He looked from the spell to his aunt who despite her gray hair, much smaller size, and supposed decrepitude managed to keep up with his fast pace. “You realize I will disappear if I speak these words on my tongue?”
“I have put to words the return spell on the reverse side of the rag. You and your fated mate have only to speak them as one and you will be returned to this place.”
He held the rag out to his aunt. “You are dear to me, sister of my father, but you try my patience with this business. I will claim a mate of my own accord. I do not wish to be fated.”
His aunt clenched her hands by her side, refusing to take the linen back from him. “Your sires were fated.”
“Yes, and this be the reason I wish not to be,” he answered.
“Your mother and father were very happy before…”
She did not finish, but she did not have to. Fenris knew the rest. His sires were very happy, until his mother died giving birth to him, before his father was reduced to a husk of his former self in his grief.
“I do not wish a fated mate,” he repeated. “Take this back. I have no use for it.”
A knowing smile played on his aunt’s lips. “We shall see. This winter has been cold and dark. You will eventually want for a mate to warm your bed. Why not put yourself in the hands of the gods?”
His aunt was the last person he wanted to talk to on this subject, even if she was correct about the state of his bed. He had not lain with a woman since his visit to the human market to the south of them before the last summer moon. There, he and his unmated pack members could lie with human women willing to trade their services for the furs, iron, small weapons, and the other items his village was known to sell.
“Aunt Bera, the only thing I want for now is my soap.”
She stopped walking. “And you may have it. I will take my leave, but will leave you with the spell.” She then turned and hurried back toward their village before he could offer any further protest.
He balled the fabric up inside his hand. Having stripped down to bare feet and his leather hunting trousers in preparation for his bath, he had nothing with which to pin it to his clothing. However, he also did not want to leave it lying around for any young she-wolf to find. She-wolves could be silly when it came to matters of the heart, and even though most of them had no knowing of written words, they might seek someone who did to help them speak the words. In the past, his aunt had taken great care not to record the spell for fear it would fall into the wrong hands.
That she had written the spell down for Fenris without his having asked it, proclaimed her frustration with his refusal to take a bride more loudly than any words ever could. But he did not want to dwell on her actions. He was fresh from the hunt, having taken down no less than three reindeer and a bear, the latter of which he had been forced to use his sword, The King Maker, to finish off.
He desired to clean both himself and his trusted weapon much more than he desired to ruminate on his aunt’s concerns about his lack of mate. And he could see Wolf Lake, which bordered his village, glittering in the distance.
“It seems we have caught the King of Wolves unawares,” a voice said from behind him.
Fenris stopped short, his grip tightening around the hilt of his sword, before he turned to face his cousin, Vidar, a wolf almost as tall and broad as he. Fenris had banished Vidar from their village two moons ago, after the younger wolf had beaten and attempted to couple with a household servant girl who did not wish his advances.
Vidar had thought his position as cousin to the king would keep him protected, despite the strict laws against coupling with a she-wolf without her father’s consent. And indeed, it had pained Fenris greatly to banish a family member who shared his own longhouse. But in the end, even Fenris could not hold himself above wolf law, especially the ones he had set down himself during the bloody years he had spent reaffirming his position as the king of the North wolves.
But like a recurring dream, Vidar now once again stood before him. However, this time, his battle axe, which Fenris had allowed him to keep, was raised and his eyes were shining with hatred and malice. Also, this time he did not stand in front of Fenris alone. At various points behind him stood four other men with swords, three of which Fenris recognized as wolves he had banished from their village for crimes ranging from theft to the murder of humans, which were also strictly forbidden under both his laws.
Fenris raised his own sword. “You should not be so close to my village, Cousin. Your mother might see you and you have already well disappointed her.”
“I beheld you talking to the wicked sorceress.” He bared his sharp lupine teeth. “The one who did put that harlot servant to her false accusation.”
Though his aunt had been the one to bring the servant girl to Fenris, it had taken but one look at the badly beaten girl to assess what had happened. He knew her attacker to be Vidar, who he had spied watching the yellow-haired girl with hard losti—lust—in his eyes on several occasions. The extent of his crime against a girl who many in his household considered like a family member had been enough to sicken even his mother’s sister, Esja, Vidar’s own mother. She had yet to ask her nephew to reverse his decision, even though it was known by all that Vidar had only gone as far as the mountains on the northern side of the lake to live.
“What matter of business is this, Vidar?” he asked.
“I wish to once again take my place in our village and there is but one way to do that.” Vidar stopped smiling now. “Become the new alpha king.”
Fenris shook his head. “You cannot hope to best me on your own.”
There was a reason the Alpha King title had stayed in his line for five generations. The sons of Fenris were known throughout the Northern lands as fierce warriors, and he himself had been trained from childhood to defend his inherited crown.
Vidar grinned. “Not on my own, no. But my friends have avowed to herald it that way when we return to the village with your severed head in my hand.”
“No one will believe your tale.”
“It does not matter that they believe, only that they submit to their new king.”
Fenris spat. Vidar had been a pig’s penis since childhood, prone to tantrums and high-handed with his mother and two sisters. And now it was plain to see he had gone mad with desire for power and revenge.
Fenris considered himself a warrior of great skill, but even he could not best five wolves, especially having just come off the late winter hunt. He cursed himself for letting his mind become so distracted by the conversation with his aunt that he had momentarily relaxed his guard, giving his cousin the perfect opening for this underhanded attack.
The conversation with his aunt.
Fenris lowered the hand that held his sword and raised the one that held the rag with the spell written upon it.
Mistaking the lowering of his sword as an admittance of defeat, Vidar came charging toward him with his battle axe raised high.
Fenris barely had enough time to utter the words that would send him hurtling through a gate to the gods-only-knew—but at that moment, any land was better than this plain, surrounded by power-mad Vidar and his outlaw followers.
He did not hear the gate open behind him, but knew it must have, because Vidar came to a fumbling stop, his eyes widening and his mouth falling open.
In the next moment, Fenris was sucked backward into a pitch-black tunnel of wind, which sent his body hurtling through space and time at such a speed, he barely managed to hold on to his sword.
Eventually he was deposited on a snowy plateau, his head slamming against a large rock just as he hit the ground with a bone-crunching thud. His head spun, and he groaned in a bid to stay conscious, but it was a bid not won. And he was surround by blackness again.
The sound of two voices speaking a strange language above him eventually came filtering in through the new blackness. And when he opened his eyes he found what looked like a Moor standing above him with his booted foot on his chest.
Fenris moved quickly. Even though the man was dressed in a strange costume—some manner of faded blue trousers and a thin coat made of a shiny and slick material Fenris had never seen before—he could smell that the man was a fellow wolf. Consequently, he didn’t waste time trying to deduce who this wolf was or why he had his boot planted on his chest. His way had always been to kill quickly, and his own life had been spared many times over because he did so. In a few moves, he reversed their positions and had raised his sword for the killing blow—
“No!!!!”
What sounded like a female’s voice rang out beside him. And he would have ignored it, except...his nostrils flared…he could not.
As if compelled by an invisible puppet master, he turned toward the voice, and found a trembling she-wolf with bushy hair and what looked like some manner of weapon pointed at him. Perhaps the spell had transported him to Iberia or what he’d heard referred to as Blaland, a hot and dry land to the far south where blamenn, black people with very dark skin, lived.
It was she.
Whoever she was, wherever she hailed from, he recognized her for who she was the instant his eyes met hers. Not only from her intoxicating scent, but also from his body’s reaction to her. A powerful wave of desire overtook Fenris, causing him to sway, even though he was in a firm killing stance. His cock swelled inside his hunting trousers, hard and surprisingly insistent, as if he were a pup in his first stages of coming manhood.
For a moment, he stood there frozen, unable to move, he was so enthralled by her. But finally he remembered himself enough to say, “I am here for you.” He held up the rag with the spell upon it. “And now we must speak these words as one, so I might go back to my lands and vanquish my enemy.”
She looked from side to side, before spewing forth words that sounded to him vaguely like some form of Germanic, but not a dialect he recognized. Why would this dark woman be speaking to him in Germanic?
He started toward her, which seemed to alarm her. She made a high-pitched noise, like a mouse, before squeezing her eyes closed. A whistling sound then emitted from her strange weapon right before something struck him with the sting of a fierce insect bite.
He looked down to see some manner of dart sticking from his shoulder. And just as he moved to pull it out, a powerful sleep overtook him, one he could not resist, even though he strove hard to fight the enveloping blackness.
Chapter 3
“YOU know, if we were mated that wouldn’t have gone so bad,” Rafe said, a couple of hours after the confrontation at the portal.
It had been an awkward and unwieldy business getting the large maybe-Viking down the mountain to the town’s two-room clinic. But he now lie sleeping upright in a hospital bed, to which he’d been handcuffed, looking much more peaceful than the two people in the room’s side-by-side visitor chairs.
Chloe adjusted her position to look at Rafe with an incredulous blink. “Seriously? We are in the clinic with a possibly crazed Viking sleeping off a tranq, and this is what you want to talk about?”
Rafe shrugged as if time-traveling Viking werewolves happened every day. “Once we’re mated, we’ll be telepathically connected, too, which means we’ll be able to say things like, ‘Hey, Chloe, don’t talk to him in German, just shoot him already.’”
“Or things like, ‘Hey, Rafe, you can thank me for saving your life any day now.’”
Rafe clenched his jaw and looked away. “The truth is, I’m more pissed at myself for letting him get the upper hand. I shouldn’t have let my guard down. What if he had hurt you, or worse? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
He sounded so guilty that Chloe’s irritation was instantly replaced with the need to comfort him. She placed a hand on his arm. “But he didn’t hurt me or you. That’s all that matters.”
Rafe shook his head. “I’ve never seen a guy that big move so fast. I wonder what he did to get cast out of wherever he came from.”
So did Chloe.
Doc Fischer, their shifter town’s middle-aged and perennially cranky doctor, entered the room at that moment. “Has he tried to tell you why he got sent back yet?”
“No, he’s still not awake,” Chloe said.
The doctor screwed his up his craggy face. “What do you mean? He’s wide awake.”
They whipped their heads around to see the maybe-Viking lying there with his eyes wide open and staring at them. Hard.
Doc Fischer went to his bed-side and Rafe joined him. However, Chloe chose that moment to get out of the doctor’s way, repositioning herself on the opposite side of the room from the reluctant patient. As much as she had enjoyed meeting the werewolves who came through the gate in the past, she figured it was largely because they were she-wolves from different cultures or points in history—but blood-thirsty werewolves with swords? Nah, she wasn’t so into that.
This guy had come very close to killing her best friend. And somehow his prone position and the fact that he was handcuffed to the bed by both hands didn’t make him seem any less deadly. For whatever reason, Chloe was having trouble staying calm now that he was awake. Something about him caused her insides to go all skittery. It was similar to how she felt when Rafe tried to talk to her about their heat night, but with a side dish of electric fear that made her nerves tingle.
And she only became more unsettled when his intense gaze followed her in her attempt to put space between them.
“We figure he’s a criminal and got cast out of his pack. Maybe he challenged the alpha and this was his punishment,” Rafe told Doc Fisher, after the old man finished examining the maybe-Viking’s eyes with a pen-light.
The doctor frowned. “Hmm, you say he came through the gate un-shifted? Usually a gate banishment is done on a diseased wolf or in desperation and toward the apex of a fight. He doesn’t have any wounds, except some bruising where his head hit that rock.”
Rafe shrugged. “Maybe he had a trial and was found guilty. There were a few packs that used the trial system, right?”
“Actually, I just consulted on this case with a friend of mine at UC Denver who specializes in history and literature from the Viking period. He said Norway and Iceland were known for their strict legal system during the Viking Age, which is why he doesn’t think this is a gate banishment. According to him, they had a fairly thorough punishment system in place, no need to go wild with the gates.”
“Then maybe he’s not a Viking. He could be from some other place and time and we just didn’t recognize whatever language he’s speaking.”
The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. I sent a picture of that sword of his to my professor friend and he recognized it, because of the wolf on the hilt. He even sent me a picture. It’s on display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. They don’t have a firm history on it. But it definitely dates back to the Viking Age.”
Doc Fischer re-pocketed his pen-light. “I think we might need to apply Occam’s razor here.”
A bad feeling began to brew in Chloe’s stomach.
“What do you mean?” Rafe asked.
“You know, ‘the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one?’” The doctor clasped his hands in front of him like a lawyer about to put forth his case. “He came through the gate un-shifted with no visible wounds. You said he tried to kill you but stopped because Chloe told him not to.”
“Not because I told him not to,” Chloe said. “It was more like I took him by surprise.”
Doc Fischer gave her skeptical look. “Plus, he hasn’t taken his eyes off of you, despite the fact that he’s handcuffed down to a bed in a time period clearly not his own. I’m thinking the logical conclusion here is this Viking has come forward in time for his fated mate.”
Both Chloe and Rafe gaped at him.
“And it’s Chloe,” the doctor added, just in case they weren’t getting his original meaning.
“No,” Chloe and Rafe said at the same time.
Doc Fischer turned his no-nonsense gaze o
n Chloe. “Chloe is there something you want to tell us?”
“No,” answered Chloe, her eyes going wide with indignation.
The doctor picked up the maybe-Viking’s chart and started making notes. “So you don’t feel anything at all right now for this wolf? No increased heart rate, heightened arousal, anything like that?”
“No! I don’t feel anything for him.” Chloe looked to the red-haired man who was still quite openly staring at her but then she quickly had to cut her eyes away, because she wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t exactly telling the truth either. While she was definitely not aroused when she looked at him, the weird skittery feeling did get worse.
“Look, we’re all thinking he’s probably a Viking, right?” she said. “The last time I checked, there weren’t a ton of black people in Norway back then. For all we know, this guy has never seen a black girl, and that’s why he’s staring at me.”
She turned to Rafe, hoping he’d back her up as he did in most things.
But Rafe didn’t agree. In fact his eyes burned with suspicion as he came to stand in front of her. He slowly and deliberately sniffed the air around her, and only then did he visibly calm down. “I don’t smell any arousal on her,” he said, his voice angry with the declaration. He swung his gaze back to the doctor. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Doc.”
The doctor held his hands up. “Don’t kill the messenger. I’m only checking off all the possibilities.”
Rafe glared at him. “I won’t let you insult her like that. She’s my mate.”
“Not yet, she isn’t. Not officially.” The doctor shook his head. “And it’s not an insult. I’m older than both of you, and I know you two love each other, but . . .” He paused, seeming to search for the right words. “These things happen. More often then you think. Especially among wolves. There’s a reason all of our legends involve either great alpha fights or tragic love stories. North American wolves have only strayed away from the tradition of fated mates spells in the last two hundred years, which is relatively recent if you think about it in terms of world history. You need to realize it can still be quite powerful when one is cast.”
Her Scottish Wolf (Howls Romance): Loving World Page 13
