Her Viking Wolves: 50 Loving States, Michigan (34 page)

Alpha princes acted in a somewhat vice presidential role for their pack until they inherited the throne, and though she hated making the somewhat arduous trip to the portal, greeting the werewolves who had come through it had been one of her favorite duties so far as Rafe’s future wife.

Technically wolves used the portal for one of two reasons. The first was to punish wolves, who had committed acts so heinous they were banished, not only from their communities but also from their own space and time. However, the last recorded instance of that happening had been when Rafe’s own mother, Lacey, was the future alpha princess. Lacey still occasionally told the story of how a werewolf had come through the gate, still-shifted and frothing white at the mouth. The crazed thing had leapt at her and Rafe’s dad barely had time to pull his gun and put a silver bullet in its head before it got to her.

To this day, the king still made them carry tranquilizer guns when they made these trips, even though a banished wolf hadn’t come through the gate in almost three decades. No, these days, most of their visitors were using the gate for its second intended purpose: to find one’s fated mate.

Fated mates spells had fallen out of fashion in modern times, and most had been lost to the winds of history. But about once a year a she-wolf from another place and/or time, came through the portal. These she-wolves were usually at two ends of a rather extreme spectrum: silly romantics, who hadn’t fully considered the repercussions of a spell that could literally rip them out of their current space and time, or women who were well-ahead of their time or couldn’t fit in with their own societies. They’d had a pre-Civil War southern debutante come through the gate the year before, but prior to that, they’d gotten one suffragette and one modern she-wolf from a middle-eastern country that put serious restrictions on women’s rights.

She glanced at the tranquilizer gun, which she kept hidden in a vintage leather holster at her hip, and wished she could just get rid of it altogether. Holsters and prairie dresses didn’t really go together.

“Who do you think it will be?” she asked, when they were about five minutes away from the gate. She was once again changing the subject, but she hoped he wouldn’t call her on it this time.

Rafe shrugged. “You never know.”

That was when they heard a groan.

“Did you hear that?” Chloe asked, dropping her voice and wishing she’d brought a first aid kit. “Do you think she was hurt? The portal spits people out so hard.”

“No,” Rafe pulled out his tranq gun. “It sounded male.”

They carefully approached the portal, an invisible rift in space and time that a lycanthrope could feel but couldn’t quite see, unless it was sucking a wolf in or spitting one out. And indeed, they soon spotted a large figure passed out in the snow and facing away from them.

Definitely male, Chloe thought. The top half of his torso was uncovered, revealing a back that was hard with muscle, even in repose. A pair of leather pants covered his legs, which were as thick as tree trunks, and probably just as hard if they matched his back. No, even though long, red hair fell to his shoulders in thick, tangled waves, Chloe could sense his maleness from his smell alone, an intense mix of wood, animal blood, and testosterone.

“Stay behind me,” Rafe told her. He edged closer to the semi-unconscious shifter and used one booted foot to turn him over.

Chloe did as she was told but even from behind Rafe, she could see the man had a hard and serious face, half of which was covered with a thick, red beard. His hand was clutched tightly around a sword, which featured an ivory grip, a large iron wolf at the top of its hilt, and a double-edged steel blade. It was coated in blood, and looked wickedly sharp. Luckily the werewolf, who had been on the verge of unconsciousness when he groaned earlier, seemed to be completely unconscious now.

She spotted a large rock near where his head now lie. “He must have hit his head on that rock when he came out of the portal. Maybe we should move it. I’d hate for the next person who came through to get hurt, especially if it’s a she-wolf.”

“Check the gnarly beard on this guy,” Rafe said, lowering his gun. “He looks like a Viking, right?”

Chloe stepped from behind Rafe to fully observe the unconscious man. “He’s either a Viking or a very strange rock star, and I’ve never seen a rock star with—”

Suddenly the maybe-Viking’s eyes popped open. And that was all the warning they got before he yanked on Rafe’s leg, pulling him to the ground and jumping to his own feet. As Rafe’s tranq gun went flying across the snow, the red-haired man pinned Rafe with a large bare foot planted squarely in the middle of his chest. And his eyes blazed with a warrior’s fury as he raised his vicious-looking sword above his head with the blade pointed downward. Chloe didn’t know a lot about sword fighting, but even she could tell this was the preparation for a killing blow.

“No!” she screamed, raising her own tranq gun and pointing it at the mad wolf.

He paused and looked toward her, pinning her with a piercing gray gaze that looked like it had been fashioned from the same material as his steel sword.

Chloe just hoped to the heavens above that whatever time period this wolf was from, he understood what a gun was—even if hers technically wasn’t a real one.

“Put the sword down or I’ll shoot,” she said, hating that she couldn’t keep her voice from trembling as she issued this command.

She half-expected him to kill Rafe then come after her. He’d pinned Rafe so quickly, he’d probably be able to do away with them both before she managed to squeeze the trigger. But he didn’t kill Rafe or her. He just stood there staring, his eyes flinty under the midday sun.

Several seconds ticked by, but he did not look away.

And eventually he said something to her in a thick, coarse language that sounded a little like German, but she couldn’t be sure. Oh God, he probably really was a Viking, she realized.

“Um,” she said, wishing now that she hadn’t chosen to take three years of high school Spanish as opposed to a language that might actually be useful when dealing with a possible Viking werewolf. Her mind fumbled around for any German she knew, and started spewing every single word and phrase, in the hopes something would stick. “
Dankeshein
? Um…
neinn
…
sprechen sie Englisch
? Um…um, oh my God,
Auf Wiendersehn
?”

He squinted at her. Then to her great alarm, he lowered the sword and came stalking straight toward her.

“Um, stop. Stop, please! Stay right where you are!” How did you say “stop” in German? She had no idea.

In the end, she squeaked, squeezing the trigger, and her eyes shut at the same time.

She heard a hard thump and when she opened her eyes, the maybe-Viking was lying crumpled on the ground with a dart lodged in his shoulder, already rendered unconscious by the fast-acting sleep agent it administered.

Beyond him, she could see Rafe, now sitting up and shaking his head. “Chloe…”

She re-harnessed her tranquilizer gun. “I know, I know, tranq the wolf first, ask questions later.”

“Especially when he has a sword pointed at my freaking neck.” Her normally indulgent fiancé didn’t look too happy with the Viking or her at that moment. “And do I really need to tell you not to close your eyes when you shoot?”

“
Y
OU know
, if we were mated that wouldn’t have gone so bad,” Rafe said, a couple of hours after the confrontation at the portal.

It had been an awkward and unwieldy business getting the large maybe-Viking down the mountain to the town’s two-room clinic. But he now lie sleeping upright in a hospital bed, to which he’d been handcuffed, looking much more peaceful than the two people in the room’s side-by-side visitor chairs.

Chloe adjusted her position to look at Rafe with an incredulous blink. “Seriously? We are in the clinic with a possibly crazed Viking sleeping off a tranq, and this is what you want to talk about?”

Rafe shrugged as if time-traveling Viking werewolves happened every day. “Once we’re mated, we’ll be telepathically connected, too, which means we’ll be able to say things like, ‘Hey, Chloe, don’t talk to him in German, just shoot him already.’”

“Or things like, ‘Hey, Rafe, you can thank me for saving your life any day now.’”

Rafe clenched his jaw and looked away. “The truth is, I’m more pissed at myself for letting him get the upper hand. I shouldn’t have let my guard down. What if he had hurt you, or worse? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

He sounded so guilty that Chloe’s irritation was instantly replaced with the need to comfort him. She placed a hand on his arm. “But he didn’t hurt me or you. That’s all that matters.”

Rafe shook his head. “I’ve never seen a guy that big move so fast. I wonder what he did to get cast out of wherever he came from.”

So did Chloe.

Doc Fischer, their shifter town’s middle-aged and perennially cranky doctor, entered the room at that moment. “Has he tried to tell you why he got sent back yet?”

“No, he’s still not awake,” Chloe said.

The doctor screwed his up his craggy face. “What do you mean? He’s wide awake.”

They whipped their heads around to see the maybe-Viking lying there with his eyes wide open and staring at them. Hard.

Doc Fischer went to his bed-side and Rafe joined him. However, Chloe chose that moment to get out of the doctor’s way, repositioning herself on the opposite side of the room from the reluctant patient. As much as she had enjoyed meeting the werewolves who came through the gate in the past, she figured it was largely because they were she-wolves from different cultures or points in history—but blood-thirsty werewolves with swords? Nah, she wasn’t so into that.

This guy had come very close to killing her best friend. And somehow his prone position and the fact that he was handcuffed to the bed by both hands didn’t make him seem any less deadly. For whatever reason, Chloe was having trouble staying calm now that he was awake. Something about him caused her insides to go all skittery. It was similar to how she felt when Rafe tried to talk to her about their heat night, but with a side dish of electric fear that made her nerves tingle.

And she only became more unsettled when his intense gaze followed her in her attempt to put space between them.

“We figure he’s a criminal and got cast out of his pack. Maybe he challenged the alpha and this was his punishment,” Rafe told Doc Fisher, after the old man finished examining the maybe-Viking’s eyes with a pen-light.

The doctor frowned. “Hmm, you say he came through the gate un-shifted? Usually a gate banishment is done on a diseased wolf or in desperation and toward the apex of a fight. He doesn’t have any wounds, except some bruising where his head hit that rock.”

Rafe shrugged. “Maybe he had a trial and was found guilty. There were a few packs that used the trial system, right?”

“Actually, I just consulted on this case with a friend of mine at UC Denver who specializes in history and literature from the Viking period. He said Norway and Iceland were known for their strict legal system during the Viking Age, which is why he doesn’t think this is a gate banishment. According to him, they had a fairly thorough punishment system in place, no need to go wild with the gates.”

“Then maybe he’s not a Viking. He could be from some other place and time and we just didn’t recognize whatever language he’s speaking.”

The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. I sent a picture of that sword of his to my professor friend and he recognized it, because of the wolf on the hilt. He even sent me a picture. It’s on display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. They don’t have a firm history on it. But it definitely dates back to the Viking Age.”

Doc Fischer re-pocketed his pen-light. “I think we might need to apply Occam’s razor here.”

A bad feeling began to brew in Chloe’s stomach.

“What do you mean?” Rafe asked.

“You know, ‘the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one?’” The doctor clasped his hands in front of him like a lawyer about to put forth his case. “He came through the gate un-shifted with no visible wounds. You said he tried to kill you but stopped because Chloe told him not to.”

“Not because I told him not to,” Chloe said. “It was more like I took him by surprise.”

Doc Fischer gave her skeptical look. “Plus, he hasn’t taken his eyes off of you, despite the fact that he’s handcuffed down to a bed in a time period clearly not his own. I’m thinking the logical conclusion here is this Viking has come forward in time for his fated mate.”

Both Chloe and Rafe gaped at him.

“And it’s Chloe,” the doctor added, just in case they weren’t getting his original meaning.

“No,” Chloe and Rafe said at the same time.

Doc Fischer turned his no-nonsense gaze on Chloe. “Chloe is there something you want to tell us?”

“No,” answered Chloe, her eyes going wide with indignation.

The doctor picked up the maybe-Viking’s chart and started making notes. “So you don’t feel anything at all right now for this wolf? No increased heart rate, heightened arousal, anything like that?”

“No! I don’t feel anything for him.” Chloe looked to the red-haired man who was still quite openly staring at her but then she quickly had to cut her eyes away, because she wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t exactly telling the truth either. While she was definitely not aroused when she looked at him, the weird skittery feeling did get worse.

“Look, we’re all thinking he’s probably a Viking, right?” she said. “The last time I checked, there weren’t a ton of black people in Norway back then. For all we know, this guy has never seen a black girl, and that’s why he’s staring at me.”

She turned to Rafe, hoping he’d back her up as he did in most things.

But Rafe didn’t agree. In fact his eyes burned with suspicion as he came to stand in front of her. He slowly and deliberately sniffed the air around her, and only then did he visibly calm down. “I don’t smell any arousal on her,” he said, his voice angry with the declaration. He swung his gaze back to the doctor. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Doc.”