Magic Tides (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years #1)(22)

“But they could? If the wave was strong enough?”

“Theoretically. They won’t though. Gods are cowards.”

The blueberry bushes ended. Marsh hugged the roadway, clumps of the smooth cordgrass blending together into a wall of green.

Watching Onyx slide around in his own blood on the floor of the arena bothered me. He was a child trafficker. The grimy cages at Red Horn said that he deserved everything he got.

It still bothered me.

He wasn’t mine to punish. My aunt would have congratulated me on finally learning some discipline. My father would have turned it into a deep examination of his own altruistic impulses and how they eventually led to his downfall and then lectured me to not repeat his mistakes.

I had to let it go. Obsessing about it would only pull me back onto a very dangerous road. It led to claiming territory, and building towers, and people who pledged their lives to me in exchange for a promise of power and immortality. That wasn’t the future I wanted. For myself or for my family.

Something rustled ahead in the marsh. I halted Cuddles. Thomas followed my lead.

The cordgrass parted, and three men emerged onto the road. They moved with the familiar, easy grace of shapeshifters. One of them carried a bucket. And the shortest of them carried a claymore on his back.

Gods damn it all to hell and back. Don’t see us. Don’t.

The three shapeshifters caught our scent and turned to look at us in unison. Three pairs of eyes caught the light of the dying sunrise and shone, one green and two yellow.

The green-eyed claymore user stood up straight. He was short but muscled like a wrestler. “Consort?”

Of all people in the whole wide world to run into.

“Consort!” The shapeshifter dropped to one knee and smacked his fist into his chest. “It’s you!”

Why me?

The shapeshifter on his right dropped to one knee as well. The other guy, the one with the bucket, stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Get up, Keelan,” I hissed.

The claymore guy jumped to his feet from kneeling position and trotted over, his eyes shining.

“We’ve been over this. I’m not the Consort. Dali is the Consort now.”

Keelan smiled at me with slightly deranged devotion, his blond hair, wet with Cape Fear’s dark water, sticking to his face and neck. “You will always be the Consort to me.”

My left eye twitched. I slapped my hand over it.

His real name was Caolan Comerford, but he’d changed it when he came to the States. Other Irish people pronounced it as Kaylin or Kwaylan, Americans called him Cowlan, and correcting people got in his way, so he settled on Keelan because it sounded cool and was something he could live with.

Keelan claimed to have descended from the werewolves of Ossory, a mythical Irish shapeshifter kingdom that was said to flourish in Ireland pre-Norman invasion. For a while, I wasn’t sure he was even Irish, since he played up the charming Celtic-rogue thing so much. But according to Curran, there might have been something to his Ossory claims, because Keelan was abnormally gifted as a werewolf. He had a huge warrior form, could keep it up for a long period of time, could talk while in it, and was absolutely lethal in a fight.

I’d interacted with thousands of shapeshifters in my life, and Keelan was the only shapeshifter who fought with a claymore. In the warrior form. The first time I met him, we were in the middle of a skirmish, and he just kind of waded into it. His claymore was 55 inches long, and he himself was 66 inches tall. He had pulled it off his back, looked around, and suddenly this enormous werewolf spilled out and started swinging the claymore, one-handed. It was all offense. He had zero sword training until me. He had just whipped the claymore around like it was a club, and it hadn’t hindered him any, because when a giant werewolf waved around 6 pounds of sharpened metal, it cleared his killing field in record time. It took me almost two years to make him into a half-decent swordsman.

“What are you doing here, Consort?” Keelan asked, petting Cuddles.

“I should be asking you that question. Why are you sneaking into the Farm? Are you trying to start a war?”

The shapeshifter with the bucket hid it behind him.

“What’s in the bucket?” I asked.

“Umm,” Keelan said.

Keelan had come to us a few months after our trip to the Mediterranean. He had been looking for something to do with his life, and once he’d heard the story of the Beast Lord and his glorious quest to obtain panacea for his pack, he decided to check us out. The moment he had seen Curran in a warrior form, Keelan decided he had found his purpose for living. Somehow my husband was the answer to everything Keelan was searching for. Curran, recognizing talent, had admitted him to the Pack on the condition he would give us 10 years.

And then Curran and I walked away from the Pack. Curran was Keelan’s favorite person, and I was his second favorite person, because I taught him how to use his claymore and because I was Curran’s mate. Keelan tried to separate with us, but Jim wouldn’t let him go until his contract was up. He counted on Keelan to counterbalance Desandra, the alpha of Clan Wolf. Except Keelan wanted nothing to do with being an alpha of the wolves. One time Desandra lost her patience and straight out asked him if he would ever make a bid for her spot, and he told her that only an idiot would want that job, because life was far too short for that kind of bullshit. Both Jim and Desandra tried to pull him to their respective sides, but Keelan proceeded to half-ass every task they had given him and was insufferably apathetic about werewolfing in general and following their orders in particular.