“For me to kiss you?” she asked. Feeling guilty that they hadn’t so much as held hands since exchanging hasty marriage vows in the backyard of his kingdom house.
“For you to choose me over him,” he answered, cupping her face. “Really choose me, like I chose you over that boring Eskimo girl.” Then he kissed her with all the passion he’d obviously been holding back, while sleeping in their sexless bed.
But that bed got broken in that morning. With a stomach full of a baby she still couldn’t remember making, she kissed Tikaani, and let him kiss her back. And then she turned over and invited him inside.
Less than a month later, a little girl was born. And they named her Janelle.
A few years after that Wilma went into heat again, this time as nature intended. “It’s going to be a boy,” Tikaani told her, proud as a peacock when the heating session was over. “I can feel it in my wolf bones.”
But it was another girl. Wilma named her Alisha, a name she’d always like, since Tikaani had been so sure it would be a boy, that he hadn’t bothered to pick out a girl’s name.
He wasn’t caught by surprise the third time she went into heat, though. And sure, he was disappointed when their third girl came screaming into the world, but this time he pinned her with an Inuit name before the doctor handed him the scissors to cut the umbilical cord.
Poor baby, Wilma thought, as she suckled her youngest and last daughter, Tuuluuwag Ataneq to her chest.
But that wolf of hers…he made her laugh. And he never made her cry. And as it turned out he was right. They ended up building a big and super interesting life together. The love Tikaani believed would come…it did. In fact, it came right on time and it never ran out.
Wilma transformed herself from a mange Detroit princess to a regal Alaska queen and by the time she reached her late sixties, she had trouble remembering what Bohdan had even looked like during those short summer weeks. Hell, she could barely remember what she looked like in her twenties anymore.
But even in her most senior moments, she never forgot the way she’d felt about the Ukrainian wrestler. Or how her heart had quickened when he said, “Am I only one? Am I only one who feel this thing?”
No, he hadn’t been the only one to feel the thing between them. But she loved her mate. More deeply and sweetly than she ever would have guessed she’d be able to love anyone after the way she was raised. But no…she never forgot Bohdan. And often she suspected, she never would.
She wasn’t thinking of Bohdan, though, the morning when Tikaani kissed her good-bye and set out on his first fishing expedition of the winter.
She fussed at him and worried that the ice hadn’t fully set yet thanks to global warming. But Tikaani was stuck in his ways. He always went fishing with her brother Wilford on the first day of winter. Even Wilford’s retirement to the Michigan kingdom house, to live with his daughter, Tiara, and her two husbands hadn’t stopped Tikaani from upholding the tradition. Nor was he stopped by the fact he had to take a tablet along while Ford fished down in Michigan. He gave her a peck on the lips and promised to be back by lunch.
“That old fool…” she thought fondly as she watched him walk down the lane to the kingdom lake, which sat right in front of their house.
Tikaani was right about most things. Her eventually falling deeply in love with him. Their big, interesting life. And even the big gamble on Tu finding as much happiness with her deaf, Oklahoma, mange state king as Tikaani had with his mange state princess.
But when he was wrong, he was really wrong. Three daughters. And no, the ice wasn’t fully set. That peck on her lips had been a kiss goodbye. She discovered that a few hours later when he never came back. For lunch or anything else.
For a while…months that fell like years, she drowned in that icy lake right along with him.
There was some attempted conversations. Nago asking if she wanted to stay on in Alaska after he’d been coronated as king. Rafes offering her a place in Colorado with him, as part of his campaign “story” of being all about family, even if he was technically a single man.
“Ya’ll need to decide all that without me,” she said, switching back to her Detroit accent after decades and decades of genteel royalty. “I’m just waiting here to die.”
So it was decided in a conversation she wasn’t paying any attention to, and just like that, her nearly 50-year stint in Alaska was done. There was some campaign rigamarole and what not after that, and then one day she found herself in Baltimore, her grandbaby the president of North America.
Baltimore…
Something had itched in the back of her mind at the mention of Baltimore, but she was too old, too sad. She couldn’t remember why.
It hadn’t mattered anyway. Baltimore was as good a place as any to wait for Lord Jesus to take her home to be with Tikaani.
Except she kept on not dying. Year after year passed, perfect physical after physical. She kept existing and existing, somehow. Until suddenly, five years had passed, and her husband’s mating scent had faded, which under normal circumstances would have meant she was eligible to be mated by another wolf again. But these weren’t normal circumstances.
Another year passed, making it six years since that lake took him. She was in her seventies now. Life pretty much done. Especially without her Eskimo king. She spent more time looking out the windows of her Wolf House bedroom than back at her own past. After all, she’d only come there to die. And frankly, Wilma was starting to get bored with the wait to die. She wanted to be with her husband again. Even if she no longer carried his smell.
However, that boredom unexpectedly lifted when one day out of the blue another goddamn Viking wolf walked into The Wolf House’s breakfast room. And then three months after that, her youngest triplet grandson took her to what turned out to be a wrestling show…produced by none other than the boy she’d stood up at that diner.
Afterwards when the Viking girl had told them all about meeting him, it had been all she could do not to ask her all the questions. Every single question about Bohdan she’d thought about but never dared to ask because she had let him go. Wilma couldn’t believe he now owned the IWF. Or that his formerly ragtag outfit could now fill arenas.
But Wilma stopped herself from asking her room hologram to look him up after Nago and Halle dropped them off at The Wolf House. No, she didn’t ask her room hologram about him. Not when the Viking girl knocked on her door and asked to use her non-restricted version of The Wolf House internet. Not even when the Viking girl came back with Rafes a couple of days later, quiet and strangely subdued.
There was no more talk of wrestling after that. Indeed, there wasn’t much talk at all, even though Rafes had decided to stay on at the house this time instead of rushing back to Colorado. You’d think that decision would have moved their relationship right on along. Wilma kept waiting for the house to fill up with Myrna’s heat smell.
But go figure, the Viking girl who when she’d arrived wouldn’t stop talking about “all the wonderous things this time period of yours holds” or asking Wilma questions that started with “Most Honored Grandmother…” now pecked at her breakfasts like a dainty bird. And the only questions she asked either Rafes or Wilma was whether they’d slept well.
This new version of Myrna listened more than she talked, which would have been fine, except Wilma had given up small talk years ago. Gladly, now that she didn’t have to reign over anything or act like anybody but the keepin’ it real she-wolf she was. And as for her grandson, all he talked about was the election. Poll numbers and campaign plans exclusively.
At least that was all he talked about until her grandniece Fensa dramatically disappeared, only to reappear two weeks at the Arizona gate, much changed. Rafes went down to Arizona then, but came back a few days later with hollowed out eyes and even tighter lips than usual. Apparently, whatever had happened to Fensa, it was highly classified.
“Great praises to my mother’s God that Fensa has been returned to your time period safe
ly,” Myrna had said demurely after he told them his hugely-redacted story at breakfast.
Since Myrna didn’t ask anything else about Rafes's top secret trip, Wilma decided not to ask any more questions herself. It had been more than clear since his and his triplet brothers' dramatic arrival into this time period that her stubborn grandson had inherited his mother’s annoying as hell habit of thinking he was always right. Wilma knew he wouldn’t be talking no matter how much his grandmother badgered him. She also didn’t bother calling to get the real 411 from Ford. The thing was, she just didn’t worry over the young people like she used to these days. After all, they didn’t need her anymore, and she was just sitting around, waiting to die.
Except she still wasn’t dead. She’d just kept on living. And now, apparently, Bohdan wasn’t dead either. In fact, he was in the same city as her. At a training center located at a street that was named after him.
Sometimes after those dull breakfasts, she actually opened her mouth to ask her room’s hologram the questions she been refusing to ask for half a century.
But then she’d request a TV show instead. Old episodes of Murder She Wrote, Heat of the Night, Walker, Texas Ranger, and Rap Star Wives. The shows and routines she was used to. No reason to mess with it while she was waiting to die.
Weeks passed. Then months. And she didn’t ask.
But then one day during their now very quiet breakfasts in late October, Rafes announced, “I’m droning out to Michigan to follow up with my cousin Fensa today. You should come with me.” He looked across the table at Myrna, who was as her new usual, wearing a dress and full make-up, even though she often worked out with her trainer directly after breakfast.
Myrna blinked rapidly, like she’d been somewhere else the entire meal and was just now realizing Rafes was sitting at the table with her. “You wish for me to come with you to my brother’s kingdom?” she asked, in that strange accent of hers. “But that was not on my appearance schedule.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Rafes answered, his jaw tightening as he speared another forkful of his vegetable and chorizo scramble. “They’re staying at the original kingdom house on the Upper Peninsula these days, now that Fensa has returned. And they’ve been hostile about me talking with their daughter, even though this is a matter of national security. Maybe you could run interference like you did with my mother at the gala?”
Again, Myrna blinked. “You feel you cannot provide your own, as you call it, interference? You would need me to do this for you, even though it is not on my appearance schedule?”
With more interest than she usually had for their boring-ass breakfast conversations, Wilma’s eyes tennis-matched back to Rafes…who shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“I don’t need you to do it, per se…” he began.
“Good, then I will not go,” Myrna answered quickly. “I am already scheduled to spend the holiday called Thanksgiving with my brothers, so there is no need for me to see them before then. And I have a wish to spend my day in meditation. My session is on the schedule. Did you not see it?”
“Yes, I saw it, but I thought—” Rafes started to say, an irritated shadow passing over his face. But then he cleared his throat and reset with, “Myrna, I don’t need you to come with me. But we’ve barely been in the same room since the gala and I thought this might be a nice way to spend some quality time together.”
“Quality time,” she repeated, as if this phrase was more foreign than any of the future tech ones she’d learned.
Then she went quiet for a long time, her eyes flickering up and down as if she was flipping through an old-style Rolodex, like the ones they used before the turn of the century. “No, thank you,” she finally said, as if that was the best response card she could find.
“No, thank you,” Rafes repeated, his tone disbelieving. “You don’t want to spend quality time with me?”
“No, thank you.” This time her answer came back a lot quicker, and she met his gaze like she used to, before her Stepford First Lady lobotomy, directly and sincerely. “I do not wish to do that. Not if it’s not required. But I will attend the rally in Wyoming tomorrow. The one which is on the schedule.”
Rafes's eyes flashed with that long-buried Detroit fury that all her grandchildren except Nago and Tu’s boy, Qim, had inherited from her side of the family. Now Wilma really sat up in her seat, wondering if Rafes would do what her father, Leroy would’ve in the same situation. Tell her “Yeah, bitch, it’s fucking required. Now get your ass on that drone.”
But folks didn’t call her grandbaby President Robot for nothing. He fixed his face just as cold as Leroy used to for business meetings, then scooted away from the table.
“I’ll see you at Sunday’s Rally then,” he said.
Myrna also stood, picking up her napkin and dropping it on the table with more grace and precision than one of those rich folks from that old show, Downton Abbey. “I’ll see you then, Rafesson.”
Wilma could only shake her damn head at the two of them. Sometimes she wondered if she’d fabricated the heated look Rafes had given the Viking girl when he popped into the kitchen in hologram form, the morning after her arrival. Maybe she’d just been imagining things, when she thought she heard Myrna call him, “Fenrir mine.” Breathless, like her whole world hung on her grandson’s next breath.
“Have a good day, Grandmother,” they said at the same time. Before walking away from the table in opposite directions.
Wilma returned to her room, a large Victorian era suite on the first floor, that had been stayed in by Kings and Queens from all over the wolf world before she’d moved. Normally, she considered the room a sanctuary, and loved the mix of overly ornate decorative features, Oriental carpets, and modern smart walls. The comfy window seats were the perfect place to while away the rest of a life, watching your shows and looking out to a never-changing view of the back lawn that didn’t include the property’s lake.
Often, she felt relieved returning to her room after her daily breakfast requirement. But today frustration gnawed at her, and the room seemed off for reasons she couldn’t quite explain.
TV, that’s what she needed, some kind of distraction. Downton Abbey…now there was a show she hadn’t watched in a decade or two. She remembered liking Maggie Smith in it. That old gal had been a straight gangster, cutting down simple bitches left and right with that sharp tongue of hers. Maybe she’d watched that today.
“Tikaani,” she said, coming to stand right in front of the ceiling’s hologram projector.
And he appeared before her, just like he always did. A white-haired king with what Nago used to call his Sensei Wu beard and mustache.
“Hi, baby,” she said, even though she knew he was just a hologram. Not the real thing.
“Wilma, my queen. Golly gee, it’s good to see you this morning.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” she answered, meaning it, but then she thought of that cold conversation between Rafes and Myrna. How they hadn’t looked at each other before they left the table. How neither of them seemed to realize how fleeting this time shit could be. Whether it lasted three months or fifty years.
“Wilma? Is there something you’d like? Something I can do for you?” Tikaani asked, reminding her with just that question that he was essentially a piece of A.I. Not real at all.
All she needed was the TV wall. Something to keep her company while she waited to die. That was all she needed.
But then she found herself asking, “Baby, could you, change your appearance?”
“Sure, honey. Would you like me to become a younger version of myself? I have 2020 and 2010 versions of this avatar, but if you’d like to go back further than that, I can put in a composite request with Nago—”
“No, I mean can you be somebody else? Like, somebody who isn’t my dead husband?”
Tikaani didn’t recoil or even look surprised by her request. Of course, he didn’t. He was only A.I., and this wasn’t a betrayal, she assured herself, as he asked,
“Who would you like me to be?
“Um. I don’t know. Maggie Smith from Downton Abbey maybe. Angela Lansbury. Anybody you have on file.”
Maggie Smith appeared before her. She was much shorter than Wilma, but still somehow managed to seem like she was looking at Wilma down her nose as she asked, “Yes, what may I do for you?” with a supercilious English accent.
Wilma folded her now thin arms around herself, thinking she was an old fool, and should tell this Maggie character all she wanted was her husband back. But then the words, “Can you tell me about Bohdan the Terrible—I still can’t pronounce his last name right.”
But as it turned out, she didn’t have to. Wilma nearly jumped out of her skin when a DJ Horn sounded and a 1990s version of Bohdan, huge and hulking in a pair of red wrestling briefs, flashed in, flickering like a strobe light to the DJ Horn’s blast.
Oh Lord, Wilma thought, trying to decide whether to cover her ears so she didn’t go deaf or her eyes so that she didn’t go into an epileptic attack.
But then the image stopped flickering, and hologram Bohdan said, “Privet, Baltimore Local. Before you read my information, you want tickets to tonight’s special match, featuring my daughter Sana the Terrible and my nephew Ivor Dollar Emoji, nyet?”
“No,” she gasped out, shocked at the offer, although this wasn’t the first time she’d encountered an informational page with a sales automation.
“Are you sure, beautiful American woman? We still have tickets left for last-minute VIP, and locals get 5% discount.”
Hell yes, she was sure. All she wanted was to skip this hard sell automation, satisfy her morbid curiosity about the Ukrainian still pretending to be a Russian villain and then act like this search never happened.
But when she opened her mouth….
24
Rafes
Rafes spent the entire morning trying not to think about the conversation with Myrna. He tried not to think about it on the drone ride to Michigan. He also tried not to think about it while questioning his cousin, who’d been a twenty-five-year-old grad student a few months ago, but had disappeared, only to reappear two weeks later…pregnant with twin dragons.
The Brothers Nightwolf Complete Trilogy: A Sci-Fi Shifter Paranormal Romance Box Set Page 59
