My male works descended. Immediately. For her. And for the time I was with her, the itch…the pain. It stopped.
Even more shocking, she had touched me most intimately, for what had turned out to be a trick on her part. A ruse meant to distract me, while her sister absconded with my prisoner.
Ola had also gotten away that night. But the damage she’d done had been catastrophic for reasons beyond my interrupted torture of the Betrayer King.
The night pain was back. And what had started out as a faint itch has morphed into a clawing need I can no longer ignore. Since her departure, I haven’t been able to rest properly, and I can barely think, much less focus on my ultimate plan of revenge against her fathers.
The dogs who murdered my father.
I shift my thrall’s eyes and watch them, standing near the front of the stage with their mate. By anthrohominid standards, the warriors are much older than when we first met underneath that purple sky. And they’re now wearing formal suits, instead of handsewn outfits made of hides. But my flame still blazes red with rage at the very sight of them.
This would have been the perfect occasion to strike them down. I could have set their entire pack on fire around them. Made them watch their mate die upon the oldest brother’s sword, exactly as my father did. I think of the surprise bit of intel I received regarding the Betrayer King’s location. Also, of the polar bear tooth, currently sitting in a glass display case inside the library of my Greek isle estate. A totem of the lengths I would go to in order to exact my revenge.
But I might not ever break the glass on that display case. I won’t be burning this kingdom house to the ground or acting on that intel. At least not any time soon.
Because of Ola.
My need for her—it has been nothing short of debilitating. Instead of plotting the final steps of my revenge over the last months, thoughts of laying claim to my enemies’ daughter have consumed my attention.
How many nights had I lain awake back in Greece, my male works, pressing against my stomach? The sweet pain of wanting her had been so excruciating, I often had to unshell and swim laps around my isle until I could fall into an exhausted sleep at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Ever since our first meeting, she has been my last thought before I sleep and my first upon waking. An absolute distraction from my most important goals.
As if to punctuate my point, the phone, sitting on the middle seat armrest lights up. Like this car, the smartphone is vintage. A rather rudimentary communication instrument, dating back to the time before biosystems and comm rings became popular, rendering physical devices like phones and computers obsolete. But this is my chosen method of communication, as I refuse to allow the upright primate’s still inferior technology into my head.
A typed message from Ao Quong, our mission’s original Lead Field Engineer, appears on the screen. Phase 1 is complete. When shall we begin the trials for our too long delayed trip?
His question feels like a repudiation.
I have spent centuries biding my time and planning another trip through the fating portal. Yet now all those plans are as the cattle would say, “up in the air.” And now here I am. Lurking in the shadows of my she-wolf’s coronation instead of plotting how to kill her entire family with the utmost suffering.
Impatience and frustration course through me, bouncing off the walls of my shell. No, I cannot allow this she-wolf to stand between me and my ultimate goals. She has been my sole obsession for months on end.
And that needs to stop.
That must stop.
Now.
Leaving the message unanswered, I close my eyes and god speak the thrall I am using to watch her. Bring her to me, I command into his mind.
Then I tell Colby, the latest in my generational line of human servants dating back to the middle ages, to drive to our next destination. I do not bother to await an answer from the thrall currently watching Ola inside the mansion. I know he will do as commanded, just as surely as I know the newly crowned Queen of North Dakota belongs to me.
Whether she knows it yet or not.
Tonight I will stake my claim.
Chapter Three
Viking Age Norway
FENRIS
The air stilled in his chest when he awoke to the familiar sight of his mate asleep beside him that morn.
They had shared a pillow for nearly forty winters. She had born three of his pups and made nearly all of his meals. Yet, his breath still caught when he looked upon her dark beauty. Even after so many winters together, he found it difficult to believe that such a glorious she-wolf should belong to him, care for him, pass each night beneath his furs.
He woke her with a hungry kiss. And after a mew of surprise, she returned his passion. He rolled her onto her back, covering her body with his, then entered her and joined them as one.
They were both nearing sixty winters, but on morns like this, he was a young wolf again. She was his fated mate, and no matter how many winters had passed, he remained desperate as a young wolf to possess her.
“Oh, Fenris, I love you. I love you so much,” she gasped as he moved in and out of her.
In truth, he still did not fully comprehend the language she called English. But these words he recognized. He had come to know them well over their many winters together. Know and treasure.
“I love you, too,” he whispered back in her English, the words thick and clumsy on his tongue.
She no longer screamed out her pleasure as she used to when they were first mated. But he could tell she was close to her women’s peak by the way her hands tightened around his arms as if he were her only port in a storm. He came down to his forearms, sheltering her body with his as a great tide of pleasure overtook them both.
For many moments they floated upon that sea of pleasure. Clinging to each other. Murmuring words of love and gratitude over their mate bond.
These were the moments he wished could go on forever. But alas, they did not. He and his mate eventually washed back to the shore of their current life.
He began to worry that his body had become too heavy on top of hers. However, when he rolled away from her, his eyes found a ceiling made of thatch. Not the intricately carved roof of the bed closet they used to share in the North Wolves’ kingdom longhouse.
To think about how his Chloe used to complain about the scant privacy their accommodations provided them from the rest of their family. Now they lived in a remote cabin deep in the woods a half day’s walk from the kingdom village he once ruled over as fenrir, the alpha of all the North Wolves.
For a brief moment, he closed his eyes and allowed himself to remember the last morn they were all together in the longhouse.
Their oldest son, Fenrisson, who they’d called FJ and their daughter, Myrna had been squabbling about how she should be allowed to wear pants inside the longhouse, even if it was forbidden outside of it.
When Chloe and Fenris emerged from their bed closet to intervene, they found Myrna already dressed in a pair of trousers made from hide scraps. She’d glared at FJ, bristling with anger from the bottom of her leather boots to the top of her unruly red curls. Meanwhile their wolf-bound son, Olafr sat on all fours between them, his dark red head swinging back and forth as Myrna accused FJ of acting as if he were the fenrir already, not merely the fenrir next.
“Better than an ever maid who not only has failed to do her family marriage duty but would now seek to embarrass them by dressing as a male,” he scolded back. He was no less angry than Myrna, though his appearance was much neater. Unlike his sister, who hated having her hair washed and detangled, he kept his long red hair tied back in two neat braids.
As usual, Chloe and he took opposite sides.
“Your sister was correct. You are not yet the fenrir,” Fenris reminded FJ. “You have no authority over her in this house.”
“Thank you, papa—” Myrna had begun to say.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to let you go out of the house looking like that,” Chloe
informed Myrna before she could finish thanking her father. “What happened to your hair? Why didn’t you wear the sleep cap I made for you last night? And what kind of sew job is this?”
Chloe bent down to tug at the makeshift trousers. “Have you purposefully ignored everything I ever taught you about how to make a good stitch? These are too hideous to look at. Here take them off. I’ll bring them with me on the ship and turn them into a skirt with a split. I needed a project anyway.”
“But mom…” Myrna began to whine in her mother’s tongue.
“Father, surely you are not taking her side,” FJ began to argue in his father’s tongue.
And thus, they’d spent the entire morning arguing with the son and daughter they each thought should do a better job of representing their parents. Not knowing they would soon lose FJ forever.
Or that they’d never see Myrna again?
“Do you think they’re okay?” his wife suddenly asked through the magic bond that allowed mated wolves to speak without moving lips and feel each other's emotions as if they were their own.
He did not have to ask who she was referring to. Several winters had passed since their sons departed but waking up in this lonely cabin remained hard on the both of them. Fenris was not sure his mate would ever be able to reconcile not knowing their children’s ultimate fate.
“Naturally, they are,” he assured her, nonetheless. “They are in your future land with their fated mates. Even Olafr.”
“Even Olafr…” she murmured. After nearly thirty winters of believing their son mentally incapable of changing from his wolf form, she still sounded stunned that it turned out he was not wolf-bound after all but seeking to ensure Chloe and he didn’t die as secretly prophesied to him and FJ by their sorceress aunt Bera.
“He was such a good boy,” she said. “I mean is. He’s still alive…somewhere…just not here.”
“Yes,” Fenris agreed, “Alive and happy and mated by fate as they are.”
“Yes…” Chloe’s reply was positive, but her voice sounded distant inside his head.
They would never see their children again. And though she tried to hide it, he could feel her grief and sorrow rippling over their mate bond.
“We should get up. Make breakfast. Keep moving,” she said in his tongue, which she often referred to as Old Norse.
He took her hands and placed them upon his chest. “I will fell a tree or two, then we shall begin the preparations for my winter hunt.”
“My brawny wolf,” she said with a laugh. “It’s so sexy when you do stuff like felling trees.”
He laughed as well. And for a few moments, they were as they used to be. Happy and fortunate. Over the past winters, he’d become used to this swing back and forth between muddy sadness and light happiness, with the necessary work of sustaining a lone cabin in the woods in between.
Yea, this morning was the same as the many that had come before it. But then without warning, it was not.
Just as they rose from the bed to break their fast, a knock sounded upon their door.
Chapter Four
OLA
The North Dakota kingdom house has five spaces that aren’t bathrooms downstairs, and each one of those spaces has been kitted out to a different theme for my coronation.
The ballroom has undergone a full-on Regency era makeover, complete with a human band playing classical music for English country dances. In the foyer, we’d set up a sick early millennium dance party, with a DJ in a flip phone costume, spinning oldies by early 21st century acts like Lil Wayne, The White Stripes, and Destiny’s Child.
When people get hungry, they can hit up the kitchen for a Roman feast that would make Bacchus set fire to his grape fields in a fit of jealousy. And nerdier wolves, like my mom, can currently be found in the kingdom house library, enjoying a literary salon, hosted by none other than London Graywolf, the only shifter to have ever won a Nobel Prize in Literature.
There’s seriously something for everyone at my once-in-a-lifetime coronation. But where do I find my boyfriend three hours after I’m officially crowned the Alpha Queen of North Dakota? Posted up on a wall in the garden, sipping on a glass of champagne, and not paying any kind of attention to the full-on Mardi Gras festivities going on in the kingdom house’s sprawling backyard.
He’s so obviously bored. And, I feel like a terrible girlfriend as I make my way over to him.
How has it taken me this long to notice that the only one not enjoying my party is my boyfriend? It’s not like Akwasi is hard to miss. Even leaned up against the wall, at six-six, he’s a good head taller than most of the people at the garden party, including me. And standing six one in my glittery gold heels, I’m not exactly a shrinking violet myself.
Yet, here he is, hidden in the shadows like this is an after party for a game he didn’t win and not his girlfriend’s coronation.
“You probably thinking you’ve won something tonight, don’t you? You expecting us to bow down to you now? Call you queen?”
The voice turns my head from my observations of Akwasi. Ugh face emoji, it’s Kirk Waters, the pack’s current gatekeeper. My uncles appointed him to the well paid position about a year ago after performing a very unimpressive candidate search of Yellow Mountain Wolves, who said the least crazy things, on the Civil War 2 preppers forums.
But like I’d warned my uncles at the time, that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as crazy as the rest of his mountain pack. The Yellow Mountain Wolves—or as Uncle Kyle calls them with a sigh, “those tragic YMWs,” were a pack time had left behind. They’d started off as the wolves who’d chosen to stay in the original kingdom village when the state pack decided to move to a suburb of Fargo in the mid-1900s.
Back then, the YMWs had been a motley mix of the ancestors of both Native Americans and white homesteaders who’d been bitten by werewolves. They’d simply wanted to continue to live off the land, hidden away from humans. And for a while, things had gone great for them. But then advances like she-wolf rights and heat control had hit our state along with biosystems and WolfNet.
Unfortunately, Uncle Kyle and Clyde hadn’t realized how radicalized the Yellow Mountain Wolves were becoming until it was too late. And by the time they did, there wasn’t much they could do.
Over the last few decades, the majority of YMWs had become active Civil Wolf War Preppers—a group of mostly male wolves who believed the North American territories were headed toward a civil war, which would cleanse the lupine nation of progressives and rollback she-wolf rights.
And would you look at that? Turns out no she-wolf in her right mind wanted to live in the woods with a bunch of guys who had zero communication skills, negative digits EQs and expected she-wolves to conform to a version of the good ol’ days when they had few choices or rights.
Well, we do have choices now. And thankfully, most of the younger females living on Yellow Mountain opted to get the heat control shots our North Dakota clinic doctors provided for free at the state pack run wolf schools. Many of them also managed to leave Yellow Mountain behind for college as soon as they turned eighteen, taking advantage of the generous scholarship fund Uncle Kyle had set up for wolves in under-served communities.
However, the fathers and brothers they left behind weren’t grateful for my uncle’s interference. Like at all. Most of the Yellow Mountain she-wolves had wisely decided to disappear without announcing that they were going off to college. And after losing all their mate prospects, the younger YMW males had morphed into a virulent involuntary celibate (incel) community.
Even worse, they’d recently started attracting other young Civil Wolf War Preppers. Males from all over North America who thought the best thing they could do to address their inability to attract she-wolves was to move into the woods with a bunch of other male wolves who liked to whine about being the victims of modern lupine politics.
It was mad annoying, and real talk 100, I didn’t care what my uncle said. Those tragic YMWs would be receiving zero invites to any mo
re kingdom house parties during my reign.
But you know, I promised not to cause a scene tonight. So instead of cussing him out loudly, I quietly point out, “Nobody in any North American state has ever been expected to bow to their queen or king. You don’t even have to show us respect. Just like I don’t have to keep you on as gatekeeper if you decide to be an asshole to me at my own coronation.”
“You can’t fire me!” he says, sneering with, like, his whole face. “That’s a four-year position.”
“Keep talking. Bet I can find a way to get around that pesky law. You know how keen my cousin, the President, is to bring all the gates under federal control. One call to him and that house we built for you will be replaced with a black box and a soldier from Wolf Force.”
Okay, I’m bluffing here. While it’s technically true that Rafes is the president of the North American wolves, it’s also true that Rafes despises me. So he probably wouldn’t take my side on anything, even if it benefitted his black box program.
However, Kirk doesn’t know that. And since the YMWs don’t believe in biosystems—it’s a liberal conspiracy to literally get in your head according to them—he probably needs this job to pay those high vintage wi-fi bills. Not to mention the fact that he lives in the newly renovated gatehouse, which is still the property of the North Dakota kingdom.
Kirk backs down but spits a wad of tobacco in the general direction of my feet before walking away.
If not for growing up with a great grandfather whose only face setting was “mean mugshot,” I’d probably be ewwing all over the place. Who spits tobacco anymore? Seriously, those YMWs are the worst!
I turn to continue my beeline toward Akwasi, only to falter when I see that he’s looking straight at me. Which means he must have seen everything that went down.
And did nothing.
Okay, I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Her Dragon Captor (Her Dragon King Duet Book 1): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 1 Page 3