The Eclective: The Celtic Collection

by The Eclective

  “Well, of course not. This is the 21st century. Do you have your money sitting in piles in your closet? No. You have it stored in a bank. It’s all 1s and 0s. We Leprechauns do the same thing. Only instead of banks, we have a virtual Tir Na Nog.”

  I stared at the computer screen where a little fairy-like creature flitted around a green meadow while a faun played a pan flute. Then I turned and stared at Kabita. She looked about as shell-shocked as I felt. I’d been running around the city looking for a damn pot of gold that never actually excited. Fabulous.

  After I finally got my voice back and my brain returned to some kind of working ordered, I turned to our client. “Mr. O’Leery, I think we’re going to have to call in an expert.”

  How I managed not to strangle the leprechaun, excuse me, Leprechaun, is a miracle of the modern age.

  ***

  A few hours later Kabita and I were standing in a dingy studio apartment out near the airport. “I can’t believe all this trouble was caused by this one little … ” I struggled for the right word as I stared down at the inert form of our “perpetrator.”

  “Geek?” Kabita suggested.

  Yeah. The word definitely fit. Or maybe … “Nerd?”

  Kabita nodded. “Could go either way. Though the sci-fi stuff says “geek” to me.”

  “Hey! I like sci-fi.”

  She gave me a look that clearly said “geek.” I guess if the shoe fits.

  We both stared down at the kid slumped over the keyboard, snoring lightly. He was slightly pudgy and wore a stained Star Wars t-shirt. His glasses had been knocked slightly askew when Kabita put the magical whammy on him. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. I just knocked him unconscious for a bit.”

  So, this was the cause of all our trouble. A technogeek game boy hacker who’d stolen a Leprechaun’s pot of gold. Completely by accident.

  Once we figured out the pot of gold was virtual, not literal, we’d had Inigo trace the hack back to this guy: Eugene Filps. With a name like Eugene, it was no wonder he’d turned hacker. Fortunately for us, he wasn’t a very good hacker.

  Apparently good old Eugene had accidently stumbled on the Leprechaun’s virtual world and when he hacked in, he mistook it for a new computer game. When he tried to download a copy of the game for himself, he’d somehow managed to steal O’Leery’s virtual pot of gold instead.

  Don’t ask me how he did it, I have no idea. But Eugene Filps had to be quite possibly the worst hacker ever. Once Inigo traced him, Kabita and I had paid Eugene a little visit. And once Eugene was unconscious, Inigo had hacked the hacker and gotten the gold back.

  “What do we do with him?” I glanced down and the gently snoring Eugene. “We can’t just leave him like this. And what if he tries it again?”

  “Oh, I’ve got that covered.” Kabita smiled and mumbled a few words in what sounded like Spanish before sprinkling some powder over Eugene’s head. “There, he won’t remember a thing when he wakes up, and since Inigo has wiped his system, he’ll spend all his time trying to get World of Warcraft back.”

  That made me laugh. “Good, let’s get out of here. This place smells like stale pizza.”

  Back at the office, O’Leery was effusive in his thanks. “I can grant you three wishes, if you like.” He beamed at me, as though eagerly awaiting my wish for world peace or a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

  Three wishes from a Leprechaun. What could possibly go wrong with that? “Uh, thanks, but no thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Very well. Miss Jones?” He turned toward Kabita. “Three wishes for you? As payment for finding my gold?”

  “Oh, Mr. O’Leery,” Kabita said with that sugary sweet expression I knew far too well. “That is so kind of you. But I only take payment in cold, hard cash.”

  Once O’Leery had paid his bill and was firmly out of earshot I turned to Kabita. “Let’s make a deal. No more Leprechauns.”

  She laughed. “Sounds good to me. Listen, Kell’s has a live band tonight. Clear over from Ireland. Buy you a Guinness.”

  I grinned. “Deal.”

  * * *

  Shéa MacLeod has never met a real leprechaun. She’s never hunted a vampire. She’s never consorted with the fae. She is, however, quite convinced dragons exist. And sometimes, just sometimes, she sparkles.

  Find more information on Shéa and her books at www.sheamacleod.wordpress.com, or follow her on Facebook and Twitter

  A man without a past.

  A woman without a future.

  A world destroyed by monsters.

  All that’s left is hope.

  In Rain Mauri’s post-apocalyptic world there are no shades of gray to survival. Until she meets a Dragon Warrior and discovers nothing is as simple as it seems.

  Together, Rain and the Dragon Warrior must uncover the truth behind the nightmare their world has become. Their quest will put them in the crosshairs of a ruthless enemy, but with her determination and his skill, they might just save their race from destruction. If they can save each other first.

  Available at:

  Other books by Shéa:

  Sunwalker Saga:

  Kissed by Darkness

  Kissed by Fire

  Kissed by Smoke

  Dragon Wars:

  Dragon Warrior

  Dragon Lord (coming in March 2012)

  The Luck of the Irish Brigade

  M. Edward McNally

  Fredericksburg, Virginia

  December, 1862

  He shouted “Aye!” when the sergeant called for “Corcoran, Francis,” though outside of roll call no one in the regiment called Corcoran by his given name. He had become “Corky,” predictably, though that had changed when it turned out there was a James Corcoran over in Company D. So he had become “Corky II,” which over the months had become “Corky, too,” and finally, “Corky, also.” Now, even his mess mates tended to call him “Also.”

  The regiment had been called to a halt, but not to attention, by the side of the road. There was a great deal of shifting around, switching muskets from shoulder to shoulder, and stamping feet. Thus Corcoran’s motion did not draw as much attention as it otherwise would have. Only the men immediately around him turned to look as he hopped from one foot to the other, wooden canteen and iron cookware knocking together where they hung on his bulging pack.

  “Is this the best possible moment for a step dance, Also?” Eamon MacDunnagh from Tipperary asked on Corcoran’s left, having hooked his own musket against his side with his elbow while rubbing his hands together for warmth.

  “Tis nay all tha’ cold,” Jimmy Bodkin added from behind Corcoran in his almost impenetrable Sligo brogue, and despite the fat flakes of snow drifting through the air.

  “It’s not that,” Corcoran said. Right foot, left foot. “How shall I put this delicately? I need to crap like a Kildare race horse.”

  Snorts from all around, white breath leaving noses. Someone a row back suggested Corcoran quit moving before he shook it loose in his drawers.

  Corcoran looked all around. They were just on the southern outskirts of the Virginia town of Fredericksburg, having camped at a steamboat landing on the Rappahannock the night before. With dawn the whole of the First Division had been roused and called to order on the road, though progress thereafter had been slow. Perhaps fifty yards of marching at a time, between frequent halts. Half of II Corps was still in front of them, trying to pass through the town while the Rebs shelled it from hills to the east. The booms and crashes shook the cold air, but after Malvern Hill down on the Peninsula last summer, and Antietam back in September, it took more than the sound of brass Napoleons to startle the old hands of the 2nd Brigade.

  A shallow culvert running back to some trees by the riverside looked promising. Corcoran glanced hopefully to the man on his right.

  “Doyle, be a love and hold my Springfield, won’t you?”

  The bearded man frowned. “It’s Boyle, and hold it yourself. A good rifleman can shoot while he shi
ts.”

  “Give thanks he only asked you to hold the musket ,” someone chirruped from the row ahead, to general merriment.

  The sergeant calling roll had reached the “M”s, and as he began with the first “Mick…” he paused so that all twelve-hundred men of the Irish Brigade could shout “Aye!”

  “Go on, Also,” MacDunnagh said as the chortling subsided. “It’ll be half an hour to get through the damned McMacs. Was that me?”

  “That was MacAhern.” MacDonald said a row over.

  “Oh, Christ, I’m going for it,” Corcoran decided, sliding into the culvert on his worn heels. Someone called after him, and was answered by someone else.

  “Jaysus, Also! Would you please not take the Lord’s name in vain as we are about to enter battle?”

  “And just who does yourself think Jaysus is? The Mexican drummer boy for the San Patrico brigade?”

  There was laughing behind Corcoran as he waddled/ran in a crouch along the culvert and slipped into what proved a dense copse of trees, startling a rabbit the marching men had scared into a briar. The hare ran off back toward the road, and Corcoran could hear his fellows shouting “Sneak attack!” and shouting for the cavalry.

  It took seventeen separate motions to reload a fired musket, and as Corcoran had mastered that process, it was not so difficult to manage gun, pack, coat, suspenders, trousers, and drawers, and do what needed to be done behind a tree. He reassembled himself and turned to go, just as the roll call sergeant up on the road concluded the Mc’s with “McWilliams, William.” Corcoran grinned as the “Aye!” was barely audible over hooting cries of “Wee Willie McWillie! Here, Willie-Willie!”

  It was then that he saw the boots.

  Corcoran missed a step and fumbled with his musket strap, as a pair of government-issue brogans were sticking out from behind a nearby tree, apparently still on the feet of a prone man. Corcoran stopped before raising the rifle for there was no movement at all from the downed fellow. He considered exactly what he should do. If some other poor soldier had just lost his nerve and ducked into the trees, Corcoran was inclined to leave the fellow be, for surely living with himself would be punishment enough. Unless of course your man was from the Irish Brigade, or even Corcoran’s own regiment, the 63rd New York. Then it wouldn’t be right to leave the fellow here, with the rest of the boys marching toward the Rebel guns.

  With his musket before him but not raised too threateningly, Corcoran stepped over to the tree to peek around it, and dropped his jaw.

  The boots were Federal-issue, no question, but the rest of the man’s uniform was not Union Blue. It was the mismatched beige-and-butternut of the Confederate South. That was surprising enough, but what plain took Corcoran’s breath away was that he knew the slack features and red hair of the immobile man, eyes closed and mouth slightly open.

  “Spanish?” Corcoran stammered.

  One blue eye opened, and when Lochlan Spanish saw a Union solider with a musket in his hands, he raised both his own and barked “I surrender, I do!” with an accent identical to Corcoran’s own, as they had both been born in Kinsale, County Cork.

  *

  After the dispersal of the Spanish Armada in 1588, King Philip had tried a different tactic against the English. He landed troops in southern Ireland, where in 1601 they were besieged in Kinsale for months by English forces. The Spanish were eventually allowed to return home after surrendering, but one of the things they left behind was a large number of births in the ensuing months. Thus the surname “Spanish” had been not so very uncommon in Kinsale for the last two-hundred-fifty years, until now it was as Irish as the Mac’s, Mc’s, and O’s.

  *

  Lochlan Spanish was a few years older than Corcoran and he had emigrated a few years before, in the middle ‘50’s. He pushed himself up to his elbows and stared wide-eyed, bright red muttonchops framing what was a dark face by Celtic standards.

  “Tommy Corcoran?” he asked in wonder.

  “My older brother,” Corcoran said, lowering his musket barrel to the ground as it suddenly felt silly.

  “Francis?” Spanish asked, and Corcoran nodded.

  “The very same. Be Jaysus, Lochlan, I thought your people were in Boston. Whatever are you doing in Confederate togs?”

  Lochlan smirked as he sat up and crossed his arms over his knees. “We are, in main. Liam’s in the 20th Mass. But I went South back in ’58. To Savannah. It’s Cobb’s 24th Georgia, for me.”

  “Why on Earth did you enlist Reb?”

  “Force of habit from the Old Country. That, and eleven dollars a month,” Spanish frowned. “Of course, t’was before I knew you Union boys were getting thirteen.”

  Spanish held out a dirty hand, and Corcoran pulled the man to his feet. Both stood shaking their heads at each other in wonder.

  “And whatever are you doing here?” Corcoran asked. “Here I mean, out of your own lines?”

  Spanish sighed and rolled his eyes. “My outfit was camped hereabouts until a week ago, before you blue boys started marching in. I…left something just here, and wanted it back. There was enough racket this morning to slip over.”

  Corcoran glanced around. Immediately beneath the tree Spanish had been lying behind was a shallow hole scooped out in the ground between the roots. The man was unarmed that Corcoran could see, and carried no supply apart from a dirty haversack tied at his belt. He held the sack up by the only object within, which Corcoran knew by its shape.

  “Lord, Spanish. You crossed enemy lines for a bottle?”

  “Oh, but not just any bottle, me lad. A tiny taste of home I’ve been carrying for eight years.”

  Corcoran removed the tall bottle of thick, dark glass and Corcoran knew it instantly by the handmade label.

  “It can’t be,” he said, but there stoppered up tight was a bottle of Doctor Kavanagh’s Kinsale Whiskey, which Corcoran knew to be the product of a tiny distillery in a farm cottage alongside the road to Cork city.

  “Oh, but it is,” Spanish grinned, revealing a mouth of teeth in rather rough condition. He cast one glance over to the road, where the roll call sergeant was now scarcely audible, and still on the “O’s.” Far beyond that on the other side of town there was the crackle of musketry, sounding like thick paper tearing. But it was a goodly ways off, and felt distant.

  “I suppose you’ll be taking me prisoner, then?” Spanish asked.

  “Well, I should,” Corcoran said. “For your own good, as much as anything. The next Union fellow to look into these trees might be English.”

  Spanish nodded soberly. “And they bayonet wild dogs and Irishmen. What say you then, Saint Francis? A last, quick nip for the road?”

  Corcoran sighed, looking at the bottle as Spanish waggled it back and forth. He had a strong memory of so many nights out on the town with his brothers, or around their father’s table after Mother and the girls had gone to bed.

  “Just a wee one couldn’t hurt, I reckon.”

  After the fifth or sixth wee one, Lochlan Spanish, still grinning, cracked Francis Corcoran over the head with the empty bottle.

  *

  It was well afternoon when Corcoran came around, face-down behind the tree with his musket and pack still nearby, but his blue coat was gone. As was Lochlan Spanish. The empty bottle remained, and Corcoran jammed it into his pack while he swore foully under his breath. His head ached from both the knot on his head, and too much of what was proudly called “The Worst Whiskey in Ireland.”

  He stumbled shivering back through the culvert to the road, though of course the Brigade was gone and had been so for hours. Corcoran was mortified, though he hoped he had not missed much. The Army of the Potomac had a new commander now, Burnside having replaced McClellan just last month after Antietam, and none of the men in the ranks expected the new boss would be eager to bring on a large fight.

  Corcoran trotted toward town until stopping in surprise, for to the side of the road just short of the first houses were what looked to be a few com
panies, in bivouac under the flag of the 28th Massachusetts. The 28th was the only regiment of the brigade who actually had their colors with them, as the others had been sent back to New York or Pennsylvania for repair before this southern march started. Corcoran left the road and headed for the men, praying they weren’t the only regiment still waiting to go in.

  He slowed as he drew near, for the fellows sitting about near the flag, which Corcoran now saw was tattered, were in a bad way themselves. Dirty, not shivering despite the cold sweat caked on them, faces black around their mouths from biting open cartridges. Their eyes were distant, almost empty, and only a few even watched him approach. Corcoran was surprised to recognize one fellow, who was not from the 28th.

  “Wille?” he asked William McWilliams of the 63rd New York, by way of Dublin. The young man stared back at him with an emptiness as long as a cathedral aisle in his dark eyes.

  “What happened?” Corcoran asked. “Where is the regiment? Where is the rest of the Brigade?”

  More men looked over, some from Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, though so many had been born on the same small island, so very far away. They were all Americans this afternoon. There were perhaps two-hundred and fifty of the twelve hundred who had answered the roll five hours before.

  “We are they,” McWilliams said slowly, the young man speaking like an oldster. “This is the Irish Brigade.”

  *

  After repeated charges against the stone wall and sunken road at the First Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862, the five regiments of the Irish Brigade were reduced from a fighting force of over 1200 men, to 256. The section of wall immediately attacked by the brigade was defensed in large part by the 24th Georgia, a predominantly Irish regiment.

  * * *

  M. Edward McNally is the last descendent of the High Kings of Ancient Eire, and can kill ten pasty Englishmen with a stern glare.

  Find him at his blog https://sablecity.wordpress.com/ or follow him on Facebook and Twitter

  Muskets, Magic, and Matilda Lanai.

  Tilda Lanai has trained for years to take her place among the Guilders of the Miilark Islands, but now the Trade House she is to serve is imperiled by the absence of a legitimate Deskata heir. Scenting blood in the water, rival Houses begin to circle. The desperate search for an exiled heir takes Tilda across a war-torn continent and to the gates of the Sable City, where centuries ago dark magic almost destroyed the world. Along with a sinister sorceress, a broken-hearted samurai, and a miscreant mercenary long on charm but lousy with a crossbow, Tilda must brave the demon-infested ruins. Only then can she find John Deskata, who may not want to be found at all.