Her Viking Wolves(17)

I feel a pang of guilt, recalling our last conversation. The woeful way he’d looked at me when I accused him of being disloyal to his actual family. I guess I’m just one other person making things tough on the beta widower this year.

“Is anyone taking care of him?” I ask, thinking about my original princess duty, starting from when I was ten. Pressing bottles of Gatorade into the hands of male wolves as they left our parties. The Detroit Alpha’s version of hospitality.

I also remember what my father told me after he and Evelyn let Yancey move into our kingdom house when I was five. “It’s the beta’s job to protect the royal family, but don’t ever forget that goes both ways. We royals gotta take care of our betas, too.”

But before Uncle Tikaani can answer my concerned question about Ford, we arrive in the residential part of town to find a group of concerned Wolf Lake citizens waiting for us. All dressed in pajamas and snow boots and wanting to know about the big flash of light on the mountain. I listen as Uncle Tikaani tells all of them go back inside, don’t worry, everything is under control.#p#分页标题#e#

To my surprise, they actually do what he tells them to without requiring Uncle Tikaani to so much as fire a warning shot. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only guns being carried in our little group are tranquilizers. Things really are different here, I think with an internal shake of my head.

It makes me wonder if Dad’s refusal to bring my brother and me to visit has more to do with him not knowing how to function in a place where a sawed-off isn’t considered an essential negotiating tool, and less about his distrust for “any motherfucking place that don’t got street lights.” For the record, this is also why we only visit my granddad in the Upper Peninsula kingdom house once a year for Thanksgiving.

However, my enthusiasm for this decidedly un-Detroitian adventure rapidly starts to wane as we make our way up the mountain, trudging through at least a foot-high blanket of virgin snow. My Adidas high tops might be fine for coding back in my snug, well-heated room, but they are nowhere near the right footwear for this challenge. My poor feet are wet and freezing within a few minutes of the journey. Lucky for me, we shifters tend to run hot.

I also have my curiosity to keep me warm. Along with Alisha’s quick knowledge dump on everything she’s learned about the portals over the last few years, which is to say, not much.

The North American Lupine Council remains terrified the humans might find out about our existence, especially with the increased sophistication of technology. So they have banned any online mention of our packs, our ways, or our very existence. In other words, it’s not like Alisha can simply use Google to get more information about the portals.

The truth is, being a werewolf historian sounds like one of the suckiest jobs ever. According to Alisha, most universities with a secret wolf program (and one can be found in nearly every state of the union  ) have large resource libraries. That’s all well and good. But if you want something from another university’s library, you have to physically go to that university, photocopy the data, and bring it back. Nothing can be sent digitally or even by fax.

Quite frankly, listening to Alisha makes me glad I decided not to bother with college before starting She-Wolf. Still, I’m grateful for the little information Alisha has managed to gather on the portals—which for argument’s sake, we’ll call magical, since no one’s even remotely close to figuring out the science behind how they work.

But of course Alisha has a few theories.

“There are only a handful of gate spells and the vast majority are there for two purposes: to provide a quick and dirty way for communities to remove unwanted wolves, and to make it possible for wolves to find their soul mates—the so-called ‘fated mate’ spell. According to my limited research, those who pair off using the fated mate spell tend to produce large broods. My friend Chloe had three pups, already above average for most shifters. And, well, you already know about Rafe and our five little ones.”

At that point, Janelle’s mate, Mag, turns around to glare at his sister-in-law.

“What are you trying to say?” he asks, his moonlit eyes dark with accusation. “That Janelle and I only had two pups because we’re not fated mates? Like you guys are more ‘official’ than we are because of your mate bond?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Alisha answers, with the academic sangfroid of a professor born. “In fact, I would never say something like that without the hard data to back it up. I’m simply citing my observations, which I’m using as the foundation for a much bigger hypothesis—an incredibly shaky one, given the small sample size of my fated mate group. But there isn’t a single historical mention I’ve found of a fated mate pairing resulting in anything less than three pups. And some fated mates have had as many as ten! You have to admit that’s unusual in a society where the average is one pup for females who go into heat over the age of twenty-five, and two for females who start heat earlier. It’s also interesting considering how many females and young used to die in childbirth. These days, our ranks have become larger than ever, but that’s mostly due to human advances in medicine that make it possible for our hybrid species to procreate and have young more easily than we used to.”#p#分页标题#e#