Her Viking Wolf (23 page)

By sunrise the next morning, the entire town knew by the sounds coming from the house that the alpha prince’s fiancée was now mated to another. The alpha prince left town, and once the she-wolf came out of a mating frenzy, she also attempted to leave town and the Viking behind. No one is quite sure where she was planning to go, but the sheriff caught her and dragged her back for a reason that still hasn’t been fully explained—this historian is also fairly sure it wasn’t legal. The Viking was permitted to visit her, but when they came back to the clinic’s cage to fetch him, both the Viking king and the she-wolf had disappeared.

This was thought to be the end of it, but then seven months later, the she-wolf came back through the portal, wounded and in labor with a son, who was delivered by the Colorado alpha king and his queen themselves. The woman stayed on for two months, waiting to be reunited with her mate. Then she left her newborn with the royals in order to visit one Professor Henley. It is not known what they talked about, as the professor refuses to meet with me, but according to other sources, during their visit a flash was seen in Wolf Springs and reportedly the Viking came back through the gate.

He spent a mere forty-eight hours in Wolf Springs. During which he recovered from an undisclosed illness and met his son for the first time. An eyewitness, who happened to be in the room at the time, said it was a very touching scene to see the Viking meet his son for the first time.

Then reportedly Chloe Adams drove into Denver to pick up two period costumes, one for an adult and one for an infant, which she paid for in cash. Shortly after that, all three family members disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

And this report would be a whole lot longer if Rafe Nightwolf wasn’t such a selfish, entitled, jerky douchebag!!!!!!!

Alisha Ataneq punched this last sentence in with particular force, since her recent visit to Wolf Springs had been such a bust. Her big mistake had been waiting until the end of the fall semester to make it. By that time, Rafe Nightwolf had finally returned to Wolf Springs and accepted the alpha king title, which he’d gotten ostensibly because his father was ready to retire, but more so, in Alisha’s opinion, because he was a spoiled brat and his overly indulgent parents wanted to give him some kind of consolation prize for losing his fiancée to a time-traveling Viking.

But as a result, not many people had been willing talk to her about what had really happened to Chloe Adams.

A knock on her open door interrupted her thoughts and she looked up to see Matt, one of the other wolf post-docs at the University of Alaska-Juneau, standing at the entrance to her office. He was one of the few other wolves she knew her age who hadn’t gone into heat yet, and she halfway suspected that, ensconced among humans as they were, they were probably both destined to either go unmated for life or mate with each other.

But if she did go into heat, she wouldn’t mind doing so with Matt. He was cute in a string-bean nerd sort of way, and at least he was also in the humanities. She already knew her mom wouldn’t approve though. Since Alisha was the second daughter of the Alaska alpha king, her mom preferred she marry some ridiculous but rich jerk like Rafe Nightwolf, not a fellow academic like herself. However, her mother’s snobbery only made a guy like Matt that much more attractive to her.

“You busy?” he asked.

She threw him a friendly smile. “I can make myself un-busy. What’s up?”

He edged himself into one of her guest chairs. “Well, I have some good news and some bad news and some possibly good news.”

Before she could ask to hear the bad news first he said. “The good news is I think I might have found those diaries you asked me to keep a look out for.”

Ever since she had all but abandoned her research on she-wolves in post-colonial Alaska, she had started putting most of her time and energy into finding out as much about the Vikings as she possibly could. She’d asked Matt, who did his work study in the wolf wing, a secret section of the library built under the cloak of night back in 1972, when the university was first established, to look for a few things for her, including the diaries of an Arab diplomat named Ibn Fadlan.

According to the annals of history, he had traveled around Norway, meeting many Vikings and journaling his experiences. But many of those manuscript pages had now “disappeared.” As a Lupine History post-doc, she knew whenever a set of ancient records were found with a few missing pieces, that usually meant the wolves had gotten to them. The North American Lupine Council was near fanatical about keeping evidence of their existence out of the human purview, and very few universities even dared to keep a secret wolf collection. When they did, it was usually in fairly libertarian places like Alaska, South Dakota, and New Hampshire, states that liked their freedoms and weren’t as scared of the North American Lupine Council as others.

“You found them,” she said, leaning forward.

“I think so. Or at least a few manuscript pages that one of our wolves smuggled out of the secret collection at the University of Baghdad back in the nineties before the first Gulf war. My Arabic isn’t that great, but I scanned it and put it through a translator and this passage caught my eye. If the translation program is working right, he talks about coming upon the village of King Fenris the Serious, which he finds puzzling, because the king is quite jovial. He is only received because the villagers think their queen, who he describes as “a beauty, dark of skin,” might be interested in talking with him, because he also has darker skin. She speaks Old Norse, but in a dialect that is often hard for him to understand, and she won’t tell him where she came from. And she is said to have three children, but he only meets two of them, a boy and a younger girl. But he says she also has a rather large wolf puppy, who stays crouched at the queen’s feet and seems to be afraid of humans. The king and queen, who he describes as “happy with each other in every way” receive him for three nights. But then the queen tells him that though she’s enjoyed his company, it is best he move on before the next full moon. She tells him it is very important he and the Vikings he is with sail in a different direction than they originally planned, saying something to the effect of though they themselves are tame, she cannot be so sure about village to the north of them that calls no man king. They take her advice, but later on, one of the Vikings manning the ship Ibn is on says he suspects the foreign queen, the king, and their entire village are creatures of legend, ones who transform from human to animal in the light of the full moon.”

Alisha’s eyes widened and she took the translated pages from him. “That’s her. I’m sure of it. I’m getting closer. How could there possibly be any bad news?”

“I was hoping you’d see it that way.” He grimaced. “The bad news is the funding for your fellowship here has just been pulled and as of next semester, you’ll no longer be employed by the University of Alaska.”

“What!?”

He raised his hands. “The only reason I’m here telling you this is because I thought it should come from a friend as opposed to the head of the department, who’s still pissed at you for pissing off the new king of Colorado.

Her eyes narrowed. “Tell me this sudden defunding doesn’t have anything to do with Rafe Nightwolf.”

Matt lifted his shoulders up and down. “What did you expect, Chloe? His family is one of the richest wolf dynasties in the United States. He has a seat on the council
and
the Nightwolf trust gives millions of dollars to the wolf residency program so shifters can attend state colleges all over the U.S. and enroll in wolf-based classes. He’s not a guy you want to piss off. And you basically announced that you plan to write an entire book about the woman who left him for a Viking.”

She shook her head. “How is no one understanding the impact Chloe Adams might have had on our own history? For all we know, she’s influenced facets of our culture we don’t even know about. How can you all stay so busy bowing and scraping to this jerk that you can be totally okay with not finding out what happened to her? Where’s your curiosity?”

He gave her a sad smile. “Believe me, Alisha. I’m not happy about this situation either. It sometimes feels like the Council only funds us so they can keep us in check. But that brings me to the possibly good news. Now that you don’t have a class load next semester, you can dedicate more time to solving the mystery of what happened to your friend.”

She was still fuming, but she realized Matt was right. Rafe Nightwolf truly was an asshole for getting her fired, but that was about to blow up in his face. He thought he was shutting her down, but he had only fueled her determination to get to the bottom of this mystery. She would find out what happened to her friend, she vowed. And she wasn’t going to let anyone, especially not Rafe Nightwolf, stop her.

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WOLF & PREJUDICE
IN 2013