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Author: Wendy
Higgins
Pub. Date: March 5, 2024
Publisher: Wendy
Higgins
From the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the YA paranormal Sweet Evil series comes a modern fantasy romance of mystery with Celtic and Gaelic mythology.
Seventeen-year-old Colette “Letty” MacIntyre has everything going for her: a
great life with her Aunt Lorna in Brooklyn, a promising singing career, and
enough distractions to forget the tragic disappearance of her parents. She’s
banking on a bright future in the city until strange things begin to happen.
People are suddenly having peculiar reactions to her singing voice, and a giant
wolfhound starts following her like a lost puppy. But the cherry on top is when
the mayor of her long-forgotten birthplace, Shehan, a mountainous island off
the craggy northern coast of Maine, shows up on her doorstep with an impossible
revelation. The Gaelic folklore she grew up hearing is real. Letty is the last
land siren on Earth…and he needs her help.
An escaped kelpie—a monstrous water horse—is terrorizing Shehan, and Letty’s
voice is the only thing that can stop it. Despite the shock at learning her
heritage, Letty returns to the island, which is filled with as much mystery as
it is fog. She wants answers to her parents’ disappearance as well as a chance
to prove herself. But in a race of mighty druids and formidable Scottish
witches, Letty’s power is an anomaly, feared and reviled by the mystic
community. Her lineage must be kept secret. It becomes even harder to fulfil
these tasks when a new enemy threatens her—an alluring, powerful druid boy
filled with darkness who would just as soon kill her as kiss her.
Will her deadly melody be enough to save the town and herself?
Excerpt:
Chapter One: Death of the Dress
I tipped my chin from side to side with my hand, feeling the satisfying cracks in my neck before shaking out my arms and meeting my instructor’s eyes. Mr. Goneley smirked with amusement as he sat at the piano in his office at my high school. I ignored the occasional muted blare of car horns from the city streets outside.
He adjusted his glasses. “Ready, Letty?”
I nodded and exhaled, though I wasn’t nervous, exactly. I’d had many in-person auditions and recitals in my life, and recently with college applications. I adjusted my silken blue choir gown. Normally I’d wear all black to match my eyeliner, nails, and dyed black hair. No black lips, though. Red all the way. And I wore my long hair in a series of intricate braids that the camera would probably not be able to capture. Oh, well.
“You’ve got this,” Mr. Goneley said. I granted him a smile. He’d helped me a lot, pushing me to apply to all the nearby musical schools for next year. This tape was for the final round of auditions with Manhattan School of Music, but Mr. Goneley had contacts in the theater world and had encouraged me to get a side job in a local theater this summer, despite my aunt’s insistence against it. A foot in the door. We’d use this video for that, as well.
“Here we go. Three, two….” He silently mouthed one as he pressed the record button on my propped phone and began to play. I closed my eyes and let everything else fall away except the notes floating up. It was a haunting, Gaelic inspired tune that I’d written myself to match my voice perfectly—smokey and breathy, yet rich. My voice was attuned to the slow, deep melody of long-ago ancestors, the hardships I could barely fathom.
Through the night, my fire bright
I wait for my sailor, nigh
I sit in the breeze, but my soul does not ease
As I wait for my lover, nigh
When I opened my eyes, I looked into the camera, willing it to hear every nuance. My arms moved of their own accord with the emotion of the song. As the notes rang from my throat a strange sensation came over me, like heat razing my skin. I’d never felt anything like that before while singing—a slight burn and tingle that only strengthened as I lost myself to the music. A sense of command filled me, and I embraced it.
Three weeks he’s been gone as I stare at the dawn
Awaiting my sailor, nigh
Powerful. That’s what I felt. Holy crap. Like I could do absolutely anything in that moment. Was the camera getting this?
The sky has gone black, the thunder does crack
As I wait for my lover, nigh
It was that moment when I noticed Mr. Goneley sweating, moisture beading along his hairline and lip. It had been abnormally hot today in New York City for May, but not that hot. The AC was pumping overhead, yet he was grimacing. I closed my eyes again to force myself to concentrate on the rumble of reverberations in my throat.
When Mr. Goneley flubbed a note, I opened my eyes and wondered if he’d stop, but he kept going for another few seconds before pulling away from the keys and staring at me. His eyes looked blank and lost as he made a strange noise at the back of his throat. I wanted to scream in disappointment because that had been the best I’d ever sang in my entire life! Would I be able to do that again on the second take? He finally broke the weird stare and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, slumping.
“Mr. G?” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I…did you change anything?” he asked in a croaky voice.
“What?”
He shook his head and rubbed his chest with the heel of his hand. “With the song? I don’t know. Your voice is…” He cleared his throat and looked at me funny. “Different.”
“No,” I told him. “It was the same, but it did feel kind of different. Like, stronger. Did it sound bad?”
Again, his head shook back and forth, almost as if in confusion. “I’m not sure how to explain it. I think it must be me. I’m not feeling well all of a sudden.” He blinked up at me as his eyes began to clear, a nervous sounding chuckle escaping him. “I’m so sorry about this, but do you mind rescheduling?”
“Yeah,” I said, regret washing over me. “No problem. I hope you feel better.”
There was a strange, awkward tension in the room as I gathered my things and Mr. Goneley gave me a wide berth to leave.
I swung my bag over my shoulder and walked quickly out of the school building, my purple boots hitting hard with each step on the Brooklyn sidewalks. A giant bird swooped down from the ledge of a window and I jumped, cursing as its wings lifted my hair for a second. Was that an eagle? I watched it dart skyward and tried to shake off the startled feeling. I didn’t have many wildlife encounters here in Brooklyn, other than pigeons and the occasional rat. I absently weaved through people, speed walking. Sweat ran down my back, probably soaking into the satiny material.
Had I been singing too loud? It hadn’t felt like it. It felt like the best singing of my life, but clearly it had been terrible based on the bizarre look he gave me. Was I losing my touch? Panic flared because singing was my everything. The only thing I was good at. And even though Aunt Lorna had been begging me for years to focus on some other line of work, something more stable, I had to chase this dream. But what if I got home and watched the video and it was awful? If my singing had felt that good, but actually been horrible…oh, Gaia. I didn’t know what I’d do.
I cut through a small park, the grass squishy under the soles of my boots. Usually there were couples picnicking on blankets and kids running around chasing bubbles, but it was barren. It was never this empty on beautiful afternoons, even during the week. Weird.
A burn of heat flashed across my skin as something huge and hairy stepped out from behind a crop of tall bushes, sending my heart into an erratic race. I stopped so fast at the massive sight that I tripped over my own feet and landed on my hands and knees. My head whipped up and I froze, holding my breath for a long beat before gasping.
A dog loomed over me. The largest dog I’d ever seen. Its face was long like an Irish hound with a shaggy dark body that appeared oddly greenish. I blinked. It was as round as a Saint Bernard, as tall as a small cow, and its silky tail twitched back and forth behind it. We stared at each other. Every fiber of my body wanted to run, but my mind screamed at me not to move. This giant mutt could, no doubt, take me down and maul my face with very little effort.
I glanced down and saw it was clearly male. With a hard swallow I whispered, “Good boy.”
He sniffed the air and lowered his head, stepping toward me almost cautiously.
My survival instinct screamed to run but I stiffened every muscle. Don’t move, Letty.
The dog slowly sat and then lay before me, its huge paws inches from my hands, like it expected something from me. My heart rate began to slow enough to give me the nerve to move into a sitting position. I never took my eyes off him.
“Are you lost?” I whispered, feeling foolish talking to a dog. “Where’s your owner?” I searched around, but there was no one.
The dog huffed through its nose. Then he lifted a heavy paw and plopped it on my booted foot.
I couldn’t help but smile, though my insides still shook. “Okay. So, you’re friendly?” I let out a deep breath. When I climbed slowly to my feet, he did too. His head came to my chest. He definitely outweighed me, and I was no waif.
My eyes scanned the park now. Literally nobody. Maybe if we walked around we’d find his owner. Taking slow steps, I began to loop the park, and the dog followed me. We passed a few people on the sidewalks now, who all took one look at the dog and steered clear.
One woman scowled. “You need to have that thing on a leash! It’s the law!”
“He’s not mine,” I tried to explain, but she scurried away.
After fifteen minutes of this, my need to get home and talk to Aunt Lorna was overpowering my need to find the dog’s owner. If I wasn’t in the middle of this singing crisis, I would have taken him to a veterinarian to check for a chip, but I didn’t have time for this. And the SPCA was all the way across town. New York was full of do-gooders who would happily take care of him. Right? Yeah….
“I’m sorry, boy,” I said to the dog, feeling silly that I needed to explain myself. “I have to go. Just stay right here until your owner comes back, okay? Or some nice person helps you.”
He cocked his head. Guilt was a stone in my gut as I turned and speed-walked away from him. Thirty seconds later his pitter-pattering paws and clickety-clacking claws sounded loudly behind me. I spun and held out my palm. “Oh, no you don’t. Stay. Stay.”
He wasn’t a very good listener. The dang dog followed me the whole five blocks to the shop. Ugh, Aunt Lorna was going to freak. Granted, she had four cats that lived at her work, but they added to the atmosphere of her witchy apothecary and gem shop. We’d never had an animal in our apartment. I stopped in front of Aunt Lorna’s shop, Moonlight Apothecary and Dispensary, which we lived two stories above.
I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. My gown was officially ruined with the rip and grass stains from when I’d fallen. I’d had to save money to buy it for the state treble choir competition.
Every single person eyed the dog warily as they passed.
“Okay,” I told him. “You need to go. Go back to the park and find your people. Go on, shoo.” He sat and I sighed. He was going to scare customers away. I rolled my eyes and wished him luck as I went inside, certain he’d finally leave once I was gone.
Incense tickled my nose, and the gentle sounds of delta waves playing overhead immediately relaxed me. Stepping into the shop always transported me from overwhelming city into a fantastical, meditative space. I took a moment to peer around at the shelves of homemade vials of oils, soaps, and sage bunches. Displays of authentic crystals with a giant rose quartz in the center. Salt lamps. Potted plants hanging from the ceiling with their long vines spidering out like jungle fingers. A table of incenses dipped by my aunt and me. This shop was our sanctuary.
All around the room were cool framed pictures of drawings—depictions of Faerie queens and creatures from Celtic and Gaelic mythology that I’d grown up hearing about. Sea maidens and forest nymphs. Brownie house spirits. Selkies and kelpies, and of course Nessie, the Loch Ness monster.
“Is that you, Letty?” my aunt called from the back room.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Good news!” she hollered. “I found someone to watch the shop next week while I go to your graduation.”
“Cool,” I said, my mind still stuck on Mr. Goneley.
Aunt Lorna bustled in, and her pretty face lit up when she saw me. She pushed dirty blond curls out of her eyes and adjusted the quartz necklace around her neck. She often acted like a little old lady, but she wasn’t. She was just wise for her thirty-something years.
“What’s the matter?” Her gentle Scottish lilt from a childhood in the Highlands calmed me for a moment. Then the memory of Mr. Goneley assaulted me again and I cringed. She swished over in her long skirt, the bangles clinking on her wrists. Her eyebrows crashed together as she looked me over. “Why do you look like that? What happened to your dress? And you’re sweating—my gods, were you attacked?”
“No,” I tried to calm her as I reached up and felt my knotted, long locks. “Not exactly. It’s a long story. Something weird happened while I was singing.” At this, she went still, and her face shuttered closed, her lips pursing like they always did when it came to my singing.
“What happened, Letty?” Gods, she didn’t need to look so severe.
“I’m not really sure,” I admitted. “But I got it on tape.”
I shouldn’t tell her all of this, considering how much she wanted me to find a different career path, but she was the only person I could talk to. I pulled out my phone with a shaking hand and started the video. When my voice first began, she sucked in a breath. And then her eyebrows crinkled. Her head began a small shake, and she took the phone from my hand to watch more closely. I crossed my arms, feeling nauseated as I recalled Mr. Goneley’s reaction. But my voice did sound great. Not to brag. It hadn’t been just a great performance in my mind.
When it ended, Aunt Lorna’s lips were pressed tightly together as she passed the phone back to me. “I know you enjoy singing, Letty. And it’s been a wonderful hobby to have growing up—”
My heart dropped. “Auntie, don’t—”
“Enough!” She raised her voice over mine. “This is a fool’s errand! This path will be filled with heartache.” She seemed to struggle for words before saying, “Do you really want to be just another New York starving artist working as a waitress and facing disappointment after disappointment?”
My breath caught in my lungs. “Why don’t you believe I can do it?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in you. It’s just unnecessary hardship, Letty! You can help me run this business, or any business. You’ve got an eye for detail and math. You’re smart.”
Ugh, this again!
“I would be miserable!” I insisted. “And I’m more than happy to help you with the shop, but that’s your dream, not mine. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I’m going to sing, Aunt Lorna. It’s my gift.”
“I don’t think it’s what your parents would have wanted,” she blurted.
Her face turned ashen as my stomach twisted and burned with acid. My parents had disappeared on a whale-watching excursion when I was four. We rarely spoke of them. Her eyes looked full of both panic and shame.
“That’s not fair,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “You can’t know that.”
I watched, as if in slow motion, as my aunt’s face pinched in pain and she grabbed her temples, her knees buckling.
“Auntie!” I dropped my phone and grasped her upper arms, leading her to a velvet armchair to sit. She breathed heavily, a small whimper escaping. She’d suffered from headaches and migraines since I could remember, but this one looked more severe than normal. “You need to see a doctor. What if something’s really wrong?” I’d lost too much sleep worrying about brain tumors, but as usual, Aunt Lorna shook her head.
“No doctors. I’ve got it under control.”
I gritted my teeth in frustration. Yes, she was the most talented herbalist possibly ever, especially in the western world. People traveled to Moonlight Apothecary from all over to get her tinctures and homeopathic healing herbal mixtures when modern medicines and clinical chemicals didn’t work. I’d seen her work miracles like a modern-day witch doctor. She was a genius, but herbs could only go so far. If she would get an MRI at least we could know what the real problem was.
“I’m okay.” She sat taller and her forehead smoothed. “I’m sorry.” She met my eyes and there was regret there. “I shouldn’t have brought up your parents.”
I nodded, at a loss for words. Her erratic behavior and headaches were scaring me lately. My aunt had always been eccentric and special. I’d come to think of her as this magical sort of being, though I knew how unhinged that sounded. But I’d seen strange things as a child. Whenever I asked for explanations, Aunt Lorna always had some logical reason for the things I’d witnessed her do when she thought I wasn’t looking. A book sliding across the table to her waiting hand. One of her potions turning bright green, then bubbling down to a muddy brown as she chanted in Gaelic—literal miracles of near-death to life from her potions. Multiple candle wicks blowing out at the same time when there was zero air movement in the room.
It had been a while since anything like that happened, so I chalked it up to fuzzy memories and childish wonderings.
After a moment, Aunt Lorna touched the ornate cuff on my wrist that she’d given me, turning it as if inspecting it. The underneath was a layer of salt, sulfur, and agate fused together and embedded onto dried fish leather. On the top was a layer of ammolite gemstone plating—iridescent red and green that looked like dragon scales. The cuff was said to provide protection and ward against evil. When she’d put it on me years ago, she’d spoken a line of Scots Gaelic as she sealed it shut with a glue substance. She was funny like that. Old pagan superstitions from when she’d grown up in the highlands of Scotland. To me, her Gaelic phrases sounded like spells, which would be apropos considering the amount of rare mystical texts and spell books she sold here. It was because of her that I said weird things like “gods” and “Gaia,” aka Mother Nature, the creator of faeries in folklore.
A sound came from the shop’s door.
“Jeebus!” Aunt Lorna’s scream had both of us jumping. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, and I followed her eyes. The giant dog stood there taking up the entire doorway staring at us through the glass. He had that greenish tint again. Had he rolled in moss or something gross?
“Coo Shee!” she yelled. I’d never heard my aunt sound so terrified before. “Letty, hide!”
“Aunt Lorna, it’s okay!” I stood and motioned to the door. “It’s just a stray dog I found on my way home today. I know he’s scary looking but he’s actually really good and sweet.”
Suddenly the dog was pushing open the shop door with his body, and Aunt Lorna screamed again, grabbing me. We did a silly tug-of-war where she tried to pull me into the back room and I yanked back, trying to reassure her that everything was okay. The dog got close to us and sat down staring at us in that intent way of his. All four cats, which had been quietly resting in their various places, suddenly began a ruckus of hissing and screaming in a flurry of orange and black as they ran, scuttling and sliding along the tiled floor until they escaped through the doorway of dangling beads to the back room. The dog watched them with a tilted head, and I swore he appeared amused.
“Good boy,” I said. “See, Auntie?” He took up a lot of space in her small shop.
She was gripping me hard, breathing erratically as she stared at it. “I’ve never…I’ve only heard…Gaia above. Did it—I mean, has he…barked?”
“What?” I thought about it. “No, he hasn’t made a sound the whole time I’ve been with him.”
She nodded and I saw her throat bob with a hard swallow. “That’s good. Very good then.” Slowly, she began to relax, still staring him down.
I told her the whole story. “He’s sort of attached himself to me. I don’t know why. I’m going to take some pictures of him and post them online. I’m sure his owners will be looking for him. Wouldn’t you think?”
Aunt Lorna never lost the look of worry. She pinched her upper nose and closed her eyes for a long moment of quiet.
“I’ve got some calls to make and things to do. I think I’ll close the shop an hour early today. Please….” She eyed the dog, then me. “Be careful. If he barks, run immediately.”
I laughed and she glared hard. “Run because of a bark?”
“I’m not messing about, Letty! Swear you’ll run.”
“Okay, I will.” My aunt often had these intuitive moments. I’d learned not to question them because her hunches were always right.
She bustled away into her back room, swishing through the beads with a rustle of clinks, and I knew she must have been discombobulated because she didn’t even make our afternoon tea. It was a staple every single day after school. I hoped she would be okay.
“Come on, boy,” I said. “Let’s go to the corner drug store and get you a leash and collar. I’ll take you up to the apartment.” He was probably hungry, and I was dying to get this stupid dress off. I’d need to find something to feed him—eggs maybe?—and take a few pictures to post online. Our landlord would go berserk and charge us if he caught sight of the dog, so I hoped its owner was found soon.
The hound followed me outside, all the way to the store, and back to the side door with narrow stairs leading up to our apartments. I felt safe with the dog at my side. For the first time ever I didn’t look back and forth to make sure nobody was hiding or acting shady nearby. I didn’t even have my safety whistle in my hand.
What a strange afternoon. I mean, the dog was awesome, but my aunt’s reaction to him had been over-the-top. She’d been stressing me out about a lot of things lately. I sighed as we walked. Tomorrow was a new day. I already couldn’t wait to go to bed tonight and put it all behind me.
