The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy

by Taylor, Theodora

  Surprised and still guilty. Because no, she could not truly believe he wanted to spend quality time with her—not after realizing that nearly everyone in his life, including his own grandmother, was part of his campaign to remain fenrir of this land. With only two weeks to go until the election, he’d obviously only wished for her company so that she could run interference with her brothers.

  Yet, he had for a moment—a very short blink of a moment—seemed truly hurt when she turned down his invitation to accompany him to Michigan.

  But no....that conversation changed nothing. Rafesson still cared not for her, and their mateship remained little more than a campaign tactic. And no matter what kind of insincere invitation he had extended, nothing changed the fact that other than that one invitation, he’d shown her no sign of intimacy or given her so much as an admiring glance, since their return from the land of Kansas.

  Knud had been wrong about his brother, so she still had every intention of leaving Rafesson after the election. So then why couldn’t she bring herself to even consider a match with the human who wished to sign paperwork with her?

  He was quite handsome. Mayhap not as handsome as Rafes, whose visage never failed to quicken her heart, even now when she didn’t wish it to. And unlike Rafes, Wrath was friendly and funny, and perhaps most importantly, actually seemed to want her. The real Myrna who’d come out of hours of pro-wrestling training feeling as if mere minutes had passed. He approved of the Myrna who spoke as she pleased and only used scripts for actual performances. Truly desired the Myrna who wore her hair in its natural state, instead of straightening it to fit in with the other political she-wolf spouses, who all seemed to think and dress the same—

  “You into women?” Sana asked, cutting into Myrna’s bitter thoughts. “Because if you are, I’m going to be cursing myself for not filing some paperwork of my own before coming up with this storyline.”

  “Oh, no thank you, Sana,” Myrna answered with a laughing smile, as they turned down the hallway that led toward the arena’s Eastern doors. “I have been warned away from you?”

  “No shit?” Sana asked, sounding more proud than offended. “By who?”

  “One of the Lunacorn Quadruplets did say she had bottles of water that have lasted longer than most of your relationships.”

  Sana barked out a laugh. “Whichever one of them said that‘s just pissed I bagged two of her sisters before deciding to leave those crazy quads alone. I bet the last two are crying themselves to sleep every night wondering why they had to miss out on the Sana Experience.”

  Myrna might have laughed at Sana’s boasts, if not for their arrival at a set of large iron doors. The entrance to the arena’s runway.

  Myrna dry swallowed as two security guards in bright yellow shirts opened the doors for them. Suddenly, she found herself without the ability to laugh, much less talk, as the geese flapped anew, wild and terrified, inside her stomach.

  “Breathe,” Sana said beside her, sounding more like a real mother now, than an over proud rooster. “You’ve practiced for this. You know the routine. All you’ve got to do is go out there and nail it, and then after this match my Dad will be waiting outside our dressing room door to congratulate you. That’s Bohdan code for ‘you did good, kid, and we’re going to keep you on for the national tour.’ Focus on that—not on whatever or whoever’s got your head so twisted, you’re not going to even take a couple of days to think about signing paperwork with Wrath Gualla.”

  Sana was right. Shaking Rafesson and his uncharacteristic request out of her head as Myrna stepped forward into the stadium.

  It all happened so fast after that. Like a horse ride across open country, a rush of wind and spirit that somehow happens both moment by thrilling moment and all at once.

  Myrna fought Sana until the discovery of a birthmark, which a makeup artist had painted on both their skins less than an hour previous. The crowd, not knowing this, gasped upon the revelation. And Myrna could swear she could hear a few people crying as Sana told the made-up story of having her baby ripped away from her, during her time in Bwanda, a made-up African country from which both the IWF “faces” Wrath and Savage Gualla, and their “heel” uncle, Notorious African did hail.

  Myrna in turn, told her the story of how she’d been raised in an orphanage and taught to wrestle by kindly Bwandan nuns. Afterwards she asked, “But if you are my mother, who then is my father?”

  Lights down. And by the time they left the ring under the cover of dark, the crowd was beside itself. “Tell us who the father is!” “Is it Notorious African?” “Tell us! Tell us! Tell us!”

  They seemed quite angry, but Sana began to cackle as soon as they cleared the stadium doors. “This match is going to be a ratings BLOCKBUSTER when we stream it in November. Myrna, baby, I just made your strange Norwegian ass a star!”

  Myrna smiled just as broadly, glad her debut had gone well.

  But then she faltered, squinting hard at the completely unexpected scene in front of them.

  For right outside their dressing room door stood Bohdan the Terrible, the head of the IWF. That might not have been so odd. Sana had assured her the retired-but-still-very large wrestler would be there to personally congratulate her if she did a good job.

  But Bohdan looked the opposite of happy. Indeed, he appeared downright furious as he glared down at an elder black woman. One who Myrna well-recognized.

  “Most honored Grandmother,” Myrna called out, her heart in her throat. “What are you doing here?”

  The implications of Wilma’s presence outside her door flooded Myrna’s mind as she closed the distance between her and the older woman. “How did you find me here?” she asked. “Is Rafesson here, too—”

  “No…no. He doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him anything. I was just here because I bought a ticket, just like everybody else,” Wilma reassured her quickly. But then she shook her head, her eyes sad and confused instead of their usual flat and grumpy. “I saw you on the poster, and I came back here to find you…but then I ran into him.”

  Myrna looked up at Bohdan the Terrible, whose face was thunderous with anger.

  “This is your grandmother?” he asked Myrna, his voice dark and ominous. Unlike Sana, he had an Eastern European accent, thick and intimidating.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Sana asked beside Myrna.

  “Your new hire is fired by me, that is what is going on,” Bohdan answered, his voice striking out like a snake, sharp and vicious.

  His announcement hit Myrna’s heart like a hatchet buried in her chest. For she loved this job she’d worked so hard to learn and she thought she’d executed her play acting perfectly.

  “I do not understand!” she said.

  At the same time Sana screeched, “What? No, Dad, you can’t do that! We killed that match. They’re still out there chanting!”

  “Did I do something wrong?” Myrna asked Bohdan.

  “No, you did nothing wrong. That fight was FLAWLESS,” Sana answered confidently. “And I swear to God, if this is some boys' club bullshit because she said she didn’t want to be in a showmance with Wrath—”

  “I am the majority shareholder still of this company! You will not defy me in this, daughter!” Bohdan yelled, cutting Sana off. Then he pointed at Wilma. “And the granddaughter of this woman will not work for me. Not ever.”

  Wilma looked stricken. “C’mon, Bohdan, don’t do this! Please! She’s not even my granddaughter. She calls me that, but really she’s just engaged to my grandson—” she begged, grabbing on to Bohdan’s arm.

  But she cut off when he ripped his arm away. As if the older woman had hurt him somehow, even though he was both much taller and heavier than her.

  “Dad, what the hell’s going on here?” Sana demanded, sounding more Ballmer than ever before. “I don’t understand why you’re being like this.”

  “I understand not, either,” Myrna said.

  And she turned from her now former IWF boss to Wilma to ask, “Most Hon
ored Grandmother, what did you say to him?”

  “Nothing!” Wilma answered, her voice tight with anger. “I didn’t say one word to this old fool.”

  There came a heavy beat of angry silence from Bohdan at Wilma’s words. Then he yelled out “SECURITY!”

  27

  Myrna

  Myrna had seen a few sides of her Most Honored Grandmother by this point. Angry, grumpy, cackling, dull and listless—but she would never have guessed she’d ever see her apologetic.

  “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” she kept saying over and over again as they made their way to the main road, after getting unceremoniously shoved out of the arena’s back door by two human security guards.

  Myrna was still reeling from the sudden turn, but somehow, she found it within herself to assure the older she-wolf, “It is not your fault grandmother.”

  “But it is my fault,” Wilma insisted just as they reached the main road, which encircled the forest around The Wolf House. “This is all my fault…”

  The older woman seemed truly distressed, but with a guilty pang, Myrna realized she would have to leave Wilma here to walk the rest of the distance by herself.

  There was no way she could plausibly re-enter the Wolf House through the front gate. Especially dressed as she still was in the ridiculous skimpy wrestling bikini with the IWF logo printed across its bottom. She’d already gotten plenty of looks from the humans as they made the way in the waning evening sunlight to the main road. She could only imagine what the security wolf at the gate would say, and then relay back to Rafesson if she showed up there with Wilma.

  No, she would have to part ways with the still distraught Wilma here. “I am sorry Most Honored Grandmother. I must re-enter The Wolf House by the way I did leave, so I can walk with you no further. Can you get up the hill by yourself?"

  “I’m seventy not one-hundred, girl,” Wilma snapped, a little bit of her usual grumpiness rising to the surface. But then her voice went frail again as she said, “But you’ve got to let me explain why Bohdan fired you…”

  “I will come find you once I am back at The Wolf House. This I do vow, Most Honored Grandmother,” Myrna answered. “I only ask that you do not tell Rafesson what you have seen this night.”

  Wilma called after her, “I won’t, but…” The older woman suddenly grabbed her arm, her grip unexpectedly tight. “You’re planning on leaving him after the election, aren’t you? Because you know he wouldn’t approve. Wouldn’t let you do this.”

  Myrna’s eyes softened. “Most Honored Grandmother, I wish not to cause you distress.”

  But Wilma shook her head. “No distress, actually. You were good tonight. Real good. And I just wanted to say, I understand… I understand wanting to make your own choices. Live your own life.”

  I understand wanting to make your own choices. Live your own life

  Wilma’s words continued to resonate in Myrna’s head as she ducked into the forest and pulled out Knud’s phone to carefully walk the path he had plotted out for her, so as to avoid the many cameras and sensors planted within these woods. However, walking through the now much-darkened forest soon began to feel like what her English tutor had called a metaphor. For as she traveled deeper into the forest, more and more worries filled up her chest.

  Knud’s warning about how Rafesson would “black-ops all over your wrestling” shit, if he found out about it before the election, rung dire in her head. Myrna had gone out of her way to make sure that both the accidental match footage and the footage she’d taped tonight would not be streamed until after Rafesson’s election date. She had no wish to visit another scandal upon him, but according to Knud, even that wouldn’t be enough if his brother found out what she’d been up to while supposedly meditating.

  “If he sniffs even a hint of something that might fuck with his campaign, he’ll try to buy the footage to guarantee it never sees the light of day. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll send in an operative, like I used to be, to make sure that footage disappears from the IWF drives. Trust me, it’s easy. You should have seen all the shit I deleted in secret for him when he was just on the Lupine Council. There’s a reason the humans still haven’t ever seen us shift on tape.”

  A new panic rose within Myrna at the thought of Rafes wolf-op-ing her footage as Knud had promised he would if he ever found out. Though she’d been—what was the word again?

  Fired, she had no wish to never be seen doing the one thing she, according to Wilma had been truly good at in this current time.

  But Myrna forced herself to relax when she sighted the rift she’d cut in the gate behind House #8 and the hole she’d made in its wall.

  Wilma was a most honorable grandmother. She would not tell Rafesson of her plans, Myrna was sure of it.

  All she had to do was as the idiom went, stick this out, she determined as she shimmied through the gate’s cut metal. Keep her promise to Knud. See Rafes into his second term. Then perhaps use the footage from the fight to earn an audition with another wrestling outfit, as she’d heard the Gualla twins had when they hopped from the WWE to the IWF.

  A warrior’s calm settled over her as she approached the hole in House #8. She had reforged a path for herself within her old village as Myrna Ever the Maid. So would she in this time period, she declared to herself before scurrying through the hole in the back wall like a squirrel (which, by the way, had not tasted nearly as delicious as the rabbits—

  “Hello, Myrna.”

  She froze, halfway inside the house and halfway out, her heart lodged in her throat.

  For Rafes was standing in front of her self-sawed hole in the wall. With Knud’s holochip projector in his hand.

  28

  Myrna

  Rafesson, as it turned out, was even worse than Bohdan the Terrible’s security guards. He did not yell or even speak. Simply took her by the arm and proceeded to drag her across the back lawn of The Wolf House, his face a cold mask of intention. Myrna couldn’t help but notice that both The Wolf House guard stand and the kitchen stood dark and empty, even though it was nearing the last meal hour.

  “Where are the outside guards and the kitchen staff?” she asked Rafesson, dread churning in her gut like something foul bubbling in her mother’s soup pot.

  Rafes did not answer.

  “And our most honored grandmother?” she asked, as he escorted her down the same long hallway she vaguely remembered walking through the one and only time she’d been invited to his office.

  Again, no answer.

  But Myrna saw that only Craig stood outside Rafesson’s office door. Perhaps that meant her honored grandmother, had been escorted away from this house by Arik.

  Had she been the one to tell Rafes? Myrna wondered, only to quickly dismiss that theory. Wilma was not the kind of person who would promise to keep a secret and then tell Rafesson immediately afterwards. Myrna knew that on instinct. Also, it would have taken Rafesson more time to both dismiss the kitchen staff and make it across the vast Wolf House back lawn than Wilma's return would have allowed.

  No, Myrna decided as Rafesson pulled her through the door. He had discovered her deception some other way.

  And then called in reinforcements.

  Myrna blinked when she entered his office. For it was filled with several holograms. And, unlike Astrid, these holograms didn’t seem to be designed specifically for her. In fact, she recognized one as Baylor, the campaign manager who’d given her explicit instructions before her appearances at events on behalf of Rafesson’s campaign.

  Was it possible all the other holograms were also replications of real people? Myrna sensed that to be the case…and also that they hadn’t all gathered here in Rafes's office to give her extra instructions for Sunday’s rally.

  “Whoa, bro!” said one of the holograms. He had dark brown skin and lustrous black curls. “You didn’t tell me your lady was into IWF cosplay. I hacking love wrestling! And wow, that outfit looks authentic—I mean it’s got the logo on the butt and e
verything…oh wait, is this why you called us in for the emergency spin meeting?”

  Many minutes later, the yelling still hadn’t died down, even after Myrna had explained to Rafesson and his team that the wrestling matches we’re only in tapings. A kind of dress rehearsal before the show went on the road in mid-November.

  However, these words only made Rafes that much more furious. “You’ve been wrestling?” he asked in the same voice her father would have used if she announced that she’d decided to move to a village for diseased and rabid wolves. “Behind my back?”

  “Yes, behind your back,” Myrna answered, her voice as frank as Wilma’s. “If I had asked you would most certainly have said no. Also, as Halle says I am my own woman—”

  “So, this Halle person put you up to this?” a woman in heels, even higher than Camille Deslobos, asked.

  “No, I put myself up to this,” Myrna answered. And in order to defend Halle’s good name, she told them about the fight during which she accidently auditioned for the job of her character Myrna Warrior Princess.

  However, this explanation landed even worse than the first one.

  “This is bad! The last thing we need before North America decides if you’re stable enough to lead them for another four years,” Baylor said before she could even finish the story. “Who knows what kind of damage this will do to the campaign. And after all the work we did to make North America think she wasn’t some savage Viking?”

  “I am not savage,” Myrna answered. “Perhaps you do not know as I do now that none of the wrestling matches put on by the IWF are true fighting. Indeed, if I were to really go into battle for my village, I would for certainly wear much more protective clothing than this.”

  There came a beat of collective silence. Then the dark-skinned male said, “Oh, bro, I have GOT to see this footage.”

  “No, you don’t, Mehmet,” Rafes answered the dark-skinned male’s hologram coldly. “In fact, you will offer the IWF whatever money they want to make sure the footage from neither of those fights ever sees the light of day.”