Her Viking Wolves: 50 Loving States, Michigan (6 page)

F
ifteen minutes later
, I’m inside the postcard. But this is no Mountain Dew run. This time I’m on a real mission, walking down the main street of the cozy little town behind the Alaska kingdom house with Alisha, Janelle, Tu, their alpha king husbands, and Uncle Tikaani. So yeah, every king and queen currently residing here in Alaska save for Aunt Wilma who stayed back at the house to watch the little ones.

If not for having read about the Colorado custom of Kings and/or Princes going to meet time travellers at their own gates, like diplomats, I would have been fully weirded out by being included in the official greeting party. Not that our time gate has gone off in my, Dad’s, or Granddad’s lifetime, but I know for sure if it had, Dad would have sent Yancey to handle it.

But now here I am, as Detroit as they come, stromping down a snowy lane to meet my first time-travelling werewolf. I don’t know whether to be excited or very, very scared.

Still, knowing how dedicated Uncle Ford has been to Wolf Lake, even opting to stay behind when they royal family came to visit us in Detroit, I have to ask Uncle Tikaani, “Shouldn’t Uncle Ford be coming with us on this trip?”

“Ah, Ford had a little too much to drink at our New Year’s Eve Party.” Uncle Tikaani answers. “Had to send Grady and Mag to pour him back into his bed. Poor guy. The holidays are tough on him and his son didn’t come home for Christmas this year.”

I feel a pang of guilt, recalling our last conversation. The woeful way he’d looked at me when I accused him of being disloyal to his actual family. I guess I’m just one other person making things tough on the beta widower this year.

“Is anyone taking care of him?” I ask, thinking about my original princess duty, starting from when I was ten. Pressing bottles of Gatorade into the hands of male wolves as they left our parties. The Detroit Alpha’s version of hospitality.

I also remember what my father told me after he and Evelyn let Yancey move into our kingdom house when I was five. “It’s the beta’s job to protect the royal family, but don’t ever forget that goes both ways. We royals gotta take care of our betas, too.”

But before Uncle Tikaani can answer my concerned question about Ford, we arrive in the residential part of town to find a group of concerned Wolf Lake citizens waiting for us. All dressed in pajamas and snow boots and wanting to know about the big flash of light on the mountain. I listen as Uncle Tikaani tells all of them go back inside, don’t worry, everything is under control.

To my surprise, they actually do what he tells them to without requiring Uncle Tikaani to so much as fire a warning shot. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only guns being carried in our little group are tranquilizers.
Things really are different here
, I think with an internal shake of my head.

It makes me wonder if Dad’s refusal to bring my brother and me to visit has more to do with him not knowing how to function in a place where a sawed-off isn’t considered an essential negotiating tool, and less about his distrust for “any motherfucking place that don’t got street lights.” For the record, this is also why we only visit my granddad in the Upper Peninsula kingdom house once a year for Thanksgiving.

However, my enthusiasm for this decidedly un-Detroitian adventure rapidly starts to wane as we make our way up the mountain, trudging through at least a foot-high blanket of virgin snow. My Adidas high tops might be fine for coding back in my snug, well-heated room, but they are nowhere near the right footwear for this challenge. My poor feet are wet and freezing within a few minutes of the journey. Lucky for me, we shifters tend to run hot.

I also have my curiosity to keep me warm. Along with Alisha’s quick knowledge dump on everything she’s learned about the portals over the last few years, which is to say, not much.

The North American Lupine Council remains terrified the humans might find out about our existence, especially with the increased sophistication of technology. So they have banned any online mention of our packs, our ways, or our very existence. In other words, it’s not like Alisha can simply use Google to get more information about the portals.

The truth is, being a werewolf historian sounds like one of the suckiest jobs ever. According to Alisha, most universities with a secret wolf program (and one can be found in nearly every state of the union) have large resource libraries. That’s all well and good. But if you want something from another university’s library, you have to physically go to that university, photocopy the data, and bring it back. Nothing can be sent digitally or even by fax.

Quite frankly, listening to Alisha makes me glad I decided not to bother with college before starting She-Wolf. Still, I’m grateful for the little information Alisha has managed to gather on the portals—which for argument’s sake, we’ll call magical, since no one’s even remotely close to figuring out the science behind how they work.

But of course Alisha has a few theories.

“There are only a handful of gate spells and the vast majority are there for two purposes: to provide a quick and dirty way for communities to remove unwanted wolves, and to make it possible for wolves to find their soul mates—the so-called ‘fated mate’ spell. According to my limited research, those who pair off using the fated mate spell tend to produce large broods. My friend Chloe had three pups, already above average for most shifters. And, well, you already know about Rafe and our five little ones.”

At that point, Janelle’s mate, Mag, turns around to glare at his sister-in-law.

“What are you trying to say?” he asks, his moonlit eyes dark with accusation. “That Janelle and I only had two pups because we’re not fated mates? Like you guys are more ‘official’ than we are because of your mate bond?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Alisha answers, with the academic sangfroid of a professor born. “In fact, I would never say something like that without the hard data to back it up. I’m simply citing my observations, which I’m using as the foundation for a much bigger hypothesis—an incredibly shaky one, given the small sample size of my fated mate group. But there isn’t a single historical mention I’ve found of a fated mate pairing resulting in anything less than three pups. And some fated mates have had as many as ten! You have to admit that’s unusual in a society where the average is one pup for females who go into heat over the age of twenty-five, and two for females who start heat earlier. It’s also interesting considering how many females and young used to die in childbirth. These days, our ranks have become larger than ever, but that’s mostly due to human advances in medicine that make it possible for our hybrid species to procreate and have young more easily than we used to.”

I think darkly of my father’s plans to breed me with a wolf who would never have wanted to have sex with me. Then I think of my mother who died in childbirth, and Alisha who hadn’t, despite giving birth to triplets several centuries in the past with zero access to modern medicine.

I think I have an idea what Alisha is getting at.

“You’re hypothesizing that fated mates might be nature’s way of assuring the continuation of the species?”

“Well, not exactly,” Alisha answers with a thoughtful frown. “That’s not how nature works. If it were up to nature, we would have either died out or evolved past our birth rate issues, which is relatively low compared to most other species on the planet. No, the portals don’t feel like nature at work. Neither do the fated mate or banishment spells. They feel more like…design.”

“So wait. What are you saying?” Tu asks. “Shifters are somehow part of God’s larger plan?”

Suddenly, a small light bulb flashes on over my head.

“No, not God,” I say out loud. “Something else.” I glance at Alisha who is trudging through the snow beside me. “You think something extraterrestrial put the portals here along with us, is that right?”

Alisha nods. “What other explanation could there be? We know the portals were put here before the advent of written language. And we know all the spells are in very ancient languages. Even the fated mate spell Rafe used to find me during the Viking Age was written in what sounds to me like some form of Proto-Mayan. We’re talking
old
.”

“Never mind all that old Mayan stuff. Let’s talk about the real bombshell you just dropped. You think we were, what…planted here!?” Tu asks. “Like by
aliens
from outer space?”

“I don’t think anything for sure,” Alisha answers. “Given how little I have to go on. My point is, every species has an origin story. Ours goes back at least as far back as the Bronze Age. And it involves a bunch of sky gods and goddesses. That’s not unusual in and of itself. Many ancient—and even some modern—cultures believed in a pantheon of gods. What
is
unusual is that in wolf history, ALL
our pre-Christian gods are sky gods. For a species as earthbound as we are, where are the gods who represent the forest or the earth?

“But that’s not all. We are neither fully human nor fully wolf. We are able to mate with each other and, on rare occasions, certain humans. If we do manage to mate with a human, that human and any of their hybrid progeny become shifters. And unlike humans or wild wolves, our bones disintegrate less than a year after death, almost as if we were designed to leave no trace of our species behind. Last but certainly not least, we have an ancient system of portals that allow us to not only find our mate at any temporal location, but to banish rogue wolves to another time. So if magic isn’t causing all this to happen, we need to look to science. Interstellar science.”

There is a long pause where the only sound is the soft crunch-crunch-crunch of many feet walking through fresh snow.

“And so…?” I prod, wanting to hear more.

“Well, if I wanted to put a new species on an already populated planet without the original inhabitants finding out and possibly killing them, I’d design them to be like us. Make them look like the dominant species—humans—but also connect them to a widespread predator, a pack animal the dominant species respects but also fears, to keep them safe and, when needed, well hidden. And if my advanced society had, say, problems with fertility, as many advanced human societies on our planet are beginning to, I’d definitely put a system in place to help with that, too.”

I am hanging on to her every word, nodding along with each point she makes. That is until I do the math and see where this is all headed.

“But no wolf has come back in time from the future, have they?” I ask. “That’s why you’re so worried about the portals, because you went back in time, and so did Rafe and your friend Chloe. But as far as you know, no one’s come back from a future beyond ours.”

On the other side of Alisha, Rafe nods in somber agreement. “The number of wolves coming through the Colorado gate have been petering out for a while now. I’ve never met anyone from beyond the last century or two. And my dad says he’s only met one future wolf. She came through in the late eighties from 2007.”

“That’s not to say there aren’t any shifters using the portals in the future,” Alisha cautions. “But if there are, their names and stories have not been recorded in any historical documents I’ve been able to find.”

“What does that mean?” Janelle asks, sounding exactly how I feel. Like a child who just heard a really scary ghost story.

“It means something must happen to the portals in the future,” I answer, my voice sounding grim. “Something we don’t know about yet.”

Before anyone can respond, Grady comes to a halt in front of us, sniffing the air hard.

I don’t smell anything, but I remember Tu saying Grady’s nose is incredibly sensitive, even by wolf standards. It’s even more fine-tuned than hers, and Tu has the strongest sense of smell of anyone I’ve ever met.

So when Tu stops next to her mate, her nose flaring in and out, I know they must have both picked up the same scent.

“Someone’s coming,” Tu tells us in a whisper. “And he smells…like Alisha’s triplets. Like they’re from the same place.”

We all look at Alisha, whose three sons were born in Viking Age Norway and still smell a bit like—it’s hard to explain. But not modern for sure.

Rafe, whose first fiancée was swiped by a Viking king, and who had to travel back in time to Viking Norway to reclaim Alisha and his sons, curses. “Not another goddamn Viking! I thought we were through with them.”

A rustling sound comes from the dark woods to the left of the manmade hiking trail. Our group falls silent, with Grady, Rafe, Mag, and Uncle Tikaani slowly raising their tranq guns as we wait for whoever it is to appear.

My heart constricts. Maybe it’s Alisha’s “you know we might have been specially bred by aliens” story. Or maybe I’m more like my dad than I thought, and feeling nervous about being stuck on a dark mountain, in the snow, with nothing but a few tranquilizer guns standing between us and a wolf who might possibly have been banished from his pack for doing God knows what.

Whatever the reason, my whole body seizes with dread.

Which is why I’m straight up holding my breath when a large, bearded man staggers out of the woods, into the bright light of the gibbous moon. Thanks to my keen night vision, I’m able to make out his tawny brown skin and long red dreadlocks. He is completely naked, and though this should make him appear vulnerable, it doesn’t. Probably because every inch of his body is corded with muscle. I’m talking negative percent body fat, like maybe he’s never eaten a carb in his entire life. In fact, the only thing on him that could remotely be called fat lay flaccid between his legs, so impressive in its thickness that despite the circumstances, I can’t help but wonder what it must look like at full staff.

Wonder and then shiver when his bright eyes collide directly with mine.

And that’s when I find out exactly how his male member looks at full staff.

“Yeah, definitely a Viking,” I hear Tu say somewhere in the distance.

And I feel my own wolf do something it’s never done before inside my unheated body. Rise inside of me and stare at this time traveler with something that feels an awful lot like sexual interest.