Fenris shook his head. “You cannot hope to best me on your own.”
There was a reason the Alpha King title had stayed in his line for five generations. The sons of Fenris were known throughout Norway as fierce warriors, and he himself had been trained from childhood to defend his inherited crown.
Vidar grinned. “Not on my own, no. But my friends have avowed to herald it that way when we return to the village with your severed head in my hand.”
“No one will believe your tale.”
“It does not matter that they believe, only that they submit to their new king.”
Fenris spat. Vidar had been a pig’s penis since childhood, prone to tantrums and high-handed with his mother and two sisters. And now it was plain to see he had gone mad with desire for power and revenge.
Fenris considered himself a warrior of great skill, but even he could not best five wolves, especially having just come off the late winter hunt. He cursed himself for letting his mind become so distracted by the conversation with his aunt that he had momentarily relaxed his guard, giving his cousin the perfect opening for this underhanded attack.
The conversation with his aunt.
Fenris lowered the hand that held his sword and raised the one that held the rag with the spell written upon it.
Mistaking the lowering of his sword as an admittance of defeat, Vidar came charging toward him with his battle axe raised high.
Fenris barely had enough time to utter the words that would send him hurtling through a gate to the gods-only-knew—but at that moment, any land was better than this plain, surrounded by power-mad Vidar and his outlaw followers.
He did not hear the gate open behind him, but knew it must have, because Vidar came to a fumbling stop, his eyes widening and his mouth falling open.
In the next moment, Fenris was sucked backward into a pitch-black tunnel of wind, which sent his body hurtling through space and time at such a speed, he barely managed to hold on to his sword.
Eventually he was deposited on a snowy plateau, his head slamming against a large rock just as he hit the ground with a bone-crunching thud. His head spun, and he groaned in a bid to stay conscious, but it was a bid not won. And he was surround by blackness again.
The sound of two voices speaking a strange language above him eventually came filtering in through the new blackness. And when he opened his eyes he found what looked like a Moor standing above him with his booted foot on his chest.
Fenris moved quickly. Even though the man was dressed in a strange costume—some manner of faded blue trousers and a thin coat made of a shiny and slick material Fenris had never seen before—he could smell that the man was a fellow wolf. Consequently, he didn’t waste time trying to deduce who this wolf was or why he had his boot planted on his chest. His way had always been to kill quickly, and his own life had been spared many times over because he did so. In a few moves, he reversed their positions and had raised his sword for the killing blow—
“No!!!!”
What sounded like a female’s voice rang out beside him. And he would have ignored it, except...his nostrils flared…he could not.
As if compelled by an invisible puppet master, he turned toward the voice, and found a trembling she-wolf with bushy hair and what looked like some manner of weapon pointed at him. Perhaps the spell had transported him to Iberia or what he’d heard referred to as Blaland, a hot and dry land to the far south where blamenn, black people with very dark skin, lived.
It was she.
Whoever she was, wherever she hailed from, he recognized her for who she was the instant his eyes met hers. Not only from her intoxicating scent, but also from his body’s reaction to her. A powerful wave of desire overtook Fenris, causing him to sway, even though he was in a firm killing stance. His cock swelled inside his hunting trousers, hard and surprisingly insistent, as if he were a pup in his first stages of coming manhood.
For a moment, he stood there frozen, unable to move, he was so enthralled by her. But finally he remembered himself enough to say, “I am here for you.” He held up the rag with the spell upon it. “And now we must speak these words as one, so I might go back to my lands and vanquish my enemy.”
She looked from side to side, before spewing forth words that sounded to him vaguely like some form of Germanic, but not a dialect he recognized. Why would this dark woman be speaking to him in Germanic?
He started toward her, which seemed to alarm her. She made a high-pitched noise, like a mouse, before squeezing her eyes closed. A whistling sound then emitted from her strange weapon right before something struck him with the sting of a fierce insect bite.
He looked down to see some manner of dart sticking from his shoulder. And just as he moved to pull it out, a powerful sleep overtook him, one he could not resist, even though he strove hard to fight the enveloping blackness.
CHAPTER THREE
“YOU know, if we were mated that wouldn’t have gone so bad,” Rafe said, a couple of hours after the confrontation at the portal.
It had been an awkward and unwieldy business getting the large maybe-Viking down the mountain to the town’s two-room clinic. But he now lie sleeping upright in a hospital bed, to which he’d been handcuffed, looking much more peaceful than the two people in the room’s side-by-side visitor chairs.
Chloe adjusted her position to look at Rafe with an incredulous blink. “Seriously? We are in the clinic with a possibly crazed Viking sleeping off a tranq, and this is what you want to talk about?”
Rafe shrugged as if time-traveling Viking werewolves happened every day. “Once we’re mated, we’ll be telepathically connected, too, which means we’ll be able to say things like, ‘Hey, Chloe, don’t talk to him in German, just shoot him already.’”
“Or things like, ‘Hey, Rafe, you can thank me for saving your life any day now.’”
Rafe clenched his jaw and looked away. “The truth is, I’m more pissed at myself for letting him get the upper hand. I shouldn’t have let my guard down. What if he had hurt you, or worse? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
He sounded so guilty that Chloe’s irritation was instantly replaced with the need to comfort him. She placed a hand on his arm. “But he didn’t hurt me or you. That’s all that matters.”
Rafe shook his head. “I’ve never seen a guy that big move so fast. I wonder what he did to get cast out of wherever he came from.”
So did Chloe.
Doc Fischer, their shifter town’s middle-aged and perennially cranky doctor, entered the room at that moment. “Has he tried to tell you why he got sent back yet?”