Page 10

Death

Sadie

The world was black, but swirling with voices.

Mine, Naomi’s, Alban’s, and two strangers I didn’t know.

…

“Naomi!”

“Sadie, run!”

Me in Wolfennite: “What is happening? Why are these mossy wolves attacking us?”

“I think they’re Irish,” Naomi answers.

“They are once again here to kidnap all the unmated she-wolves.”

Me: “Oh, heavens!”

“No idea what the two of ye are saying, but if ye come with us nice and easy, no one will get hurt — aw, feckin’ hell. What’re ye doing here, Kingdom Defender?”

Naomi’s voice: “Alban!”

Echoes of Malcolm and Gavin proclaiming “Remember the Irish!” rings out over the conversation.

“Stay where ye are, Defender,” the scariest of the two wolves growls.

His voice is so feral, he barely sounds human.

“If ye make me cut our she-wolf, I’ll gut ye and feed yer entrails to the forest boar for their supper.”

Our she-wolf?

??

“So, you ken my title,” Alban answers the feral growler, his voice shockingly unafraid.

“Then you also ken I can’t let you take any of these females out of here without a fight.”

The less scary Irish Wolf speaks up: “Kingdom Defender, this situation isn’t the same as in the 1500s.”

“So, you’re not looking to steal all our females? Again?”

“Not all of them, no. We will leave behind the mated ones this time. The ones we do take will be brought back to our kingdom to give our males their consideration for matehood. But in the spring, they will be given a choice about staying, and the ones who are not heat-mated and no longer wish to stay with us will be delivered back here to Faoiltiarn. Tell your king he has my vow on that.”

“Tell him yerself. After I deliver you to the dungeon cells underneath the castle.”

“There are two of us. And one of you. We can do this the easy way, where you step aside and let us leave. Or… we can do this the hard way and risk the life of the precious first baby born to the Faoiltiarn royal family in over thirty years.”

“Either way, she is ours! We will not be leaving Dùn Faoiltiarn without her.”

The sound of the scariest of the two wolves sticking his tongue out and licking Naomi’s neck.

Actually licking her!

Me, screaming in English: “Leave her alone!”

Naomi calling out: “Stop! I agree to go with them. Just take the baby. Take the baby so she doesn’t get hurt.”

Alban: “I cannae let you make that sacrifice, Naomi.”

Naomi insisting: “It’s not up to you. I made sure the rule was included when we put together the New St. Ailbe Ordnung. She-wolves can come and go as they like—without restraint or repercussion.”

Me, without even having to think about it: “I volunteer to go, too!”

Naomi: “No, Sadie, you can’t!”

“Actually... going with us isn’t a choice. You’re both coming with us for this special opportunity, either way.”

With that statement, the formerly least scary Irish Wolf moves into first place.

Me, swallowing but trying…

trying to be brave: “See, Nay, it’s already all decided. I’m going with you.”

“Okay, then, we’ll be on our way,” says the feral growly one.

“If you’ll put down the pokey stick and step aside, Defender.”

Back and forth the voices of Naomi and Alban go until finally he concedes with an…

“Aye, give her to me, then.”

The new first-place scariest wolf: “Alright, enough of this drama... We’ve a mission to carry out.”

The Feral Growl wolf: “Ye’re going to need both our jabbers for sure to know The Potential is out. Here, take mine. I’ve got some other stuff to give to our banreen.”

Banreen—not banrigh, but close.

Are these random Irish Wolves referring to Naomi as their queen?

What will happen to her?

To us?

Fear, like nothing I’ve ever known, consumes me as I’m stabbed with not one, but two needles at the same time.

I whimper in the black.

Naomi’s voice: “It’ll be alright. Everything will be alright... No matter what happens, we’ll be all right, and I’ll figure out how to get us out of this—mmfph!”

Black.

Black.

More black.

Then, suddenly, I heaved awake with a huge inhalation…

to find myself inside a glass coffin surrounded by white.

I was dead!

But I wasn’t!

I was alive!

But in some kind of heaven, enclosed in a glass box.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

Someone was screaming the words in my ear with a heavy THWUMP!

THWUMP! THWUMP! in the background.

It was me. My screams for help hit the glass walls and echoed right back at me inside the box.

And the thwumping sound was coming from my palms. Slamming against the coffin lid…

to no avail.

Everyone in the new St. Ailbe village thought I was so strong.

But the lid didn’t budge—not even a tiny bit.

Oh heavens! Oh heavens!

What was I going to do?

I’d die in here. I’d never get out?—

The sound of something popping.

Like the vacuum seal on a canning jar releasing, but one hundred times louder.

Then air hissed all around, and the glass cover raised—just popped right up, like something on a spring hinge, though I could see no metal in this coffin…

box…whatever it was.

The air filled with a crisp citrus smell.

Lemons, ripe and ready to be picked in a space flooded with heavenly light.

I sat up, expecting to find myself in some sort of celestial lemon grove, but no…

All that sparkling white I’d woken up to turned out to be a chandelier dripping with crystals, hanging down from a high ceiling of white plaster.

I was sitting inside the coffin, on top of a long table.

In some sort of modern dining room, framed by several picture windows, flooding the space with daylight.

What in the world? I began to ask myself.

Right before I saw Death himself, looming above me with a whiteboard sign in his hands that held two words: Don’t Scream.

I didn’t scream.

Mostly because I was too shocked.

Being friends with someone as cynical as Naomi had made me secretly harbor some doubts about the afterlife depicted in the Wolfennite version of the Bible.

So, I hadn’t actually expected angels to greet me at the gates of heaven and lovingly remove the cursed stain of wolfhood from my body so I could live out my eternal life as a human.

But I also had not expected Death to be an actual person.

Yet there Death stood, pale-skinned and dressed in a black turtleneck and leather pants that belled out over heavy black boots.

He loomed over my coffin, with a storm of black hair so wild and tousled, it almost appeared to be moving.

I blinked at him.

“So, after all those promises that scary Irish Wolf made Alban, he and his friend just killed me?” I asked Death.

“Poisoned me with whatever was in that needle they poked me with and left me to rot?”

Another terrible, much darker thought suddenly occurred to me.

“Is that what happened to the original stolen she-wolves? Why they never found them? Were they all kidnapped and murdered in their sleep?"

I looked around frantically, "Please tell me Naomi isn't here, too.”

Death quirked a dark brow over eyes that were a surprising shade of crystal-clear light blue.

They twinkled with amusement before disappearing under silky black lashes as he cast his gaze down.

To my surprise, he wiped the Don’t Scream message away with his sleeve before writing something with a fat marker he pulled out of his front pocket.

His hand, I noticed as he wrote, was covered in strange tattoos. Symbols—possibly a language, but unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The markings didn’t resemble Hebrew, Chinese, or the Celtic runes I occasionally saw in Faoiltiarn. They felt wholly foreign and otherworldly, full of dots, crescents, and shapes that looked half-finished.

He turned the board around to me: Not Death

“Oh no…” My stomach dropped, thinking of the Spring Fire and the Winter Sloth. Had my mother been right about my general unworthiness? “Did I not—did I not make it to heaven? Am I in the other place? Are you…?” I lowered my voice to a whisper to ask if I was, in fact, speaking to “…the devil.”

This time, the amusement quirked his mouth, raising one side of his lips. More erasing. And soon I got another message: Not Death. Not Devil. Glad you are living. And awake.

“So I’m not dead...” I let out a huge breath of relief before it occurred to me to ask, “Then why am I here? Why did the Irish Wolves put me in a coffin?”

More erasing. Then: Very Long Story. Tadhg will tell it.

“Who’s Tadge?” I winced a little over my pronunciation. I highly doubted I’d gotten that name right. And even possibly ruder, I felt compelled to ask the possibly disabled man standing in front of me, “And is there a reason you can’t tell the long story? Why don’t you talk?”

His light-blue eyes switched to the side with a considering look. He wrote for a bit longer this time before flipping the board: Eschewed spoken words years ago. They are inefficient. Cannot abide that speaking your thoughts requires so little thought.

“Well, I suppose you have a point there,” I conceded. Heat warmed my cheeks. “I’ve felt nothing but silly since I mistook you for Death.”

Another quirk of his lips. And more erasing. Then: Sadie, may I touch you? Help you out of your box?

I jolted a little. “You know my name?”

More writing. Then: Yes. I am Cian, your Shadow King . May I … ?

He punctuated his written question with a palm-in-air extension of his other hand, and his sleeve pulled back, revealing the bottom of more tattoos crawling up his wrist.

The Shadow King… He wanted to touch me...

A weird sensation warmed my stomach, then rose, clogging my throat. I barely managed to choke out, “Sh-sure. Thank you.”

He came closer, and that was when I realized the delicious lemony smell I’d attributed to heaven was actually coming off of him.

His citrus scent filled my nose, bright and sharp. Also, he smelled… different. Not like a fellow wolf. But somehow familiar. So, not wolf. But also, not human… maybe.

Once again, I resented my sheltered upbringing. Only knowing the other community members of St. Ailbe for nearly my entire life meant I didn’t have the context to suss out the answers to so many of the questions I’d had since making this trip nearly a month ago.

The Shadow King’s eyes fluttered when he got close, and I braced myself for another written question—this time about my odd smell.

Instead, he set the board aside and held out his hand.

Which I took.

Because I didn’t realize everything inside my body would go haywire as soon as I touched his palm. But somehow, it wasn’t upsetting.

It was like being an egg cracked and dropped into a frying pan full of heat and butter.

As he helped me out of the coffin and down from the table, everything inside my body was scrambling and rearranging.

Until suddenly it resettled, and I was standing in front of him. Still an egg. But completely reformed.

“ Hallo ,” I breathed out with a new feeling inside my chest.

He was even taller than he’d looked when I was sitting inside the glass coffin. To my surprised, I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes, and he hunched a little—like I sometimes did when talking to Naomi, since she was so much shorter.

Only our height difference was worse. The Shadow King had to be nearly a foot taller than me—long, but not overly slender. I sensed muscle beneath the thick cable-knit sweater, and his broad shoulders met the ends of his storm-cloud black hair.

He didn’t return my Wolfennite hallo . Of course, he didn’t. But his eyes…

There was no way to explain it with my limited experience. But it felt like I really was that plate of scrambled eggs, and he was eating me up.

And though his lips didn’t move, I heard the words, “You’re awake. Good.”

The voice was a deep, affable rumble, and it didn’t sound at all like the Shadow King looked.

In the next moment, I found out that was because it belonged to another person entirely when a huge, red-haired male came to stand beside us.

And that’s when I fell right back into that frying pan for another scramble.

He looked a lot like Alban—but also, not at all.

He was around the same size and heft, but he wore a strange cologne that completely blocked his scent. Still, I suspected he, like the taller Shadow King, wasn’t a wolf. Or fully human.

Like Alban, he had thick hair and a lot of bulk. But unlike Alban, his hair was combed back in neat, lustrous waves, his beard was neatly trimmed, and his eyes were a twinkling light brown instead of a contemptuous, stony gray.

Better than Alban , something whispered inside of me as he regarded me with a warm, inviting gaze.

“I see you’ve already met Cian, your Shadow King,” he said. “I’ll introduce myself, then. I’m Tadhg, your Mountain King.”

So, Tadhg with a long “I” sound—not Tadge . And apparently, the Shadow King’s C-i-a-n wasn’t pronounced Cyan, as I’d originally assumed, but Kee-ann . And did he say he was also a king of… wherever this was?

I looked around, but all I found were more mysteries.

Not only did I appear to be standing in a dining room with two walls made mostly of glass, but beyond one of those window walls lay what appeared to be a long dirt road with an abrupt end. Almost like some sort of landing strip, similar but smaller than the one we’d taken off from back in Canada.

I’d be fascinated by all these details I was finding out about all at once, if I wasn’t so busy trying not to faint. Because now Tadhg was also looking at me like I was a plate of eggs.

“H-hallo,” I somehow managed to get out.

“May I take your hand to greet you, or does it belong to the Shadow King now?”

I didn’t realize Cian—the Shadow King—still had my hand gripped tight between us until he said that.

And before I could withdraw, the Shadow King transferred his long, pale, symbol-covered hand to my wrist and offered my hand to Tadhg.

As if he were giving the other male a present.

A present Tadhg affably accepted with both of his hands.

“Hello, Sadie. I know, under the circumstances, it’s likely hard for you to believe. But we really do want to try to get your consent for everything,” he told me. “So, is it alright with you if your Mountain King lays a kiss upon your hand?”

I’d actually seen this custom of kissing a hand in greeting carried out a few times at Tara’s wedding reception. It was no big deal, I knew. More a way of showing respect than anything else.

But him asking the question while looking me directly in the eye made it feel like a big deal.

Made me stutter, “Y-yes. Um, okay.”

He pressed his lips to the top of my hand...

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness.

Outside, I managed to appear calm, but everything inside of me was screaming and scrambling again inside that frying pan with a high flame underneath.

“I imagine you have a lot of questions.” Tadhg’s voice cut through all my internal noise like a calm, warm boom. “And I’m here to answer all of them.”

Did I have questions? The frying pan sizzled and popped as I tried to get a hold of my right mind.

“Why did you kidnap me? And where are all the other Wolfennites? Especially Naomi!” I blurted out, finally resetting to my awkward default.

“Good question,” Tadhg let out a low chuckle as he lowered but didn’t, I noticed, fully let go of my hand.

Was that a thing? A custom in… wherever this was? Did people not let go of hands after a greeting, just held on until who knew when?

Tadhg went on. “Well now, the Irish Wolves carried on to their own kingdom with your friend and the other she-wolves after dropping you off with us. It’s admirable that your community’s so inclusive in Canada, but I’m afraid us Irish shifters haven’t quite caught up yet. We still keep to our own, with them on the east coast and us on the west.”

“What, it’s just me here with you two?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why did the Irish Wolves leave just me behind?”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Tadhg said, his amused gaze softening into something more sympathetic. “But we don’t want you confused about any of this—or about the choices you’ll be asked to make. So I’m happy to explain everything. Including our reasons for… arranging this meeting.”

I tilted my head at his swapping in arranging for kidnapping .

Meanwhile, Tadhg explained. “It all started when we found out that the Canadian she-wolves who came to the Bridal Exchange brought someone like us with them.”

“Someone like us ?” I repeated, still very confused, despite his patient and warm tone. “What do you mean?”

Tadhg’s brow knitted, and for the first time since walking in, he looked as confused as I felt. “What do you mean by what do I mean by someone like us?”

I shook my head, not understanding his confusion over my puzzlement. Then it occurred to me there was one other question I maybe should have asked before all the others. “What exactly are you two?”