Page 42

Twenty Years Later

DORIE

“Some last factoids for you before you go, Dorcas. Wolves don’t live as long as humans. While the average full Scottish human can expect to live seventy-five to eighty years, depending on several factors, like gender and general quality of life, the average wolf can only expect to live to sixty to sixty-five. But bears have a life expectancy that’s between humans and wolves—seventy to seventy-five. Did you know that?”

“I did not!” I admitted.

But that explained why, by the time the oldest Shadow Princess told me this factoid at the goodbye breakfast the Irish Bears threw for me on my last morning in their Secret Kingdom, Senair Hamish was long gone, but Granni Claudine was still kicking around in the room they’d shared at the top of the stairs in our three-generation house.

Right now, she was probably humming old hymns between fussing at my mother and little brother Albie to eat more breakfast before they left—for her last week of teaching at the village school and his first week of a summer sentry internship at the palace, respectively.

Granni never quite seemed to grasp the difference between how much food wolves and bears needed to survive and constantly guilt-tripped us about our apparent determination to starve ourselves to death and leave her with no one .

Was it any wonder I’d gone from near-emaciated when we first arrived in Faoiltiarn to 5’9” and fluffy by the time I reached the bears’ Secret Kingdom at my apparent middle age of 32?

Still, I couldn’t even begin to compare, or keep up with, the other shifters around the table, which was long enough to fit over twenty large and ravenous bears and the first she-wolf they’d ever invited into their kingdom.

I’d dutifully gone to the wall-long breakfast buffet for Granni’s always-insisted-upon second serving.

But the oldest Shadow Princess, who stood much taller than me—with dark-brown skin, bright-blue eyes, and stick-straight, jet-black hair flowing down over her ample curves, all the way to her wide hips—was already on her fourth.

“What have you thought of the kingdom so far?” the oldest Mountain Prince asked from the other side of me.

“Anything or anyone yer planning to revisit before you leave?”

He was the same age as my younger brother, but considerably more flirtatious.

While the Shadow Princess—who, like Albie, was also on break from uni—had been peppering me with helpful epigenetic and historical facts all week, the Mountain Prince’s factoids had bent a lot more biological.

He’d especially wanted me to know about the bears’ recently concluded Wedding & Awakening Season, which appeared to be a poetic way of saying everyone had come out of hibernation to either get married, get down, or both for most of the spring.

Being away at university, he’d missed it, but he’d hinted more than once that he was always open to belated celebrations.

And before I could answer his question, he let me know, “I’ve always preferred older bed partners. And you’ve got a couple more hours before Mum drives you to the Wolves’ kingdom, I believe. Sex with the future king would make for a great souvenir, wouldn’t it? Not to mention a hell of a story.”

I tried to hide the cringe that thought set off in me, but apparently, I didn’t do a good enough job.

“Read the social cues she’s exhibiting,” the Shadow Princess said from the other side of me.

“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.”

Sure.

That was as good an excuse as any.

At least I wouldn’t have to explain that I didn’t have near the experience he clearly thought I had, even though I was 32.

“Also, she’s an unmated wolf, and most likely a virgin,” the Shadow Princess added without being asked.

“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.”

Okay.

Well. I guess that was out there.

Not for the first time, I wished I wasn’t quite so light.

I had enough curls on my head to easily be identified as partially Black, but not quite enough melanin to hide when I blushed beneath my freckled skin.

“Can we change the subject?” I asked, feeling the opposite of the consummate diplomat vibe I was going for.

“What did you plan to tell your Scottish King and Queen about us when you got back?” the second-youngest Mountain Prince asked from the other side of his brother.

“Oh, um…” I tried to think of how to tell him in the nicest way possible that the king and queen did not care at all about the Irish Bears—especially Aunt Tara, who’d given me a long list of questions to ask her estranged younger sister, the Queen of the Irish Wolves.

Once again, the Shadow Princess beat me to the punch.

“Given that this was the twenty-year anniversary of the Scottish Wolves’ invasion of the Irish Wolves’ kingdom, I highly doubt Dorcas’s king and queen are thinking of us at all. We were just the party that offered an invitation to peace talks.”

“You really can call me Dorie,” I told the Shadow Princess.

For, like, the one-hundredth time that week.

“I prefer Dorcas as it’s not the same as a cartoon fish,” she answered in that overly direct way of hers.

“But what about our da’s invasion of their kingdom?” the younger Mountain Prince asked his older sister before I could defend my much-preferred nickname.

He squinted at me in a way that reminded me of the hardened Mountain Kings in many of the portraits lining the gallery walls of the palace’s main hallway.

According to the Shadow Princess, gestating bears were believed to choose their own genetic traits in the womb from the DNA they had to work with, which explained her having her mother’s very dark skin paired with her father’s extremely bright-blue eyes.

But the red-haired and hulking second-youngest Mountain Prince had chosen only his mother’s brown eyes and taken the rest from his Mountain King line.

Even though he was still a teen, he towered over me and was at least three times as wide.

He was hard to look at, to be honest. With his red hair and sheer brawn, he looked even more like Da than Albie did.

“Successful zero-death interactions are rarely discussed,” the Shadow Princess answered.

“There’s a reason the French Revolution makes every European History syllabus, but almost no one studies Portugal’s bloodless military coup, the Carnation Revolution.”

“Portugal had a military coup?” the older Mountain Prince asked, proving her point.

But while she was right about the Irish Bears’ successful invasion not being discussed much in Faoiltiarn, I had thought about that day often.

Back then, I hadn’t known that the Irish Bears kept a standing army that basically required every single citizen of their community to be trained to fight and follow orders in bear form.

So that day, looking on from the window of my parents’ room with my mother, all I’d seen was what looked like a river of bears dressed in strange armor flooding from the gate toward the main street below our house.

The reason the invasion had been bloodless came down to primal instinct.

Wolves didn’t fight bears in nature, and the citizens of Faoiltiarn—who had definitely not received any military training beyond playing Scots and Irish—quickly got out of the bears’ way, instinctively ducking into the nearest shelter to avoid being trampled or worse.

I’d never forgotten the sight of the General Bear at the head of the rampaging herd suddenly halting in the street outside our house and shifting from a reddish-brown beast into a man, his strange armor shrinking and reshaping itself to fit his human form.

Despite my overhead viewpoint, I could tell he was even more giant than my new da, Alban.

“SADIE! WHERE ARE YOU? I CAN SMELL YOU!” he’d roared as bears rushed by all around him.

“SEND OUT MY MATE OR I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE KINGDOM TO THE GROUND!”

“I thought the bear in the dungeon was Sadie’s mate,” I’d whispered to my mother, who held me tight in her arms, despite her swollen baby belly.

Maem hadn’t answered.

Her wide, scared eyes had stayed locked on the scene below.

Looking back, it was obvious she’d feared the General Bear would track his mate’s scent into our house, which would put us all in danger.

Senair Hamish had gone to the front room with his shotgun and a grim look after telling us to lock ourselves into the primary bedroom.

But to my shock, Sadie had burst out of the house and called, “Tadhg! Tadhg! I’m right here!”

The general, who I would later be introduced to as His Majesty, Tadhg Ryan, Mountain King of the Irish Bears, had turned to face her and roared, “HALT!”

The river of bears had come to an immediate stop, like soldiers playing freeze tag.

And he and Sadie had rushed to each other through the sea of standing bears.

But instead of kissing, as I’d often seen Da and Maem do when they thought I wasn’t watching, he’d ripped off his forearm armor and offered his crooked bare arm to her with a formal bow of his head.

To my shock, Sadie had offered him her forearm, too, placing it directly against his mouth.

I’d thought it was some sort of strange bear greeting—until they both bit down on each other’s forearms, hard.

I’d spent the week getting answers to the questions I had back then, learning about the Irish Bears’ culture—from their praise of three serpent gods to their practice of bond-biting, which established a psychokinetic mental link.

No mating heat required, like with us wolves.

But I never forgot that invasion.

Mostly because of my mother’s sudden expulsion of pent-up air and the happy smile that followed…

relief that Hamish hadn’t killed Sadie with his shotgun and, therefore, hadn’t signed all our death warrants.

“I remembered,” I told the sons of those two bears, twenty years later.

“When you all left with Sadie without hurting anyone... that was the last time I saw my mother smile. She never got over my da, Alban, not coming home from Ireland. Neither did I.”

A somber silence fell over the table at the mention of the battle that had estranged the Sister Queens of Scotland and Ireland forever.

Until the Shadow Princess told me, “My own da says that time is only a construct of the Big Laptop. Whether you got a short sentence or a longer saga with your father, the love meant the same.”

A poetic sentiment, to be sure, but I couldn’t help the flare of resentment inside me.

Someone who’d had twenty years with three fathers would never understand the pain of losing the only good one I’d ever known less than two months after I started calling him Da.

“If you’ve had enough to eat, Dorie, we should probably get going,” a voice said behind us.

We all turned to see the Queen of the Irish Bears, often referred to as the acronym HMSQ by her ten children and subjects alike, standing beside the oldest of her three High King sons.

By tradition, the throne was ascended when the inheriting king or queen turned twenty-five.

So in just over five years, Sadie’s reign would be ceded to the Shadow Princess, the flirtatious Mountain Prince, and the High Prince with steely gray eyes and a white streak in his loose curls standing next to her.

But dressed in one of her infamous strawberry-patterned gowns, paired with one of her three crowns, she stood every inch the queen today.

In fact, I suddenly felt underdressed.

She’d told me specifically to wear comfortable pants and a light tee.

She’d even gifted me a thick, cozy, Irish-knit green sweater cardigan, saying, “It might get quite cold on your trip.”

I stood up immediately and curtsied, as I’d seen so many of her subjects do throughout my week here.

“Your Majesty,” I said with a bow of my head.

“Should I change into something more formal?”

“No, do not worry yourself, Dorie,” she answered with the same gentle tone and eyes I remembered from when I was a child, curious about the bear chained to my bed.

“You are perfect just as you are.”

Less than an hour and a kiss from two of Sadie’s three kings later, we were on the road in a vehicle that the Shadow King—the still-unmet royal I’d privately begun referring to as the Invisible King —had designed and built for long-distance travel using the extraordinarily advanced technology the royals referred to as “god tech.”

It looked like one of the golf carts the kingdom used to get around, but it was wheel-less and sped along on what felt like a soundless cushion of smooth air, heading toward the Irish Wolves’ kingdom on the opposite coast.

The Queen of the Bears, I’d learned, had gone into estrus more times than any queen in the kingdom’s history—and had also managed to earn a psychology degree.

Though she refused to call herself a therapist formally, she was known throughout the kingdom as the person to turn to when you had an emotional problem you needed help with.

So asking her what to expect when I met Aunt Naomi seemed like a natural conversation-starter for the trip.

“Well, you won’t have to deal with ten princes and princesses asking you questions, like you did with us.” Then she 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.

This was not part of the intel I’d received since arriving in the Bear Kingdom.

The ad hoc welcoming committee of princes and princesses that had shown me around seemed more concerned with teaching me how to use the god tech and having me memorize poems in Irish I was supposed to recite to Naomi, but which, according to the High King himself, I was absolutely not to say out loud, not even in a whisper, before meeting the Queen of the Irish Wolves.

“Is Aunt Naomi no longer with the last remaining king?” I asked.

“They tried, for the children’s sake,” Sadie said.

“But I heard you talking 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, searching for the most judicious way to phrase what came next.

“…not always kind. 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, but you will have to pre-forgive her for her particularly acerbic tongue.”

Once again, I found it hard to believe that this unfailingly kind and warm female could be estranged from the Granni who’d not only stayed and made Hamish’s last years worth living, but also gotten our family through the worst of our pain over losing Alban.

In fact, just a few months before sending me on this diplomatic trip, King Magnus had awarded her a Medal of Honor from the city for her extraordinary acts of service, including overseeing the midwifing of the baby boom that followed the Norwegian exchange brides the village had been granted a couple of years after “Bloody February,” as both the Scots and Irish now called the battle that had taken so many lives on both sides.

But before I’d left, Granni had only said, “Please let my daughter know I’ve spent the rest of my life deserving it .”

I’d passed that message on to Queen Sadie not long after our first meeting.

Her eyes had teared up—but then, just as quickly, she’d shifted the subject to my twin cousin Scottish princes.

“Has it been decided which of them will inherit the throne?” she’d asked, as if the males she’d never met interested her far more than the mother she’d lived with for 23 years.

As I’d learned through my own years with my grieving mother, there wasn’t anything I could do about that pain.

So instead, I’d asked the one question I knew Granni Claudine would want answered.

“Did you ever get the name Granni sent you—of your father? Through the Shadow King? She wasn’t sure, since she never heard back.”

“I did,” Sadie confirmed.

“And he’s still alive and kicking, just like your Granni. Next month, we’re actually scheduled to visit him—and my half brother, half sister, and all their nieces and nephews. I never could have imagined, growing up in that small village, that my family would eventually become so big.”

She smiled, and I could tell her memories of that parent were far fonder than the ones of her mother.

“Are they, ah… like Irish Bears?” I asked awkwardly, wishing I’d done literally anything to prepare myself for diplomacy before I was unexpectedly assigned the role of brokering this once-in-a-lifetime chance at peace the Irish Bears offered us out of the blue, as long as Magnus and Tara sent me, and only me.

“If you mean, do they mate in multiples—the answer is yes,” Sadie replied with a teasing smile.

“They call their setups mauls . But can you believe the male maul bears also give each other bond bites? Declan and Tadhg were completely aghast. I don’t think they could fathom being in each other’s heads the way they’re both in mine. And especially not the Shadow King’s.”

She laughed, and I tried to smile along, though I’d never met her mysterious third husband and wasn’t sure what part of being in his head was supposed to be funny.

I was about to ask a follow-up question, but then something caught my eye in the distance.

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.

And as if that weren’t alarming enough, there were people standing on the rolling hills in front of the sparkling green city.

Rows upon rows of people.

All dressed in the same green robes.

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?”

“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.”

One I sensed I needed to hear.

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 unblinking, staring horde.

“But I’m not quite sure I could give you a satisfying answer.”

Then, just like that, she pivoted back.

“Anyway, I’m still wondering about your Twin Cousin Kings. So you’re saying the law is whichever one of them mates first becomes the future King of the Scottish Wolves? Do you have opinions about who’s going to be mated first?”

I did, actually.

And even though I sensed the subject had been changed, I easily fell into one of Faoiltiarn’s favorite topics.

“It even has a pool that’s up to over six million pounds now! The town’s taken to calling it the Twin Kings Lotto .”

We stuck to more pleasant subjects for the rest of the trip.

However, I was surprised when we didn’t stop at the smaller, but no less quaint, village of thatched-roof houses and a single castle that Sadie identified as the Irish Wolves’ Secret Kingdom.

Instead, Sadie passed by the village altogether and pulled the floating cart to a stop beside a tower in the middle of a sheep pasture.

It looked just like the kind that had taken me from the mansion that the Irish Bears called Wicklow Gate to their Secret Kingdom beneath Ireland.

“Tara 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.”

I didn’t mind.

After we popped out back in The Above as the bears called it, into a stone circle on an open seaside cliff, Sadie revealed that she had inherited Granni’s resonant singing voice with a slow, rambling rendition of that bittersweet Mary J.

Blige and U2 song that King Tadhg had put on when he got in a slow dancing mood after my big welcome dinner.

Also, making or way over rolling hills toward a two-story red house perched in front of a sparkling lake for a kilometer or two was way easier than the hikes Senair used to take me on through the mountains “to walk off the grief” after Alban’s death.

I couldn’t believe this green, hilly place was where Da died—or that I, of all people, was actually here to broker peace between the two wolf kingdoms.

“Why me?” I asked Sadie as we got closer to a.

“Uncle—I mean, King Magnus—said you requested me as their ambassador specifically, even though I just moved back to Scotland after going to uni and working abroad.”

One of the first questions the youngest and fourth High Prince had asked was, “Why do you sound like North America?”

For so many reasons, I didn’t feel equipped to handle these negotiations.

“I hope you’ll understand after you meet Naomi,” Sadie answered.

“It could only be you.”

Maybe.

But I didn’t understand at all when my Aunt Naomi, the Queen of the Irish Wolves, emerged just before we reached the house.

She was small but sharp as a razor.

High cheekbones, wiry muscles, cornrows that fell down her back like whips.

Everything about her was sharp, the complete opposite of Sadie’s teddy bear softness.

It was hard to believe they were best friends.

A much taller female and male flanked her, and they carried the same sharpness, though younger.

Her children. I could tell at first sniff.

The son had long red hair braided in a way that reminded me of the Vikings of yore.

And the daughter had wild curls with leaves and sticks with bright red berries woven through them—clearly intentional, but it made her look like a living bush of poisonous berries.

They all wore leather outfits that could have easily gotten them cast as bandits in one of those historical entertainments set in the days before metal armor.

The first thing Naomi said to me was, “You are not allowed in my home. We will have this discussion by the Three Gods Lake.”

Then she turned and headed around the house toward the sparkling body of water, obviously expecting us to follow.

Sadie didn’t seem the least bit surprised by this announcement.

She simply adjusted my duffel on her shoulder and followed.

I trailed behind, wondering where I was expected to sleep.

Maybe in the small town I could see on the other side of the lake in the distance.

We stopped at the water’s edge—so close I could see that it was more like a reservoir or basin.

No beach. Just a grassy lip with a steep drop, surrounded by signs warning that swimming wasn’t allowed.

No problem . I’d never learned how to swim, and even after the hike under a real sun in hot, unmoderated temperatures, the thought of risking my life in what looked like a massive, sheer-drop hole of water did not appeal to me.

Naomi turned to face me, her expression as hard as one of the stones in the circle we just hiked here from.

Was this where I was supposed to recite the poem I’d been taught?

I looked to Sadie for some kind of clue about how to proceed.

“You probably have questions for me,” Naomi said before I could speak.

Her voice was cold, and her eyes glittered with unchecked rage.

“Including which one of us killed Alban Scotswolf. I’m told you called him Da .”

“I did,” I confirmed.

“But I don’t need to know who?—”

“It was me,” Naomi said, tilting her sharp, beautiful face with the expression of someone enjoying a truly delicious memory.

“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.”

Naomi told me this…

told me she’d killed my da, who’d survived the battle with her evil, kidnapping husbands…

who had only wanted to get his duty over with and come home to me, his unborn son, and my pregnant maem…

She told me this with a proud smirk on her lips, madness sparkling in her eyes.

Okay…

Okay…

I realized two things in that moment:

1.

I was no diplomat. Uncle Magnus should never have sent me.

And…

2. This bitch was about to die.

In an instant, the temper I’d learned to tame after a difficult childhood flamed hotter than a bonfire.

My fists curled at my sides, and I stepped forward, vision going red with only one thought in my mind: Kill her.

But then Sadie was suddenly in front of me, blocking my path, her taller, larger body shielding me from Naomi.

“Here, Dorie. Take this,” she said quickly, swinging the duffel she’d insisted on carrying for me from her shoulder to over my head and arranging it like a crossbody satchel.

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 said again, forcing my attention back to her.

Despite the duffel, she pulled me into her arms, hugging me tight.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I’m so very sorry. Remember the poem! Say it out loud!”

Is she kidding?

No peace would be brokered here today.

And there was no way I was going to recite my bitch of an aunt a poem.

The only thing I was going to do was?—

Sadie’s hands landed hard on my chest, cutting the violent thought off.

Sadie was so nice.

So warm and kind.

It wasn’t until I hit the ice-cold water that I realized…

she’d shoved me.

And in that instant, Aunt Naomi became the furthest thing from my mind.

I was drowning.

Oh God, I was drowning.

Much faster than I should’ve been under the weight of the duffel.

I kicked and twisted, but I couldn’t get free.

Couldn’t stop sinking.

And for some reason that song Sadie had been singing about forgiveness and temples and higher laws went off in my head as I sank…

Down…

Down…. past the lake’s stone wall.

Except… the wall changed.

It went from smooth to bumpy.

I vaguely registered carvings.

Three statues. Giant dragons with extended snouts.

I was drowning.

Dying…

With a song about fractured relationships that may or may not work out playing in my head.

But as I sank, I couldn’t help wondering, What are these intricately carved statues of sleeping dragons doing down here?

Then the dragon statue in the middle…

blinked… its eyelids opening to reveal glowing orbs, green as emeralds.

And staring straight at me.

***