But then another full moon passed, and she realized unless she wanted to spend Christmas in an unheated house, she might need to apply a little of her DIY spirit to reuniting her family.
The day after the November full moon, she asked Rafe’s mother if she could babysit F. J. for the whole day. The queen quickly agreed, telling her to bring F.J. and all the supplies by in the morning.
Chloe thought it would be a simple hand off at the door. But after Lacey took the baby from her, she insisted Chloe come into the living room for a bit, where, to her surprise, they found the alpha king waiting.
“Is that little F.J.?” he boomed, rising off the couch to meet them at the living room’s arched entrance. “I’ve been missing you, little guy. Come here.”
“Shhhh! You’re going to scare him,” the queen said, swatting at his arm.
“What, this little guy isn’t scared of nothing, are you?” Without so much as a by your leave, he plucked F.J. out of his wife’s arms and settled him into the cradle of his own. “You should’ve seen him on that mountain, Clo. He shifted so quick. Told mean old death, ‘Hey, man, I’m not having none of that!’ Never seen anything like it. This pup right here’s going places.”
Chloe could only look at the queen confused.
“I know he was angry at you before because of what happened with Rafe. But after the incident on the mountain, what we almost did . . .” The queen blushed. “He felt very badly about that. He’s actually the one who bottle-fed F.J. while he was still shifted and healing. The truth is he’s been begging me to get you to let him babysit for weeks. I doubt I’ll actually get much time with him today.”
“No, you will not,” the king assured her. “Me and F.J. here have got big plans. First a manly man’s breakfast. Then we’ve got that city council meeting. Then we’re coming home and watching the Broncos game. Isn’t that right?
Isn’t that right?
”
He rubbed his index finger on F.J.’s belly and the baby belched out a happy gurgle.
“Dale, you are not going to take a baby to the city council meeting.”
“Watch me,” the king answered. “And if any of them wolves try to give me guff about it, I want you to poop on them. Okay, little man?”
As if in answer, F.J. let out a happy screeching sound that could easily be taken as an affirmative.
“Yeah, that’s right. This pup gets it. He really does.” He then turned to Chloe and held out his hand. “Hey can I borrow that doo-hickey you’ve got on? Probably come in handy at the meeting.”
Completely baffled by this sudden turn of events, Chloe unstrapped the Baby Bjorn from around her body and placed it in his outstretched hand. “Um, okay…just call if you need anything, I guess.”
“We won’t,” Rafe’s father said as he walked out of the room, singing “Are You Ready for Some Football?” and bouncing F.J. in the air.
PROFESSOR HENLEY WAS EVEN MORE enthusiastic to see her then the Colorado king had been to see F.J. He met her outside of Sturm Hall, all but bouncing from foot to foot with excitement.
“Come, come!” he said without preamble. He grabbed her hand and led her into the building. “You won’t believe what I’ve found.”
Professor Henley led her into a cluttered office with a least ten standing pillars of dusty textbooks stacked as high as her head and two walls worth of bookshelves stuffed with texts of varying sizes. His only guest chair was covered in what looked like a pile of student papers, which he recklessly pushed aside, telling her to “Sit! Sit!” as they scattered on the floor.
She sat. “So were you able to find anything about the fated mates spell?” she asked.
“In a word: no,” he answered, taking a seat of his own behind his desk. “After I got your call, I started searching for anything that would lead me to that original spell. But as you know, werewolves, due to wanting to keep our existence secret from humans, have an unfortunately rather oral history—I believe you said your friend in Alaska was working on getting more of it down on paper for her graduate study, if I’m remembering correctly. That’s good work she’s doing. It’s shameful how little we wolves know about our own history.”
As much as Chloe admired Alisha for the same reasons as Professor Henley, she was way more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t found out anything new about the fated mates spell. “So why were you so happy when you met me outside if you didn’t find anything?”
He grinned. “I didn’t say I didn’t find anything. I said I didn’t find anything out about the fated mates spell. Your Fenris’s aunt and her peers did a good job of keeping that one under wraps. If there was ever another case of a sorceress writing it down as she did for your wolf, they were very good about making sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Also, charcoal on linen has an expiration date, so there’s no way even the most careful archaeologist would have found it.
However, after the fated mates spell turned out to be a dead end, I decided to start looking for any mentions of the Fenris I could find. That would be a little harder, and I thought I might have to travel to your friend’s university in Alaska since they have a much bigger collection than we do. And just in case, I wanted to get as much information about the only thing we have of your Viking in this time. His sword. But when I looked it up again, I found a detail I hadn’t noticed before.”
He turned the computer monitor on his desk around to show her a blown up picture of what she immediately recognized as Fenris’s sword set on a sheet of red velvet for it’s formal museum photograph. “I don’t understand. What’s so great about finding Fenris’s sword—”
But then she blinked, seeing what the Professor had. Seeing what hadn’t been on the sword when she knew Fenris. “Oh, my God, there are words. Words on the sword!”
“I haven’t been able to translate the runes fully yet, but I think they say—”
“Come back to me my fated one, so we may once again be as one,” she supplied. Then she said the words again in Old Norse.
“Your Old Norse is very good,” the professor said. He pulled out his smart phone and set it to record. “Could you repeat that? When’s the next time I’ll have a chance to hear Old Norse from an almost native speaker?”
She dutifully repeated the words three more times into the recorder, before asking,
“Do you think the words are some kind of spell or a clue about how to find the spell we need?”
As if in answer, her phone started ringing. Under any other circumstance, she would have let it go to voicemail, but she saw from the caller ID it was Rafe’s mother.
“Hi,” she answered the phone. “Is F.J. okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” the queen answered, her voice perfectly pleasant. “But the gate just flashed and my husband told me to call you…”
“Tell me,
please
tell me you did not bring that goddamn Viking forward in time again,” he yelled in the background.
“Dale, watch your language around the baby!” she shouted back. Then her voice returned to its usual queenly dulcet when she asked Chloe. “So you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that flash would you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHLOE
had never driven so fast in her life. She nearly skidded a few times, as she came up the curvy mountain road to get back to Wolf Springs. But it still wasn’t fast enough. When she got there, she found her Viking once again passed out in the clinic, sleeping off a tranq. But this time he didn’t look nearly as vital as the first time he’d come. His body was still strong and rippling with hard muscle. But underneath the beard he’d once again grown, his cheekbones looked almost sunken in. And there were dark circles under his eyes.
“For a king, this guy doesn’t have a hell of a lot of diplomacy. He not only put a dagger to the king’s throat, but the poor queen had to shoot him with the tranq gun. Again.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t planning to really hurt the king. He just wanted the king to take him to me. If he was really looking to kill, he would have brought out his silver-plated sword.”
Both Doc Fischer and the king gave her a sour look. “Uh-huh,” said Doc Fischer. “Well, it’s a good thing we got him back down the mountain. He’s severely dehydrated, and from what I can tell, malnourished. It’s like he’s been on some kind of hunger strike or something. We hooked him up to an IV, though, so you two should be good to…do whatever you plan to do in a couple of days.”
She took the Viking’s IV-less hand before asking the king, “Where’s F.J.?”
“The wife and I left him with Doc here while we went up the mountain and now the queen has him back at the house. By the way, if you want F.J. to spend the night with us, that’s A-okay with us. We’ve got a travel pack-and-play in the attic. And you left enough breast milk to feed a baby wolf army.”
She stroked the side of the Viking’s face. “I might take you up on that.”
“Might or definitely?” the king asked after the doctor left the room. “Because F.J. was excited about helping me make my famous pancakes in the morning. Maybe you and the Viking can stop by and have breakfast. But tell him to leave the dagger at your place.”
She laughed. “I will. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
Dale started to turn to leave, but she had one more thing she had to say, since who knew if they’d ever have a chance to talk alone like this again. “And King Nightwolf, I just want to say again that I’m so sorry I hurt your son, and even more sorry I won’t get to have you as a father-in-law. Whoever Rafe mates with is going to be a very lucky she-wolf.”
The king waved a dismissive hand. “Ah, forget about what happened with Rafe. I’ve never doubted you were a great gal. I just had a feeling from the beginning that you and him weren’t meant to be. My grandma had a little of the future reckoning in her. Maybe I inherited it from her.”
“Maybe.”
“But don’t bother yourself too much about Rafe. He’ll get over it. Eventually. Maybe. Okay, probably not. He’s pretty bitter. But you got bigger things than him to worry about right now. We’ll talk some more when you pick up little wolf for breakfast.”
He saluted her and walked out.
Just then, the Viking began to stir. At first he looked around confused, his tangled red hair whipping across his face as his hand automatically went for the sword at his back. But then he saw her, and smiled. The most beautiful smile she had ever seen. It reached all the way into his eyes and seemed to emanate from his very soul.
“Beauty,” he said. And he pulled her onto the bed with him, hugging her tight and strong. “Beauty.”
She would find out later that after his aunt shifted back into human form, she told him there was a reunion spell that would deliver him again to his fated mate, but that it was almost impossible to cast, because it was necessary for both mates to say the words at the same time. Only after a full moon’s worth of the most explosive grief of his life, because it looked like he would never make it back to his mate, did he remember what she told him about seeing his sword on the “internet.” So he had the spell engraved in the sword, and from that moment forward, he ensconced himself in his bed closet, saying the words over and over again, barely pausing to eat or drink and only sleeping when it forcibly overtook him. For the rest of his life, his family would teasingly refer to him as Fenris the Chanting, for his actions over the weeks it took before the black tunnel opened and brought him back to her.
And he wouldn’t care.
“It is you,” he said bringing her hands to his chest with tears in his eyes. “The pup?” he asked, obviously fearing the worst because he wasn’t present.
“Oh, he’s good. He’s great,” she assured, tears also brimming in her eyes. “The Colorado king and queen are babysitting him tonight, and we’re scheduled to see him first thing in the morning. He’s, like, besties with the king now. It’s kind of weird.”
From the confused look on his face, he obviously didn’t understand much of anything she said past, “He’s great.” But eventually his smile returned and he said, “Then it is us.”
And this time tears spilled as she nodded. “Yes, it’s us.”
“We are not able to go to our son until the morn.”
He continued to stroke her face, his own full of fondness. “And your medicine man has made it so your wounds have fully healed.”
“Yes, I got the stitches out a few weeks ago, and I’m healed up pretty nicely.”
“You are fully healed even though three full moons have yet to past?
“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything—”
Without further ado, he flipped her onto her back and was soon reminding her of when she told him in her time, she-wolves weren’t allowed to have sex again until three full moons had passed after the birth of their pup.
She did think to protest. It had only been two months. And they were in a hospital bed with him attached to an IV. But then he yanked the IV needle out of his hand, and bit into her breast, just hard enough to get her attention. And just like that, she felt herself creaming down below as the scent of her arousal rose up in the air and any reservations about having sex with her fated mate flew out of her head.
His own scent, all forest, and longhouse, and burning fires filled her nose as he covered her with his body, before driving himself into her. He then lowered his head to her shoulder and began moving on top of her, almost frantic with his thrusts, as if he were trying to bury himself inside of her, so that they may never be parted again.
And maybe he achieved his aim. A climax rose quickly rose within her and she exploded just as he began to groan his release. For a glorious few moments, they were joined as one, locked together in both space and time in a starburst of pleasure beyond anything either of them had ever known.
And as she came down from the stars, breathing hard, she knew this time they would get it right. They were fated mates, and from this moment on, they would be together always.
EPILOGUE
TWO
years ago, a Viking alpha king showed up in the shifter town of Wolf Springs and claimed the she-wolf then engaged to Colorado’s alpha prince, as his fated mate. She reportedly did not want to honor the claim and still planned to mate with the alpha prince as soon as she went into heat. But then she unexpectedly went into heat on the night of a full moon, which kept her in human form. For reasons, still not quite understood, the Viking alpha king also didn’t shift and he somehow found his way to her.