He was no longer looking at the ground, his red gaze found hers with a shake of his great head.
“No, you don’t understand. I’d rather spend another month with you than the rest of my life without you.”
“You know not what you say!” he all but snarled inside her head. “What you ask of me.”
“You thought I’d die with Golden Son, didn’t you?” she pointed out, spreading her arms to both sides. “And you let me have him anyway. What’s so different now—?”
“Do you believe watching you almost die was easy, Reverence?” he suddenly roared inside her head. “The memory haunts me like one of your night demons to this very day!”
He gave his dragon head another angry shake. “And I knew not this yellow flame then. It was hard enough when I merely treasured you. Do you think I could let you die now? When I know there is an excellent chance to prevent it?”
“It’s my choice!” she insisted, standing her ground. “My choice whether I live or die. You took my choice away from me for years. Now I’m taking it back. So, no! I won’t go! I love you with every fucking thing I have, and I’ll die before I ever let you send me away for my own good. Just like my parents did.”
He said nothing. But he didn’t have to.
She’d seen that kind of stillness before. Like that time when she’d been caught talking with Ola at camp.
Her Aunt Tu standing there, so still her thoughts were as loud and clear as if they’d been spoken aloud. “You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You’re crazy.”
“I’m. Not. Crazy,” she told him with tears shining in her eyes. “I just love you. More than this life. More than my survival. Please. Oh, God. Oh, Fenrir Wolf, please don’t send me away.”
Her dragon. Her dear, dear dragon looked down at her for a long time. And then…
He was a giant man, cupping her face with his fingers. “And I love you the same, Fensa. My Fensa. We drakkon treasure not our names, but your name will forever be writ inside my heart. Our love will be embedded in the stars, even if, as you say, a moon falls from the sky. And though I have known you for but a wingbeat of my life, I will die with your name upon my flame. This I promise you. This I vow.”
Then he took her hand, laying it over his cheek as he pressed his forehead to hers.
His words, so beautiful, so sincere, so poetic, ripped open her fucking heart. Because nothing he said to her could cover up the real meaning of a male pressing his forehead to his mate’s.
Goodbye. He was telling her goodbye. But this time it would be for way longer than a few hours.
He was saying no, she couldn’t stay here with him. Couldn’t die in his arms after having their babies.
He stepped back and returned to his dragon form, before throwing out a caw she recognized well. It was the one he always used to call their son to his side.
Then her dragon raised his huge forepaw, palm facing forward to receive her goodbye. Her final goodbye.
But no, NO!
He wouldn’t get it.
Fensa turned on her heel and started making her way down the mountain.
She’d hide, she thought desperately. He wouldn’t be able to send her away if Eos couldn’t find her. She threw a hasty glance over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following.
And what Fensa saw nearly stopped her cold. Xenon with their son. The large blue dragon pressing his forehead to that of the much smaller golden dragon. And the golden dragon…his shoulders shook. Not with laughter, she knew, but with the human tears he’d inherited from his mother.
Fensa stood there, mesmerized. The goodbye spoken in a screeching language she could not understand. But then she realized her folly. Because in the next moment, Eos shot into the air.
She watched him go up at an angle, then descend, landing in front of her a boy with a set of golden dragon wings.
“Mama…” he said sadly, in her native language. “It is time for us to go.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head
But when she reached up to push him away, he grabbed hold of her. Both hands wrapping around her wrists like manacles.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Please don’t do this, Eos. I’m your mother. You have to listen to me. Please—!”
She cut off when a tunnel like the one her father had described opened behind her resolute son. “Nooooo!!!” she screamed, only to have the tunnel instantly suck her and Eos into its confines.
35
Once inside the tunnel, Fensa and Eos traveled in a way she could only describe as slow motion-fast. It was dark, but she could see clearly. As if another sense had kicked in, something beyond mere sight.
The girl who’d hoped to become a theoretical physicist if she could just keep her delusions under wraps, looked around, her curious mind overriding the heartbreak. If only for a moment. Was the tunnel made up of dark matter? Anti-matter? Layers of time? Multiverses?
But before she could ponder the nature of the tunnel any further, everything stopped. Or at least she and Eos stopped, hovering in the deep, endless black. Fensa looked around with wide eyes.
They seemed to be at a kind of crossroads. In the middle of several tunnels, or paths, converging in one place.
“Mama?” came Eos’s worried voice.
His hands were still wrapped around her wrists like manacles, but his eyes were darting around everywhere, as they did when he sensed a predator nearby.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, even though she wasn’t sure of that at all. Apparently, she was back to being the parent now that her bid to die keeping her family together for as long as possible had failed.
“Why did we stop? Papa said we’d go straight through back to your time. He said it would only take a few wingbeats.”
The mention of their last conversation stabbed Fensa through the heart. But for the sake of her son, she kept it together. Decided she had to stay sane, if only for him. “I don’t know why we’re hanging out here, but I’m sure it will be alright—”
She stopped because Eos was no longer listening to her. His eyes had gone to a spot just over her shoulder, and they were now saucer-wide.
Fensa followed the direction of his shocked stare and saw a woman coming toward them through one of the tunnels. She, too, seemed to be traveling at an impossibly fast speed. But then like Fensa and her son, an unseen force brought her to a sudden stop. The woman hung in the black next to them, looking just as surprised to see them as they were to see her.
She was brown, her skin the same raw umber as Fensa’s. She wore her hair in long curls that looked well cared for with regular salon visits, and expensive hair product. The young woman wore a pair of smart shorts, and what appeared to be a self-cooling tank. Fensa had seen those on television and knew they were not inexpensive. The clothes were made of a very stretchy material, which meant they were forbidden at the facility for fear of patients using them to hang themselves.
This girl wore her shorts and stretchy tank top well. She had curves for days, and she was young. Very young.
But no, now that Fensa studied her more carefully, she could see the “girl” wasn’t that young at all. She only appeared young because her skin lacked the weathered appearance of someone who’d spent a lot of time outdoors. She might even be the same age as Fensa, but it was evident she hadn’t spent the last four years living in caves and glaciers without sunscreen, basic grooming tools, and moisturizer.
Oddly, even after Fensa had noted their similarities, she still didn’t see it. Not until she heard Eos say, “Wolf Mama?” He was using her formal title, but he wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the newcomer.
Fensa shook her head in confusion. The other woman did the same.
“I don’t understand,” they both said out loud.
In the same voice.
The newcomer asked, “Where am I? When am I?” Two questions Fensa recognized from a very long time ago.
But before she could even begin to formulate a response, a bright lig
ht exploded between them.
V
Except it wasn’t okay.
36
15,000 years later
“And though we know very little about the tribe who once lived here, my aunt, the renowned historian, Alisha Ataneq-Nightwolf, and I have extensive evidence that they were descended from a pack that may date all the way back to Ice Age Siberia. And my cousin, Fensa, is working on a theory that Arizona might have been home to the very first of the fifty time portals located across the U.S.”
“Excuse me, I have a question.”
Koko Lonewolf tried to suppress a flare of annoyance as the birthday girl interrupted her lecture. Again.
Perla Deslobo, the twelve-year-old princess of the Arizona pack, had requested this guided tour and was accompanied by two members of her private staff. A security guard, and a squat woman only a few inches taller than the Princess herself—Koko assumed she must be the long-suffering nanny.
Koko was well-acquainted with security guards and nannies after growing up as the Princess of Wyoming. However, she distinctly remembered asking for a Harry Potter-themed roller skating party for her twelfth birthday. Princess Perla, on the other hand, had requested a guided tour of the original kingdom town, a collection of wolf-made cave dwellings, still in-tact after all these centuries. For the second year in a row, according to their Advanced Wolf Studies department head who’d given her this assignment.
As an anthropologist, Koko usually loved giving tours. But in this case, Princess Perla seemed more interested in asking an endless ream of questions, than in listening to Koko’s prepared lecture.
“As I explained before, Princess, there will be plenty of time after the tour for questions—”
“If those early shifters were from Siberia, how did they get here?”
Well, if the kid was going to keep interrupting, at least she was asking good questions, Koko thought before answering, “During the last major ice age, a land bridge connected North America to the Eurasian continent, specifically to the area we now call Russia. It’s believed that many, if not most, of the human and wolf First Nations people crossed the bridge to get here. In most cases, they were following elk and other herd animals, and stopped along the way, settling in Canada and the northernmost parts of the U.S., before later generations eventually made their way to Arizona. However, unlike those other groups, our shifter tribe didn’t stop along the way. According to the pictograms and carvings they left behind, they were led here by a giant female, and a serpent god. We can’t be sure exactly when—”
“You mean a dragon.”
“I’m sorry?” Koko said, trying to hold on to her shit as Perla interrupted her for what felt like the hundredth time.
“My grandma says the First Tribe was led here by a dragon man who fell in love with a giant wolf woman. But then she left him, and the dragon was so sad, he went to sleep for a long time. The tribe eventually forgot about him because he’d been gone for so long. But then one day, over a thousand seasons later, a cave wall broke open and he reappeared. The people were surprised because they’d always assumed he was just a story. But he wasn’t, and everybody saw him. Then he flew up into the sky, and the people were sad because he was never seen again. Ever.”
“Wow!” the other security guard said, looking extremely impressed with Perla’s native version of the story.
“Well, if that’s true, it’s an excellent example of a myth,” Koko inserted, trying to steer this collective car back into reality land. “In fact, this tribe is the source of some of our most enduring North American myt—”
“Excuse me, I have another question,” Perla said again, this time raising her hand in the air.
“And once more, I want to remind you that the time for questions is at the end of the—”
“My grandma says it is a true story,” Perla said aloud. “Grandma says her grandma passed it on to her so they would never forget they used to have a dragon. And I’m supposed to pass it on to my granddaughter since I’m the Princess of Arizona.”
Yes, you’re the Princess of Arizona, which means I can’t strangle your little neck, Koko reminded herself as she gritted her teeth behind her tight smile. Typically, an inquisitive child wouldn’t push her buttons so hard, but this one reminded Koko a little too much of her older sister. Sarah Lonewolf, Queen of Wyoming, and self-professed know-it-all from birth. This kid was like a walking trigger for the many childhood arguments she’d had with the sister who always thought she knew better than Koko. Still did, in fact…
“That’s not a question, and perhaps your grandmother should lead your next birthday tour,” Koko suggested between gritted teeth.
“She has a bad hip and can’t get up the mountain anymore.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“But I liked Miss Fensa. She gave me this tour last year. Why isn’t she here this year?”
Koko’s irritation was suddenly replaced with sadness.
The only reason Koko was guiding the child’s birthday tour instead of her cousin, Fensa, was because Fensa had disappeared from the apartment they shared two weeks ago. Nobody knew for sure where she’d gone, but everyone was freaking out that the she-wolf who was supposed to be taking over the Michigan throne after grad school, had disappeared without a trace. Including Koko.
Which was why the head of the Advanced Wolf Studies department had suggested she lead this “special favor” tour for the Arizona royal family. “Do something with your mind other than worry about your cousin,” he’d suggested.
As if. But she’d been giving it the literal college try. Until the Princess brought up Fensa.
“Are you alright?” the nanny asked Koko.
Koko shook off her worry, and pasted on a smile she could only hope didn’t look as false as it felt. “Hey, speaking of pictographs, let’s go back down to the caves and take a look at some of them. Inside are some of the earliest samples of cave art in the world, and there’s even a few examples of what many scientists think may be one of the earliest forms of writing in North America.”
“It’s the dragon god’s language,” the literal little princess said with the authority of a historian who’d gotten her Ph.D. at Oxford. “Grandma says—”
The girl suddenly stopped talking, but not because of the killing look Koko shot her way. The portal they stood beside suddenly erupted with a massive burst of light. Muted but bright, it looked like the small space had quietly exploded, then immediately imploded, leaving behind only the sound of heavy thumping.
And when the light cleared…
Koko and the Princess gasped.
There was a dragon. A ten-foot-tall dragon with golden scales hovering in front of them. And that thumping sound? That would also be him. Or more specifically, his large golden wings beating against the air as he kept himself and the woman he carried aloft. Then Koko gasped again.
Because the woman was…Fensa!
Fensa, in her typical modern Indiana she-wolf uniform of a self-cooling tank and smart shorts. But her sun hat was missing, as were her shoes. It was as if she’d been snatched from her apartment wearing nothing but her lounge clothes. Her head lolled to one side, and she appeared to be unconscious.
She also appeared to be pregnant. Like, super, super pregnant.
The security guard gaped, then remembered to pull out his gun, just as the nanny fainted dead away.
But the talkative little Princess only said, “WOW! Wait till I tell Grandma about this!”
37
There was a story Fensa’s papa used to tell about her grandmother. The same story Fensa had once told Xenon. How her grandmother was tricked by her grandfather into returning with him to Viking Age Norway. According to Fensa’s father, though she’d been pissed off at first, Fensa’s grandmother soon learned to love her new home, and her Viking mate. But then she’d been attacked by a wolf during her seventh month of pregnancy, and against her wishes, Fensa’s grandfather sent her back to her time, promising to find her agai
n.
Soon after her return, Fensa’s grandmother woke in a room at the Arizona clinic—the closest one to the North American gate, no longer pregnant.
It was only a family story, told by her papa to amuse and amaze at bedtime.
But many decades later, the exact same thing happened to Fensa.
Except instead of what used to be the Arizona clinic, she recognized the pale green walls of what had been turned into the Arizona State Sanatorium. Thanks to having the only gate in North America, the kingdom town had upgraded to a hospital, while its old clinic had been converted into a home for mentally ill wolves after her cousin Tu, Queen of Oklahoma, made a huge bequest in the hopes of helping her troubled nephew, Knud.
Oh, no…Fensa shook her head at the sight of those familiar walls. Only to regret it. For once her bioware stayed quiet, but what felt like the worst headache she’d ever had—even worse than the concussion she’d scored after going through the time gate the first time—pulsed inside her head, topped off with a faint ringing noise.
“You’re awake. Good.”
The words were spoken by a deep voice, so close she at first thought they were coming from inside her head. That Xenon had somehow joined her after all. But no, this wasn’t the voice of her mate. It was deep, but not dark and resonant. And when she gingerly turned her head in the direction the words had come from, she found not Dale Nightwolf, as her grandma Chloe had, but his grandson—her cousin…
“Rafes…” she croaked.
“President Nightwolf,” he corrected. Reminding her of his title.
Oh yeah…her mother had mentioned something at Papa’s funeral about him becoming President of the North American Lupin Council, the governing body that oversaw the North American wolves. But why was he now insisting the crazy cousin he’d watched get carried screaming out of teen wolf leadership camp call him by his title?
“You’ve obviously had a mental breakdown of some sort,” he told her, as if in answer to her question. “You disappeared two weeks ago, only to show up here in this condition. Do you have any idea how scared your family was? How scared we all were?”
NAGO, His Mississippi Queen: 50 Loving States, Mississippi (The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy, Book 1) Page 40