First, however, it appeared that they would have to get past a drafty, miserably old-fashioned creature on the outside.
“Ah,” said Lord Maccon upon seeing the reception committee of one, standing, arms crossed, outside the castle front gates. “Gird your loins, my dear.”
His wife looked up at him, her wet hair falling from its fancy arrangement. “I do not think you should be discussing my loins just now, husband,” she said in a sprightly manner.
Miss Hisselpenny, Felicity, and Madame Lefoux came to stand next to them, shivering in the rain, while Tunstell and Angelique began organizing the baggage.
“Who is that?” Ivy wanted to know.
The personage stood shrouded in a long, shapeless plaid cloak, face shadowed under a beaten coachman’s hat of oiled leather that had seen better days and barely survived them.
“One might well ask instead, what is that?” corrected Felicity, her nose wrinkled in disgust, her parasol raised ineffectually against the deluge.
The woman—for upon closer inspection, the personage did appear to be, to some slight degree, of the female persuasion—did not move forward to greet them. Nor did she offer them shelter. She simply stood and glared. And her glaring was most definitely centered on Lord Maccon.
They approached cautiously.
“You’re nae welcome here, Conall Maccon, you ken!” she yelled, long before they were within any reasonable conversational distance. “Hie yourself back away now afore you be fighting all what’s left of this here pack.”
Under the shade of the hat, she appeared to be of middling years, handsome but not pretty, with strong features and coarse thick hair, tending toward gray. She boasted the general battle-ax demeanor of an especially strict governess. This was the kind of woman who took her tea black, smoked cigars after midnight, played a mean game of cribbage, and kept a bevy of repulsive little dogs.
Alexia liked her immediately.
The woman shouldered a rifle with consummate skill and pointed it at Lord Maccon.
Alexia liked her less.
“And dinna be thinking you can change on me. Pack’s been free of yon werewolf’s curse for months, since we started out across the sea.”
“Which would be why I’m here, Sidheag.” Lord Maccon continued to advance. He was a good liar, her husband, thought Lady Maccon proudly.
“You be doubting these bullets be silver?”
“What matters that, if I’m as mortal as you?”
“Och, you always were a sharp one with the tongue.”
“We have come to help, Sidheag.”
“Who’s been saying we need help? You’re na wanted here. Hie yourself off Kingair territory, the lot of ye.”
Lord Maccon sighed heavily. “This is BUR business, and your pack’s behavior has called me down on you, willing or nae. I’m not here as Woolsey Alpha. I am not even here as mediator for your Alpha gap. I am here as sundowner. What did you expect?”
The woman flinched away, but she also put down the gun. “Aye. I see it now to rights. ’Tis na that you care what happens to the pack—your old pack. You’re simply here touting queen’s will. Turn-tail coward, that’s what you are, Conall Maccon, and naught more.”
Lord Maccon had almost reached her by now. Only Lady Maccon still trailed behind him. The rest had stopped at the sight of the woman’s gun. Alexia glanced back over her shoulder to see Ivy and Felicity huddled near Tunstell, who had a small pistol pointed steadily at the woman. Madame Lefoux stood next to him, her wrist held at just such an angle to suggest some more exotic form of firearm was concealed but enabled just inside the sleeve of her greatcoat.
Lady Maccon, parasol at the ready, moved toward her husband and the strange woman. He was speaking in a low voice so that the party behind them could not hear through the rain. “What did they get up to overseas, Sidheag? What mess did you get into over there after Niall died?”
“What do you care? You up and abandoned us.”
“I had no choice.” Conall’s voice was weary with remembered arguments.
“Bollix to that, Conall Maccon. ’Tis a cop-out, well and truly, and we both be knowing it. You fixing the mess you left behind these twenty years gone, now that you’re back?”
Alexia looked at her husband, curious. Perhaps she would get the answer to something she’d always wondered about. Why would an Alpha abdicate one pack, only to seek out and fight to rule another?
The earl remained silent.
The woman pushed the worn old hat back off her head to look up at Lord Maccon. She was tall, almost as tall as he, so she did not have to look up far. She was no slight thing either. There was muscle rolling about noticeably under that massive cloak. Alexia was suitably impressed.
The woman’s eyes were a terribly familiar tawny brown color.
Lord Maccon said, “Let us inside out of this muck and I will think about it.”
“Pah!” spat the woman. Then she marched up the beaten stone path toward the keep.
Lady Maccon looked to her husband. “Interesting lady.”
“Dinna you start,” he growled at her. He turned back to the rest of their party. “That is about as much of an invitation as we’re likely to receive around these parts. Come on inside. Leave the luggage. Sidheag will send a man out to get it.”
“And you are convinced she will not simply toss it all into the lake, Lord Maccon?” wondered Felicity, clutching her reticule protectively.
Lord Maccon snorted. “No guarantees.”
Lady Maccon immediately left his side and retrieved her dispatch case from the mound of luggage.
“Does this thing work as an umbrella?” she asked Madame Lefoux on her way back, waving the parasol.
The inventor looked sheepish. “I forgot that part.”
Alexia sighed and squinted up into the rain. “Capital. Here I stand, about to meet the dreaded in-laws looking like nothing so much as a drowned rat.”
“Be fair, sister,” contradicted Felicity. “You look like a drowned toucan.”
And with that, the little band entered Castle Kingair.
It was just as drafty and old-fashioned on the inside as its appearance would suggest from the outside. Neglected was too fine a term for it. The carpets were gray-green, threadbare relics from the time of King George; the chandelier in the entranceway supported candles, of all ridiculous forms of lighting; and there were actual medieval tapestries hanging against the walls. Alexia, who was fastidious, ran one gloved finger along the banister railing and tutted at the dust.
The Sidheag woman caught her at it.
“Na up to yon high-falutin’ London standards, young miss?”
“Uh-oh,” said Ivy.
“Not up to standards of common household decency,” shot back Alexia. “I heard the Scots were barbarians, but this”—she brushed her fingers together, releasing a small cloud of gray powder—“is ridiculous.”
“I’m na stopping you from heading back out into the rain.”
Lady Maccon cocked her head to one side. “Yes, but would you stop me from dusting? Or do you have a particular attachment to grime?”
The woman chuckled at that.
Lord Maccon said, “Sidheag, this is my wife, Alexia Maccon. Wife, this is Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair. My great-great-great-granddaughter.”
Alexia was surprised. Her guess would have been a grand-niece of some kind, not a direct descendent. Her husband had been married before he changed? Now why hadn’t he told her that?
“But,” objected Miss Hisselpenny, “she looks older than Alexia.” A pause. “She looks older than you, Lord Maccon.”
“I would not try to understand, if I were you, dear,” consoled Madame Lefoux with a slight dimpling at Ivy’s distress.
“I am just about forty,” replied Lady Kingair, unabashed at stating her age before strangers and in polite company. Really, this part of the country was just as primitive as Floote had said. Lady Maccon shuddered delicately and adjusted her grip on her parasol, prepared for anything.
Sidheag Maccon looked pointedly at the earl. “Nigh on too old.”
Felicity wrinkled her nose. “Ew, this is simply too revoltingly peculiar. Why did you have to involve yourself in the supernatural set, Alexia?”
Lady Maccon merely gave her sister an arch look.
Felicity answered her own question. “Oh yes, I remember now—no one else would have you.”
Alexia ignored that and looked with interest at her husband. “You never told me you had a family before you became a werewolf.”
Lord Maccon shrugged. “You never asked.” He turned to introduce the rest of the party. “Miss Hisselpenny, my wife’s companion. Miss Loontwill, my wife’s sister. Tunstell, my primary claviger. And Madame Lefoux, who would be happy to examine your broken aethographor.”
Lady Kingair started. “How did you ken that we…? Never mind. You always were uncanny with the knowing. You being BUR has na improved that to anyone else’s comfort. Weel, that’s one welcome guest. Delighted to meet ye, Madame Lefoux. I have, of course, heard of your work. We’ve a claviger who’s familiar with your theories, a bit o’ an amateur inventor himself.”
Then the Scotswoman looked at her great-great-great-grandfather. “I’m supposing you’d as lief see the rest o’ the pack?”
Lord Maccon inclined his head.
The Lady of Kingair reached off to the side of the darkened stairwell and clanged a bell hidden there. It made a noise halfway between a moo and a steam engine coming to an abrupt halt, and suddenly the hallway was filled with large men, most of them in skirts.
“Good heavens,” exclaimed Felicity, “what are they wearing?”
“Kilts,” explained Alexia, amused at her sister’s discomfort.
“Skirts,” replied Felicity, deeply offended, “and short ones at that, as though they were opera dancers.”
Alexia swallowed a giggle. Now there was a funny image.
Miss Hisselpenny did not seem to know where to look. Finally she settled on staring up at the candelabra in abject terror. “Alexia,” she hissed to her friend, “there are knees positively everywhere. What do I do?”
Alexia’s attention was on the faces of the men around her, not their unmentionable leg areas. There seemed to be an equal mix of disgust and delight at seeing Lord Maccon.
The earl introduced her to those he knew. The Kingair Pack Beta, nominally in charge, was one of the unhappy ones, while the Gamma was one of those pleased to see Conall. The remaining four members fell two for and two against and ranged themselves to stand accordingly, as though at any moment fisticuffs might spontaneously break out. Kingair was smaller than the Woolsey Pack, and less unified. Alexia wondered what kind of man the post-Conall Alpha had been, to lead this contentious lot.
Then, with unseemly haste, Lord Maccon grabbed the surly Beta, who responded in a halfhearted manner to the name of Dubh, and dragged him off into a private parlor, leaving Alexia to mitigate the tense social atmosphere he left behind.
Lady Maccon was equal to the task. No one of her stalwart character, required since birth to supervise first Mrs. Loontwill and later two equally improbable sisters, was unprepared for even such trying circumstances as large, kilted werewolves en masse.
“We heard about you,” said the Gamma, whose name sounded like something slippery to do with bogs. “Knew the old laird had suckered himself to a curse-breaker.” He paced about Alexia slowly in a circle as though examining her for flaws. It felt very doglike to Alexia. She was prepared to jump back if he cocked a leg.
Luckily, his statement was misconstrued by both Ivy and Felicity. Alexia was not known as a preternatural to either of them and she preferred to keep it that way. Both young ladies seemed to assume that the phrase curse-breaker was some queer Scottish term for wife.
Felicity said, sneering at the enormous man in front of her, “Really, can you not speak English?”
Lady Maccon said quickly, ignoring her sister, “You have the upper hand on me. I know nothing of you.” They were all so very large. She was not used to feeling diminutive.
The Gamma’s broad face went pinched at that. “Over a century he was master o’ this pack and he na mentioned us to ye?”
“Could be me he does not want to know you, rather than you he does not want to talk about,” offered Alexia.
The werewolf gave her a long, assessing look. “I’m thinking ’tis that he never brought us up, did he?”
Sidheag interrupted them. “Enough gossip. We’ll show you to your rooms. Lads, go grab in the extras—blasted English canna travel light.”
The upstairs bedrooms and guest accommodations seemed no better off than the rest of the castle, muted in color and dank in smell. The room given to Lord and Lady Maccon was tidy enough but musty, with decorations of brownish red some hundred years or so outdated. There was a large bed, two small wardrobes, a dressing table for Alexia, and a dressing chamber for her husband. The color scheme and general appearance reminded Lady Maccon of nothing so much as a damp, malcontented squirrel.
