Prologue
It was an unknown secret to the Sooga villagers that there was a púca among them. Most Celts would have called them foolish and naïve to ignore the presence of one, but Sooga was nowhere near Ireland.
Sooga village was already so strange. What difference would it have made if they'd known a púca lived with them, pretending to be human? Honestly, most of them thought the beloved girl to be a wrathful goddess among men already.
No, Sooga village didn't need to know Pucca, the powerful quietly loud girl they all so dearly loved, was a goblin to a lot of the oecumene.
Pucca did know, however. Moving into Sooga Village, hiding her horse ears beneath two hair buns and maintaining her eyes closed to disguise her golden eyes, had been so easy.
All she'd wanted was her own piece of land, some territory to terrorize all her own. Sharing land with her brothers and sisters was such a bothersome prospect, after all.
Three brothers had adopted her immediately, offering her oodles of noodles and love and a beautiful cat to call her own. Yani, her beloved.
A girl called Ching came by with her own pet chicken, Won. They jump roped and Ching played with a sword. Before long, Pucca spoke to her, but only to her.
If Pucca ever had to leave Sooga, she decided she'd take Ching with her. For better or worse, this child was her best friend.
Oh, but who would dare force Pucca away from her own land? A goblin she may be, but she overpowered the local gods and mythos. Even dragons feared her; she might have truly been a goddess among men.
Abyo gained Ching's affections, and Ching trained harder for him.
And then, a boy named Garu moved to Sooga.
He was quieter than Pucca, and his hair was tied into two ponytails. A single red heart adorned his clothes. He was a serious fellow, the sort Pucca simply couldn't get along with.
And yet something about him…
Really made her want to bully him.
It was shocking the first few days of knowing the ninja. Pucca knew this feeling's name.
Mischief. Inherent in all púca. Her brothers and sisters claimed they felt it for their home town, where they spit on the berries and whispered frightening words into children's ears.
Having never felt any sort of attachment like that for Erin, Pucca had felt nothing when she left the town. Even for Sooga, she felt only a sense of belonging, no specific need to mess with the people.
Garu's hair…she wanted to pull it.
His hands…she wanted to make him scrape them.
She wanted to trip him and knock him around. Pinch his cheeks, yank his ears, push him to the ground and mark his skin red and black and blue.
Mostly, she really wanted to kiss him.
Her mouth was more poisonous than her siblings', sadly, so she'd never get to mark his lips with her own. Not if she wanted to keep him. And she really wanted to keep him. Maybe even more than she wanted to keep Ching and Yani and her beloved uncles.
"Garu, Garu, Garu," she trilled to Ching all day long, mostly about the kisses and the painful hugging. Lovely Ching smiled happily, glad to add her own little "Abyo, Abyo, Abyo" here and there. They were like two lovestruck girls gossiping about boys. Maybe they were.
Maybe mischief was, to púca, what love was to humans.
A funny version of love. No. A freaky version of love.
Pucca could feign human love easily, but she refused to. Instead, she confessed her attraction to Garu. The boy had taken a vow of silence and couldn't refuse.
Now that he was all hers, Pucca decided to bully him.
The days of chasing him went by perfectly. All was good. Pucca was glad she had left Erin, and she thought there was nothing that could ever force her back.
She might have been wrong about that…
