But this man drives with more self-assurance than Uncle Clyde. And if you’ve ever seen a black man from Detroit drive anywhere, you know that’s pretty damn confident.
“What’s your name?” I demand.
“My name is Colby, Mistress.” He looks at me over his right shoulder when he says that, and I inwardly jolt. He looks more like a fresh-faced college kid than a Bond villain’s henchman. How old is this guy? Is he an ageless dragon like Damianos? No, I don’t think so…
I covertly sniff in his direction. I don’t pick up any wolf or fire. From what my nose is telling me, he’s one-hundred percent human. Good. Maybe that means unlike the guy sitting next to me, he actually has some humanity.
“Colby what?” I ask. “I want to know exactly who’s helping this asshole kidnap me.”
“He won’t feel any guilt over his assistance if that’s your aim,” Damianos says beside me. “I assure you, this Colby and all the Colbys before him heed me and only me without compunction.”
He leans over, so close, his fire and ash are all I can smell, and pulls the seatbelt across me. The sides of his large hands brush against my body as he does, and there’s no mistaking the sensation when he touches me this time. My wolf stands all the way up.
But why though? Does this stupid bitch not realize we’re being kidnapped? By someone who probably plans to…actually I’m not quite sure what he’s got planned for me.
“What exactly is this kidnapping about?” I demand. “What’s your endgame? Where are you taking me?”
He slides me an icy look. “Does it really matter?”
“I’m sitting here with an electronic collar around my neck, so yeah I’d say it matters where you’re taking me. It matters a lot.”
“Funny that you should call the contraption I had Akwasi place around your neck a collar. Dogs..." His mouth tilts up, but the amusement in his voice never makes the climb all the way up to his deadly cold eyes. “That’s what we drakkon began calling you wolf mutations after we saw how the anthros had domesticated many of your grey wolf cousins.”
Okay… how much worse would this situation go for me if I punched him in his smug mouth?
But then I hear my uncles tutting in my head.
“Honey, you can’t ever let them see they’re getting to you,” Kyle had explained after I cussed out one of the older small town pack leaders for calling me “the girl alpha.”
“Just put a bullet in them when nobody’s looking,” Clyde advised.
“Oh, Clyde,” my uncle-in-law had said, giggling like his husband was telling a joke. Though I suspected from the lack of protestors throughout the first gay alpha’s reign that Uncle Clyde might be a total “where is the lie?” meme come to life.
Okay, I’m a queen now. What would a real queen do? Stall, I decide. Get more information. Keep him talking while I try to figure out what to do.
“Is that what you call humans?” I ask. “Anthros?”
“Anthrohominids. Also upright primates. And cattle.”
Cattle….
“They were basically raising the humans here like cattle. And I guess we were, like, their hunting dogs.”
I recall what my twin Fensa told me after we rescued her dragon mate. That it had been the alien dragons from Mercury who were responsible for the wolf shifters race. We’d been a genetic mutation of humans created by the dragon court’s royal geneticist, a dragon named Fenrir. Our species was originally supposed to be some kind of gift to the royal dragon family. And apparently Fenrir, the Royal Geneticist, had been the basis of the Fenrir wolf myth we’d grown up with courtesy of our Viking werewolf fathers, not a wolf locked up by Odin—Fensa stopped here to let me know Xenon hadn’t appreciated the North Wolves’ colorful interpretation of what he had attempted to deliver to them as a fact-based history.
According to Fensa by way of Xenon, the Royal Geneticist had petitioned to make Earth a protected territory, due to our potential to eventually develop into an advanced civilization if left alone.
Xenon and friends had been sent here to supposedly investigate those allegations—but really to get the planet set up with what they called fertility portals and to train us werewolves for the next royal hunt. To nobody’s surprise, the super corrupt investigation team sent back a report that Fenrir was wrong and of course the elite drakkon should be allowed to hunt us to their hearts’ content.
But then to everybody’s surprise, Fenrir blew up the dragon’s home planet in response.
“He was, like, an ecoterrorist before that was really a thing,” Fensa told me. “And before that, he’d designed us wolves to live amongst the humans, then aid in the fetching of them whenever dragons popped over to our planet to hunt them.
Real hashtag, it had been #toomuchtoprocess. “Okay, I’m going to pretend like I never heard that,” I told her after she explained the origin of werewolves. “I’m just going to go back to what I believed before. That humans are basic, and wolves are, like, magic. Cuz there’s no way I’m going to start saying ‘what the Fenrir Dragon.”