Though, that would explain a lot.
Yet another long pause before he answered. “Our pronouns are we-us-our.”
“Oh! You’re collective gender.” My chest lurched with excitement.
Collective gender was a relatively modern concept used mostly by privileged people with “fuck norms” money to signal that they didn’t see things like class, color, or gender—even if they lived in huge houses behind locked gates thanks to the money the patriarchy had passed down to them.
Usually, I found collective gender folks pretty insufferable with all their supposed virtue signaling. But if he was one ofthem, that meant I was either in my same time period and had only crossed through space, or I’d traveled forward in time.
Please, let it be the former, I silently prayed before asking the first question of Fated Mate Time Travel: “When exactly is this? Also, where exactly is this? Also, what are you? My nose is telling me you’re not fully human or a wolf like me.”
He stared down at me. I’d yet to see him blink.
But this silence was different. He didn’t simply stare at me. His green eyes darkened. And dropped, tracking down my face to the chest I didn't realize was heaving until his gaze snagged on it, before going even lower.
Was he…?
My heartbeat came faster, stealing even more of my breath. Was he ogling me?
I wasn’t used to being ogled. At least not in real life. Kiwi got a deeply unsettling amount of disturbing fan messages from male wolves across the globe. A few had even proposed.
But I was fully natural without any glow-ups as the many, many beauty surgeries and body recomp drugs were called, so I’d never gotten much attention from the opposite sex. The Mountain Prince didn’t count. (Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if his come-ons were fueled by some kind of bet about egg-planting a wolf.)
I wasn’t used to being so obviously… ahem, appreciated by someone who looked like the AI answer to “white-haired male Adonis.” That knot in my belly was back. Tightening and loosening, like something with breath.WhenandWhereandWhatwere the top three questions on my list.
But in that moment, the fourth one rose to the top.Who?
As in,Who are you?
Are you my fated mate?
“We are not able to…” He broke the silence first, tugging his faintly glowing gaze up to my face with what appeared to be effort. “We are unable to talk with you in this ssstate. Pleassse ...”
He shifted his gaze downward again, then snapped it back up. Another long pause. I got the impression he was mentally composing himself.
“Please recover yourself,” he eventually finished, without the hiss. “And then we will attempt to give your questions answers. Answers you will perhaps not like.”
I wascorrect about the door being god tech. It slid open with just a touch of my fingertips and led into… another cavern.
But not quite as large as the one I’d come from, and my eyes widened when I saw what filled it.
A natural pool, sunk into the rock floor, its stone edges worn smooth by what had to be centuries of water. It was fed by a small cascade that tumbled down the far wall in a series of quiet falls, and the surface was covered in lotus flowers—white and pale pink, drifting on broad green pads.
Ferns grew straight from the rock walls wherever they could find purchase, and a shaft of daylight fell through a wide opening in the cavern ceiling high above, turning the mist from the falls into something close to light.
It was, objectively, the most beautiful bathroom I had ever seen.
On the far right of the back wall, I found what I was looking for to confirm my guess about where I was: large embedded buttons, the size of ping pong paddles. The buttons had glowing green hieroglyphs etched into them—like Korean and Runes had a futuristic baby.
I couldn’t read what it said, but I recognized it immediately.
“The language of our gods.”The Shadow Prince cleric’s voice echoed in my head. “Ever-lit, yet unknowable.”
Beside the buttons hung four tubes, which filled me with unease and made me recall the strange being’s invitation to eliminate my waste myself. As if it had already been done before.
There was no toilet that I could see.
But I didn’t need to use it, and my stomach felt full, even though it had been at least twenty-four hours since that last breakfast at the Irish Bear Kingdom.
