What are these intricately carved statues of sleeping dragons doing down here?
Then the dragon statue in the middle… blinked. Its eyelids opened to reveal glowing orbs, green as emeralds.
Staring straight at me.
I stared back…
…until the duffel dragged me farther into the deep, down where I could no longer see those emerald eyes.
I couldn’t breathe.
Water, water, everywhere, but my lungs were burning.
Then suddenly, Sadie’s words echoed in my mind,“Remember the poem! Say it out loud! Right now! It will save you!”
As an investigative holoscribe who’d spent her entire career uncovering truths the North American wolves in power would rather the people they served didn’t know, I’d been jokingly suspicious from the start when Sadie’s nineteen-year-old son had shown up at their three gods temple to teach me the Irish poem I was supposed to recite to Naomi when I met with her. The one he warned me couldn’t be said out loud.
He was technically the Shadow Prince, but he referred to himself as the Shadow Cleric—with a capital S and C. He was so pale, he could have passed as White, and though we spent hours together silently rehearsing that difficult poem in sections of syllables, so that I’d get the pronunciation right, the Shadow Cleric never once smiled or laughed at any of my jokes.
Including when I teased him about the nature of his poem. “In my experience, the only poems you’re not allowed to say out loud are fating spells.”
He blinked. Like a pale-blue-eyed lizard. “You have knowledge of fating spells? I thought they were no longer in use by the general populace.”
“They aren’t,” I conceded. “But obviously, I had to do a lot of research on mating portals.”
He crooked his head to the side. “Why?”
Now it was my turn to blink. How little research had they done on me before insisting I had to be the one to serve as the Scottish kingdom’s diplomat? “Do you not… um…?”
I stopped myself, thinking better of pointing out that I was a holoscribe who’d been fired before I’d gotten the chance to publish the final scathing holoimmersives in what was supposed to be a 12-part, year-long series on President Rafes Nightwolf’s decision to block every wolf in North America from the mating portals after the kidnapping and death of his cousin Ola Greenwolf.
But yes, that had basically made me an expert on the portals that could shoot wolves through space and time to be united with their fated mate—sometimes mates.
I knew there were fifty in North America, in every single state, but none in Canada or Mexico, and only a few scattered throughout Europe and Asia.
There were only a handful of ways to access these portals, and they all involved saying a fated mate spell while in their vicinity.
However, there was no mating portal in the secret kingdom that I could sense. And I would have known if there were. Portals emitted an electromagnetic field that wolves picked up on a biological level—unless they were black-boxed like the ones President Nightwolf had locked down in North America.
And as advanced and plentiful as the Irish Bears were, I didn’t seriously think they messed around with something as ancient and not particularly well-understood as the mating portals.
Also, I hadn’t wanted to risk the Irish Bears coming to their senses and demanding I sign an NDA, jeopardizing the story that would get me back in the game.
So, I’d kept my mouth shut and learned the difficult Irish poem.
But what if I had been right?
What if Sadie had been trying to tell me to say that poem as “a get out of dying card”?
Many of the stories I’d uncovered about mating portals, including the longtime Michigan Kings, who were two Vikings married to one modern-day she-wolf, had started off with someone trying to escape certain death.
And, listen, I was all out of other ideas.
I clung to Sadie’s last words like a lifeline and recited the poem out loud, using the last of my rapidly dwindling air to bubble it into the water.
Suddenly, I was no longer in a lake.
The water vanished in a rush of sensation—a vacuuming wind, like I was being pulled through an invisible tunnel. My stomach lurched as reality twisted around me.
