“Hello?”
Sure I'd heard something, I stepped further onto the gravel outside the front door of Iain Scotswolf’s cottage, searching the woods on the other side of his circular driveway. "Who's there?"
Someone was watching. I could feel their eyes on me.
My normally dormant wolf crouched inside me at full alert as I sniffed, trying to catch a scent. But I could only pick up what must have been an entire burrow filled with rabbits.
“Who's there?” I demanded again. This time, though, I inserted a hard note into my voice to sound a little braver than I actually felt in a foreign land with some unknown set of eyes crawling over my skin like spiders. "Show yourself!"
“Hiya, it's just us!”
I jumped when a voice sounded not from the woods but directly behind me.
I turned to find two Scottish male wolves shuffling around the side of Iain’s house. One sported shaggy blond hair and wore a sheepish expression. The other stood slightly taller and held up his hands with an ingratiating smile.
“Didn’t mean to scare you there, lass," he said. His chin-length brown hair gleamed underneath the setting sun like it was auditioning for a shampoo commercial.
“Then why are you…?” I stopped and quickly shoved the phone — which a good Wölfennite female most definitely shouldn’t have in her possession — back into the large pocket of my modest dress before finishing my question. “Then why are you skulking around, watching me like some kind of creepers?”
They exchanged glances like two boys silently agreeing on their cover story after they knocked a baseball through someone's window.
“Saw you walking over this way earlier while we were watching that bat and ball game you Wölfennite lassies enjoy playing so much,” the shaggy blond answered. “Not you, though. Never see you playing.”
I controlled the impulse to roll my eyes.
I loved a good pick-up game of baseball as much as anyone who’d been raised with one sport — and one sport only — as their sole option for physical gameplay. But ever since we’d arrived at this place the Scottish Wolves called their "kingdom village" for the Bridal Exchange program, our fun matches had become more like scouting pageants.
The hopeful Scottish grooms had made a habit of gathering at the fence around the diamond the kingdom built for us as a welcome gift, gawking and loudly ranking us to the point that I’d noped out of playing any more games.
Unlike the other Wölfennites, I refused to let mating a devout-enough male be themain point of my life. My plans were bigger than the Bridal Exchange, and the last thing I wanted was to actually enter into any kind of relationship with the would-be Scottish grooms. Which was why my tone came out one-hundred percent skeptical and zero percent pleased when I asked the two Scots standing in front of me, “And how exactly does that connect to you following me over here?”
The walking shampoo ad stepped forward with a slight bow of his gleaming head. “We were waiting for you to come out so we could escort you to the church.”
I stared at them blankly.
"For your sister's wedding?" the shaggy blond reminded me.
Oh…
That's when I noticed they were both freshly shaven and wearing wool tweed vests and jackets over the kilts the Scottish male wolves preferred exclusively to pants.
"Did you not hear the gathering bells ringing, then?”
A bit of shame poked into my balloon of annoyance. “No, I didn’t.”
I’d spent all morning constructing a sternly worded email to the Registrar’s office at the Ontario Institute of Technology after getting a schedule filled with basic science and math 101 courses for my first in-person semester in January. They didn’t seem to care that I’d already taught myself Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics, and Chemistry in secret, using old textbooks and the laptop Barbara, the woman who owned the bookstore next door to my parents’ furniture shop, had gifted me for my sixteenth birthday —even though us Wölfennites technically weren’t supposed to celebrate birthdays with outsiders offering us forbidden technology.
I’d taken that gift, though, and spent the next six years, using it to secretly give myself the kind of education that was denied to me after my Wölfennite education was “finished” at the age of fourteen. However, the folks at OIT didn’t care about my equivalency diploma or the hours I’d spent in the dead of night taking free online courses, or the fact that I’d already passed the AP Calculus and Physics exams that should have placed me in higher-level courses.
I’d been so busy arguing my case that I hadn’t registered the loud clanging of the church bells for my sister’s wedding.
“What were you doing in Iain’s cottage, then?” Shampoo Ad asked. “Having a gawk at all that tech he’s got in there? Must've been like looking at an alien spaceship for one of you Wölfennite lassies. Probably had no idea what any of that stuff was.”
“Um…” Instead of admitting I knew every gadget in Iain Scotswolf's basic smart house, I asked, “Why did you want to walk me to the church?”
“Because we’re interested in courting you,” the shorter one answered, his expression becoming confused. “I know you didn’t post anything for the letter-writing part of the exchange, but isn’t that why all of you came here?”
“Hmm.” I made a noncommittal sound since my sister, Tara, had already warned me against telling everyone the truth. I’d only signed up for the Wölfennite exchange program as a free ticket to her wedding.
