I’ve been putting this one off.
Not because I don’t know what to write. Because I know too much, and case files are supposed to maintain a certain distance, and distance is a thing that becomes increasingly difficult when the subject has your number and uses it.
We’ll get to that.
Conn O’Cuinn. Celtic Soldier demon. Over three hundred years old and looks—on a good day, in decent light—like a man who has lived hard through his forties and made his peace with it. Brown hair. Eyes that can’t decide between green and blue depending on his mood, and his mood, in my experience, is usually better than the situation warrants.
He carries Ireland with him. Not as sentiment. As bone.
The Cause has been the engine of him for longer than most nations have existed in their current borders. He is not romantic about it. He is not loud about it. He simply will not stop. There is a difference between a demon who fights for something and a demon who is something, and Conn O’Cuinn is the latter. The fighting is just how it manifests.
He commands with the ease of someone who stopped needing to prove himself several centuries ago. His men would follow him into places that would make most soldiers reconsider their life decisions.
He doesn’t say please.
He has a hawk.
I mention this because a soldier who uses a bird for surveillance is a soldier who understands patience, who understands the value of a view from above, who trusts something wild enough to let it go and knows it will return. That tells you most of what you need to know about Conn O’Cuinn in terms of character assessment.
He also, for what it’s worth, drinks whiskey. With an e. Irish. Always Irish. He’s flexible about most things. Not that.
The events of the last few years, particularly the chaos that unfolded in Ireland when the Tipping Point hit, tested him in ways I won’t detail here. The reports exist. The Author has written them up faithfully. She didn’t blink.
What I will say is this: he made a deal. Believed he was dealing with the right side of the ledger. I have thoughts… What matters is that his motivation was sound. His loyalty to his men, to his Cause, and to the people he chose to protect, never wavered.
He came through it.
He’s in Cork now. I know this because he tells me. Irregularly. He’s working. The west of Ireland has its own particular infestation problems and Conn has always been thorough. He also has his hawk back, which I take as a sign that he’s sleeping better.
He wants the quiet life. The old songs. The land. He says I’ll be grand with the particular conviction of a man who means it and knows it probably isn’t coming yet.
He’s right on both counts.
We’re both watching the signs. We’ve talked about it—over whiskey spelled correctly—in the knowledge that naming what you’re watching has a tendency to wake it up faster. Some things you track in silence. Some things you track together from a distance, in separate pubs, on bad phone signals, and trust the other man to tell you when it moves.
It isn’t over.
We both know it isn’t over.
The Author mentioned, in passing, that Conn O’Cuinn has admirers.
Not the kind he’s used to. The kind who found him through the books. Through her writing. The BookTok girlies, she called them—and apparently they’re vocal, and apparently they have opinions, and apparently those opinions include strong feelings about what kind of story Conn should be appearing in.
Dark romance, she said.
I relayed this to Conn on our next call. Cork signal. Both of us in our respective pubs.
There was a pause.
“They want her to write what now?”
I explained the genre. Broadly. He listened.
Another pause.
“And do these girls,” he said, slowly, “know anything about me? Specifically? The animal side?”
I told him, oh yes. Especially the animal side. They knew enough to find it/him attractive and not quite enough to find him alarming. But if they knew the half of it—the actual history, the actual weight of three hundred years of life—they might find their enthusiasm redirected somewhat.
He thought about this for a moment.
“Or,” he said, “they wouldn’t.”
Fair point.
He asked for the Author’s number anyway.
I didn’t give it to him. She can thank me later. He’d have her writing something entirely different by Tuesday.
Kevin, apparently, has not stopped laughing.
To read the books mentioned in this post, go to:
