“Maidir le ham diabhal,” a familiar voice called out to him. “I have your clothes. You need to stop leaving them shoved under the nearest rock, boyo.”
Riordan made a face at where his older brother stood on the rocky shore, Donal shaking said clothing in his direction. “Where else do you want me to hide them? And don’t you dare say the nearest bin.”
He tied his sealskin around his waist. Glamour could hide his pointed ears but generally not his clothes or lack thereof. Selkies had no qualms about showing skin in either form, but mundane humans could get ridiculously prudish about it. The last thing he wanted was for someone to call the cops on them.
“You could try your car,” Donal said, passing over the clothes and shoes once Riordan made it to him. They were of the sameheight and shared their mother’s brown hair and eyes, but Donal had far more freckles than Riordan and was older by about a century. “Well? How was your patrol?”
Riordan grimaced as he hastily yanked on his clothes before undoing his sealskin, shaking it out into the guise of a leather jacket that was definitely far too hot for the weather today, but it never bothered him. Wrapping himself up in his sealskin, even on land, was like wrapping himself up in a soft, comforting blanket.
“No,” Riordan confessed. “My search came up empty, like always.”
Donal grimaced and headed toward the flatter greenery of the mainland. “So did everyone else’s today. Don’t blame yourself for that. Saoirse never would.”
They’d been searching for their little sister’s sealskin ever since it had been stolen as a way to get their clan under the thumb of an enemy. Saoirse had been frantic after the attack, bruised and shaken. The perpetrators had only taken her sealskin—changed at the time into the form of a fashionable coat—and left her battered in a club two weeks ago. They hadn’t demanded she come with them, though she’d confessed she’d felt the hideous pull of power in her soul that urged her to go to the thief who held her sealskin now. She was able to remain with the clan so far, though Riordan knew that wouldn’t last for much longer.
Ever since her sealskin was stolen, Riordan had handled several calls regarding his sister’s future and his clan’s anticipated subservience. If they defied the demands placed on them, Saoirse would be forcibly called to her new mate’s side, bound to the person who held her sealskin. If they caved, she’d be allowed to stay with her clan, but her sealskin would be hidden somewhere they could never find, forever keeping them in line.
Neither option was a good one, and Riordan had spent every spare hour he could in search of his sister’s skin, to no avail.
“You came back early,” Donal said once they made it up to the grass and the pavement. “I was surprised to get your text. You could’ve come home first rather than go on patrol.”
The cement was warm beneath Riordan’s bare feet, shoes dangling from his fingers. His feet were still damp from his swim and he had a towel in his trunk he was going to use to clean up with before putting on his sneakers. “The wedding is over and I needed to clear my mind.”
Riordan tried not to hunch his shoulders. He had gone to Underhill as a representative of their clan to Cú Chulainn’s wedding. Riordan would have preferred staying in Boston and handling the mess they’d been dragged into and sent his brother. But Donal couldn’t make clan decisions with other fae, so it had been up to Riordan to go.
“Did anyone take you up on our request for help?” Donal asked.
Riordan shook his head, lips pressed tight together for a few seconds before he spoke. “No. Mostly, they wanted to know why we weren’t going home.”
“Back to Ireland or Underhill?”
“Does it matter?”
They weren’t the only clan of selkies calling the United States of America home, but they’d been in Boston longer than any of the others. They’d come over before the Great Hunger but were followed decades after by the desperate Irish who managed to flee the devastation. Underhill hadn’t yet sprouted hawthorn paths into the Americas at the time; those had come later, with belief fed by the Irish.
Riordan’s clan and others had made the new land home as best they could, knowing back then that traveling beyond the veil was nearly impossible without returning to Ireland. But it hadput them—for a brief moment in time—out of reach of those who knew about their sealskin.
Eventually, the fae found their way to foreign shores, spreading roots into a land that welcomed everyone from all walks of life, whether mundane or magical or something else. Several hundred years later, and they’d watched Boston grow from a colony to a thriving modern city, one they’d sunk their own business ventures in. It made returning to Underhill difficult. Leaving a place where they were comfortably entrenched in the supernatural community to a world past the veil where they’d have no political leverage after being gone for what might have been thousands of years in Underhill wasn’t enticing.
“Water off the pelt, boyo,” Donal said. “I hope the rest of the wedding was nice.”
“Sure,” Riordan said, thinking about the mortal at the dessert table whose name he’d failed to get and had been kicking himself over ever since. The dark-haired young man who’d talked back to Lord Diarmait had immediately caught Riordan’s attention in a way no one else ever had. Even now, Riordan couldn’t stop thinking about him, but he didn’t tell Donal that.
Riordan firmly told himself the fixation would pass.
Donal clapped a hand onto Riordan’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Come on. Let’s head to the pub. You look like you could do with a pint.”
Riordan nodded tightly, knowing he was being uncharacteristically quiet, but he hated coming back empty-handed.
When they reached the cars, he wiped off his feet before putting on his sneakers and getting behind the steering wheel of his Corvette. Donal was already driving away, taillights bright against the June twilight. Riordan started the engine and droveafter his brother, weaving his way through traffic in the South Boston neighborhood his clan had called home for centuries.
His immediate blood kin had owned a tract of land near the beach and had kept it, even through the period of historical discrimination against the Irish and the fae. These days, the surrounding streets were filled with homes and apartment buildings, and theirs was no different. Clan Maguire had built a number of homes on the two blocks of land they owned, the squat-looking triple-decker buildings mostly filled with clan members. The corner building that Riordan and his siblings called home also housed a pub on the first floor, a local spot as much as a destination one.
The Maguire Pub on the corner was the original location of the Irish pub and restaurant business empire he and his siblings had created and still presided over. They had locations in many big cities on the East and West Coasts, close to the oceans or other waterways. They were in the process of opening a new location in New York City after a multi-year delay, thanks to the Battle of Samhain, but it had been paused yet again while they dealt with this current threat to their livelihood.
Riordan drove down the easement that cut the block in half, parking in their home’s garage in the rear of the building. Donal pulled in behind him, his headlights switching off. The triple-decker home was half a block down from the pub, which made it easy to lock everything up behind them and make their way between buildings to the street out front.
They walked in an easy silence toward the pub, the door propped open to let in a breeze. Entering, they passed through a silence ward that kept the raucous sound of the pub inside the walls. The noise hit Riordan’s ears like an explosion: music, laughter, and the sounds of televisions showing whatever game was on. The Red Sox were playing an away game, and quite a few patrons were dressed in their team’s colors.
