Werewolves in Love 2: Yours, Mine and Howls (38 page)

Declan grinned. “Thereabouts. I’d have to look it up. I was born a year after the Black Plague wiped out half the Faroes.”

Cade looked over at Michael. “What we talked about the other night. Vargalf. Fae wolves. Fae longevity, Fae talents. He’s one. And I guess I am too, and Dylan.” He glanced at his nephew, who’d pulled his iPhone out of his pocket.

“He’s six hundred and sixty,” Dylan announced as they stared at him. “According to Wikipedia, the black plague wiped out half the Faroe Islands around thirteen forty-nine.”

“Do you go anywhere without that thing, pup?” asked Dec.

Dylan grinned. “No.”

“But I thought you were Irish,” Michael protested weakly.

“Not originally. I was born in the Faroe Islands, as was Cade’s mother. We all went to Iceland later. I didn’t get to Ireland ’til I was a couple hundred years old.” The ancient werewolf shrugged. “For that matter, Declan MacSorley’s not my original name. I was born Dougall Mac Sumarliddison.”

“Your first name is Dougall?” asked Dylan. “Like MacDougall?”

“Aye. It’s a family name. One of Somerled’s sons founded the clan MacDougall.”

Now Cade was thoroughly confused. “But—you’re my maternal uncle.”

“And I’m also a direct descendant of Somerled, like your da. Your mother and father were related. Eirny found it kind of funny. She couldn’t tell your dad, of course.”

“Wait a minute. Sumarliddison was the name of one of Somerled’s sons. But it’s not in use anymore. Hasn’t been for centuries.”

“Very good, pup. You do know your family history. Yes, it’s an old, old name. And I’m an old, old wolf.”

Cade drained his cup and held it out for more. His throat had gone dry. His heart was pounding, his hands clammy. Even after the hints Dec had dropped in the woods, to hear it out loud—a six-hundred-year-old uncle, a shapeshifting daughter, a selkie mother—his mind couldn’t stretch much further. At this point, if Dec told him they were aliens from outer space, he’d have no choice but to believe it.

“My mother?” His voice came out in a croak. He took another sip and tried again. “My mother. She was a selkie?”

Dec nodded, no longer smiling.

“How old was she?”

“Fifty years younger than me, pup.”

Cade’s eyes went to the open window on the other side of the room. He stared at the woods beyond, not really seeing them. “Did my father know?”

“No,” said Dec.

“You’re older than Sindri,” he murmured, awestruck.

“I’m his godfather. His mother raised us, like he raised you and Carson. She died giving birth to him.” His voice got quiet. “I pulled the wee fella from her body right before she left us.”

“Why didn’t he ever mention you?”

Dec ran a hand through his hair and blew out a hard breath. “Ah. Well. That’s part of the whole story. I always thought I’d meet you and Carson. Your mother meant for me to. She kept waiting for a way to explain things to your father, but she never found it. You know how she was, Cade.” Cade’s gaze returned to Dec, drawn by the morose tone in his uncle’s voice. “Your mother never took the hard way if an easier one was available.”

Cade sighed.

“Then she insisted on going back to Scotland, and your father took you all, and Sindri blamed himself for that. And Louis’ family took the two of you away to Savannah, and then… The years rolled on, y’see, and I kept finding excuses to stay away. Shame. Fear, pain, guilt. Take your pick. I wasn’t wolf enough to do my duty by you.” He shook his head, downed his drink in one gulp and poured some more.

“But you stayed in touch with Sindri even after my parents died?”

“Aye. Always. He pointed me to Dylan.”

“How did he know?”

“Eir told him. In a dream or a vision or however she communicates with him. I’ve never understood it and he doesn’t talk about it. But she told him Carson had a son. Didn’t tell him how to find either of them, of course. She’s never that helpful. She gets involved just enough to feck with your life, but not enough to actually help. Took me five years to track down Carson, two more to find Dylan. I’m wasted as a bartender. I’d make one hell of a good P.I.”

“Dec,” said Ally, “what did Sindri blame himself for?”

“It’s a long story, love.”

“I think it’s time you told it, then, don’t you?”

Dec grinned sadly. “Your mate is bossy, Cade, you know that?”

“Yeah. I like it. Now talk.”

For the first time since Cade had known him, Declan MacSorley—or Dougall Mac Sumarliddison, or whoever the fuck he was—looked ill at ease and lost for words.

“Well, now…I’m not sure where to start.”

Cade snorted. “How about with the fact that my mother was a selkie?”

“That’s a seal who turns into a person, right?” asked Michael.

“Or a person who turns into a seal,” said Dec. “Like with any shifter, it depends on how you look at it.”

“So Stinky Butt isn’t the first and only female shifter running around?”

“No. There’ve never been many of them. Right now there are only six or seven. Maybe eight or nine, with the
barn
here.”

Becca snoozed on beneath the chair. He couldn’t believe Ally was letting her sleep on the dirty floor, cat form or not.

“They’re all related to us. Cousins, and in my case nieces too, I guess. Most of them are cousins
and
nieces at the same time, on account of how thoroughly bollocksed our family tree is.”

“Okay, good. The family tree,” said Cade. “Start there. But first give me another shot.”

Dec poured. “Somerled. It starts with Somerled.”

“Wait,” said Ally. “That was the Scottish king?”

“Lord of the Isles, yes. Eleven hundred AD or thereabouts.” Dec took another swig. “My great-great-grandfather.”

“Fuck,” Michael said again. “That’s just bizarre.”

“Somerled was a Vargalf?” asked Dylan.

“No, just a wolf, but he started the whole thing.” Dec stretched his legs out and settled back on the couch, keeping a tight grip on the rapidly dwindling Glenfiddich. “You know how his three sons founded the oldest clans.” Cade nodded. “Well, Somerled had another son you don’t hear much about—Alan Sumarliddison. He didn’t found any clans, and he never became a king.

“Alan Sumarliddison was a shame and a horror to his family because he was a Fae wolf—a werewolf with a Fae talent. Telekinesis, specifically. He could move objects with his mind. Needless to say, this disturbed the fuck out of everyone who knew him. Somerled came from old Norse and Gaelic bloodlines, important families. Finding one of his pups with a Fae talent left the old bastard right gobsmacked.”

“How’d it happen?” Cade asked, enthralled despite his growing sense of vertigo, the feeling he’d fallen so far down the rabbit hole he’d never climb out.

“Somerled married the King of Man’s daughter. The King had a bloodline full of Fae, which he managed to hide. He was determined to marry his homely little girl off to the Lord of the Isles.”

“But Fae and wolves can’t have kids together.”

“According to family legend, Man thought they’d fake a pregnancy and slip a baby in when no one was looking. All he cared about was his daughter becoming Queen of the Isles. Imagine the old schemer’s surprise when Ragnild—that was my great-great-grandmother’s name—turns up pregnant by her werewolf husband. There weren’t a lot of geneticists in twelfth century Scotland, so we’re still working this out, but there must’ve been a mutation, because Ragnild ended up having six or seven kids with Somerled.

“All the sons were wolves, but Alan was a Fae wolf. When they figured out his abnormality, they married him off to a spinster cousin, gave him a pot of gold and a bunch of land in the Faroes, and told him to keep his head down or lose it.”

Dec paused for another long swig. “In wealthy families back then, marriage between cousins was the norm. And if your family’s carrying weird genes… Sure enough, Alan’s three sons were all Vargalf, and so were
their
sons. Alan’s youngest grandson was my dad. His sister, my aunt Ingeborg, was a fox. Not fox as in pretty girl. She was as plain as Ragnild. No, Ingeborg turned into a small red canid that you hunt from horseback. She was the first female shifter we know of.”

“So a Vargalf’s daughter is a shifter?” asked Ally. “Wait a second. Sarah Jane called Becca something. I don’t remember the word, but she said it was Norse for a female shapeshifter.”

“The word’s dyrkona,” Dec replied. “Actually, it means changing woman. But not every Vargalf’s daughter is one. It requires Vargalf lineage from both parents—remember, there was a lot of consanguineous shagging back then. In time, we think, the gene became recessive. I think that’s how Eirny managed to have you two—Louis must’ve carried the recessive gene. One of my cousins is a doctor in Norway. He’s obsessed with all this. He’d love to meet you and Dylan, by the way.”

Dec fell silent as Cade’s brain began to race.

“So…Dad showed up in Scotland researching his ancestry, and…”

“And saw Eirny on Scarista Beach. Which, by the way, is the same beach where Adnar had seen her three hundred years earlier, or thereabouts. God knows how much I loved your mother, Cade, but her judgment was for shite. Anyway. Your da was smitten immediately, and so was she. When Louis told her he was a descendant of Somerled, it tickled her. It made them—what? Distant cousins? Or maybe it made her his great-aunt five hundred years removed?”

“And she didn’t tell Louis about being a selkie, or about Vargalfs or anything?” Dylan asked.

“Oh, no. No. We keep our heads down, always have done. There’s not as many of us as there used to be. Fae can’t stand us. Werewolves, back when they knew about us, didn’t like us much either. Wolves have long forgotten about us, but not the high Fae. No, see, when Eirny first met your da, she didn’t realize she’d end up marrying him, so she was economical with details about her family.

“But then he claimed her. Well, she didn’t know how to tell him at that point that she wasn’t at all what she appeared to be. I told her to go ahead and just lay it all out on the table. She was his mate, he wouldn’t walk away. But…hard road, easy road. She packed up Sindri, went to Georgia, married Louis. At that point, she was thinking she’d live with Louis until he died and then she’d go back to Iceland. Or Scotland. Point is, she never thought she’d get pregnant. Because at that point we didn’t realize Louis had the recessive Vargalf gene. Then she turned up pregnant, and who the fuck expected that?”

His face lit up in an expression of pure delight. “I’m telling ya, pup, when word made its way among the Vargalf that your mama was pregnant by a wolf…” He laughed softly. “Gobsmacked doesn’t begin to describe the reaction. You two were the first ones born in about two hundred years, and the first ones ever in the New World. Far as we knew, anyway.”

He stared at Michael for a long moment, then said, “Ah, shite. The Glenfiddich is gone.” He looked around. “Anybody drunk yet?”

No one was. Ally’s metabolism was just like a werewolf’s. It would take a few dozen bottles to get all five of them drunk.

“There’s a bottle of MacAllen in here,” Michael said, pulling it from another of the cardboard boxes. “He didn’t drink anything but scotch? I could do with a beer.”

“At least he had good taste in whisky.” Dec stood and stretched. “I need to step outside for a moment. ’Scuse me, children.”

Once he’d left, Ally turned to Cade, laying a hand to his cheek. “You okay? Still with me here?”

“Yeah, it’s just…goddamn. Are you believing all this?” He lay back down with a sigh. “Why didn’t Sindri ever say anything to me? He’s had plenty of time.”

“Dec said something about Sindri blaming himself,” Ally murmured.

She ran her fingers through his hair, gazing down at him with a worried expression. Did she sense his fear? He hoped to God she didn’t. He didn’t want anyone, not even his mate, to know how this was messing with his head.

Michael cleared his throat. “Look, wolf, if you’d rather I cleared out and gave y’all some privacy…this is family stuff, and I don’t want to intr—”

“No,” he answered immediately. “You’re family, Michael. You know everything else about me, why not this?” Michael had to know he was freaked out. It wouldn’t matter, which was why he trusted Michael more than anyone else on earth. More, even, than Ally. “I don’t think anyone outside this house should know about it, though.”

“Cade, does this mean we’re gonna live hundreds of years?” Dylan asked softly.

Cade and Ally’s gazes met.

“Yeah. I think it does.”

The room got very quiet.

“Kind of makes me wanna puke,” said Dylan.

“Me too, son. Me too.”

At least Dylan and Becca would live as long as him.

Oh Christ. What about Ally?
Would he live for centuries after she died?

The room began to spin. He really did think he might puke.

“I have to go outside.” He climbed to his feet, growling when he realized how unsteady he was.

“Cade, wait.” Michael rose to his feet. Cade pushed him back down.

“No. You stay here. Call the ranch, have someone pick us up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Dec, who’d been staring at the ground outside, looked up when he walked onto the porch. “You all right, pup?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

Michael pulled out his phone to call the ranch.

“Talents,” he said after hanging up. “Cade’s talent is telepathy, and—”

“Oh!” Ally exclaimed. “Yeah! And Dylan’s is languages. But…Cade’s talent is kind of weak, isn’t it? And why didn’t we ever realize about Dylan?”

“How the fuck would I know?” Michael asked.

“And what about Dec?” asked Dylan. “What’s his talent?”

The three of them sat in silence for a minute.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dylan said suddenly.

“Don’t say f—”

“I know what it is, and it’s
stupid,
” the teenager scoffed, ignoring Ally. “Everyone likes him. That’s his talent.”

“Charm. Huh. I guess if you’re going to wander the globe for hundreds of years, it’s useful,” Ally mused.

“Cade sure as hell didn’t like him,” said Michael.

“Well, neither did I, when we first met him. But Fae talent doesn’t always work on other Fae.”