins.
Let’s make sure this club-buying bastard isn’t the one funding all their misadventure.
And let’s also plan for another Ireland trip back when the snow’s melted.
I’ve a feeling it will be easier to find that Irish filth when they’re not actively hiding. ”
We spent most of the morning on a conference call with Iain, making tentative plans for our next actions based on whatever Iain dug up. Also, there was the matter of figuring out how the Irish Wolves came to know all the details of the royal wedding.
“I hate to say it, but I think they must’ve had someone on the inside feeding them information,” Magnus told the three of us. “Just in case, let’s keep our plans for a return trip to ourselves.”
So, nae, I didn’t get chewed out by our king or queen.
Still, I couldn’t have felt more terrible as I walked out of the throne room. All I wanted at that moment was to go straight home and open up my largest handle of whiskey.
However, I stopped short just outside the throne room instead.
Leora was standing there, dressed in the same skirt and ribbon blouse I’d given her. As if I hadn’t left for three weeks plus, but simply paused our conversation.
My heart stilled in my chest.
And, she said, “Hi, Alban. Can we talk? Somewhere private?”