Daniel, the youngest of the three Quinn brothers, sat in the center of his bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. The eight-year-old had an imagination that never seemed to stop. He could see dragons and sea serpents wherever he looked and though he was a bit of a baby, Riley was beginning to like him more as he got older. Danny could fashion all sorts of wild things, using his little pocketknife to carve monsters and ogres and bloodthirsty insects. His rucksack was always filled with blocks of wood and bars of soap, just in case he imagined something to make.

“I suppose it was,” Riley said, plopping down on the bed next to him. “Da said it was blowing so hard he couldn’t stand up straight.”

“Do you think our ma was selkie, like da says she was?”

“No,” Riley said. His father had always been fond of telling fanciful tales of the night he’d met their mother. “And she wasn’t a mermaid or a faerie, either. She was just our ma, only younger.”

Riley missed those bedtime stories, filled with characters from Irish myths and legends. There had been time for them back when life was much different around the Quinn house. Before his father had been sacked from his job, before he’d decided to buy in to the Speckled Hound, an old pub in Ballykirk.

Long hours serving the local crowd and occasional tourists meant that Eamon and Maggie Quinn were never home to put their boys to bed. Riley’s older sisters, Shanna and Claire, did all the cooking and cleaning around the small white-washed cottage. The boys took care of the garden and milked the cow and tended the chickens they kept.

“We should go out there,” Riley said. “Let’s see if the wind will knock us down like it did to Da.”

“Will you two just lay off and go to sleep?” Kellan looked over from the book he was reading. “Blathering about the weather isn’t going to change it. And if you go out there Da will whip your arse until you can’t sit down.”