Chapter Two
D rip, drip, drip .
The sound of water falling filled my ears as I awoke again and was immediately confused about where I was.
Was the ceiling leaking in one of the exhibits again? Albert was going to get pissed if we had to go in and fix things when our schedule was busy enough because we already had to shift several exhibits around to accommodate the King Arthur one, so if maintenance hadn’t fixed the roof, which they swore up and down that they had, they were going to see the normally proper British man lose his mind.
Rolling onto my back with a groan, I worked to open my eyes. It wasn’t like me to nap at work even if some of the other designers always tried to sneak in some shut eye on the little cot we kept in the office.
Trini wasn’t going to let me hear the end of it if she found me.
I could already hear her teasing: ‘I thought you said it was ‘unprofessional’ to nap at work, Gwenny.’
It was unprofessional—but I must have felt sick or something because here I was obviously doing it myself. I just never thought the cot would be so damned uncomfortable. They always made it look so cozy, but to me it was lumpy and uncomfortable, like I was lying on a pile of straw rather than the taut fabric pulled over a metal frame.
And where were the soft blankets they always kept neatly folded next to it? Whatever was over my legs was scratchy .
Drip, drip, drip.
The sound of water falling again brought me back to the main issue at hand. I needed to get up and find Albert to let him know that if the ceiling in the office was leaking because of the storm that had been hovering for the past week, that there were definitely going to be other spots in the museum that would be leaking as well.
I opened my eyes—or at least—I thought I opened my eyes. I could physically feel them open but instead of seeing the shabby, dim office where they kept us design folks I saw absolutely nothing.
Had the power gone out during my impromptu nap?
My lips pulled down into a confused frown as the haze of sleep started to fade from my mind.
No, none of that was right. The last thing I remembered hadn’t been working, though I had been at the museum.
Charles had brought me there and taken me into the King Arthur exhibit…
Then there’d been a glowing sword and then nothing at all, I realized with a soft gasp.
“Are you finally awake?” a voice asked me in a strange, lilting accent as the inky darkness all around me was penetrated by a soft green glow from what looked to be crystals hanging from the ceiling.
As my surroundings became clearer, I realized I definitely was not in the museum anymore but instead inside of a cave with a low ceiling.
I sat up, trying to stave off the sudden wave of nausea that came with going vertical too fast and wheeled myself around in the direction where the voice had come from.
Standing a few feet away from me was a man. He seemed unassuming enough, though his clothing was strange. He was dressed in what looked like a gray-blue tunic over a flowy white shirt and a pair of what looked to be some kind of animal skin pants underneath.
If I wasn’t trapped in a strange cave with him I would have almost thought he was one of the actors the museum hired to dress in period clothing and act like people from different time periods.
But the man’s eyes seemed to glow in the dim light, chasing that notion away entirely. He wasn’t bad to look at with his grungy devil-may-care stubble and curly hair that seemed to stick up in all directions like he had a habit of running his fingers through it.
He looked almost normal—even handsome—but those eyes of his coupled with the fact that I’d somehow been kidnapped told me he was anything but. My instincts were telling me to calm down, that the man wouldn’t hurt me, but I’d never been one to listen to those anyway so I tamped down on them hard as I shot him a glare.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, my voice rough and groggy still.
The crystals lightened even more, changing color to a paler light that let me see that not only did his eyes glow, they glowed green as he stared at me, his mustache twitching down with his frown.
“I know it’s a lot to take in but there is no need for such aggression, Guinevere.”
I wanted to snort derisively at his tone, but rule number one of getting kidnapped was not to piss off your captor and my sarcasm had gotten me in trouble before.
“Who are you?” I repeated again, more nicely this time as I slowly started to scoot backwards away from him until my back hit the cold wall and I could feel the dampness of it. “And where am I?”
The man took a step forward and my hand shot up to stop him. He paused before holding both of his hands up like I was some kind of animal needing to be soothed.
“My name is Merlin and I’ve been looking all over for you, Guinevere.”
I flinched at the use of my full name again. I thought I’d heard it more in the past twenty-four hours than in the last year of my life and it was like I could hear the echo of my mother saying it even as it rolled off of the man’s tongue.
“Gwen,” I corrected him as I started to shiver from the chill of the wall. Bringing my knees up, I hugged my arms around them in an attempt to ward off the cold.
Glowing eyes shifted away from my face to my shaking shoulders. “Apologies for your surroundings, this cave does me well when I need to gather my magic, but I fear it is very uncomfortable for most others.”
He lifted a hand, his fingertips lighting up with the same glowing green color of his eyes and the cold wall behind me started to heat up like a heating pad, soothing away the shivers as he crouched down in front of me.
I gawked at him, my brain struggling to come to terms with what I’d just seen and completely glossing past it. Maybe he had some lights on his fingertips and heated walls like some people could install in their bathroom floors. Yeah, that was it. Definitely not magic.
“I am sorry for pulling you so abruptly out of your timeline as, ironically enough, I was running out of time to get you here,” he told me with a soft chuckle, his eyes crinkling in the corners and softening his whole face.
Despite myself, my shoulders relaxed at the sight of it, my instincts once again rearing their ugly head to simper at me that this man wouldn’t hurt me with no evidence to back it up.
I was also going to ignore that little tidbit about a timeline. I didn’t know what that was about and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like the answer he was going to give. No, for now I needed to focus on the location we were currently in and try to figure out a way to get out and get to the police.
“Where is here ?” I asked, gesturing to the cave. “Are we still in London? Where is Charles?”
Not that I cared to see him, but if he was also kidnapped somewhere I felt like I should at least say something.
But Merlin just frowned and shook his head.
“Charles? Who is Charles? You are the only one I pulled through the sword, Guine—Gwen,” he said, quickly correcting himself with a sheepish smile.
“The sword? Are you saying you pulled me through a sword? How?” The glowing fingers I’d ignored before were coming back to bite me as I watched the man chew on the inside of his cheek like he was trying to figure out how to break some bad news to me.
“Well…” Merlin began just as something underneath me started to glow. The lumpy makeshift bed I’d been lying on began to shift underneath me like a sinkhole had opened and I was slowly being sucked inside.
I moved to get up, to get off of the suddenly unsteady floor and move to safety, but my legs wouldn’t obey me as they started to sink into what could only be described as a glowing crevice. “What are you doing? Are you doing this?”
Merlin shook his head roughly, his mouth agape as he reached out for me and a shock of electricity made him withdraw with a hiss. “I think the gods are telling me it’s time for you to meet them, I’m afraid they aren’t the most patient beings…”
“Meet who?” I blurted as I scrabbled at the edge of the hole for purchase. If I could just get a good handhold I could get out of this. “Help me!”
But Merlin just shook his head as he leaned in close so that our faces were only an inch from each other.
He has no scent, my brain whispered in realization as the man spoke. How is that possible? Even betas have scents.
“I will follow as soon as I am able, Gwen, do not panic. You are in the time your soul was always meant to exist in. Things will be confusing for the time being, but Arthur will take care of you. He is much too chivalrous not to.”
“What?” I asked with a shout as a roaring sound filled my ears as my shoulders sank into the hole and the last thing I saw before darkness closed in around me was Merlin’s concerned face before I fell.
Wind whipped around me, forcing me to swallow my scream as it tugged at the strange clothing that I hadn’t been wearing a moment ago.
Pale blue skirts flipped up around my face, temporarily blinding me as the sensation of dropping thousands of feet filled my stomach, like the drop of a roller coaster except this lasted longer than any coaster I’d ever been on.
Then, with an audible pop, I wasn’t falling through darkness anymore but through balmy, damp smelling air and into someone’s arms.
The sound of people’s gasps filled my ears as I tried to reorient myself, the strong arms keeping me from falling straight on my ass tightened as my feet dangled pitiably.
I sucked in a breath, taking in a mouthful of the man’s heady, spiced scent and gasping as my insides tightened with anticipation. My suppressants must have been wearing off because normally the scents of alphas were a dull echo compared to the blast I was getting from the man clutching me tightly in his arms.
The man in question also sucked in a gasp and something vibrated in his chest for a moment before stopping abruptly as my toes finally brushed the uneven ground beneath us.
My eyes fluttered open and I was staring into a pair of the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen—like the tropical ocean on a sunny day the eyes of the man in front of me practically shimmered in the surrounding torch light.
Wait , I paused, torch light ?
“Are you well?” the man holding me in his arms asked, his deep voice tinged with confusion as he let me slide down the front of him and despite myself I couldn’t help but notice how rigid and firm his torso was.
He looked like something straight out of a medieval Hollywood movie with his square jaw that was only barely disguised by the red-gold beard and neatly coiffed hair.
As Trini would have said: Me likey .
Which was a completely inappropriate thought for the predicament I now found myself in.
His clothes were also something different than I’d ever seen before, the deep rouge doublet he was wearing was embroidered with shining gold thread, forming a triumphant dragon over his breast that was bisected by the gold filigree chain spanning from one side of his shoulders to the other.
All of that was encapsulated by the burnished gold crown twinkling just above his furrowed brow as he stared down at me.
Uncomfortable, I stepped out of his arms and away from him, needing to catch my breath outside of the sphere of his mouth-watering scent. It had been so long since I’d smelled any alpha in this capacity, so it made sense that it was affecting me so much… but even still there was something nagging me deep in my mind that the man’s spicy cinnamon and nutmeg scent was not normal by any means.
“My king, is all well?” someone asked from behind me. “I had no clue you had such a display planned with the princess.”
“Princess?” the man asked, wheeling back, his red-gold beard twitching with confusion as he looked from me to whoever had spoken. “What princess?”
There was a pause before the same voice, more hesitant this time, replied, “Princess Guinevere, your Majesty, our host’s daughter?”
“Arthur, my friend, when we conversed earlier this evening you told me you had no preference on omegas,” a new man said as he came into my vision. He was shorter than the man in front of me and older, his dark curly hair and gray-streaked beard highlighting that as he grinned and clapped the man—Arthur—on the back.
My brain had started to connect the dots earlier when the strange man in the cave had introduced himself as Merlin, but with the man’s name, the strange clothing, and the torches placed around what looked to be a clearing of trees, things were starting to become abundantly clear.
“I must have fallen and hit my head or something,” I muttered under my breath as I reached up to touch my head only to find that there was a crown woven into my curls. “Yep, I’m definitely in a coma somewhere. That explains it.”
“Explains what, my heart?” the older man asked, turning to me with a frown. “And what is a coma?”
“Leodegrance, are you saying this maiden is your daughter? When did you father a child?”
Leodegrance threw his head back and laughed. “Do you jest, Arthur? Guinevere has been the light of my immeasurably long life forever. You used to tell me how delightful she was when she was a small child and you were just a boy-king, do you not remember?”
Arthur’s head whipped towards me as his frown turned suspicious. “What manner of magic are you using to trick these people? I could feel it sizzling on your skin when I touched you.”
I opened my mouth to speak—to defend myself from the sudden accusation—because how dare he accuse me when I was clearly the one so out of my element here?
And why was this strange man calling me his daughter? In my twenty-six years on earth I’d never had a father.
Donor X34S2 was the only name I had off of the sperm bank paperwork my mother kept in the attic, shoved out of sight in case I ever developed some sort of genetic abnormality.
No, Adelaide Ramos always claimed that she had never wanted to be married, instead happy to focus on her career as a financial analyst. She’d also never wanted children until, as she told me when I was small, she began having dreams about me.
Not wanting to be married never changed, but she did seek out a donor so that she could have me at nearly forty. I grew up never needing a father because my mother had literally done it all for me while also being a busy career woman. There was never any gap to fill.
Now this man in front of me was suddenly calling himself my father and I was having trouble keeping up.
Especially because, somehow in this fucked up reality my surely comatose brain had conjured up, this man actually looked like me.
He had the same brown eyes and dark curly hair, and not only that, when he turned and shot me a smile, my dimple which my mother had loved so much, winked in his cheek.
Leodegrance’s smile disappeared and suddenly the cheerful man was replaced with someone much different, much more dangerous. “Trick? Arthur you best watch your words, my child would never trick any—”
There was a clap of thunder overhead, which was strange because the night sky was completely clear of clouds, and suddenly the man from the cave appeared next to Arthur’s shoulder.
“I see I am too late for the betrothal,” he said cheerfully, his eyes locking in on me. Do not say anything, Gwen, just let me handle this.
At first, I thought he’d said the words out loud, but even after they’d been said they still echoed in my head like he was underpinning his message so that I didn’t do anything he deemed stupid.
“Merlin, by the gods is it really you?” Arthur gasped, seeming to momentarily forget all about me as he rounded on the man and pulled him into a ferocious hug. It was so aggressive that I was pretty sure I heard the shorter man’s bones crack as he groaned.
“Arthur, you know I enjoy when my bones remain whole in my body,” Merlin said, his voice tight as he gave the bigger man a few pats on the back.
Arthur’s blue eyes darkened as he frowned at the man. “It has been nearly ten years since you’ve disappeared, so forgive me if I am surprised by your sudden reappearance.”
“I was busy communing with the gods about your future wife.” Merlin stepped away from Arthur and turned so that he was standing next to me. “ Princess Guinevere is who the gods have indicated their preference for, she is the omega I once told you of, remember?”
It was my turn to gawk at him and his hand whipped up to grip mine tightly. Again, Guinevere, say nothing.
It’s Gwen, you pompous ass, I shot back, and judging by the way his fingers twitched on mine, he’d definitely heard the retort in my mind.
Leodegrance’s foul mood seemed to lighten up at Merlin’s words because the king clapped his hands together. “Wonderful, if Merlin says so, then it must be true! Tonight, we celebrate!”
The crowd roared with delight, holding up wooden steins of what looked like a pale ale as the music began again. The shift was so abrupt that I felt off-balance from suddenly not being the center of everyone’s attention.
Instead, there were only a few faces in the crowd still looking at me with confusion, not to mention the angry alpha who was still glancing between me and Merlin.
“Merlin you had better have a good reason for—” Arthur began but Merlin cut him off, which I had a feeling was a common occurrence with the green-eyed man.
“I will explain everything to you in great detail, my friend, but for now I must speak with the princess for I believe she will have far more questions for me than you will,” Merlin said, tugging me down the little raised crop of land that Arthur had been standing on, leaving the king behind with a dumbfounded look on his face.
“Hey!” I protested as he pulled me out of the crowd into a copse of trees, away from the prying eyes of the partygoers who had all but forgotten about me again.
I yanked my arm out of his grasp and glared at him. “Okay, this is going too far and I’d like to wake up now.”
Merlin’s brown brows drew together as he finally looked at me for the first time since he’d appeared in a literal crash of lightning earlier. “Whatever do you mean?”
“This,” I said, gesturing to the medieval merrymaking happening behind him. “It’s obvious that I’ve fallen and hit my head—or better yet I somehow got hit by a car coming out of that shitty date with Charles. It was bound to happen eventually with the way people drive in London. I’m in a coma of delusion because we were just in the King Arthur exhibit and I was missing my mom. Really cool, but now I want to wake up, please.”
Merlin was quiet for a moment before he shook his head. “Gwen you were not hit by a car, nor are you in a coma.”
“Then how do you, Merlin, King Arthur’s trusted wizard, know what the hell a car is? That’s not necessarily something a person from medieval England would know. Not only that, aren’t you supposed to be, I don’t know, old? Only my mind would conjure you up as a hot wizard, so I must be in a coma.” I pointed at my head for good measure as if a gash from some kind of head injury would reveal itself by doing so.
At least, that was always what the dream psychologists wrote that it would. Acknowledge the dream and it won’t have any power over you anymore.
And yet here I still stood, in a blue dress that I’d never seen before in my life with a damned crown on my head as the not-so-old-and-kind-of-hot wizard looked at me with sympathy.
“Well, for one, you are not the first omega I have pulled through time. There have been others and I have been able to look—and learn—about the modern day through their eyes,” Merlin explained a bit sheepishly, his pale, freckled cheeks suddenly flushing pink. “And while I appreciate the compliment about my appearance, may we focus on the issue at hand?”
My own cheeks warmed and I looked away from those too-bright green eyes that glowed even outside of the little cave I’d awoken in.
Finally, I nodded reluctantly. I really didn’t want to have to go through this whole entire thing, but maybe if he explained, my brain would somehow wake up and I’d be in a hospital in London instead of ancient Wales talking to a bona fide wizard.
“Ten years ago the gods sent me a portent of disaster. My king’s kingdom would fall into despair if he did not find his fated omega—a woman by the name of Guinevere and she would save the future of Logres.”
This was sounding all too-familiar to the story that the docent had been telling in the exhibit before I touched that stupid sword.
“But there was something barring me from bringing her to Arthur to set the prophecy into motion in order to save Camelot. You see, the soul of the omega to be—the one who would unite Arthur with some of his most trusted allies—her soul was lost in a time far in the future.”
Despite still fully believing this was all a dream, his words made my knees feel weak. It was as if everything he said sizzled with a something that I’d never felt before. It skittered along my skin, all of the hair on my body as something deep inside of me seemed to reach out to meet it.
Merlin blinked with surprise and the feeling intensified for a moment until I gasped, then it was gone.
“That doesn’t make any sense because Guinevere doesn’t—” I began trying to explain to him that, in the legend, Guinevere did nothing but stand on a hilltop while her pack was slaughtered by the Saxons. But it was as if something had reached out to grip my throat and I gagged around the words.
I folded at the waist, trying to regain the breath that had just been pulled out of me.
The pain was so intense that I was considering that maybe—just maybe— my coma theory was wrong. I coughed, trying to clear my throat to tell Merlin that there was no way I was the same Guinevere from the tale. I’d never wanted any alpha, let alone an entire ass pack during a time when that wasn’t the norm in England.
That was the kind of shit that got you burned at the stake like some of the iterations of the legend foretold and I had no interest in being barbecued for kissing someone I wasn’t meant to be kissing.
“Be at ease,” Merlin soothed and I felt his hand on my back. The same feeling as before filled me, but this time instead of sizzling it felt soothing, almost like it was trying to comfort the strangled sensation I was being racked with. “Do not try to tell me of Arthur’s future, Gwen, as the gods do not like it when their plans are meddled with.”
I shot him a withering look, but as soon as I stopped trying to say the words out loud, the feeling evaporated as if it had never happened at all.
“How much do you know?” I asked accusingly, my world starting to crash down around me as I was slowly coming to the realization that I really wasn’t in Kansas—London, I mentally corrected—anymore.
“Some,” Merlin answered with a shrug. “The gods have also only seen fit to show me bits and pieces of Arthur’s future. I do know however, that without you in the mix, it shall be bleak.”
Irritation filled me at his blasé attitude. “So, what? You’ve just decided to yank me from the future without my permission so that I can fulfill some ridiculous prophecy for you?”
“Well, I prefer to think of it as a portent,” Merlin corrected unhelpfully.
I paused to take a breath, debating on whether or not I really wanted to continue debating synonyms with an ancient wizard or if I wanted to just get to the point. “So, if I help you save Arthur, will you let me go back home?”
Merlin seemed surprised, his green eyes widening inexplicably. “You would want to return home after finding your fated pack?”
It was my turn to shrug and cross my arms over my chest. “Maybe. I’m not really enthused about living in a time where there isn’t any indoor plumbing.”
I didn’t really believe in fate and the king whose arms I’d just landed in didn’t seem to either.
Merlin’s expression fell and I tried not to feel guilty as his eyes looked as if they were about to fill with tears. “Gwen, I’ve been searching the future for you for the better part of ten years. In all of my visions of the future you were never unhappy here—”
“Merlin,” a voice came from behind the wizard’s shoulder.
I tilted to the side so I could look around him and found the king in question taking long strides in our direction, his face clearly displeased with what he was seeing.
Merlin’s eyes closed and he let out a soft groan like he wasn’t ready to face the king yet, but even still, he straightened with a smile and turned to look at the approaching alpha.
“Arthur—” he began magnanimously as he held his arms open, but it was Arthur’s turn to cut the wizard off before he could say anything.
“Do not,” he warned, glancing between me and Merlin, his bright blue eyes taking us in before he spoke. “Were my ears deceiving me or did you just utter the words ‘ time travel ’?”
Merlin looked as if he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I may have…?”
“Explain,” Arthur demanded, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “Why is it that every soul in that party recognizes a princess that I have never met before and why you have suddenly reappeared after absconding into the night ten years ago.”
“Well, it is very complicated…”
I wanted to chime in with my own opinion about the entire situation, still angry that I’d been pulled so unceremoniously from my timeline and shoved into the arms of an alpha I’d never met before.
But Arthur was already speaking again.
“Uncomplicate it then.”
His tone brokered no room for excuses, which made sense seeing as the man in front of me was, after all, a king.