He shoved through the pack and found his aunt and a few of his family pack members licking the deep wound in her side, cleaning it the only way they knew how in their present form. But even they he shoved aside to get to his bride.
She looked up at him with tears of pain and frustration in her eyes. “Fenris, my water broke. And I’m having contractions. The baby is coming. But it’s too soon. We’re going to lose him.”
He raised her hand, which was still covered in his cousin’s wolf blood, to his lips. “Nay, this I will not allow.”
She breathed hard through the pain of her cramping. “I’m so sorry. I wanted us to be a family so badly.”
“I will not allow it, beauty.” He kissed her hand again. “You said if a baby is born in seven full moons in your time, your magic people might save it.”
She caught his meaning and began shaking her head even before he could fully explain it. “No, no! You can’t send me back.”
He reached into her wedding dress. “I must, beauty. Your wound is deep and your waters have already broken. You cannot shift to heal, and we have no human medicine in the village. There is no other way.”
She tried to slap away his hand, but he managed to unpin the spell. And this was when she began to sob. “No, I don’t want to leave you. And you said you wouldn’t abandon me.”
His heart tore at the sight of her tears and he once again took her hand, holding it to his chest fiercely. “And I will hold fast my promise. I will find a way back to you, beauty.”
“How?” she asked, shaking her head. She then clenched her teeth when another contraction overtook her. They were coming fast now. He could not linger here with her.
“I do not yet know. But I will. I promise you this on my life. I will be your mate and a father to our pup, and we will be as one again.”
He kissed her sweet lips and then her forehead, which was damp with sweat despite the bitter chill of night.
Then before she could protest again, he yelled out to the other wolves to back away from her body, which they did.
With one last longing look toward the woman who had shown him a happiness he had never thought to know, he spoke the words to send her back to her own place and time.
“No, Fenris,” she screamed, but it was too late. The black tunnel opened up just beyond her and sucked her into it as if she were but a pebble on the ground.
Chapter 22
COLD and pain. Pain and cold. That was all Chloe knew at first when she landed outside the portal on Wolf Mountain. First she just lay there in the snow, her stomach cramping, wondering why no one had come to get her yet.
Then she heard growling, and two black wolves, one large, one small, appeared less than a meter away. And that’s when she remembered it was still a full moon night, and moreover, she was back in her time, where shifter’s “got wolf” whenever the full moon rose in the sky.
Not again, she thought, reaching for her woman’s dagger, only to realize she must have dropped it after killing the last wolf.
She resorted to throwing rocks at the two black wolves, hoping it would be enough to stave them off for a while before the sun rose.
It wasn’t. Chloe’s aim wasn’t great and neither was the strength she put behind it. The larger wolf barely flinched as it continued to advance. And soon it was so close, all Chloe could do was squeeze her eyes shut and shield her throat, as it leapt at her, jaw open wide.
But then she heard a big thump. When she opened her eyes, the dawn’s earliest light had broken across the sky and the Colorado king lay there in human form, naked as a jaybird, with his equally naked wife lying just a few meters beyond.
“Goddamit, not you again,” the king declared when he saw her lying there in the snow.
But the queen, the still very pretty Latina with the same light brown eyes as Rafe, framed by a polished bob, rushed over and fell to her knees beside Chloe. “She’s hurt. Really hurt, and in labor, I think.” The queen lifted her skirts up. “Oh my God, Dale, I can see the head crowning.”
And then Chloe passed out.
But apparently the alpha couple decided against letting her and her baby bleed to death in the snow. When she woke, she did so in the clinic’s hospital bed, dressed in a fresh hospital gown, with only the bandages on her side and the fact that she was wearing some sort of hospital diaper the only evidence she had been attacked by a wolf and forced into early labor.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked Doc Fischer when he came strolling in. “Did he make it?”
“Oh, he made it, all right,” Doc Fischer answered with an uncharacteristic smile. “Queen Lacey ended up delivering him right there on the mountain. The king had to run and get a Swiss Army knife out of his pants to cut the umbilical cord. But from what they told me, your pup shifted almost before King Dale could get the job done. Like he knew if he had any chance of survival, he had to let his wolf half have him as soon as possible. They showed up at my door with you passed out, looking like a Renaissance Fair murder victim, and this dark red wolf puppy in their arms. Let me tell you, my old eyes didn’t know what to think.”
He chuckled, like the drama of her life was some kind of campfire story. Then as if to confirm her assessment, he said, “Boyo, I’ll be telling your story at parties for years to come.”
“Can I see him?”
“Sure! He morphed back into his human form with fully developed everything a couple of hours ago. Hell of a kid, I tell ya. That Viking of yours must have some strong genes.”
The only thing that kept her from dissolving into tears at that point was her fierce need to see her son and assure for herself he was all right.
And he was. The nurse brought him in from the other room, and he was nothing less than perfect. A light brown butterball of a baby with a head full of red curls, and deep brown eyes that were very clearly her own.
“Hello,” she said, happier than she’d ever been to meet anyone.
He reflexively grabbed her finger, and squinted against the clinic’s bright light.
At that moment, Chloe knew love at first sight, and she wondered why she had ever had the audacity to fear love. For one look into her son’s bright eyes, and it was explained that what had happened between her parents, what had subsequently happened to her, was due to the absence of love, not a surplus of it.
Real love could never be toxic. Real love didn’t lead you to leave your pup at the side of the road in order to be with your mate. No, real love, she realized, had been Fenris sending her back in time if it meant both she and the baby might live. And real love would be what brought them back together.
“We’ll all be a family again,” she whispered to the baby, kissing his dewy soft forehead. “I promise you.”
Chloe had promised their baby they would be reunited with his father, and she’d meant it. She had every faith Fenris would keep his promise and return to Colorado for them.
Only, he didn’t. One full month—which Chloe was still counting in full moons—passed. Fenris Junior, or F.J., as she had taken to calling him, continued to thrive, breast-feeding like a maniac and charming his mother at every turn just by being alive.
But unlike when she went into mating frenzy with Fenris, this time she had some help with tackling this significant milestone. Much to Chloe’s surprise, on her fourth day back, the alpha queen showed up at the clinic to drive F.J. and her to Chloe’s old house, which she’d taken the liberty of dusting and converting the guest bedroom into a nursery.
“What about…?” Chloe asked, when she stepped into the room, which now had a crib and changing table on the wall opposite of the small guest bed.
“I’ll handle him,” Lacey answered, stringing her arm around Chloe’s shoulders.
The Colorado queen appeared on her doorstep every day that first month, ostensibly to bring her extra food, but really to hold F.J. for an hour or two while Chloe took care of certain practicalities like showering and packing up the house.
They had a few unspoken ru
les. They didn’t talk about the king and queen almost tearing her apart in wolf-form on the mountain, and they didn’t talk about Rafe, who from what Chloe could glean, still hadn’t returned from his Alaska trip. She wondered briefly if he would eventually become engaged to the king’s oldest daughter, Janelle, who was incredibly sweet, and who reminded Chloe of Rafe’s mother. But she didn’t dare ask.
Instead she rushed to get everything she needed to square away her modern life while she waited for Fenris. She turned off all the utilities, canceled all of her credit cards, closed her bank account, and either sold or liquidated all of her assets, so she’d have cash on hand until Fenris returned.
But then another full moon passed, and she realized unless she wanted to spend Christmas in an unheated house, she might need to apply a little of her DIY spirit to reuniting her family.
The day after the November full moon, she asked Rafe’s mother if she could babysit F. J. for the whole day. The queen quickly agreed, telling her to bring F.J. and all the supplies by in the morning.
Chloe thought it would be a simple hand off at the door. But after Lacey took the baby from her, she insisted Chloe come into the living room for a bit, where, to her surprise, they found the alpha king waiting.
“Is that little F.J.?” he boomed, rising off the couch to meet them at the living room’s arched entrance. “I’ve been missing you, little guy. Come here.”
“Shhhh! You’re going to scare him,” the queen said, swatting at his arm.
“What, this little guy isn’t scared of nothing, are you?” Without so much as a by your leave, he plucked F.J. out of his wife’s arms and settled him into the cradle of his own. “You should’ve seen him on that mountain, Clo. He shifted so quick. Told mean old death, ‘Hey, man, I’m not having none of that!’ Never seen anything like it. This pup right here’s going places.”
Chloe could only look at the queen confused.
“I know he was angry at you before because of what happened with Rafe. But after the incident on the mountain, what we almost did . . .” The queen blushed. “He felt very badly about that. He’s actually the one who bottle-fed F.J. while he was still shifted and healing. The truth is he’s been begging me to get you to let him babysit for weeks. I doubt I’ll actually get much time with him today.”
“No, you will not,” the king assured her. “Me and F.J. here have got big plans. First a manly man’s breakfast. Then we’ve got that city council meeting. Then we’re coming home and watching the Broncos game. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right?”
He rubbed his index finger on F.J.’s belly and the baby belched out a happy gurgle.
“Dale, you are not going to take a baby to the city council meeting.”
“Watch me,” the king answered. “And if any of them wolves try to give me guff about it, I want you to poop on them. Okay, little man?”
As if in answer, F.J. let out a happy screeching sound that could easily be taken as an affirmative.
“Yeah, that’s right. This pup gets it. He really does.” He then turned to Chloe and held out his hand. “Hey can I borrow that doo-hickey you’ve got on? Probably come in handy at the meeting.”
Completely baffled by this sudden turn of events, Chloe unstrapped the Baby Bjorn from around her body and placed it in his outstretched hand. “Um, okay…just call if you need anything, I guess.”
“We won’t,” Rafe’s father said as he walked out of the room, singing “Are You Ready for Some Football?” and bouncing F.J. in the air.
Professor Henley was even more enthusiastic to see her then the Colorado king had been to see F.J. He met her outside of Sturm Hall, all but bouncing from foot to foot with excitement.
“Come, come!” he said without preamble. He grabbed her hand and led her into the building. “You won’t believe what I’ve found.”
Professor Henley led her into a cluttered office with a least ten standing pillars of dusty textbooks stacked as high as her head and two walls worth of bookshelves stuffed with texts of varying sizes. His only guest chair was covered in what looked like a pile of student papers, which he recklessly pushed aside, telling her to “Sit! Sit!” as they scattered on the floor.
She sat. “So were you able to find anything about the fated mates spell?” she asked.
“In a word: no,” he answered, taking a seat of his own behind his desk. “After I got your call, I started searching for anything that would lead me to that original spell. But as you know, werewolves, due to wanting to keep our existence secret from humans, have an unfortunately rather oral history—I believe you said your friend in Alaska was working on getting more of it down on paper for her graduate study, if I’m remembering correctly. That’s good work she’s doing. It’s shameful how little we wolves know about our own history.”
As much as Chloe admired Alisha for the same reasons as Professor Henley, she was way more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t found out anything new about the fated mates spell. “So why were you so happy when you met me outside if you didn’t find anything?”
He grinned. “I didn’t say I didn’t find anything. I said I didn’t find anything out about the fated mates spell. Your Fenris’s aunt and her peers did a good job of keeping that one under wraps. If there was ever another case of a sorceress writing it down as she did for your wolf, they were very good about making sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Also, charcoal on linen has an expiration date, so there’s no way even the most careful archaeologist would have found it.
However, after the fated mates spell turned out to be a dead end, I decided to start looking for any mentions of the Fenris I could find. That would be a little harder, and I thought I might have to travel to your friend’s university in Alaska since they have a much bigger collection than we do. And just in case, I wanted to get as much information about the only thing we have of your Viking in this time. His sword. But when I looked it up again, I found a detail I hadn’t noticed before.”
He turned the computer monitor on his desk around to show her a blown up picture of what she immediately recognized as Fenris’s sword set on a sheet of red velvet for it’s formal museum photograph. “I don’t understand. What’s so great about finding Fenris’s sword—”
But then she blinked, seeing what the Professor had. Seeing what hadn’t been on the sword when she knew Fenris. “Oh, my God, there are words. Words on the sword!”
“I haven’t been able to translate the runes fully yet, but I think they say—”
“Come back to me my fated one, so we may once again be as one,” she supplied. Then she said the words again in Old Norse.
“Your Old Norse is very good,” the professor said. He pulled out his smart phone and set it to record. “Could you repeat that? When’s the next time I’ll have a chance to hear Old Norse from an almost native speaker?”
She dutifully repeated the words three more times into the recorder, before asking,
“Do you think the words are some kind of spell or a clue about how to find the spell we need?”
As if in answer, her phone started ringing. Under any other circumstance, she would have let it go to voicemail, but she saw from the caller ID it was Rafe’s mother.
“Hi,” she answered the phone. “Is F.J. okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” the queen answered, her voice perfectly pleasant. “But the gate just flashed and my husband told me to call you…”
“Tell me, please tell me you did not bring that goddamn Viking forward in time again,” he yelled in the background.
“Dale, watch your language around the baby!” she shouted back. Then her voice returned to its usual queenly dulcet when she asked Chloe. “So you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that flash would you?”
Chapter 23
CHLOE had never driven so fast in her life. She nearly skidded a few times, as she came up the curvy mountain road to get back to Wolf Springs. But it still wasn’t fast enough. When she got there, she found her Viking once aga
in passed out in the clinic, sleeping off a tranq. But this time he didn’t look nearly as vital as the first time he’d come. His body was still strong and rippling with hard muscle. But underneath the beard he’d once again grown, his cheekbones looked almost sunken in. And there were dark circles under his eyes.
“For a king, this guy doesn’t have a hell of a lot of diplomacy. He not only put a dagger to the king’s throat, but the poor queen had to shoot him with the tranq gun. Again.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t planning to really hurt the king. He just wanted the king to take him to me. If he was really looking to kill, he would have brought out his silver-plated sword.”
Both Doc Fischer and the king gave her a sour look. “Uh-huh,” said Doc Fischer. “Well, it’s a good thing we got him back down the mountain. He’s severely dehydrated, and from what I can tell, malnourished. It’s like he’s been on some kind of hunger strike or something. We hooked him up to an IV, though, so you two should be good to…do whatever you plan to do in a couple of days.”
She took the Viking’s IV-less hand before asking the king, “Where’s F.J.?”
“The wife and I left him with Doc here while we went up the mountain and now the queen has him back at the house. By the way, if you want F.J. to spend the night with us, that’s A-okay with us. We’ve got a travel pack-and-play in the attic. And you left enough breast milk to feed a baby wolf army.”
She stroked the side of the Viking’s face. “I might take you up on that.”
“Might or definitely?” the king asked after the doctor left the room. “Because F.J. was excited about helping me make my famous pancakes in the morning. Maybe you and the Viking can stop by and have breakfast. But tell him to leave the dagger at your place.”
She laughed. “I will. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
Dale started to turn to leave, but she had one more thing she had to say, since who knew if they’d ever have a chance to talk alone like this again. “And King Nightwolf, I just want to say again that I’m so sorry I hurt your son, and even more sorry I won’t get to have you as a father-in-law. Whoever Rafe mates with is going to be a very lucky she-wolf.”
Her Scottish Wolf (Howls Romance): Loving World Page 28
