Patience wasn’t my strongest virtue, but my hunting instincts warned me that waiting for the meal Sea’s father had predicted would be my best move.
Pushing down my hunger — for now — I returned to my pack, who were waiting for their Wild King just a few kilometers away at the next set of fating stones. They’d temporarily settled for a dry midday meal in what we called “the below.”
“What did the Sea King want with ye, then?” Lorcan, my second in command and the Wild Wolves’ largest hunter, asked when I arrived.
“I’ll tell ye later,” I promised before howling in wolf voice to the rest of the pack to continue our yearly trek to the fating stones atCarn na Scáthanna— the barren moor where we would perform three days’ worth of rituals to honor our dead and ask the three gods to bless us during the hardship of winter. Truth was, I didn’t like thinking of my father, much less honoring him. That was why Samhain was my least favorite of the pagan holy days.
But I led my pack south toward the land the humans called County Clare with the certainty that I would not be leading the ritual this year.
So,no, as they say in the new language, it didn’t surprise me that the Sea King refused my suggestion to reap those she-wolves without thatcladhartha, Dublin.
Nor was I shocked when a small falcon found us a few days later.
Lorcan plucked her from the air without bothering to fetch a leather armband.
“If you bite me, I’ll bloody end you, merlin,” he growled in wolf voice before loosening the piece of vellum from her sharp claw.
"Just says, Meet us at the westernmost fating stones after the next full moon." Lorcan flipped the note this way and that before handing it over, confused. "Whoever sent this didn’t even bother to sign it. What's it mean?"
It was happening.
After seventeen years, the Cursed King’s wait was over. A surge of emotion tightened my chest, and a slow grin crept across my face as I answered Lorcan, "The time for the Second Reaping has finally come."
I let out a howl that reverberated into the distance, raw and unrestrained.
That evening, I rallied my hunters with a short command. "To hell with the Dublin King, then! We ride to the Cliffs of Aillte come the break of the next full moon!"
We were under strict instructions not to bother the Tríbéirríthe's Scottish wolf source. But whoever it was gave us explicit mission details on a single sheet of paper entitled BURN AFTER READING.
For this reason, the day of the Scottish King’s and New Queen’s wedding found us Sea and Wild wolves lying upon the snow-covered ground in the Highland forest that fronted the Prince of Scotland’s cottage.
“He never uses the house anymore,”the source had written down for us. “He prefers to stay at the castle with his brother and the heavily pregnant new queen, who also happens to be best mates with the Prince’s American wife, who gave birth to the first baby she-wolf our kingdom has seen in years and years.”
While reading over the details in the Sea King’s secret castle office, I’d paused at the mention of the wives.
The First Reaping spared no one. Our ancestors took every female we sighted to replenish our desperately low numbers, from the babes in the cribs to the then Scottish King’s bride, Mairi — who went on to become the mother of our three kingdoms.
“As I said before when I gave you my conditions, we will only take the unmarried she-wolves of mating age,” the Sea King had said when I stopped reading the single-spaced typed-out instructions.
“What if —” I started to ask.
“Then we extract the Tríbéirríthe's potential and let ours go with her already mated life,” he’d said. “Dublin was right about this being a different time. I will not reap a young mother or a pregnant bride no matter what that piece of stone says.”
We didn’t need the City Wolves to pull off the Second Reaping, but at this point, the Sea King was the Wilds' only point of contact with the Tríbéirríthe. We needed him to lead this mission. I had nochoice but to agree to his conditions and trust the prophecy to provide the right she-wolf to fulfill it.
So, as instructed, we gathered outside the Scottish Prince’s cabin, lying in wait on the dark forest floor. And when the bells started ringing to announce the call to the wedding, we watched the town empty out from our partially blocked view.
Heaps of wolves dressed in kilts and plaids, along with a flock of Wölfennite lasses wearing long, plain blue dresses, passed by the bridge on the other side of the house.
It seemed that every single kingdom town wolf would be attending the King’s wedding to his Canadian bride.
Well, almost every wolf. The large, redheaded shifter installing solar panels on the castle roof all morning, did not pause when the church bells rang.
“What’s he all about then?” one of the Sea Wolves asked behind us. “Why isn’t he joining the rest for their King and Queen’s wedding?”
“Who cares?” One of my rougher wolves answered. “While staring at that potato, I can smell all the fresh she-cunt walking by even under all them layers. Ripe and juicy for the mating.”
“Remember the ground rules,” Sea bit out. “You are not to touch them.”
