Wait, wouldn’t this be where…?
I tipped my head all the way back, and sure enough, there was the door in the ceiling I’d thought I was looking for. So high, I instantly knew it had been created only for creatures who could fly.
Was that Knifey McFenrir’s lab up there? Was that where he’d carried out all his experiments to see if he could breed a she-wolf optimized enough to carry a dragon baby?
Was that what he’d meant when I asked him if he fell in love with Dorie 1, and he answered Yes?
Was that his sick version of love? Mating all 999 versions of me that came before? Until he gave up and decided to kill me instead.
It doesn’t matter!I reminded myself.
Now was not the time for curiosity. I had to get out of this Pleistocene Alien version of the Frankenstein castle and put together my next steps.
The way out was easy to spot. A large slab of untouched rock wall stood across from where I’d just exited. Its size let me know this would be the only section of rock where a door big enough to fit a dragon could be placed.
And sure enough, as soon as I got close enough to it, a giant glowing rectangle appeared.
Forty or so feet tall, compared to the four twenty-five-foot wooden ones that dotted the rest of the circular gallery.
The glowing rectangle looked like the parent to all the other little doors, and as it opened for me with a muffled slide of stone, it put me in mind of a mother saying, “Okay, child, you can go through.”
Mother…
Had I really been pregnant and died in childbirth 999 times—1000 if you counted Dorie Zero?
Stuck back in my childhood bedroom in Faoiltiarn, seeing how all my old schoolmates had solved the village’s dire birthrate problem by doing the same kind of exchange they’d attempted with the Wölfennites with other less zealous communities, I’d pretty much accepted my fate. Thirty-two was ancient in she-wolf years, and I’d bitterly accepted that my best chance at finding another wolf to mate had passed me by. That children just weren’t in the cards for me.
I’d traded that life to live out my holoscribe dreams.
Never questioning why I’d been so obsessed with the fating gates as soon as I found out about their existence, after another wolf at Mizzou took me to see the state’s gate nearby.
Why were there fating gates in every single state in America, but only a handful in Europe and Asia?
Who had made them?
These questions had knocked around in my mind from the start.
And when President Nightwolf had blackboxed all the North American ones during his second term, going against public sentiment, my curiosity about the gates that were known to actually suck wolves through time had gone into overdrive.
I’d started investigating the story, and I just couldn’t let it go.
Apparently, that inclination hadn’t been due to tenacity—but to my body and soul keeping the score on all my past lives.
And now here I was, stuck in an era before humans had developed written communication. Expected to serve as an incubator for some geneticist who obviously didn’t give a poop… You know what? No, no! I was going to stop talking like a goddamn purple baby koala.
He didn’t give afuckabout me and had been perfectly willing to run his experiment as many times as it took. Until now.
Why now?
My holoscribe instinct tried to wriggle that question through my head, but I mentally stomped on it like the worm it was.
I didn’t want to ask any more questions. I just wanted to be pissed off.
Even the cool night air hitting my face as the doors opened failed to decrease my anger.
An ocean crashed in my ears as I stumbled through the exterior entrance, feverish with pure fury.
Like, really burning up.
