Total silence, only relieved by birdsong and the faint hum of the small craft the construction workers used to hover in to the construction site. Which reminded Rafes…
He has work to do here. And no time for bleeding hearts—even if this one is his mother. He walks away from her dramatic chain show towards the portal that will be contained within the black box by the end of the day, no matter what she says.
“Face Clyde,” he says, elling his fingers open.
“What’s up, little cuz,” Clyde says, his face filling up the finger screen an instant later.
Ignoring the glare of his mother’s disappointed eyes on his back, Rafes says, “Clyde we’ve got a problem. I need you to—”
The portal erupts right in front of him, emitting a sound like a contained sonic boom. Then comes a sharp burst of light illuminating everything and everyone at the construction site before it contracts back inside the portal like a nuclear mushroom cloud.
But not before leaving something behind.
Behind him, he hears his mother and the construction workers gasp. And Rafes’s own eyes widen as a woman with curly red hair and brown skin raises up to her arms from where she’s been unceremoniously dumped on the time gate’s grassy meadow. Obviously disoriented, she climbs to her feet, legs shaky, like a newly born foal.#p#分页标题#e#
Rafes’ heart stops. She’s naked. Completely naked save for her mouth which is covered in blood.
But despite that…and despite how he knows he should be responding to this situation, Rafes can’t stop his eyes from traveling up and down her body. Taking in her full breasts with their dark brown aureolas and the wide hips creating such a nice canvas for the feminine triangle housed within.
Staring at her, he feels himself harden inside his slacks. Every ounce of his fiber whispering one word: “Mine.”
And somewhere in the distance, he hears his mother say, “Myrna? Myrna is that you?”
* * *
THE VIKING GIRL HAS ARRIVED.
Standing on the balcony of his hotel suite, Damianos, or simply Anos as he is known during this iteration of his lifetime, reads the words on his finger screen once, then twice, then three more times.
Finally he closes the floating screen with a quick tap of both his index fingers against both of his thumbs and turns to watch the sun cast a yellow shadow over Lycaeon as it sets in the distance. Nestled in the hills of a remote island called Lukos, the sleepy village is so small and underdeveloped, it has never become a human tourist site. To most eyes, it looks like there’s nothing much here. Just a collection of square white houses with blue doors and one lonely two-story hotel with a terracotta roof. The hotel doesn’t even bother to advertise.
Yet if a human tried to make a reservation, he’d find the hotel at capacity. Fully booked up year-round by a certain kind of traveler. Wolf travellers who preferred to stay in a place—a kingdom town, as they called the communities that sprouted around their time portals—where they’d be free to shift during the full moon.
But even those shifter travelers had no idea this particular hotel was open to wolves but not actually owned by one.
No, Anos bought this place in a secret deal many years ago, when the country was going through a financial crisis and the Greek alpha found he was in need of liquid funds. Anos happened to have such funds and also a willingness to keep the details of their agreement completely secret. So the Greek alpha sold to him, just like the Italian alpha, and the Romania alpha, and quite a few other alphas who’d panicked during their country’s financial downturns—a few of which he himself had orchestrated.
If you live long enough, you learn a few things.
And now he had finally lived long enough.
The girl from the woods was here. Which meant it was time. Finally.
All their plans. All their dreams. They’d pay off soon.
Behind Anos, the balcony’s sliding glass doors whisper open and close.
“Sir, may I get you anything else?” Colby, his faithful human assistant, asks with a dip of his gray head as he hands him his nightly glass of wine.
Colby’s been with him a long time—at least by human standards. And he’s proven himself invaluable. Like his father who served Anos before him, he performs every task with discretion and without question. And like his father before him, he has never asked why Anos never appears to age much.
“That will be all, Colby,” Anos answers the old man with a dip of his large head. “But before you leave for the evening, please turn on some music.”
The speakers in this hotel are very old. So old they still have to be accessed through a physical device via a Bluetooth connection located in his suite’s sitting room.