Page 167 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“Oi! Let him free!” she snapped at the children, who immediately toppled back onto the carpet to continue wrestling with each other.
If I hadn’t known she was the matriarch of the house before, I did then.
“So, you finally decided to grace us with your presence, did you?” she asked Caomhán as he pulled himself up.
“Aintín,” he said formally, though with a smirk that didn’t match his solemn tone.
They traded a quick kiss before the woman turned to me, eyes sharpened as before.
“So?” she asked again, lapsing into Irish. “Are we bringing strangers home now?”
“Cassandra, this is my auntie, Aoife Mac Conmara,” Caomhán said.
Aoife reared like she’d been smacked in the face. “We’re sharing all our secrets with strangers, are we?”
“Check again,Aintín. She’s not as strange as you might think. It’s masked a bit by her power, but it’s there.”
Aoife’s eyes darted between us, and her slightly hooked nose twitched before her blue eyes popped open. “A seer? With Ciarán Mac Conmara’s blood?”
“I wouldn’t have believed it either had I not seen her in the water,” Caomhán concurred. “She’s nomurúch, but the closest thing for a halfheart.”
“Halfheart?” I wondered.
“Means you’re not a shifter, though you’ve got the blood,” Aoife said curtly.
“We’ve all got a bit of animal inside us,” Caomhán clarified with a wink. “But shifters think those who can’t change are only living with half their heart.” He turned back to his mother. “Sure, and she’s family,Aintín. Come home to meet her kin.” He nodded toward the rest of the clan who had all stopped what they were doing to observe the interactions between us. “These are my cousins and yours too, Roisin and Maggie, and the rest are their weans. Say hello.”
I gave a feeble wave to the women and children all eyeing me openly. I suddenly felt like I had walked straight into a wolf’s den and was being considered for dinner. Family or not.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What exactly is your relation to Ciarán?”
Caomhán’s eyes gleamed, and something about his smirk told me the answer before he even spoke. “He was my grandad’s brother. Me mam’s uncle. Aoife’s uncle as well.”
Aoife grunted, almost as if she would prefer not to acknowledge the relation.
“So that would make you…”
“Your cousin, like I said.” His mouth spread into a wide grin. “Isn’t that right,Aintín?”
Aoife—otherwise known as my first cousin, once removed—just grunted again. Then she turned and barked a quick command. Without question, all the children and their mothers departed the room for the backyard.
“Come,” she said to me and Caomhán and without waiting for a response, turned on her heel and marched out of the room.
We followed her into a light-showered kitchen at the back of the house that looked more industrial than residential. One side of it was lined with shelves holding plastic vats and glass jars of varying sizes. On the stove, a stock pot full of something highly acidic was bubbling and making my eyes water, and on the enormous counter island, a huge fish was splayed open, mid-fillet next to a wicked knife.
Aoife put on a pair of plastic gloves from a box on the counter and picked up the knife to continue filleting the fish.
“Aoife and my cousins sell the family catch in the village and the fish markets in Galway,” Caomhán explained. “Some fresh, and they pickle the rest.”
I managed not to wrinkle my nose. That explained the smell of vinegar. “More siblings?”
“More cousins. Second or third, or maybe twice removed. I can never remember which comes from which mother.” Caomhán shrugged, almost as if it didn’t matter. “Most of the fishermen are my uncles, though. Plain men, but good on boats.”
“Did Ciarán’s siblings, ah, have a lot of children?” I asked as Aoife slid the knife under the fish’s spine with practiced ease, then yanked out the bones all at once before dumping them into a bin of scraps and setting the finished fillets into a box stuffed with ice.
“Grandda was a special kind of rogue, wasn’t he,Aintín?” Caomhán slid onto a stool at the stainless steel island.
“No different than the rest of you,” Aoife cut back as she slipped a knife into the back of one particularly big herring. “Turn thirty-three, and you can’t keep your pecker between your legs.”
