His twin sisters are firmly Team Mom. Nago is preoccupied with that Mississippi she-wolf. Again. And Knut—well, who knows where Knut is these days. With all the black-ops work he’s been doing for the Lupine Council, Rafes would consider it a miracle if he even managed to make it home for Christmas.
But his father’s absence really hurts. Before this, Rafe supported his oldest triplet in everything he’d ever done from his first peewee football game to his run to become the youngest Lupine Council president in North American history. The fact that he won’t be here makes Rafes feel like an orphan, despite coming from a much larger than normal wolf family.
“I don’t know, Ola,” Rafes answers his younger cousin. “How about you tell them they’re welcome for the nearly three decades they got to wait for her. For all we know—”
“Don’t say it!” Ola says, cutting him off. “Don’t you dare!”
Right. No one was ever allowed to say what had most likely happened. That the portal probably sent Myrna backwards in time or somewhere so far away from Scandinavia, she hadn’t been able to make it back to her family in Viking Age Norway. No, it would be too crazy to say that highly logical scenario out loud. Instead, they’d all rather make it look like he was literally killing this famously lost she-wolf with the Black Box Initiative.
Rafes is about to tell his cousin exactly what he thinks about her and his mom using some most likely long dead Viking shield maiden as the poster child for their protests against the Black Box Initiative, when he sees a kerfuffle in the distance.
He comes to a dead stop.
“What?” Ola asks on the screen. “What’s going on?”
But from her shit-eating grin, he can tell she already knows. His mother. That’s what’s going on. She’s somehow managed to chain herself around a big pile of black box construction materials and is now yelling a bunch of stuff about every wolf’s right to time travel at the advance crew of construction workers who showed up to set things up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Rafes closes his finger screen without bothering say goodbye to his traitorous cousin.
“Mom…” he growls as he approaches the spot where she’s chained up.
“Don’t worry,” she answers. “I’ll leave just as soon as my T.A. is done getting my side of the story.”
Rafes looks over his shoulder and sure enough, the cute blonde who asked all the convenient questions during his mother’s earlier protest speech is rolling tape on her fingers.
“Mom,” he says, barely able to keep his voice even. “I can’t touch you, but I’m more than willing to bring the power of the Lupine Council down on that acolyte of yours if you don’t tell her to close her fingers.”
Alisha glares at him. But with a suck of her teeth, she says, “Okay, Maddie, I think we got enough. Head back on back to the hotel now. I’ll meet you there before we leave for Norway tonight.”
Rafes waits until his mom’s willowy sycophant is fully out of hearing range before asking, “Why are you going to Norway this time, Mom?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, little boy.”#p#分页标题#e#
Little boy. He towers over his mother now. He’s the president of the goddamn Lupine Council for god’s sake. The most powerful wolf in the North American territories. He’s literally had Knut kill wolves for less than what his mother is doing right now. Only she would call him little boy.
And only she could get away with it.
“Mom,” Rafes says, keeping his anger locked tight behind his jaw. “I know we’re on two different sides of the portal issue—”
“With you being on the side that not only designed these monstrosities, but is also overseeing their installation,” she reminds him, folding her arms over the steel chains.
“But I’m not your enemy,” Rafes continues, refusing to take his mother’s bait.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. But then I got a call from Ola telling me you pushed these damn things through, starting with North Dakota. And before she inherited Kyle’s throne!”
Rafes inwardly curses. He knew going over Ola’s head to her lame duck uncle-in-law would piss her off, but did she really have to go crying to his mom about it?
“Mom,” he says, changing tact. “You know I love you, but I also love my people and I’m trying to protect them from the dragon threat.”
“A threat you don’t even know exists.”
“A threat you can’t convincingly prove doesn’t exist. From what FJ and Olafr told me, the dragons hit all of Scandinavia’s portal towns hard. And according to the docs you and Matt found, they might have made moves on kingdom towns in the British Isles and Asia, too. Why would they have done that if they weren’t after our time portals?”