I rubbed at my temple. “I just need to be alone right now—please. Get out.”
To his credit, he didn’t make me ask a third time.
With a single nod, he turned and left. For such a huge being, his shoeless feet barely made a sound on the stone floor.
Much like the ones at the Wicklow gate mansion, the doors swung wide open without having to be touched and closed behind him after he walked through.
As soon as he was gone, I made a beeline for the duffel bag he’d left in the bathroom.
The journal…
My holoscribe brain was in overdrive. I had to come up with a plan. There was no way I was staying in caveman times.
I needed to check the notes I’d been taking all week with the bears. A fresh burst of resentment flared inside of me. I’d felt soguilty about the story I was planning to sell, having no idea that Sadie was plotting to push me into a lake the entire time.
Why? Had it been an act of revenge? Some kind of declaration of war? Maybe I was a virgin sacrifice of some sort.
I recalled how the Shadow Princess chided her womb brother, the Mountain Prince, for coming on to me yet again at that last breakfast in the bear’s secret kingdom.
“Read the social cues she’s exhibiting. 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.”
I’d been so embarrassed when the Shadow Princess added,“Also, she’s an unmated wolf, and most likely a virgin. 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.”
The Shadow Princess was right about me being a virgin at the age of thirty-two. A hard thing to find in the Bear kingdom, where they celebrated every spring with what sounded like a full-on sex festival. Had the Shadow Princess been in on it, too?
I yanked open the zipper of the duffel. It was still slightly damp and smelled faintly of lake water. There had to be something I wasn’t seeing. Some indication that Queen Sadie and company were going to betray me like this.
I didn’t have to dig for the bullet journal. It was the last thing I’d packed and right near the top, center stage, in the middle of my things.
However, my heart sank the moment I pulled it out. Dingy liquid squelched out between the pages and dripped onto the stone floor. The elastic band had gone loose and sodden, and when I pulled it aside and opened the journal, I found a swollen mass of waterlogged paper.
“No,” I whispered.
I tried to turn the pages anyway.
The first sheets tore under my attempt to peel them away from the mass. The rest clung together, pulpy and blurred. Ink had bled into ink until everything was just gray soup, and my cramped little notes were dissolved into illegible ghosts.
Every conversation with the bears. Every description of their castles and perfectly rendered town. Every stupid, precious detail I’d been hoarding away like a squirrel…
Gone.
Rage rushed up my throat. Pure—but not at all simple.
The Irish shifters… they’d used me—played me for the fool, as Granni Claudine would have said. And worst of all, they had won.
Panic began to creep in at the edges of the anger, and there it was…
Despair had joined the party. I began to sob.
What was I going to do? How was I going to—hold on…
The incoming mind collapse abruptly cut off when I noticed something else. Right next to the green cardigan sweater Sadie had insisted I take with me.
That weird god tech rubber bag. The one they said was filled with gifts for Naomi, the Queen of the Irish Wolves.
Just like they said that poem was for her, too.
I couldn’t let myself hope anymore, but I sat on the floor and crisscrossed my legs to go through it. The opening was a heavy zipperless clasp that released with a small hiss of air, like it had been pressure locked.
