But he wasn’t hulky like the Mountain King or my brother. He wore nothing but a pair of black pants, and every muscle wascarved sharp by the moonlight. In his perfectly still position, he looked like a marble statue with a bonfire burning inside of it.
I blinked. Like most wolves, my vision was excellent, even at night. But there was something about this guy that made me doubt my eyes.
He was ethereal in a way that gave me that uncanny valley feeling of early 2020s AI. Perfectly symmetrical, with glossy white hair. As if someone had designed him to look like a human. But gotten it slightly wrong. His proportions were too perfect. The symmetry unnatural.
He wasn’t human. My nose confirmed it. However, he wasn’t a wolf, either.
So what is he?
The question typed across my mind like vintage keyboard strokes. Along with,Why is he just sitting there, so eerily still?
Somehow, I worked up the courage and enough saliva in my dry mouth to say, “Hello?”
He didn’t answer.
I rose into a sitting position, then quickly regretted letting the fur slip down when the cold air goose bumped my skin.
I was naked. Even worse, it was freezing in a near-arctic way I wasn’t used to after a week of perfect secret kingdom summer.
I pulled the blanket back up to my chin. Then frowned again when its scent hit my nose.
The fur smelled like an animal I couldn’t identify.
Where were my clothes? The duffel bag with all my supplies? Had he taken them? Or had they been lost in the portal?
I tried again.
“Hello?”
Still no answer. His head hung, fully bowed. I might have thought he was asleep, or even frozen to death, if not for those emerald-green eyes emitting a faint glow.
I swallowed. Looked to both sides. We were in some kind of cavern—or maybe a very large room with round rock walls. The space was completely devoid of furniture, save for my fur-blanket-floor-bed setup.
“Hi,” I tried again. “Do you speak English? Are you my fated…”
I trailed off. Even after spending an entire year documenting and reporting on all the fated mates in President Nightwolf’s privileged family line, I still found it hard to believe that I’d apparently had to utter a fated mate spell to get out of dying.
But a holoscribe was going to holoscribe—and figure a way out of wherever and whenever this was. So, for the good of the story I could only hope I’d eventually be able to sell to a very eager paranormal news outlet, I asked, “Are you my fated mate?”
“By the fire star, you should not be here.” His voice was disconcerting, to say the least. A scrape of glass over burning coals.
But my heart soared with hope.
He speaks English! Oh, thank god! He speaks my language!I was hugely relieved—even if he did so with an unsettling glass-and-smoke accent.
This could have gone a lot, lot worse.
In my research, there was almost always a major language barrier when a wolf traveled through time. Even if it was within their own country. As I learned when I trekked all the way to Norway for my holoimmersive on Ola NAME’s time-traveling fathers, things got confusing real quick when Old Norse met the modern version.
But he knew modern English, so it might be possible I was still in the current century—maybe even on the same continent.
“You can understand me! All the happy face emojis!”
First rule of time travel, Kiwi’s algorithmically modulated chipper Australian voice reminded me from my memory.Ask him WHEN you are.
That’s right!I eagerly reached out and touched his arm. “Can you tell me exactly when I am? And where? And then maybe we can?—”
“You should not be here!”
