“I give less than two fucks if I embarrassed you in front of your friend,” she answered, coming to stand toe-to-toe with him. “You lied to me!”
“I did as I must after you did try to abscond with my pup in your belly,” he yelled back.
“I wasn’t trying to abscond with anything. I was trying to get away from you, you time-traveling psycho.”
“I know not the meaning of psycho, but understand this word to be insulting in its nature, and as I said, I will bide no more insults from you, Chloe.”
“Oh, you think that was an insult? That was nothing. Check this out,” she said before she unleashed a tide of every curse word she had ever learned and few she managed to make up right there on the spot at him. Then she tried to kick him again, but this time, he easily deflected her foot.
“Try that again, and I will—”
“What will you do?” she yelled, holding her arms out at her sides. “Drag me to some time and place, away from everyone and everything I know and love, where I am literally the only black person for hundreds of miles? Because I can’t really think of anything worse than what you’ve already done.”
“Calm yourself,” he said. “You are fortunate I have chosen to honor our lot as chosen mates after what you attempted.”
“Are you not listening to me, like, at all?” she asked. “I didn’t ask you to honor our vows. I wanted you to let me go. And you lied to me. What happened to ‘we can say fare thee well?’”
“Nay, I did not lie. I spake that mates could say fare thee well. I never promised to leave you behind. In addition, it is in the manner of the spell that I could not say it alone and be able to return to my time without you.”
“And somehow it all comes down to you, right? Who cares what I want?”
He honestly looked confused now. “I do not comprehend your meaning. What I want should be what you want. You are after all, my mate.”
She balled her hands into fists. “My meaning is I’m somebody, too. I have wants and needs and a soul and desires just like you. And maybe I don’t want to live in one of the coldest places on Earth, raising pups in a house that doesn’t even have running water.”
He stepped toward her. “I do understand because I appeared in your village with few clothes and only my sword to recommend me you may think you have mated with a pauper king. But I assure you I have much treasure, and you will have every comfort in my home. Any other she-wolf would thank the gods for their good fortune if they were to be chosen as my lifelong mate.”
“Any other woman from this time you mean.” She pointed to the ground. “Because really, what you need to be doing right now is thanking my God I’m a Christian, or I would kill you in your sleep for doing this to me.”
“You would threaten me after what you attempted to do this morntide? You would threaten me when you are the one who should be about an apology for your actions?”
“The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t floor the gas when our stupid sheriff showed up,” she grumbled, folding her arms.
“Again, I do not comprehend your meaning.”
“I mean you’re used to a certain kind of she-wolf, just lying down and taking whatever you male wolves choose to dole out. But the she-wolves from my time, we don’t play that.”
He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand before he could tell her he didn’t understand her again. “We have a saying in the wolf community: ‘Wolves mate for life, so decide how you want your life to go and treat your she-wolf accordingly.’ You obviously want to be miserable.”
Now he folded arms. “Be aware you are not the only one who has cause to be not pleased with this union. I would not have had the fated mates spell cross my lips if not for being in great need of an escape. It was either the spell or my own slaying at the hands of enemy wolves. And I especially would not have uttered the incantation if I had but known the depth of your talent for treachery.”
She held up a hand, “Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me the only reason you came back in time and ruined my entire life was not because you were looking for true love or anything, but because it was the nuclear option in some fight?”
“I do not comprehend ‘nuclear option,’ but if by this you mean—”
He suddenly cut off, his head turning sharply to the side as he sniffed the air.
And though she was angrier than she had ever been about anything in her life, including the time she was left at the side of the road by her own parents, she went quiet, sensing the danger as he did, and even more scary, the scent of five different wolves in the trees surrounding the stone cabin.
He moved to pick up his sword, which was still lying in the snow near the portal. “Stay here,” he said.
And that was all he said before he called out something in Old Norse, his eyes glittering with a new kind of anger.
Whatever is was, it smoked out four of the men hiding in the trees. They came charging toward him from all directions, hollering with axes raised high.
Fenris stood his ground, the only indication he was prepared to engage them, a slight baring of his teeth. And then the next thing she knew, he was plunging his sword through the stomach of the first man to reach him, then raising his foot to kick the man, whose belly was now smoking, backwards off his sword. He freed it just in time to duck and catch a axe, which had been hurled at his head, by its wooden handle.
For a moment he had two weapons, until he swung the axe himself, catching his second attacker right between the eyes, before raising his sword with his other arm and swinging it at a third guy. His biceps flexed hard with the effort it must have taken to decapitate the guy with one hand and with one blow.
As the now smoking head rolled through the snow, Chloe couldn’t help but be impress with Fenris’s obviously superior fighting skills. But then she saw the forth wolf behind Fenris, drawing back his arm to bring his axe down on Fenris’s head.
“Look out behind you!” she yelled into his mind.
But a thrown axe lodged in the back of the would-be killer’s head at the same time Fenris turned around, quick as a whip, and plunged his sword into the guy’s heart.
Chloe looked in the direction the last axe had flown from to see the gatekeeper grinning over his co-authored kill.
He turned to Chloe and said something in Old Norse, which Fenris mind-translated for her.
“He does apologize for his delay. His mate died many years ago, and he did have some trouble finding her pelt.”