But that remembered happiness was fleeting, because the memory of the next morning followed heavy on its heels. Him coming out of the shower, wanting her again, even though he could now smell she was with cub. Actually, the smell of her pregnancy had been even stronger than usual, or at least stronger than any other pregnancy he’d ever smelled on another she-wolf—perhaps because he knew it was his pup she carried within her womb. And that knowing made him want her even more.
But he had sensed something wrong as soon as he came out of the bathroom. There was the smell of her heat, stale and in the past, but the new scent of her pregnancy—it was gone. Then he spotted his phone on the floor near his bed, and his confusion was replaced with dread, because the last thing he’d done before getting in the shower was send King Tikaani a message assuring him of the success of what the Alaska king had dubbed in his hashtag heavy texts as Mission #tamingoftheshrew. “Only problem—think she still wants to write Chloe book,” he’d added as an afterthought.
Later, after three hours of unsuccessfully trying to reach Alisha on her cell phone, Matt had been brought in for questioning, and after a few none-too-veiled threats, the Canadian wolf had confessed to the letter. Only King Tikaani had been able to keep Rafe from going after the academic with his bare hands.
“No, son,” he said to Rafe, holding the younger man back. “I can’t let you hurt one of my subjects, right in front of me. It’s not a killable offense under any law and he’s already proven how much he likes squealing. If you beat him up, he’ll go to the authorities, and he’s not worth a Council investigation. Just try to calm yourself down.”
Rafe backed down, but he was nowhere near calm. His mate was out there by herself. Both his biological and protective instincts were going crazy. “If anything happens to her... to my cub…”
“Nothing will happen to her, because we’re going to find her,” the king assured him. “Soon.”
But they hadn’t found her. She’d managed to cross the border into the lower forty-eight, and they hadn’t heard from her since. And now he was back in Colorado, pining over Alisha and waiting for news from the many state wolf packs engaged in the search for his mate.
For the past year, he’d thought not mating with Alisha would be his worst nightmare, but as it turned out, mating her and having her leave him like this was even worse. He could barely function, he wanted her back so bad. The physiological nature of their mating bond combined with his protection instinct now that she was with cub made him want to tear his human skin off his body, turn wolf, and run through the vast spread of America looking for his she-wolf even though he had no idea where she was.
He raised his hand, signaling for another whiskey, needing another shot glass-sized dose of oblivion. But when he looked up, the bartender was gone. In fact, the whole bar was empty. As if it had been quietly cleared out while he stared into his drink.
“Son.” His father was standing in the doorway now, and he walked over to him in a way Rafe had seen a few times before. Tight and regretful. The stance of a king who didn’t want to tell one of his wolves that his mate had been killed by someone hunting illegally during a full moon night, who wished like hell he didn’t have to console a couple whose pup had come out still-born. It was the same way Dale had looked when he’d come to Rafe’s house the morning after that February full moon to tell him Chloe had been mated to another.
“Is Alisha all right?” he asked his father now. He’d suspected she’d been hitchhiking since she crossed the border and though she-wolves could usually handle themselves when it came to human males, if one had managed to drug her without her knowledge… his heart skittered thinking of what could have happened to her and his cub because she had been running from her mate. “Just tell me she’s all right. I don’t care about anything else as long as she and our pup are all right.”
But his father soon proved him a liar.
“She’s all right as far as I know. But I just got off the phone with Mag. She showed up in Wyoming an hour ago. Janelle’s not exactly being forthcoming, but from what Mag could piece together, Alisha got her hands on some kind of spell that allowed her to open the Wyoming portal gate…”
Rafe would find out many weeks worth of research later that Alisha had found a written word spell on Chloe’s computer, and that this written word spell took its speaker back to whatever time and place the written words she quoted were created as long as they were chanted next to a portal. Professor Henley had found the spell for Chloe during her return visit to Colorado, but his ex-fiancée hadn’t been able to use it because she didn’t know of any words written by Fenris. But Alisha… Alisha had the photocopy of Ibn Fadlan’s journal entry about Chloe, perhaps written while he was in the village.
No, Rafe didn’t know any of that when his father first told him about the spell, but the word “spell” alone froze him in place with dread.
“No,” he said, even as his wolf began to keen inside him, like it could hear something his human couldn’t, something terrible and unfathomable to a newly mated shifter.
Then Dale took him by the shoulders and confirmed what Rafe’s wolf already knew, causing him to howl with rage. And his soul to scream with emptiness. The moon was strong that night, and his father narrowly escaped the bar before Rafe shifted. It would take weeks to repair the damage he did to the space upon finding out his she-wolf had gone to a place where he could not follow.
Twas two weeks before Christmas, and Rafe’s heart had been ripped apart.
13
Almost five years later
Alisha woke up to the sound of a rooster shrieking in her ear—okay, not in her ear exactly. He was outside with the rest of the chickens, but he might as well have been inside the longhouse, he was that loud, the sound of his wake-up call easily piercing through the wooden walls of the Fenris king's longhouse.
She might have been able to tune out the rooster and the sound of the voices of Fenris's many family members speaking in Old Norse as they set up the trestle table for breakfast against the benches on the other side of the house. Alisha had gotten used to the rooster and she'd managed to learn such a miniscule amount of Old Norse that their words might as well have been white noise.
Yet just as she was about to pull the cover up to her ears, a small hand shook her shoulder. "Mama, Mama. Wake up."
She cracked open an eye.
"Rafesson? What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be with rest of the kids in the forest by now?"
Unlike modern wolves who sequestered themselves in mountain towns in order to avoid killing humans when they turned and went wolf, Norse wolves were taught from childhood to maintain full control of themselves. Every winter, after the first rise of “Freya’s mating lights”—or the aurora borealis as it was called in her time—all wolf children between four and twelve winters spent the rest of the moon cycle in wolf form, overseen by Fenris's beta, Randulfr, as they learned to control and hunt with their lupine bodies. It was a fascinating practice for someone who'd grown up under the stricture of forbidden turning on non-full-moon days, and she'd been excited to get a first-hand account of the practice from Rafesson.
Yet here her son was, his solemn face a younger photocopy of his father's even if he'd inherited her wild curls, which, like hers now, spiraled out of his head and spilled out over his small shoulders.
Rafesson picked up a woven basket filled with bath items, including a rough bar of soap and a glass container of conditioner, both of which had been made for her by Chloe. "Randulfr said I could come after I walked with you to the hot spring."
Now she fully sat up. "You don't have to walk with me to the hot springs. I like going by myself."
Rafesson looked at her as if she were mad. "It is Freya’s time."
The “North Wolves” as they called themselves had some curious ideas about polar night and the aurora borealis. Most from her time understood the two phenomena to be a result of part of Norway being located within the polar circle and therefore subje
ct to the sun dipping below a free horizon at the same time occasional magnetic storms lit up the winter sky with colorful displays. However, the Viking Age wolves hadn’t exactly been scientific when pursuing explanations about the strange lights and the long periods of darkness. No years of rigorous observations, no hypotheses put forth as careful theories until they could be proven.
No, the Viking wolves were dead sure the first aurora borealis of the polar night season was a heavenly green light for sexy times. Obviously Freya, the Norse goddess of fertility and, as Norse mythology would conveniently have it, art, was signaling all she-wolves to go into heat, and all males mated and unmated to rut or pursue respectively so as to honor Freya with wolf cubs during the harvesting season. It made for a rather raunchy and rowdy atmosphere in the village, and it was part of the reason the children were being sent away to “wolf school.”
“I know it’s Freya’s time,” she said to her son now, “but that doesn't mean anyone would hurt me. I'm still under the Fenris's protection, and nobody's going to mess with him to get to me.”
She thought it also best not to add that she still had her mated scent, that is, Rafe’s marking scent upon her body, even if it was rather faint after all these years and would all together disappear over the course of the next three weeks. The point was, it was forbidden for any male to claim a she-wolf who still had another’s mating scent upon her, unless her original mate was dead. Rafe hadn’t been born yet, and as far as she knew, he wasn’t dead. But in three week’s time, his scent would finally wear off, which meant she’d have what was referred to in her time as a “wolf annulment,” legal dispensation for two wolves to go their separate ways, since they hadn’t mated again or married in the years it took for their mating scent to wear off.
That was a little too much to explain to her little boy, who was already going to have his world turned upside down when they returned to the future in just a few weeks.
“Head out to wolf school,” she told him. “And I'll try to get my bath in before breakfast."
Rafesson answered her with a stubborn shake of his small head. "No, I'm going with you. Now!"
"Rafesson..."
He thrust the basket at her, effectively cutting her off, and Alisha had to shake her own head. You could take the alpha prince out of his time period but apparently that didn't make him any less of a little dictator. Rafesson was exceedingly bossy for his age, and she would have reminded him who was the mother and who was the son if she didn't know he was genuinely worried about her.
“Alright, alright.” She took the basket from him and slung on a clean shift to wear underneath her long wool tunic. As she and Rafesson made the trip from the bed benches to the front door of the excessively lengthy longhouse, several of Fenris’s kin called out with laughing jokes, which didn’t need translation.
She knew they thought her vain to the point of insanity for bathing every day, even in the winter, which necessitated a one-mile trip to the hot springs since the lake and bay were frozen over. Chloe, her fellow blamann, or black person, had taken to the age with the zeal of a missionary gone native, happily adopting the North Wolves bathing habits of once every week and even less than that in the winter, so this made Alisha’s insistence on bathing every morning baffling to Fenris’s extended family.
It had become something of a morning ritual to throw out teasing jokes about her clean ways, which Alisha couldn’t return. Even if she hadn’t been aware of unduly affecting the course of history with a too-early explanation of germs, she’d come to find out that despite her well-rendered translation work of a few Yupik texts during her graduate studies, she was beyond terrible at speaking and comprehending Old Norse.
However Rafesson, who’d been born here, understood every sharp tease. Shortly after they were out of the longhouse and walking down the main dirt road toward the spring, the sky dark overhead, he said. “They’re right, Mama. Don’t wash everyday when I’m gone. Wait until I get back.”
Alisha scrambled for a good reason to deny his request, and came up with, “No way, I need some me-time every day, or I’ll go crazy.”
This argument sounded plausible enough. North Wolves were hell on a person’s privacy. They didn’t just eat together like modern families, they spent their entire day together in the longhouse, cooking, sewing, tending the farmstead out back, basically living on top of each other. Chloe, who’d never had the big family experience, loved this way of life, and Rafesson had never known anything but this way of life. But for a person like Alisha, who’d gotten used to living alone, it could have been true that she went to the hot spring every day because she needed guaranteed private time—it wasn’t, but it could have been.
“What’s ‘me-time?’” Rafesson asked, frowning.
She was struggling to figure out how to explain the concept of me-time to her well spoken, but nonetheless still only four-year-old son, when a pair of heavy footsteps fell in, walking beside them. A most unwelcome smell invaded her territory, and she knew who it was, even before he whistled to get her attention.
Skeggi, one of Fenris’s warriors. Like Fenris and most of the other Norse Viking wolves, he had red hair, and like the other warriors in the village, he wore a bear pelt as a coat with the still-attached head as a hood. However, Skeggi was larger than any other wolf in the kingdom village, and he was also more vain. He had a long red beard and was often seen about the village stroking a comb made of walrus ivory through it, in a way that put Alisha in mind of a cartoon villain plotting a hero’s downfall.
She’d told him in both Old Norse and modern English that she wasn’t interested, but over the years he’d made it clear he didn’t give a damn what she thought of his plans to claim her after her mating scent wore off. It was like Rafe all over again, but in hulking, illiterate, Viking form.
And true to character, when he addressed her, he raised his voice so anyone who wasn’t already outside tending to their homesteads came out to hear what he had to say. Once a good crowd had gathered, he began to recite what sounded like a poem. She only caught about every tenth word of what he shouted at the top of his lungs. But his tone was lyrical. And, judging from the way quite a few people in the crowd were laughing and jeering, a few of the men actually simulating sex play, she suspected his poem wasn’t a sweet ode to her eyes.
Her suspicions were confirmed when Rafesson placed his hand on the hilt of his children’s sword, a light, dull-bladed piece of steel used to teach the village’s boys fighting skills. “My mother she is!” her son screeched at Skeggi in Old Norse.
Skeggi just laughed and had the nerve to ruffle Rafesson’s hair. Rafesson drew his sword, growling low in his throat, apparently unconcerned the Viking had four feet and about a thousand pounds on him.
Alisha stepped in front of her son. No Viking would harm a child, but who knew what punishment they had on the books for children who dared to draw their swords on a warrior? Knowing this harsh time period, they’d command Rafesson to be put in the village stocks, one of which was child-sized and used on precocious thieves.
“Forgive him, please,” she said in her stilted Old Norse.
“Mama, no!” Rafesson cried behind her in English. “You don’t know what he said! Let me cut out his tongue!”
She turned to glare down at Rafesson, prepared to drag her mini Viking thug away from this fight by the ear if necessary. But then Chloe came rushing up to them, a large red wolf at her heels.
Chloe said a few angry words to Skeggi in Old Norse, to which he gave an equally angry answer, nodding toward Rafesson. Even dressed only in a simple shift and tunic with the ragged old fox pelt she insisted on wearing over all the fine furs Fenris had gifted her with, Chloe looked every inch a queen. She kept her chin lifted high as she issued what sounded like a royal edict to Skeggi, who gave her a deferential nod, before walking away.
Rafesson seemed prepared to go after the large Viking, his sword still drawn, but the red wolf got in front of him, pushing the little boy bac
k with it’s long muzzle. Rafesson yelled at the wolf in Old Norse, and Chloe kneeled down and said something to the boy, frustratingly enough, in Old Norse, which meant Alisha had no idea what was being said.
Rafesson argued, jabbing his sword in Skeggi’s direction, but Chloe’s face closed, like a mom who’d had enough of his back talk. She cut Rafesson off with a set of Old Norse words even Alisha could understand. “I am your queen.”
Rafesson and his little child’s sword drooped under that reminder, and Alisha realized why her friend had chosen to address her son in the village’s language as opposed to modern English, which he understood just as well. Chloe hadn’t wanted him to lose face with the rest of the village. If Rafesson challenged a warrior and let him walk away from the fight as Skeggi had, he would have been derided. Nordic winters were a boring and bleak business, and the North Wolves could keep themselves entertained with a story like this for the long dark months around their longhouse fires, teasing its hapless subject mercilessly. But if Chloe commanded he couldn’t fight Skeggi by order of the queen, then Rafesson had no choice but to back down, pride still in tact.
Further evidence of her friend’s good intentions came when Chloe said something to Rafesson in a much gentler tone. Something that made him throw his arms about her neck, like the small boy he still was, even if he’d been brought up in an age that treated males like grown men from a very early age.
He rushed back to the longhouse, calling out, “Bye, Mama!” in English as he left.
“What did you say to him?” Alisha asked her friend, after Chloe sent the onlookers back to their respective morning tasks with an all-encompassing glare.
“That Olafr and I would personally escort you to the hot springs today and every day he’s away,” the smaller woman answered, threading her arm through Alisha’s. She set them to walking on the road out of the village, with her red wolf—technically Chloe’s youngest son, though Alisha had never seen the teenager out of wolf-form—padding behind them like a lupine bodyguard.
Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) Page 10