“Chloe? Chloe?” she heard the Viking ask frantically inside her head. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The wolf lunged at her, burying its sharp teeth in her side, as if its sole intent was to tear the baby out of her womb. Red-hot pain ripped through her side, and she nearly passed out when he opened his jaw wide and sank his long, hot teeth into her again.
She screamed partly out of pain, but mostly out of terror.
But then she remembered the woman’s dagger, the one she had worn, only to tease Fenris about always nagging her to wear her dagger.
“Tis your wedding gift,” she had said in her joking speech after recounting for their guests how often they’d gone back and forth about this.
But now she ripped it from the looped belt from which it hung, and she didn’t know where the strength came from, but she, Chloe Adams, who was too squeamish to even wring a chicken’s neck, stabbed the crazed wolf in his gray eye.
It let go of her side with a screech of pain. And Chloe followed it, her mind pitch-black with rage over what he had done to her and her baby. She stabbed it over and over again, in the heart, in the other eye, in the stomach, until it let out one last hideous yelp and morphed back into a human form, a young man with unwashed red hair, who she would bet money was Fenris’ cousin.
And only then did she feel the cramping in her pelvis and the dampness. Between her skirts.
“No, no, no, not now,” she cried in realization.
Her water had broken.
FENRIS WAS CLOSING IN ON A DEER he could smell about half an acre away when Chloe pushed into his mind, “Fenris! Fenris! One of the wolves is after me, it’s trying to—”
And his heart went cold when she cut off mid-sentence.
“Chloe? Chloe?” he asked, already turning around and running the other way, much to the surprise of the wolves he was leading in the hunt. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The other wolves did not understand what was going on, but nonetheless, they followed him as a pack. Then they heard her scream. And this time it was not in ecstasy as his family had teased her for before. It was a scream of pain.
Fenris ran. Faster than he had ever run without shifting into a wolf as he did so. He had missed shifting over the course of the last seven moons, but never as much as he did now when he was confined to this human body while the woman he loved above all others screamed in the distance.
The other wolves also became compelled by the scream and they left him behind. He hoped to Fenrir they got to her in time, before... no he couldn’t finish the thought. It made his vision go red at the edges.
“Chloe? Speak to me. Let me know you are unharmed, beauty.”
Again, no answer.
And as he ran down the village’s main thoroughfare toward her scent, he could now smell the thickness of her blood in the air as well as the acrid stench of his cousin.
He rounded the corner toward his longhouse and spied his cousin’s human body lying in the distance, eyeless with angry stab wounds in his heart, stomach, and the side of his head. He would find out later his queen killed the large wolf, with nothing but her will to live and her tiny woman’s dagger. And that would make what happened soon after much harder for him to bear.
But at that moment, his eyes searched around for her, until he realized she must be inside the large gathering of wolves.
He shoved through the pack and found his aunt and a few of his family pack members licking the deep wound in her side, cleaning it the only way they knew how in their present form. But even they he shoved aside to get to his bride.
She looked up at him with tears of pain and frustration in her eyes. “Fenris, my water broke. And I’m having contractions. The baby is coming. But it’s too soon. We’re going to lose him.”
He raised her hand, which was still covered in his cousin’s wolf blood, to his lips. “Nay, this I will not allow.”
She breathed hard through the pain of her cramping. “I’m so sorry. I wanted us to be a family so badly.”
“I will not allow it, beauty.” He kissed her hand again. “You said if a baby is born in seven full moons in your time, your magic people might save it.”
She caught his meaning and began shaking her head even before he could fully explain it. “No, no! You can’t send me back.”
He reached into her wedding dress. “I must, beauty. Your wound is deep and your waters have already broken. You cannot shift to heal, and we have no human medicine in the village. There is no other way.”
She tried to slap away his hand, but he managed to unpin the spell. And this was when she began to sob. “No, I don’t want to leave you. And you said you wouldn’t abandon me.”
His heart tore at the sight of her tears and he once again took her hand, holding it to his chest fiercely. “And I will hold fast my promise. I will find a way back to you, beauty.”
“How?” she asked, shaking her head. She then clenched her teeth when another contraction overtook her. They were coming fast now. He could not linger here with her.
“I do not yet know. But I will. I promise you this on my life. I will be your mate and a father to our pup, and we will be as one again.”
He kissed her sweet lips and then her forehead, which was damp with sweat despite the bitter chill of night.
Then before she could protest again, he yelled out to the other wolves to back away from her body, which they did.
With one last longing look toward the woman who had shown him a happiness he had never thought to know, he spoke the words to send her back to her own place and time.
“No, Fenris,” she screamed, but it was too late. The black tunnel opened up just beyond her and sucked her into it as if she were but a pebble on the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
COLD and pain. Pain and cold. That was all Chloe knew at first when she landed outside the portal on Wolf Mountain. First she just lay there in the snow, her stomach cramping, wondering why no one had come to get her yet.
Then she heard growling, and two black wolves, one large, one small, appeared less than a meter away. And that’s when she remembered it was still a full moon night, and moreover, she was back in her time, where shifter’s “got wolf” whenever the full moon rose in the sky.
Not again, she thought, reaching for her woman’s dagger, only to realize she must have dropped it after killing the last wolf.
She resorted to throwing rocks at the two black wolves, hoping it would be enough to stave them off for a while before the sun rose.
It wasn’t. Chloe’s aim wasn’t great and neither was the strength she put behind it. The larger wolf barely flinched as it continued to advance. And soon it was so close, all Chloe could do was squeeze her eyes shut and shield her throat, as it leapt at her, jaw open wide.