Or that they’d never see Myrna again?
“Do you think they’re okay?” his wife suddenly asked through the magic bond that allowed mated wolves to speak without moving lips and feel each other's emotions as if they were their own.
He did not have to ask who she was referring to. Several winters had passed since their sons departed but waking up in this lonely cabin remained hard on the both of them. Fenris was not sure his mate would ever be able to reconcile not knowing their children’s ultimate fate.
“Naturally, they are,” he assured her, nonetheless. “They are in your future land with their fated mates. Even Olafr.”
“Even Olafr…” she murmured. After nearly thirty winters of believing their son mentally incapable of changing from his wolf form, she still sounded stunned that it turned out he was not wolf-bound after all but seeking to ensure Chloe and he didn’t die as secretly prophesied to him and FJ by their sorceress aunt Bera.
“He was such a good boy,” she said. “I mean is. He’s still alive…somewhere…just not here.”
“Yes,” Fenris agreed, “Alive and happy and mated by fate as they are.”
“Yes…” Chloe’s reply was positive, but her voice sounded distant inside his head.
They would never see their children again. And though she tried to hide it, he could feel her grief and sorrow rippling over their mate bond.
“We should get up. Make breakfast. Keep moving,” she said in his tongue, which she often referred to as Old Norse.
He took her hands and placed them upon his chest. “I will fell a tree or two, then we shall begin the preparations for my winter hunt.”
“My brawny wolf,” she said with a laugh. “It’s so sexy when you do stuff like felling trees.”
He laughed as well. And for a few moments, they were as they used to be. Happy and fortunate. Over the past winters, he’d become used to this swing back and forth between muddy sadness and light happiness, with the necessary work of sustaining a lone cabin in the woods in between.
Yea, this morning was the same as the many that had come before it. But then without warning, it was not.
Just as they rose from the bed to break their fast, a knock sounded upon their door.
Chapter Four
OLA
The North Dakota kingdom house has five spaces that aren’t bathrooms downstairs, and each one of those spaces has been kitted out to a different theme for my coronation.
The ballroom has undergone a full-on Regency era makeover, complete with a human band playing classical music for English country dances. In the foyer, we’d set up a sick early millennium dance party, with a DJ in a flip phone costume, spinning oldies by early 21st century acts like Lil Wayne, The White Stripes, and Destiny’s Child.
When people get hungry, they can hit up the kitchen for a Roman feast that would make Bacchus set fire to his grape fields in a fit of jealousy. And nerdier wolves, like my mom, can currently be found in the kingdom house library, enjoying a literary salon, hosted by none other than London Graywolf, the only shifter to have ever won a Nobel Prize in Literature.
There’s seriously something for everyone at my once-in-a-lifetime coronation. But where do I find my boyfriend three hours after I’m officially crowned the Alpha Queen of North Dakota? Posted up on a wall in the garden, sipping on a glass of champagne, and not paying any kind of attention to the full-on Mardi Gras festivities going on in the kingdom house’s sprawling backyard.
He’s so obviously bored. And, I feel like a terrible girlfriend as I make my way over to him.
How has it taken me this long to notice that the only one not enjoying my party is my boyfriend? It’s not like Akwasi is hard to miss. Even leaned up against the wall, at six-six, he’s a good head taller than most of the people at the garden party, including me. And standing six one in my glittery gold heels, I’m not exactly a shrinking violet myself.
Yet, here he is, hidden in the shadows like this is an after party for a game he didn’t win and not his girlfriend’s coronation.
“You probably thinking you’ve won something tonight, don’t you? You expecting us to bow down to you now? Call you queen?”
The voice turns my head from my observations of Akwasi. Ugh face emoji, it’s Kirk Waters, the pack’s current gatekeeper. My uncles appointed him to the well paid position about a year ago after performing a very unimpressive candidate search of Yellow Mountain Wolves, who said the least crazy things, on the Civil War 2 preppers forums.
But like I’d warned my uncles at the time, that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as crazy as the rest of his mountain pack. The Yellow Mountain Wolves—or as Uncle Kyle calls them with a sigh, “those tragic YMWs,” were a pack time had left behind. They’d started off as the wolves who’d chosen to stay in the original kingdom village when the state pack decided to move to a suburb of Fargo in the mid-1900s.