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Author's note
This brief installment concludes Part Eight. Part Nine will finish the portion set in Spring. Part Ten will bring us, at last, to Winter.
This is primarily an incest story, but it is also sci-fi/fantasy, and supernatural elements are not incidental to the plot. Additionally, many chapters will feature elements of other categories, particularly group sex and anal.
All sexual acts are consensual and involve parties who are at least eighteen years of age.
As ever, if you have questions feel free to email me or leave a comment. Either way, I'll try to respond in a timely manner.
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After his daily training session with his grandmother, Cahill relieved Uncle Seamus and Aunt Fiona from babysitting duty. They had a little one of their own on the way, so it was good practice for them to watch over Ty and Niall, but he still felt bad about imposing on them as often as he had since they'd returned to the Dreaming.
"Slow day?" he asked his mother when he got to their magick shop.
The place was as good as empty, aside from a few college students sitting by the windows. That lot spent just enough money on tea to cover the cost of the wifi service Walk the Ways provided, but rarely bought much else. Occasionally they'd express some interest in love potions, occult texts, or some of the various talismans and trinkets Cahill and Caronwyn had endowed with minor glamours, but they mostly just wanted a place to sit and work. Or waste time on Facebook and Twitter while pretending to work. Something like that.
When they'd first come up with the idea, Cahill had thought that they'd be filled to the rafters day and night. Queen Titania had woven Faerie more prevalently into the Dreaming, altering the very fabric of the mortal world.
Which, of course, wasn't really the mortal world at all, but a fey construct. A simulacrum. He was still getting used to that idea.
At any rate, the world he'd once thought of as real no longer sat adjacent to Faerie, like two neighboring countries sharing a border, but overlapped with it like the circles in a Venn diagram. The degree of overlap varied from place to place and with the position of sun and the moon, but the existence of the supernatural was no longer a secret. One might have expected that to change things. For the most part, though, it really hadn't.
He wasn't sure if it was just that most people still didn't believe or what. That was hard to believe, given the growing fey presence in certain industries. Maybe humanity had just lost its interest in the mystical. Or maybe it was just a matter of time before interest in the supernatural grew. Like any fashion trend, it wouldn't really take off until the right type of people embraced it, and the wrong people went out of their way to criticize it.
Whatever the reason, most mortals went about their lives more or less as they had before.
His brother's theory was that it all had to do with the fact that one of the first industries the fey had taken over was pornography. People were plenty fascinated with seeing fairies fuck, Seamus mused, but they weren't especially interested in discovering what else the mystical beings had to offer. That struck Cahill as just cynical enough to be plausible.
"You guessed it," Caronwyn replied from behind the counter.
"And how's our little girl?" he asked, leaning over the bassinet to pinch his daughter's big toe through her pink booties. She smiled at him, circling her little feet and hands through the air. "She give you any trouble?"
He didn't really need to ask, of course. She never did. Wynne was a quiet, happy child. She hardly ever cried, and when she did, it hardly took any effort to quiet her.
"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" Ty yelled, running past Cahill as fast as he could. He held up his drawing of Fiona, which sort of almost kinda looked like her, and waved it about like a flag. "Lookie what I made!"
The loud noise his son made led some of the college students to slip their headphones off their ears and gaze over at the newcomers. As ever, the unwanted attention from total strangers caused little Niall to throw himself against his father's leg.
"It's okay," he told Niall, tousling his hair.
His son held his hands out in a silent bid to be picked up. Cahill happily obliged.
"Is that your Auntie Fi?" Caronwyn asked.
"Yup! See her green hair? See?" Ty said, smacking the paper repeatedly with his finger.
"Looks just like her," his mother told their son. "You better be careful. Keep that up, you just might trap someone in a piece of paper."
"Nuh-uh!" Ty protested. "Dad, tell Mom she's being silly."
"Quarter moon tonight," Cahill said to her instead.
Ty gave him a dirty look, huffed, turned on a heel, and raced to the back of the store. He claimed one of the armchairs tucked in between the bookcases, and pulled out his handheld game console, forgetting all about the stupid grownups.
"What can I tell you," Caronwyn replied, her eyes on their son.
The overlap between Faerie and the Dreaming grew even thicker when the moon was between phases, just as it did every day at dusk and dawn. Full moons might have meant something to werewolves, if such existed, but his kind thrived on states of inbetweenness.
"One girl came in looking for some help forgetting her ex-boyfriend," his mother continued, "and an older gentleman almost bought one of your fiddles, but other than that, it's been teas and tonics all day."
There were a handful of mortals who were more attuned to the supernatural. Who appreciated other aspects of the fey besides the physical. They tended to show up on days like this more often than at other times during the lunar cycle. But there were only so many of them, and Savannah wasn't Boston or New York.
"How was...your training session?" she asked, reaching over to take Niall from him.
Cahill almost hadn't caught the hesitation. Almost.
"Fine," Cahill said.
Better than fine, actually. His grandmother was pushing him harder than his mother ever had, and it was paying dividends. He grew stronger by the day. And his mother was excited for him, more or less. But he understood that she didn't love how much time he spent with Aeife, even though very little of that time was spent having sex. She probably knew that, but she probably also spent a lot of time pretending that she didn't.
She raised her eyebrows at him in a silent question.
"I think I might be able to untie the knots soon," he said, referring to the mess his aunt had made of his mind. He'd refused to ask his father to do it. One day, he'd be glad his father owed him a boon, even if Arawn was no longer the Prince of the Emerald Court. No sense wasting that just to spare himself hearing a few songs now and then. They were getting easier to tune out, anyway. "At least, your mother thinks so."
"That's good," Caronwyn replied with all the enthusiasm of a dead possum.
"Fiona wants to know if you'll help her pick out colors for the nursery," he said.
Her brown eyes regarded him coolly for a time. He could almost feel her weighing the pros and cons of letting the topic of his grandmother go. Eventually, she asked, "Does that mean she's finally settled on a name?"
Cahill shrugged.
Of late, every time he saw his sister, she asked him whether he liked "Aila" better than "Aileen." She must have finally found a favorite, because the topic hadn't come up.
Brittany, on the other hand, had known that she'd name her and Finnegan's son "Padraig" even before they'd known for sure that they were having a son. His kid sister couldn't be better prepared to become a mommy. It was strange. And sweet. And sexy as all hell.
Not that Fiona wasn't. She was just overthinking everything. He'd never seen anyone change their mind so many times about so many things. Once her baby girl arrived though, her maternal instincts would take over and she'd make a wonderful mom. Cahill was sure of it. His sister had struck him as motherly, in the best possible way, ever since he'd met her.
"I like `Aileen' better," his mother said, not for the first time.
"Me too," Cahill said. And he meant it. But he didn't doubt that he'd share his mother's preference for "Aila" if she felt differently. He never found any fault in any of her decisions, no matter how big or small. "And the one can be used as a nickname for the other."
"Exactly," Caronwyn agreed.
Just then, the bell above the front door dinged, announcing the possibility that they might sell something more than tea and special brownies today after all. They turned as one to greet the customer, but found none.
It was only Kearney, with yet another pretty young th--with
Teagan
on his arm.
His cousin was always smiling. She was a happy, carefree creature, precisely the sort of fey mortals expected all of them to be. But the soft smile on her face now was different. The low thrum in her Libido confirmed it.
And it wasn't just because she was in love, he realized. She wasn't showing yet, but Cahill had come to recognize the way pregnancy subtly altered a woman's Libido.
All the college kids turned and stared, then started whispering to one another, wondering if they were really seeing
the
Teagan Dreamsmyth. In the past few months, she'd become as famous as one could be when one only did children's movies.
Like any good starlet, she paid them no mind whatsoever.
"Hey," his uncle said simply.
Teagan let go of Kearney's arm and gave Cahill a hug. She didn't throw herself at him as she might have in the past, but expectant mothers rarely did. It was strange, but not in a bad way, to see the girl walk when she could have jumped or skipped or danced instead.
"Good to see you, Kay," she said.
"And you," he replied, kissing the top of her head.
"Caron," Kearney said to Cahill's mother.
If she replied, she didn't do so verbally. Cahill didn't sense any real change in her Libido though. That was good. His mother held the Dreamsmyths in even lower regard these days than she once had. He wasn't sure how much of that had to do with what the queen had done to Aeife and Oona as opposed to the hatred she'd developed for Liadan after he finally came clean about everything, but it definitely extended to the whole clan. She refused to even admit to herself that her mother was falling in love with Oberon, let alone acknowledge that the former prince was as good to her as a woman's own son would be.
Still, he didn't huge Teagan too tight or too long. A hint of disappointment spread across her face when he pushed her away, but better her than his mother.
"To what do we owe the pleasure?" Cahill asked his uncle.
Kearney shrugged. "Hollywood can be so tedious. Need to escape every now and then."
Teagan slapped his arm and said, "Dad," with a combination of affection and displeasure.
Dad? He'd never come around to thinking of her as a sister, but he'd thought Arawn was her father. She'd thought as much herself, at one point.
"What he means is, he wants to thank you for helping him," Teagan explained. "If not for you, we'd never have met."
