Chapter 6 Answers You Will Perhaps Not Like
Answers You Will Perhaps Not Like
I fell and fell… First through the water… And then through air… Until…
I awoke with a gasp, body jerking, brain seizing. Huge guy who’d tried to kill me last night once again sitting at the foot of my bed in seiza.
Except now loads of daylight streamed into the cavern, warming it to the temperature of an early spring day.
He’d put on a shirt—some kind of loose gray linen thing with a deep V-neck and no discernible buttons.
And instead of looking at the ground, he stared straight at me, his emerald gaze unblinking.
As if he’d been patiently waiting for me to get around to waking up.
This time, I grabbed the strange-smelling fur blanket and took it with me as I immediately scrambled to my feet and tried to run.
“Dorcasss! Dorcasss! No!” Suddenly, the male who’d tried to kill me last night was in front of me with his large hands raised. “Do not run from us. Pleassse.”
I pulled up short. And not just because he surprised me by asking in an unexpectedly nice tone.
This was more the kind of stopping you do right before you hit a brick wall.
I had been right last night. The guy who saved me, then tried to kill me, was gigantic. Sports was not my beat, and I didn’t personally know any basketball players, but he was taller than any on the global roster. I was sure of that. Closer to eight feet than seven if I had to eyeball my guess.
And made of solid muscle. His carved body filled my entire eyeline, blocking out everything behind him. So yes, he might as well have been an organic wall as far as this facedown was concerned.
I reeled back, fully ready to run in another direction—but stupid holoscribe instincts.
My primal flight response was interrupted by my need to ask, “Hold on, how do you know my name?”
Long beat. As if he was processing my question. “We have placed your duffel in the bath space.”
He extended a hand toward somewhere behind me, and I looked in that direction to find that the cavern wasn’t quite a solid slab of rounded stone.
There was a set of double doors, framed and made of wood, on the wall farthest from me. And then, about a meter away, I could make out a rectangle etched into the wall. Faintly glowing, as if to say, “Hey, I’m actually a door, too!”
“We have set out fresh clothes for you as well.” The savior-killer’s voice drew my eyes back to him. He was no longer hissing his esses, I noticed. “If you wish, you may cover your nakedness with them and eliminate your bladder yourself.”
That was actually a really thoughtful offer… that I could not take just yet because so many questions.
Even if English was his second language, I did not like what that “yourself” he added to “eliminate your bladder” implied.
However, I went with my most pressing question first.
“Thank you, but can we talk about the part where you put a knife to my throat and scared the poop emoji out of me last night?”
Another long pause. Then: “We are sorry about that.”
I waited for more. But he only stood there, towering over me like a huge, ethereal, non-answering tree.
“Sorry about that?” I glared up at him. “That’s all you have to say?”
His expression shifted, a minuscule tightening at the corners of his mouth. “No, of course not.”
I began to hope for an explanation. But then he just said, “We are pleased you survived the night after your great fall through the portal that brought you to us.”
My mind swam. I was so confused. It felt like my heartbeat had moved up to the part of my brain responsible for processing new information.
Also…
“We?” I asked him. I looked all around for the other person or people he might be referring to, sincerely hoping they weren’t invisible.
Though, that would explain a lot.
Yet another long pause before he answered. “Our pronouns are we-us-our.”
“Oh! You’re collective gender.” My chest lurched with excitement.
Collective gender was a relatively modern concept used mostly by privileged people with “fuck norms” money to signal that they didn’t see things like class, color, or gender—even if they lived in huge houses behind locked gates thanks to the money the patriarchy had passed down to them.
Usually, I found collective gender folks pretty insufferable with all their supposed virtue signaling. But if he was one of them, that meant I was either in my same time period and had only crossed through space, or I’d traveled forward in time.
Please, let it be the former, I silently prayed before asking the first question of Fated Mate Time Travel: “When exactly is this? Also, where exactly is this? Also, what are you? My nose is telling me you’re not fully human or a wolf like me.”
He stared down at me. I’d yet to see him blink.
But this silence was different. He didn’t simply stare at me. His green eyes darkened. And dropped, tracking down my face to the chest I didn't realize was heaving until his gaze snagged on it, before going even lower.
Was he…?
My heartbeat came faster, stealing even more of my breath. Was he ogling me?
I wasn’t used to being ogled. At least not in real life. Kiwi got a deeply unsettling amount of disturbing fan messages from male wolves across the globe. A few had even proposed.
But I was fully natural without any glow-ups as the many, many beauty surgeries and body recomp drugs were called, so I’d never gotten much attention from the opposite sex.
The Mountain Prince didn’t count. (Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if his come-ons were fueled by some kind of bet about egg-planting a wolf.)
I wasn’t used to being so obviously… ahem, appreciated by someone who looked like the AI answer to “white-haired male Adonis.” That knot in my belly was back. Tightening and loosening, like something with breath. When and Where and What were the top three questions on my list.
But in that moment, the fourth one rose to the top. Who?
As in, Who are you?
Are you my fated mate?
“We are not able to…” He broke the silence first, tugging his faintly glowing gaze up to my face with what appeared to be effort. “We are unable to talk with you in this ssstate. Pleassse ...”
He shifted his gaze downward again, then snapped it back up. Another long pause. I got the impression he was mentally composing himself.
“Please recover yourself,” he eventually finished, without the hiss. “And then we will attempt to give your questions answers. Answers you will perhaps not like.”
I was correct about the door being god tech. It slid open with just a touch of my fingertips and led into… another cavern.
But not quite as large as the one I’d come from, and my eyes widened when I saw what filled it.
A natural pool, sunk into the rock floor, its stone edges worn smooth by what had to be centuries of water. It was fed by a small cascade that tumbled down the far wall in a series of quiet falls, and the surface was covered in lotus flowers—white and pale pink, drifting on broad green pads.
Ferns grew straight from the rock walls wherever they could find purchase, and a shaft of daylight fell through a wide opening in the cavern ceiling high above, turning the mist from the falls into something close to light.
It was, objectively, the most beautiful bathroom I had ever seen.
On the far right of the back wall, I found what I was looking for to confirm my guess about where I was: large embedded buttons, the size of ping pong paddles. The buttons had glowing green hieroglyphs etched into them—like Korean and Runes had a futuristic baby.
I couldn’t read what it said, but I recognized it immediately.
“The language of our gods.” The Shadow Prince cleric’s voice echoed in my head. “Ever-lit, yet unknowable.”
Beside the buttons hung four tubes, which filled me with unease and made me recall the strange being’s invitation to eliminate my waste myself. As if it had already been done before.
There was no toilet that I could see.
But I didn’t need to use it, and my stomach felt full, even though it had been at least twenty-four hours since that last breakfast at the Irish Bear Kingdom.
Better not to think about that, I decided, scanning the area for my cordura duffel bag.
I found it tucked in the corner with clothing lying on top.
A folded dark green jumpsuit—not mine—along with what I recognized as my own comfort bra and a pair of cotton underwear.
And… yes, yes, yes! My heavy-duty black boots stood next to the bag with a perfectly dry pair of socks stuffed inside the right one.
For someone who’d tried to kill me last night while hissing, “You shouldn’t be here!” my possible fated mate had thought of everything.
I noted that the jumpsuit fit perfectly, the fabric moving and readjusting until it hugged my body just right.
Below the waist, it had flaps in front and back that held together on their own, with no closures I could see.
The suit faintly vibrated with the same energy I remembered sensing from the god tech appliances and surfaces in the Bear's secret kingdom.
Could you use god tech in clothes, too? I added that question to the long mental list.
My copper curls could have done with a good detangle, but I settled for pulling it back into the hair band, still miraculously snug around my wrist, despite my drop through the lake—and possibly time.
I rushed right back out the god tech door, too eager to get answers to all of my ques—
“Whoa, were you just waiting out here the entire time?”
I once again jerked to a stop right before I ran into the giant being, who was directly on the other side of the door.
Instead of answering, he stepped to stand beside me and placed a hand on the small of my back to guide me forward.
It was warm, radiating heat like the pad my human roommate in college used during her time of the month. And though his touch was innocent, the knot tightened in my belly.
“You requested to know when and where you are. It is best that we show you, Dorcas.”