Why me?I asked myself as I flew to an Irish coastal town called Wicklow in a private plane belonging to the three billionaire founders of the KaCh€ng! App—all three of whom I would later find out were not only the Kings of the Irish Bears, but also Sadie’s husbands.
Sadie—the tall, dark-skinned, and voluptuous Irish Queen—met my plane on what turned out to be their Wicklow mansion’s own private airfield. She wore a dress similar to the one she’d had on when I’d found her chained to the bed in my room, a pretty pink frock covered in strawberries. But she was twenty years older now, and all traces of the angry female I’d met were gone. She hugged me tight, like she was greeting an old friend.
“Thank you so much for coming!”
“Thank you so much for the invitation,” I answered with a nervous laugh. “But um… why me?”
“Is this your bag? I’ve never seen one with a double-strap design like that. How cute!” Sadie’s eyes lit on my da’s old black Cordura duffel.
She’d never seen a standard army duffel?
I began to ask how that was possible before remembering that, like my mother, aunts, and me until the age of twelve, Sadie had grown up in a cloistered Canadian shifter religious sect called The Wölfennites. I’d bounced off to the States to dive into a life in the modern human world as soon as I got the chance at the age of 18. But Maem hadn’t gone out of her way to find out more about the modern human world beyond what she needed to teach in the village schoolhouse, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sadie hadn’t, either.
“Here, let me carry that for you.” She took the duffel and slid it onto her shoulder. “Follow me. We’ve got so much for you to see and do before we go visit Naomi.”
Was she avoiding my question or truly that excited about me—and only me—being here to represent the Scottish Wolves, as opposed to the much more qualified Scottish Twin Princes? I couldn’t tell.
But I didn’t have time to press. She hustled me inside the cliffside mansion, guiding me by the elbow. Even though I was an all grown-up five foot nine now, Sadie was taller than me standing up—at least six feet and surprisingly spry. I could barely keep up with her as we raced through well-appointed rooms in a thoroughly modern mansion to a set of double doors that swung open on their own.
“Welcome to the Wicklow Gate!” Sadie said with a cheery sweep of her hand.
All my questions were immediately replaced with new ones. The Wicklow Gate, as she’d called it, was some kind of ballroom, but instead of a dance floor, it held a towering rock structure that put me in mind of Stonehenge… if Stonehenge was located inside a ballroom.
“What in the world?” I asked.
“And that’s just the gate.” Sadie grinned down at me, pulling me forward by the elbow. “C’mon, it gets even better.”
She walked me straight toward the gap between two of the massive stones and?—
Everything went black.
My stomach dropped like I’d stepped off a cliff. For one terrifying second, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. The world no longer made sense. There was only the feeling of falling through nothing.
Then, just as suddenly, the dropping sensation stopped, and I could once again feel the ground beneath my feet.
I blinked hard, trying to get my wolf vision on line in the pitch black.
Then a door whispered open.
As my brotherwould have said,Holy feck.
The bears lived in a secret kingdom. A secret kingdom I could barely describe. Or take pictures of since my holo phone didn’t work down here. Nor did my NanoPad.
Unfortunately, theWolfNet Gazettehadn’t paid well, so I’d never been able to afford the bioware that would let me make calls and record video with a subvocal command and a few blinks.
I did my best to record what I could in the old way, furiously scribbling in one of the vintage bullet journals I’d found still wrapped in cellophane in Da’s office. Da’s own father, Senair Hamish, as I called my step-grandfather, had died five years ago, leaving the house to my maem, but she still hadn’t touched that room. It was like a time capsule, forever preserving the memory of Alban Scotswolf, the male we only got the chance to love for less than a year.
SECRET KINGDOM NOTES:
Underground (and by ground I mean MOST OF IRELAND) kingdom. Smells like dirt and sediment, but looks like something AI designed with the prompt “futuristic fantasy land hobbit village—but for bears.” Everything runs on something called god tech.
They call actual Ireland, where non-shifter people live, “The Above.”
God Tech = Holy shit level technology that allows them to render and reconfigure buildings like simulations and control the weather. Fake sky? They claim this tech was given to them “sometime before the Bronze Age” by three serpent gods.
Three Bear Kings: Each have their own castle.
High King = Opulent palace. One floor—but huge. Where Sadie and most of the kids stay. High King is romance-holo level businessman—capital B. Squints at anybody who’s not Sadie.
