IT took Chloe quite a few shocked moments before she was able to speak again. “Well, wow. Um, can you tell him I’m not going anywhere with him and I would like him to return home to his own time period? Now.”

After looking up a few words, the professor translated, and the Viking’s eyes shined with amusement as he answered.

The professor translated, “He’s basically saying, no, you will come with him. And even if he was willing to leave you here, which he isn’t, he won’t go back with out you.”

She shook her head. “Who do you think you are?” she asked the Viking directly. “You can’t just step into my time and tell me to come to yours. I have a life here. And that wolf you were trying to fight earlier is the person I’ve chosen to spend the rest of my life with. Not you.”

The professor had to look a few more words up in order to translate. But before he could even finish doing so the Viking was shaking his head and pounding his chest for emphasis.

“He says he will spray Rafe’s blood across the snow for his insult—it’s actually some pretty poetic stuff he’s saying. Very Beowulf-esque. But the main point is he wants you to know you are his.”

“Can you explain to him in my time period, men don’t own women? They don’t drag them around by the hair, and he can’t tell me what to do.”

The professor flipped through the pages of his dictionary. “I can try.”

“Good,” she said, standing. “Exhibit number one can be me walking out of here to go be with the man I’ve chosen and love.”

And she did just that, her own righteous anger fueling her steps.

But that anger faded when she found Rafe sitting on the clinic steps, hunched over with his fists balled up on top of his knees.

She dropped down beside him and strung her arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry that happened,” she whispered.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. But he leaned over toward her and Chloe was pretty certain he sniffed her for evidence of arousal before saying, “It’s not your fault. This is some fucked up shit, but it’s not your fault.”

Her heart flooded with love for him then. And she nuzzled against his shoulder in the friendly way they used to before Rafe came into his manhood, before his brotherly affection became muddied with lust.

“I’ll move in with you,” she said.

He turned to her. “What?”

“I’ll move in with you after the full moon. I want everyone, including your father, to know how much I love you and how committed I am to you and only you.” She nudged him. “But you’re going to have to get rid of that TV in the kitchen. I hate it.”

He cupped her face in his warm hand. It was in the twenties that day, but wolves ran hot—male wolves even more so than female ones. “You just made me a very happy man.”

“I want to be with you. I choose you,” she told him.

“Well, I think you made the right choice,” Rafe said, patting her knee. “Now, seriously, you want me to kill that chicken for you before I leave for work, right?”

Chloe let her head fall against her shoulder in embarrassment. “Right. I tried to do it myself this morning, but it looked at me with these big innocent eyes.”

Rafe shook his head and chuckled.

“I know, I know,” she said, before he could. “Worst wolf ever.”

* * *

The day passed quickly with Chloe rushing to finish up her chicken and fennel recipe and get it edited and posted online before the full moon rose. Generally, Rafe bounced back from shifting with energy to spare, but turning into a wolf and then back into a human took a lot out of her. It often took up to forty-eight hours for her to sleep it off, and back when she’d been in school, almost all of her absences had been due to recovering from her monthly shift.

Rafe thought this was because she chose to cage herself up during full moon nights as opposed to running with the pack as he did. But as civilized as modern werewolves were in human form these days, they became particularly wild when they shifted, or “got wolf” as Rafe referred to it. They spent the entire night, in what seemed to Chloe to be a hunting-lust, taking out animals big and small, or whatever else crossed their paths.

A few times human hikers, who had ignored all the “No Trespassing” signs at the foot of Wolf Mountain, had gone missing or survived the attack and gotten changed into werewolves themselves. Back in the eighties, the number of wolf attacks had gotten so bad the North American Lupine Council had strictly forbidden shifting outside of full moon nights, just to keep the damages to a minimum.

In any case, it just wasn’t in Chloe’s nature to “get wolfed,” so she chose to shift in the confines of her own home rather than running to the mountain with her fellow wolves.

About an hour before sunset, Doc Fischer called to tell her they’d made little to no progress in convincing the Viking to go back to his time. “He keeps telling the professor he can’t go back without you. I’ll cage him up before sunset, but we can’t just keep him chained to a bed when he turns back into a human. I think it’s time to bring the king in to handle this.”

“Why do we have to bring the king into it?” she asked. “He can’t make me go back in time with him.”

“No he can’t, that’s why we’re going to have to consult with him. We’re at a stalemate, and he’ll have to decide how to handle it.”

Chloe rubbed a hand over her face. If anyone else were her mate, the king, who was an otherwise fair and level-headed leader, would side with the she-wolf. But since she was engaged to his son, he might just decide to declare their engagement null and void, if it meant freeing Rafe up to mate with another. The king liked her well enough, but he liked the king of Alaska’s three daughters even better, and if he could forge an alliance and get grandpups, he’d probably be more than willing to kick Chloe to the curb.

Rafe had been right, if they had any hope of his father ruling in their favor, they had to make a strong show of commitment by moving in together.

“Or I could kill him,” Rafe said when she called to give him the update. “That would solve everything.”

“Rafe, you can’t take a life. You may ‘get wolf’ one night a month, but you’re still half-human and bound by council law.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rafe muttered. “I’m just glad we’re moving in together, even if it’s under these circumstances.”

“Me too,” she lied, looking with real regret around her homey kitchen, which was pretty much the exact opposite of Rafe’s uninviting and sterile one.

After she got off the phone, she started making her own preparations for the night’s turn. Unlike Rafe, who simply met up with a bunch of his friends in the woods and stripped out of his clothes before shifting, her preparations were a bit more civilized. First, she plated up the rest of the chicken and fennel recipe and put it in the refrigerator. If she was lucky, it would be enough to tide her over for the next forty-eight hours. Next, she turned off all but a few lights and dug out a fresh pair of pajamas to wear the next day before descending the stairs into her basement. This was where her washing machine, dryer, and wolf cage lived.

The cage had come with the house. Wolves who didn’t care to roam the countryside all night locked themselves in cages, so as to keep from destroying their homes as wolves were wont to do. Luckily for her, the house’s last owner had felt as she had about turning outdoors and had installed a custom floor-to-ceiling cage.

When she moved in, she’d added the further amenity of covering the hard concrete floor with cushions made from the same soft but synthetic fabric used in chew-proof dog beds. She’d also placed her foster mother’s record player outside the cage, so she’d have some form of entertainment while she waited for the turn. She usually spent her evenings crafting or reading, but she couldn’t bring anything that she didn’t want destroyed inside the cage, so that wasn’t an option.

Listening to Myrna’s old R&B records somehow made it feel like her foster mother was still alive and in her next-door cage, speaking soothing words to the pup Chloe had once been, while they both waited for the turn.

Myrna had possessed more heart than money, so she’d only been able to afford cramped dog cages for herself and the abandoned she-wolf pup she volunteered to care for. But still, Chloe had valued the fourteen years they had together, and liked to think back to those days when she curled up in her own cage, which was luxurious by comparison.

That night, she put the soundtrack to Mahogany on before closing herself into the cage and stripping down to her panties. She put the cage’s key into the box on the far wall. Key boxes were another clever werewolf invention. They were placed just high enough so she couldn’t get to it in wolf form, but could easily access it when she was human again and let herself out of her cage. This was another step up from the one Myrna had provided. Back then, they’d had to wait for Rafe’s mother to come and let them out.

Rafe’s mother had already told her she expected Chloe to take over the royal duty of opening the cages once she and Rafe were properly mated, and Chloe would be more than happy to do so. She liked that she’d be of true service once she became part of the royal Colorado family, and she was excited about her many upcoming duties. She just hoped the Viking didn’t ruin everything for her.

With a sigh, she put the heavy cage key into the built-in box and laid down, covering herself up with the warm, indestructible fire blanket she kept in the cage for full moon nights. She then closed her eyes, listening to Diana Ross sing while she waited.

She soon dozed off and therefore didn’t realize something was wrong until the music stopped playing, and the thunk of the needle slipping off the record jolted her awake.

She sat up, her eyes going to the basement window. But no, it was dark outside. Now that the music had stopped playing, she could even hear the far-off howls of her freshly-turned pack members. So why was she still in human form?

Her body began to tingle. At first she thought maybe it was the turn, come late, and she got to her knees, preparing to go feral. But the turn didn’t happen, and the tingling continued, spreading over her still-human body until she was flush with fever, and sweating from the unrelenting prickling underneath her skin. It was as if all of her nerve endings had electricity coursing through them.

She must be sick, she thought. Usually wolf-sicknesses took the form of things like rabies, which contrary to her current situation, kept them in wolf form long after the sun had risen again. But maybe this was a wolf-sickness she had never heard of before.

She ran her hands over her face, which was flush but didn’t seem to have anything wrong with it. She touched her neck next, checking her thyroid, but it seemed to be okay, too.

She ran her hands over her arms and legs, and even cupped her breast to give herself a self-examination. She’d never heard of a she-wolf contracting breast cancer, but since wolves weren’t allowed to talk about being wolves on the internet, you never knew…

When her hand grazed her nipple, a sweet pain zapped through her, freezing her where she knelt and causing her to draw in her breath and then release it again with a short gasp. She looked down and saw that her nipples were now as hard as rocks. And as if they had minds of their own, her hands started kneading her breasts, her thumbs strumming over black-cherry-colored buds again and again, unable to stop themselves from exploring the sensations this action caused within her body.

Soon she felt a tugging sensation below, and the lips of her most intimate part clenched in and out in a wet silent beg, before it began to release something even she could now recognize as heat.

She was in heat, she realized foggily, literally dripping with the need to have a wolf mate with her. But Rafe was somewhere on the mountain, running through the night with his fellow pack members.

Chloe dimly recalled a Health class, in which they were informed that she-wolves in heat didn’t turn, even during a full moon, nature’s way of cutting down on possible birth defects. No, once you went into heat, you stayed in heat until you were mated with a pup in your belly. And after that, neither you nor your mate turned again until three months after the baby’s birth.

For the first time in her life, she touched her pussy for a reason other than cleaning it. The clenching was so insistent, the tentative rubbing against the swollen bulb between her folds proved to be too little. She was soon plunging her fingers into her tunnel, working them in and out, trying to find some relief.

But if anything, this only made it worse. As if angered by her meager offering, her pussy clenched even tighter, sucking her fingers into its vise grip, but refusing to be satiated by anything less than a mate’s cock. Soon, tears of frustration began to roll down her cheeks. They weren’t even an hour into the full moon and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear the wait for Rafe to change back and come find her.

“Please, please…” she begged no one in particular as she rubbed herself against the mat, trying desperately to find some sort of release.

And that was when his scent filled her nostrils. She opened her teary eyes and found the Viking standing at the bottom of her stairs. He had clearly been watching her trying to masturbate. And his eyes were hot with one hundred percent unadulterated and extremely feral lust.