AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’d wager there’s more wood beneath that table than beneath their arses,” I said, attempting to wrest my brother’s gaze from the basic bar floozy.
Mark gave me a half-hearted grunt of acknowledgment, not even pretending to listen.
I shoved a half-empty stew bowl directly at his chest, feeling a pulse of satisfaction when it caught him hard in the sternum.
“Gonnae no dae that, Kat,” my giant, dumb lug of a sibling growled, batting the bowl aside.
My hand flashed out to catch it before it could sail off the table’s edge and burst to bits on the inn’s muck and straw-covered floor, drawing attention to our presence.
“You might as well save the heavy artillery, Mark. She cannae hear ye,” I mocked, doing a decent job of approximating a Scots brogue thicker than the spring mud stuck to everyone’s boots.
It was easier to slip into than I was altogether comfortable with.
Like my brother, I was born in the Highlands, but we’ve lived abroad long enough to have lost the burr when we talk to each other.
Which we did less and less these days.
“It’s not her,” I said, picking up my glass of what passed for Scotch in a place like this. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I thought longingly of Caisteal Abernathy, where there were bottles older than Christ’s nappies in our father’s wine cellar.
“You don’t know that.” Mark’s normally warm and resonant voice was flat and cold.
“Just because she’s working in a shifter-friendly pub doesn’t mean she’s one of us,” I pointed out.
His jaw flexed, and his eyes narrowed as one of the men at her table made a lewd gesture behind her oblivious back. “Not yet, maybe.”
I heaved a disgusted sigh and sagged back in the uncomfortable chair. “How many times have we been through this now? Twenty? Fifty?”
“Five.” He managed to pack the short syllable with a significant amount of pain. Eighty years ago, it might have been able to reach me. Now, it just intensified my already simmering irritation.
Still, I knew my brother. He was as bloody-minded as he was optimistic and wouldn’t let it go until he’d had the chance to rule her out himself.
The sooner, the better.
The odor of livestock and sweat stewing with the constant din of braggadocious lowland males in rut gave me the hives.
Sticking two fingers in my mouth, I whistled, feeling an ugly little surge of satisfaction when my brother and several patrons winced and covered their ears. Others, including the waitress with flaming red hair, stared at them, perplexed.
She hadn’t heard anything at all.
I aim a smug smile at my brother. “Ye were saying?”
“Just because she’s the heir doesn’t mean she has abilities, Kat.”
His stating this like a foregone conclusion did little to comfort me.
We both glanced across the hall just in time to see one of the men clap her on the backside. Before Mark could launch himself out of his chair, the wench whirled and pinned the offending hand to the table with a meat fork. Smiling cheerfully, she whispered something that stole the color from his face.
“All right, so maybe this one’s not exactly like the others,” I admitted grudgingly.
My brother leaned forward, his huge body practically twitching with excitement. “Did ye see how fast she moved?”
“Aye, I said. “But there could be a million explanations for that. And most of them more likely than her being this werewolf heir you’ve been on about for over a century.”
“The prophecy is real, Kat.” For the first time that evening, he turned to give me his full attention. Though it’s the very thing I’ve wanted, I felt an unexpected pang of sadness.
He’s looking more like our father every year.
Prominent cheekbones. The brutal cliff of a jaw. Dark, watchful priest’s eyes that could convince a person to do anything.
