Chapter 6 Answers You Will Perhaps Not Like #2
“Please call me Dorie.” I had to crane my neck just to look at him as I told him, “I hate my full name.”
He peered down at me sideways from his superior height. “That is lamentable. We quite like it.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What’s your name, then? So I can call you some version of it you don’t like.”
Yet another long pause, like he was a robot and my question required extra processing.
Wait, was he some kind of robot?
My eyes widened, and I looked down and to the side with the new thought.
Him being a robot would explain quite a few things. Including his poreless skin and way-too-symmetrical looks.
But why would the fating portal send me hurtling through time and space to a robot?
Fated mates being so biologically compatible they had lots of babies together was the main point of Fated Mate Time Travel.
One wolf scientist I’d gone all the way to Oslo to interview in person for my story on the Michigan queen’s time-traveling Viking Werewolves had even referred to them as fertility portals.
“Aengus.”
I looked up to find the strange being—whose name was apparently Aengus—still watching me as we walked across the huge cavern. His emerald-green gaze steady in a way that felt like a slow devouring.
My cheeks heated, and the knot in my tummy did that weird squeezing thing again.
“Aengus,” I repeated, liking the feeling of it on my tongue. “Is that the Irish Gaelic version of Angus?”
“We are not sure. This name was bestowed.”
“Did the person doing the bestowing know about your intermittent hissing thing?” I asked.
His face abruptly hardened. Several seconds ticked by before he answered, “Yesss.”
Okay, I could tell I’d hit a sore spot. But I wasn’t sure whether I’d insulted him or brought up an unpleasant memory.
Either way. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or bring you down.”
“Our feelings are not hurt. We are glad you have arrived.” He stopped about six feet away from the cavern’s back wall and raised a hand. Hovering it near my face, as if he would maybe stroke my cheek. Touch me…
My chest thrummed. With fear or anticipation? I wasn’t sure.
But in the end, he lowered his pale hand and said, “We will answer your first two questions now.”
“And how about my third question?” I asked. “The one about what you are.”
This reply came immediately. “We will see how you respond to the first two answers. Then, after you have emotionally recovered, we will address your third. Come, let us take one more step forward.”
We did, and suddenly a neon-green rectangle appeared on the smooth cavern wall. Another door. Tall and wide enough for us to walk through it together.
Aengus turned to me with an unblinking tilt of his large head.
“We are sorry for the great upset this will cause you… Dorie,” he said, right before the door slid open, sending a rush of cold air into the room.
However, only my face felt the effect. The jumpsuit expanded with a slight hiss, and I was immediately buffeted by a cushion of warm air as I stepped through to the world outside.
I would have been so appreciative if not for the utter shock of what lay before me.
We’d emerged from what turned out to be a huge stone castle carved into the side of a mountain. A fortress, just like the one in the secret Bear Kingdom.
Actually, exactly like the Mountain King’s formal residence. An ugly feeling rose inside of me.
I recalled what I wrote in my journal. 1300s???
The 1300s would have been bad. Really bad.
But then it got even worse when I saw the herd grazing in the open patch of grass just a few meters away.
They resembled deer or elk. But bigger. Big like a moose—but even larger, with antlers so wide and branching they fanned out like three-pronged wings.
A horrible word—a word I didn’t even remember I knew—dropped into my head.
Megafauna.
My brain threatened to collapse.
I did not want to be looking at megafauna.
I also did not want to be seeing those bogs in the distance—the bogs that bore an eerie resemblance to the ones featured in the National Museum of Ireland’s holoimmersive on the well-preserved Bronze Age people they’d pulled out of the peat, bodies so perfectly pickled by the acidic water you could still see the horrified expressions on their faces.
And I especially did not want to notice how sheets of ice—not snow, but ice—clung to the bog’s bank. Or how the trees that stood behind it were denser, wilder, than any I’d ever seen. Unbroken by the pastoral road Sadie and I had air-carted down to get to the Irish Wolves’ kingdom.
As if no people had ever lived here.
I thought of the holoimmersive I hadn’t clicked on in the National Museum of Ireland’s list.
THE PLEISTOCENE AGE: Ireland Before People
No… no, no, no!
There had been a holo-rendering to go along with that link, too. And it matched this almost exactly—save for the castle fortress behind me.
“Please…” I whispered to Aengus, who still stood beside me. “Please tell me this is god tech. Some kind of incredibly real holoimmersive of the Pleistocene Age.”
“We are sorry, Dorie,” Aengus answered. “We cannot tell you that. We have no wish to upset you, but it is true. You have arrived in a time far, far before your own.”