The patience was found.
The shame was evaporated.
And grace was put back on like the crown I could suddenly feel myself wearing as I rose to my feet. So much taller than my mother than I remembered.
No more words.
Claudine could no longer even meet my eyes.
In fact, she lowered her own and dipped her head.
In a way that felt like a bow.
And she did not lift it again as I left the room and walked down a set of stairs to a cozy living room with a fireplace that actually emitted heat and smoke that wasn’t merely a scent.
Dorie was nowhere to be found, but the massive man with hair the color of dirty snow and crazed eyes stood at the front door. With a shotgun raised.
“Hamish, don’t!” Claudine called out behind me.
Right before there came a sound I’d only heard on the digital wall and inside my mind when the climaxes with my kings were particularly good.
An explosion.
Followed by the urgent ringing of church bells. The same kind we used back in St. Ailbe when a tornado was coming our way.
And just like that, the rest of my Irish Bears’ love story was reduced to an…
Epilogue
Twenty YearsLater
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 morebreakfast 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 tostarveourselves to death and leave her withno 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 oranyoneyer 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.
