Chloe could only look at the queen confused.
“I know he was angry at you before because of what happened with Rafe. But after the incident on the mountain, what we almost did . . .” The queen blushed. “He felt very badly about that. He’s actually the one who bottle-fed F.J. while he was still shifted and healing. The truth is he’s been begging me to get you to let him babysit for weeks. I doubt I’ll actually get much time with him today.”
“No, you will not,” the king assured her. “Me and F.J. here have got big plans. First a manly man’s breakfast. Then we’ve got that city council meeting. Then we’re coming home and watching the Broncos game. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right?”
He rubbed his index finger on F.J.’s belly and the baby belched out a happy gurgle.
“Dale, you are not going to take a baby to the city council meeting.”
“Watch me,” the king answered. “And if any of them wolves try to give me guff about it, I want you to poop on them. Okay, little man?”
As if in answer, F.J. let out a happy screeching sound that could easily be taken as an affirmative.
“Yeah, that’s right. This pup gets it. He really does.” He then turned to Chloe and held out his hand. “Hey can I borrow that doo-hickey you’ve got on? Probably come in handy at the meeting.”
Completely baffled by this sudden turn of events, Chloe unstrapped the Baby Bjorn from around her body and placed it in his outstretched hand. “Um, okay…just call if you need anything, I guess.”
“We won’t,” Rafe’s father said as he walked out of the room, singing “Are You Ready for Some Football?” and bouncing F.J. in the air.
PROFESSOR HENLEY WAS EVEN MORE enthusiastic to see her then the Colorado king had been to see F.J. He met her outside of Sturm Hall, all but bouncing from foot to foot with excitement.
“Come, come!” he said without preamble. He grabbed her hand and led her into the building. “You won’t believe what I’ve found.”
Professor Henley led her into a cluttered office with a least ten standing pillars of dusty textbooks stacked as high as her head and two walls worth of bookshelves stuffed with texts of varying sizes. His only guest chair was covered in what looked like a pile of student papers, which he recklessly pushed aside, telling her to “Sit! Sit!” as they scattered on the floor.
She sat. “So were you able to find anything about the fated mates spell?” she asked.
“In a word: no,” he answered, taking a seat of his own behind his desk. “After I got your call, I started searching for anything that would lead me to that original spell. But as you know, werewolves, due to wanting to keep our existence secret from humans, have an unfortunately rather oral history—I believe you said your friend in Alaska was working on getting more of it down on paper for her graduate study, if I’m remembering correctly. That’s good work she’s doing. It’s shameful how little we wolves know about our own history.”
As much as Chloe admired Alisha for the same reasons as Professor Henley, she was way more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t found out anything new about the fated mates spell. “So why were you so happy when you met me outside if you didn’t find anything?”
He grinned. “I didn’t say I didn’t find anything. I said I didn’t find anything out about the fated mates spell. Your Fenris’s aunt and her peers did a good job of keeping that one under wraps. If there was ever another case of a sorceress writing it down as she did for your wolf, they were very good about making sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Also, charcoal on linen has an expiration date, so there’s no way even the most careful archaeologist would have found it.
However, after the fated mates spell turned out to be a dead end, I decided to start looking for any mentions of the Fenris I could find. That would be a little harder, and I thought I might have to travel to your friend’s university in Alaska since they have a much bigger collection than we do. And just in case, I wanted to get as much information about the only thing we have of your Viking in this time. His sword. But when I looked it up again, I found a detail I hadn’t noticed before.”
He turned the computer monitor on his desk around to show her a blown up picture of what she immediately recognized as Fenris’s sword set on a sheet of red velvet for it’s formal museum photograph. “I don’t understand. What’s so great about finding Fenris’s sword—”
But then she blinked, seeing what the Professor had. Seeing what hadn’t been on the sword when she knew Fenris. “Oh, my God, there are words. Words on the sword!”
“I haven’t been able to translate the runes fully yet, but I think they say—”
“Come back to me my fated one, so we may once again be as one,” she supplied. Then she said the words again in Old Norse.
“Your Old Norse is very good,” the professor said. He pulled out his smart phone and set it to record. “Could you repeat that? When’s the next time I’ll have a chance to hear Old Norse from an almost native speaker?”
She dutifully repeated the words three more times into the recorder, before asking,
“Do you think the words are some kind of spell or a clue about how to find the spell we need?”
As if in answer, her phone started ringing. Under any other circumstance, she would have let it go to voicemail, but she saw from the caller ID it was Rafe’s mother.
“Hi,” she answered the phone. “Is F.J. okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” the queen answered, her voice perfectly pleasant. “But the gate just flashed and my husband told me to call you…”
“Tell me, please tell me you did not bring that goddamn Viking forward in time again,” he yelled in the background.
“Dale, watch your language around the baby!” she shouted back. Then her voice returned to its usual queenly dulcet when she asked Chloe. “So you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that flash would you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHLOE had never driven so fast in her life. She nearly skidded a few times, as she came up the curvy mountain road to get back to Wolf Springs. But it still wasn’t fast enough. When she got there, she found her Viking once again passed out in the clinic, sleeping off a tranq. But this time he didn’t look nearly as vital as the first time he’d come. His body was still strong and rippling with hard muscle. But underneath the beard he’d once again grown, his cheekbones looked almost sunken in. And there were dark circles under his eyes.