“What is happening?” I heard Bat shout over the sudden whirring noise as an errant cyclone seemed to form in the middle of the bar, right above Rex.
Suddenly there was a popping sound and, holy shit, a woman dressed in a golden ball gown appeared out of thin air and fell right into Rex’s arms.
Rex turned to us, holding the stunned woman in his arms.
“What the fuck?” Rex barked before he dumped the poor thing onto the floor. Her yelp filled my ears and I immediately wanted to crouch down next to her and see if she was okay, but Doc tugged me behind him so that he could protect me. The look in his brown-eyed glance was a clear order: stay back, stay safe.
“Did you just see what I saw?” Doc asked in wonder as we stared at the woman.
“I figured I was just seein’ things again, Doc, but if you just saw an omega dressed in a ballgown pop out of the mirror that Rex thrifted… then yeah, I saw what you saw,” Bat whispered loudly and I watched the woman’s head snap to the side to look at us and I saw that her eyes were the prettiest shade of cornflower blue. She had high cheekbones and big eyes that were rounded with fear and as Rex continued to shout at her she turned to look at him again, her waterfalls of golden curls spilling over her shoulder as she looked up at him like he was some kind of boogie monster.
“Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in our bar?” Rex barked his question at her and when she didn’t answer him fast enough the idiot reached out and yanked her to her feet. Doc’s irritation at Rex’s callousness filled our bond, and I found myself echoing it. We did not man-handle women in this pack, Rex knew that better than anyone.
“I—I don’t know, I was at the Gala and then the mirror above our fireplace started to glow, and then I was here,” the woman told Rex, stumbling over her words.
Rex, apparently oblivious to the anger coming down the bond from the rest of us, gave the woman a violent shake and I watched her head bounce back and forth on her neck like she was some kind of bobble-head.
That was enough for Doc. He pried Rex’s fingers away from her shoulders and I could already see faint bruises forming on her cream-colored skin from my alpha’s grip.
Doc’s voice was low as he reprimanded Rex, who seemed to realize that he had definitely overreacted to the woman popping into existence before our very eyes.
I listened as Doc spoke gently to the woman, asking for her name.
“J-Juneau Wilde,” she said and the alarm bells in my brain started to clang together. I knew that name. I had heard that name recently.
Whipping out my phone, I started to scroll down the list of my favorite true crime podcasts until I found what I was looking for. In the show notes of the episode was a link to an article about the case and I opened it, hurrying over to where Rex and Doc were still hovering over the woman.
As soon as I came close, I could smell her scent and realized with a jolt that she was an omega. She smelled like lemons and sugar. I wanted to press my nose to her wrist and inhale her scent deep into my lungs. She must have felt the same because her hand reached for me, only to be cut off by Rex.
“Don’t touch,” my alpha growled and I watched her wither into Doc, looking upset.
I smacked his shoulder, angry that he had come between us even though I had no rational reason to be.‘Dude, what the fuck? She isn’t going to hurt me, she’s a hundred pounds soaking wet,’I signed, glaring up at him.
Rex looked a bit sheepish. “I know she doesn’t seem like she’s dangerous, PC, but she popped out of a fucking mirror,” he said and I could already see his damn puppy dog eyes coming out from being scolded. My big alpha liked to talk a big game, but he hated when anyone from our pack was mad at him.
‘Just because she came out of a mirror doesn’t mean she’s evil.’I wasn’t surewhatit meant, but that still didn’t give Rex license to scare the shit out of her.
“Podcast,” Rex growled and my full nickname coming out his mouth made my shoulders draw up. I hated when he called me anything other than PC. “You know I don’t fuck around with that woo woo shit so get to your point.”
I rolled my eyes at him. He hated the mention of anything supernatural. I had never met such a scaredy cat in such bulky packaging before in my life.
There had even been a time that Bat brought home a souvenir Ouija board from Salem and Rex set it on fire in the backyard. I could understand why a woman appearing out of nowhere would scare him, but he still needed to treat her as the human being that she so clearly was.
I turned away from him and showed the article to the woman. At the top was a picture of her, aged and yellowed by the decades since it had been taken, but it was definitely her.
“That’s me,” she said, her blue eyes meeting mine as she nibbled on her lower lip, revealing a little pair of cute-as-shit rabbit teeth.
I used my finger to scroll down.‘Tell her to read,’I signed to Rex who heaved a massive sigh.
“Read,” he told her flatly.
She seemed confused about my phone but her eyes began to scan the article, her face growing paler with each line that she read.
“What… I don’t understand,” she said a little breathlessly when she had finished.
“If you really are the Juneau Wilde from this article, then you went missing over a hundred years ago,” Doc murmured gently like he was talking to one of the errant animals that he treated at the vet clinic he worked at rather than a fully-grown woman.
She shook her head vehemently. “No. It isn’t possible, time travel is pure science fiction.”
