Her Viking Wolves(18)
I think darkly of my father’s plans to breed me with a wolf who would never have wanted to have sex with me. Then I think of my mother who died in childbirth, and Alisha who hadn’t, despite giving birth to triplets several centuries in the past with zero access to modern medicine.
I think I have an idea what Alisha is getting at.
“You’re hypothesizing that fated mates might be nature’s way of assuring the continuation of the species?”
“Well, not exactly,” Alisha answers with a thoughtful frown. “That’s not how nature works. If it were up to nature, we would have either died out or evolved past our birth rate issues, which is relatively low compared to most other species on the planet. No, the portals don’t feel like nature at work. Neither do the fated mate or banishment spells. They feel more like…design.”
“So wait. What are you saying?” Tu asks. “Shifters are somehow part of God’s larger plan?”
Suddenly, a small light bulb flashes on over my head.
“No, not God,” I say out loud. “Something else.” I glance at Alisha who is trudging through the snow beside me. “You think something extraterrestrial put the portals here along with us, is that right?”
Alisha nods. “What other explanation could there be? We know the portals were put here before the advent of written language. And we know all the spells are in very ancient languages. Even the fated mate spell Rafe used to find me during the Viking Age was written in what sounds to me like some form of Proto-Mayan. We’re talking old.”
“Never mind all that old Mayan stuff. Let’s talk about the real bombshell you just dropped. You think we were, what…planted here!?” Tu asks. “Like by aliens from outer space?”
“I don’t think anything for sure,” Alisha answers. “Given how little I have to go on. My point is, every species has an origin story. Ours goes back at least as far back as the Bronze Age. And it involves a bunch of sky gods and goddesses. That’s not unusual in and of itself. Many ancient—and even some modern—cultures believed in a pantheon of gods. What is unusual is that in wolf history, ALL our pre-Christian gods are sky gods. For a species as earthbound as we are, where are the gods who represent the forest or the earth?
“But that’s not all. We are neither fully human nor fully wolf. We are able to mate with each other and, on rare occasions, certain humans. If we do manage to mate with a human, that human and any of their hybrid progeny become shifters. And unlike humans or wild wolves, our bones disintegrate less than a year after death, almost as if we were designed to leave no trace of our species behind. Last but certainly not least, we have an ancient system of portals that allow us to not only find our mate at any temporal location, but to banish rogue wolves to another time. So if magic isn’t causing all this to happen, we need to look to science. Interstellar science.”
There is a long pause where the only sound is the soft crunch-crunch-crunch of many feet walking through fresh snow.
“And so…?” I prod, wanting to hear more.
“Well, if I wanted to put a new species on an already populated planet without the original inhabitants finding out and possibly killing them, I’d design them to be like us. Make them look like the dominant species—humans—but also connect them to a widespread predator, a pack animal the dominant species respects but also fears, to keep them safe and, when needed, well hidden. And if my advanced society had, say, problems with fertility, as many advanced human societies on our planet are beginning to, I’d definitely put a system in place to help with that, too.”#p#分页标题#e#
I am hanging on to her every word, nodding along with each point she makes. That is until I do the math and see where this is all headed.
“But no wolf has come back in time from the future, have they?” I ask. “That’s why you’re so worried about the portals, because you went back in time, and so did Rafe and your friend Chloe. But as far as you know, no one’s come back from a future beyond ours.”
On the other side of Alisha, Rafe nods in somber agreement. “The number of wolves coming through the Colorado gate have been petering out for a while now. I’ve never met anyone from beyond the last century or two. And my dad says he’s only met one future wolf. She came through in the late eighties from 2007.”
“That’s not to say there aren’t any shifters using the portals in the future,” Alisha cautions. “But if there are, their names and stories have not been recorded in any historical documents I’ve been able to find.”