Her Viking Wolves(79)
Nice.
No wonder my grandfather, Leroy Greenwolf, an upstart black biker from Arkansas, ended up taking over the pack in the sixties. You can accuse Granddad of a lot of bad things—and I do mean a lot. As in, I’m pretty sure the FBI still has a file on him somewhere in a dusty archive. But he is not a coward.
Not only did he relocate the kingdom town to Michigan proper, he made Detroit, his adopted town, our home base. Even going so far as to name our pack after it. Which is why it came as a complete surprise to just about every damn body when Granddad decided to retire to the old kingdom house after officially handing over the state pack to my father.
Granddad turned out to be a lot like me. He enjoys his solitude. We’re technically never invited up here unless it’s Thanksgiving. And even then its not a one hundred percent guarantee he’ll let us spend the night after dinner’s done. There have been a couple of years when Granddad’s gotten so irritated with having all of us “up in his house too long,” that we’ve ended up heading out early to a hotel, with him yelling after us that we might not be invited back next year. No wonder Uncle Ford never visits.
Speaking of which, on the drive up here I’d had a furious back-and-forth WTF??? text conversation with him. Because his promise to keep FJ and Olafr contained back in Alaska obviously hadn’t been kept.
He texted back a long grumble about Uncle Tikaani interceding on their behalf because of something my cousin Alisha told him. And FJ pulling a sword. And how there wasn’t “nothing he could do about it.” In other words, he’d been forced to let them go.
Ford had hoped their remote location in the Alaska wilderness and lack of knowledge about planes, trains, and automobiles would keep them from coming after me. But after going into town for a few hours, they holed up in FJ’s room, talking to Alisha on a cell phone.
At some point in the evening, they slipped out of the kingdom house and that was the last anybody saw of them.
It didn’t take long for Uncle Ford to realize what they planned to do. But by then, it was too late. With Alisha’s apparent help, the brothers simply waited out the hours it took me to land in Michigan. Then they went outside and spoke the fated mate spell again.
And so here I am. Tramping through the snow with a pup in my belly. Their pup. Trying to figure out how to tell my murderous alpha king father I have not one, but two mates. And desperately trying to come up with a plan to stop him and Yancey from shooting both of them on sight.
Something chitters a short distance away and my father actually pulls his sawed-off. Until he sees that the small squirrel racing up a nearby tree trunk is not the shifter he’s looking for. He lowers his weapon with an aggravated shake of his head.#p#分页标题#e#
“Why do all these portals have to be up in the fuckin’ mountains? Always out in the middle of nowhere,” he complains.
My father hates the middle of nowhere. Aside from a few visits to my grandfather, he’s spent his entire life mostly within the city limits of Detroit, and he still doesn’t understand why his father retired here. Especially since Dad’s inability to become one with nature is technically Granddad’s fault. Back in the late sixties, he moved our kingdom town to Hidden Hills, a gated community recently abandoned due to white flight. And now we’re one of the very few states with a kingdom house situated in a city rather than in a small town close to the state’s portal.
The move to Detroit was never an issue because our state’s portal hadn’t worked in, well, forever. Until now, that is. Which is why my father was forced to drive several hours from Detroit to kill whoever it was that came through the gate.
Poor Dad, I think to myself, with a totally unsympathetic roll of my eyes.
I try opening my mind link again. “Are you there? Olafr? FJ?” I ask, mentally reaching out to both of them over our mate bond. “If you can hear me, you need to run. My dad is on his way and he will kill you if he sees you.”
Silence.
I mentally kick myself once more for not anticipating this. Not just that Uncle Ford would fail to keep the brothers contained in the Alaska kingdom house, but for not realizing they could easily track me down in Michigan by simply repeating the fated mate spell.
If I’d been a few miles south or west of here, the brothers could have easily ended up at the Wisconsin or Indiana gates. Which would have been better. Both those kingdoms are legitimate. In other words, they don’t depend on illegal activities to fund their crowns like Detroit does. If my two Vikings had landed elsewhere, it would have bought me some time and kept them safe. And provided some potentially supportive witnesses, who, I like to think, would not have been okay with my dad showing up out of the blue and killing two time-traveling wolves in their territory.