“Make quick work of the bed, beauty,” Fenris said inside her mind as he ran toward the forest with the other wolves at his heels. “As I will make quick work of this deer, so I might have the pleasure between your legs that much sooner.”
“I’ll get it decorated as fast as I can, considering I’m carrying a bowling ball around.”
“I know not what you mean by ‘bowling ball,’” he answered, somewhat predictably.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, heading back to the village. “I’m going now.”
She just hoped she was at least able to make it back to the longhouse before Fenris did. He was nothing if not quick, and as Rafe might have said, “Dude knows how to hunt.”
She smiled thinking of Rafe and Colorado. They were now like a memory that was good until it got bad, but then got good again, because she was now so happy. Rafe would eventually find another she-wolf, hopefully one who pleased him in every way as Fenris said often of her. And eventually his anger would fade, and he’d see their split, though dramatic and humiliating, was for the best.
Her thoughts were abruptly cut short by a low growl and the sudden stench of a wolf who had not taken his Saturday bath in a very long time.
She froze in her tracks when she saw a large red wolf, standing halfway between her and the door of the king’s longhouse.
Fenris had assured her all wolves were trained to be in control of themselves while in wolf form and she had seen for herself over the course of her seven months in the village how much more civilized they were in wolf form than people from her own time.
But she could tell just by looking at this wolf that he wasn’t civilized. Though, he wasn’t frothing at mouth, his gray eyes looked crazed.
She took two steps back and the wolf took as many steps towards her, crouching low.
“Fenris?” she said, calling his name out loud, because she didn’t quite know what to do.
Then the wolf charged her. She cried out and ran, hoping to God there wasn’t a distance limitation on telepathy as she yelled, “Fenris! Fenris! One of the wolves is after me, it’s trying to—”
A growl pierced the air beside her, right before the stinky red thing threw itself at her back, pitching her forward. She caught herself on her wrists, keeping her belly from hitting the ground. She had to protect the baby, she thought. But she also had to protect herself.
“Chloe? Chloe?” she heard the Viking ask frantically inside her head. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The wolf lunged at her, burying its sharp teeth in her side, as if its sole intent was to tear the baby out of her womb. Red-hot pain ripped through her side, and she nearly passed out when he opened his jaw wide and sank his long, hot teeth into her again.
She screamed partly out of pain, but mostly out of terror.
But then she remembered the woman’s dagger, the one she had worn, only to tease Fenris about always nagging her to wear her dagger.
“Tis your wedding gift,” she had said in her joking speech after recounting for their guests how often they’d gone back and forth about this.
But now she ripped it from the looped belt from which it hung, and she didn’t know where the strength came from, but she, Chloe Adams, who was too squeamish to even wring a chicken’s neck, stabbed the crazed wolf in his gray eye.
It let go of her side with a screech of pain. And Chloe followed it, her mind pitch-black with rage over what he had done to her and her baby. She stabbed it over and over again, in the heart, in the other eye, in the stomach, until it let out one last hideous yelp and morphed back into a human form, a young man with unwashed red hair, who she would bet money was Fenris’ cousin.
And only then did she feel the cramping in her pelvis and the dampness. Between her skirts.
“No, no, no, not now,” she cried in realization.
Her water had broken.
FENRIS WAS CLOSING IN ON A DEER he could smell about half an acre away when Chloe pushed into his mind, “Fenris! Fenris! One of the wolves is after me, it’s trying to—”
And his heart went cold when she cut off mid-sentence.
“Chloe? Chloe?” he asked, already turning around and running the other way, much to the surprise of the wolves he was leading in the hunt. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The other wolves did not understand what was going on, but nonetheless, they followed him as a pack. Then they heard her scream. And this time it was not in ecstasy as his family had teased her for before. It was a scream of pain.
Fenris
ran
. Faster than he had ever run without shifting into a wolf as he did so. He had missed shifting over the course of the last seven moons, but never as much as he did now when he was confined to this human body while the woman he loved above all others screamed in the distance.
The other wolves also became compelled by the scream and they left him behind. He hoped to Fenrir they got to her in time, before... no he couldn’t finish the thought. It made his vision go red at the edges.
“Chloe? Speak to me. Let me know you are unharmed, beauty.”
Again, no answer.
And as he ran down the village’s main thoroughfare toward her scent, he could now smell the thickness of her blood in the air as well as the acrid stench of his cousin.
He rounded the corner toward his longhouse and spied his cousin’s human body lying in the distance, eyeless with angry stab wounds in his heart, stomach, and the side of his head. He would find out later his queen killed the large wolf, with nothing but her will to live and her tiny woman’s dagger. And that would make what happened soon after much harder for him to bear.
But at that moment, his eyes searched around for her, until he realized she must be inside the large gathering of wolves.
He shoved through the pack and found his aunt and a few of his family pack members licking the deep wound in her side, cleaning it the only way they knew how in their present form. But even they he shoved aside to get to his bride.
She looked up at him with tears of pain and frustration in her eyes. “Fenris, my water broke. And I’m having contractions. The baby is coming. But it’s too soon. We’re going to lose him.”
He raised her hand, which was still covered in his cousin’s wolf blood, to his lips. “Nay, this I will not allow.”
She breathed hard through the pain of her cramping. “I’m so sorry. I wanted us to be a family so badly.”
“I will not allow it, beauty.” He kissed her hand again. “You said if a baby is born in seven full moons in your time, your magic people might save it.”
She caught his meaning and began shaking her head even before he could fully explain it. “No, no! You can’t send me back.”
He reached into her wedding dress. “I must, beauty. Your wound is deep and your waters have already broken. You cannot shift to heal, and we have no human medicine in the village. There is no other way.”
She tried to slap away his hand, but he managed to unpin the spell. And this was when she began to sob. “No, I don’t want to leave you. And you said you wouldn’t abandon me.”
His heart tore at the sight of her tears and he once again took her hand, holding it to his chest fiercely. “And I will hold fast my promise. I will find a way back to you, beauty.”
“How?” she asked, shaking her head. She then clenched her teeth when another contraction overtook her. They were coming fast now. He could not linger here with her.
“I do not yet know. But I will. I promise you this on my life. I will be your mate and a father to our pup, and we will be as one again.”
He kissed her sweet lips and then her forehead, which was damp with sweat despite the bitter chill of night.
Then before she could protest again, he yelled out to the other wolves to back away from her body, which they did.
With one last longing look toward the woman who had shown him a happiness he had never thought to know, he spoke the words to send her back to her own place and time.
“No, Fenris,” she screamed, but it was too late. The black tunnel opened up just beyond her and sucked her into it as if she were but a pebble on the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
COLD
and pain. Pain and cold. That was all Chloe knew at first when she landed outside the portal on Wolf Mountain. First she just lay there in the snow, her stomach cramping, wondering why no one had come to get her yet.
Then she heard growling, and two black wolves, one large, one small, appeared less than a meter away. And that’s when she remembered it was still a full moon night, and moreover, she was back in her time, where shifter’s “got wolf” whenever the full moon rose in the sky.
Not again, she thought, reaching for her woman’s dagger, only to realize she must have dropped it after killing the last wolf.
She resorted to throwing rocks at the two black wolves, hoping it would be enough to stave them off for a while before the sun rose.
It wasn’t. Chloe’s aim wasn’t great and neither was the strength she put behind it. The larger wolf barely flinched as it continued to advance. And soon it was so close, all Chloe could do was squeeze her eyes shut and shield her throat, as it leapt at her, jaw open wide.
But then she heard a big thump. When she opened her eyes, the dawn’s earliest light had broken across the sky and the Colorado king lay there in human form, naked as a jaybird, with his equally naked wife lying just a few meters beyond.
“Goddamit, not you again,” the king declared when he saw her lying there in the snow.
But the queen, the still very pretty Latina with the same light brown eyes as Rafe, framed by a polished bob, rushed over and fell to her knees beside Chloe. “She’s hurt. Really hurt, and in labor, I think.” The queen lifted her skirts up. “Oh my God, Dale, I can see the head crowning.”
And then Chloe passed out.
But apparently the alpha couple decided against letting her and her baby bleed to death in the snow. When she woke, she did so in the clinic’s hospital bed, dressed in a fresh hospital gown, with only the bandages on her side and the fact that she was wearing some sort of hospital diaper the only evidence she had been attacked by a wolf and forced into early labor.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked Doc Fischer when he came strolling in. “Did he make it?”
“Oh, he made it, all right,” Doc Fischer answered with an uncharacteristic smile. “Queen Lacey ended up delivering him right there on the mountain. The king had to run and get a Swiss Army knife out of his pants to cut the umbilical cord. But from what they told me, your pup shifted almost before King Dale could get the job done. Like he knew if he had any chance of survival, he had to let his wolf half have him as soon as possible. They showed up at my door with you passed out, looking like a Renaissance Fair murder victim, and this dark red wolf puppy in their arms. Let me tell you, my old eyes didn’t know what to think.”
He chuckled, like the drama of her life was some kind of campfire story. Then as if to confirm her assessment, he said, “Boyo, I’ll be telling your story at parties for years to come.”
“Can I see him?”
“Sure! He morphed back into his human form with fully developed everything a couple of hours ago. Hell of a kid, I tell ya. That Viking of yours must have some strong genes.”
The only thing that kept her from dissolving into tears at that point was her fierce need to see her son and assure for herself he was all right.
And he was. The nurse brought him in from the other room, and he was nothing less than perfect. A light brown butterball of a baby with a head full of red curls, and deep brown eyes that were very clearly her own.
“Hello,” she said, happier than she’d ever been to meet anyone.
He reflexively grabbed her finger, and squinted against the clinic’s bright light.
At that moment, Chloe knew love at first sight, and she wondered why she had ever had the audacity to fear love. For one look into her son’s bright eyes, and it was explained that what had happened between her parents, what had subsequently happened to her, was due to the absence of love, not a surplus of it.
Real love could never be toxic. Real love didn’t lead you to leave your pup at the side of the road in order to be with your mate. No, real love, she realized, had been Fenris sending her back in time if it meant both she and the baby might live. And real love would be what brought them back together.
“We’ll all be a family again,” she whispered to the baby, kissing his dewy soft forehead. “I promise you.”
CHLOE HAD PROMISED HER BABY they would be reunited with their father, and she’d meant it. She had every faith Fenris would keep his promise and return to Colorado for them.
Only, he didn’t. One full month—which Chloe was still counting in full moons—passed. Fenris Junior, or F.J., as she had taken to calling him, continued to thrive, breast-feeding like a maniac and charming his mother at every turn just by being alive.
But unlike when she went into mating frenzy with Fenris, this time she had some help with tackling this significant milestone. Much to Chloe’s surprise, on her fourth day back, the alpha queen showed up at the clinic to drive F.J. and her to Chloe’s old house, which she’d taken the liberty of dusting and converting the guest bedroom into a nursery.
“What about…?” Chloe asked, when she stepped into the room, which now had a crib and changing table on the wall opposite of the small guest bed.
“I’ll handle him,” Lacey answered, stringing her arm around Chloe’s shoulders.
The Colorado queen appeared on her doorstep every day that first month, ostensibly to bring her extra food, but really to hold F.J. for an hour or two while Chloe took care of certain practicalities like showering and packing up the house.
They had a few unspoken rules. They didn’t talk about the king and queen almost tearing her apart in wolf-form on the mountain, and they didn’t talk about Rafe, who from what Chloe could glean, still hadn’t returned from his Alaska trip. She wondered briefly if he would eventually become engaged to the king’s oldest daughter, Janelle, who was incredibly sweet, and who reminded Chloe of Rafe’s mother. But she didn’t dare ask.
Instead she rushed to get everything she needed to square away her modern life while she waited for Fenris. She turned off all the utilities, canceled all of her credit cards, closed her bank account, and either sold or liquidated all of her assets, so she’d have cash on hand until Fenris returned.