Chapter 20 Moons
Moons
Why me?
Now I knew.
One moment, I was getting the full story of how I’d come to receive a special invitation to be pushed into a lake. And the next, I was storming out of the room of the guy who called himself Fenrir Prime.
I knew my temper was a problem. I’d probably still be snug in my Toronto mini-studio right now if I hadn’t blown up at my bosses for giving in to President Nightwolf’s demand for a public apology and retraction of my story.
But that self-control stuff was all done.
Kiwi’s voice had completely disappeared.
Bloody February…
My da…
The prophecy…
Sadie’s hands on my back…
Getting pushed into that lake.
It had all been Knifey McFenrir. Every single lifetime.
Luckily, the room’s doors opened for me or I would have just lost it. Pulled the knife out of my pocket and used it on everyone.
As it was, I didn’t even have to break my stride as I tore out into a circular gallery with high ceilings and an emerald-green mosaic floor.
Wait, wouldn’t this be where…?
I tipped my head all the way back, and sure enough, there was the door in the ceiling I’d thought I was looking for. So high, I instantly knew it had been created only for creatures who could fly.
Was that Knifey McFenrir’s lab up there? Was that where he’d carried out all his experiments to see if he could breed a she-wolf optimized enough to carry a dragon baby?
Was that what he’d meant when I asked him if he fell in love with Dorie 1, and he answered Yes?
Was that his sick version of love? Mating all 999 versions of me that came before? Until he gave up and decided to kill me instead.
It doesn’t matter! I reminded myself.
Now was not the time for curiosity. I had to get out of this Pleistocene Alien version of the Frankenstein castle and put together my next steps.
The way out was easy to spot. A large slab of untouched rock wall stood across from where I’d just exited. Its size let me know this would be the only section of rock where a door big enough to fit a dragon could be placed.
And sure enough, as soon as I got close enough to it, a giant glowing rectangle appeared.
Forty or so feet tall, compared to the four twenty-five-foot wooden ones that dotted the rest of the circular gallery.
The glowing rectangle looked like the parent to all the other little doors, and as it opened for me with a muffled slide of stone, it put me in mind of a mother saying, “Okay, child, you can go through.”
Mother…
Had I really been pregnant and died in childbirth 999 times—1000 if you counted Dorie Zero?
Stuck back in my childhood bedroom in Faoiltiarn, seeing how all my old schoolmates had solved the village’s dire birthrate problem by doing the same kind of exchange they’d attempted with the Wolfennites with other less zealous communities, I’d pretty much accepted my fate.
Thirty-two was ancient in she-wolf years, and I’d bitterly accepted that my best chance at finding another wolf to mate had passed me by.
That children just weren’t in the cards for me.
I’d traded that life to live out my holoscribe dreams.
Never questioning why I’d been so obsessed with the fating gates as soon as I found out about their existence, after another wolf at Mizzou took me to see the state’s gate nearby.
Why were there fating gates in every single state in America, but only a handful in Europe and Asia?
Who had made them?
These questions had knocked around in my mind from the start.
And when President Nightwolf had blackboxed all the North American ones during his second term, going against public sentiment, my curiosity about the gates that were known to actually suck wolves through time had gone into overdrive.
I’d started investigating the story, and I just couldn’t let it go.
Apparently, that inclination hadn’t been due to tenacity—but to my body and soul keeping the score on all my past lives.
And now here I was, stuck in an era before humans had developed written communication. Expected to serve as an incubator for some geneticist who obviously didn’t give a poop… You know what? No, no! I was going to stop talking like a goddamn purple baby koala.
He didn’t give a fuck about me and had been perfectly willing to run his experiment as many times as it took. Until now.
Why now?
My holoscribe instinct tried to wriggle that question through my head, but I mentally stomped on it like the worm it was.
I didn’t want to ask any more questions. I just wanted to be pissed off.
Even the cool night air hitting my face as the doors opened failed to decrease my anger.
An ocean crashed in my ears as I stumbled through the exterior entrance, feverish with pure fury.
Like, really burning up.
I slowed just a few feet away from the entrance. I was still so close that the door hadn’t slid back shut.
Suddenly, my legs felt weak, as if they might give out. And my entire body started to itch.
No, not itch…
Burn.
It felt like my clothes were eating me alive. I lived in my self-cleaning jumpsuit, but suddenly I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.
As desperate as I’d been to escape, I found myself stripping naked instead. Even my shoes and socks were too much to bear. I yanked them off my feet.
Only to stop and stare at the sight between my legs.
My sex was coated with something that glinted in the bright light. A warm slick poured out of me in slow, agonizing pulses.
And the not-so-mythical button Diarmuid had found earlier—it was throbbing, as if it had a heartbeat of its own.
W.
T.
P.
E.
The ocean crashed even louder in my ears. And that was when I realized…
The ocean wasn’t in my ears. It was right in front of me. Crashing like something angry and alive into the cliffside I was standing on.
A dim memory from a history class long, long ago.
How Ireland used to be connected by a land bridge to Great Britain.
But for some reason, it still took the original settlers until the Mesolithic Period to arrive there.
“Why?” another student asked my mother.
“Not sure,” my maem admitted. “Perhaps ask the librarian the next time you visit the castle.”
Looking at the ocean, I think I knew why not too many people dared to cross that land bridge.
And why my modern heat control shot had suddenly sent up three ghost emojis.
The memory of that classroom conversation faded as I raised my eyes to the sky. And saw the two moons hanging over the ocean.
The two full moons.