Chapter Four

Kiran had someone fetch the physician. While he wanted his mate taken care of, he also had many questions, and he brought her to the throne room where the audiences were often attended to. There he pulled a chair from a small table and placed it in the middle of the room before making her sit down. It wasn’t long before the older physician, dressed in a brown robe, arrived, ready to take care of Kiran’s mate. The old man stared at her as strangely as the others had, but with a single nod from the king, he got to work. He tried figuring out how to remove her jacket, but it was tied together in a way he had no knowledge of.

“Take it off,” Kiran ordered his mate.

She smiled, yet appeared annoyed. “Why don’t you start?” she asked mockingly.

It made the men around the room laugh, and even Kiran felt amused. The others rummaged through her things, and she narrowed her eyes at them.

“Do not touch that!” she ordered.

“You don’t command anyone here, at least not yet,” Kiran said.

“Well, if you don’t want one of them to get shocked, you should put it down.”

“Shocked?”

“Ouch!”

The moment Kiran had asked, someone dropped a strange metallic box, and one of the others was shaking his hand, hissing so much his canines were growing longer and showing.

“Hmm, it usually does more than that,” she mumbled, as Kiran turned to her.

“Are you a witch?” he asked.

“Oh God, don’t tell me they exist here as well.”

“What?”

The woman’s behavior was turning weirder and weirder, and Kiran did not know what to think. Yet she began opening her jacket and carefully took it off. When it was on the ground, the physician took it and threw it to the king.

“Wonderful… Will all my clothes come off?” she taunted.

“Not in this room,” Kiran teased, and he knew she understood the hidden message.

The physician got to work, but when she saw the physician about to poke her with a needle, she pulled away, shaking her head.

“Are you insane?” she asked, making the older man look shocked.

“He is trying to help,” Kiran told her.

“He is going to infect me.”

She suddenly dug into her many pockets, found an even smaller metallic box and made it light up. They all watched as she held fire in her hand, staring in awe, before she grabbed the needle, and burned it. Then she focused on her shoulder before she got to work. The physician, like everyone else, stared at her with an open mouth and remained frozen as she attended to her wound. But while she could do the front side of it, she could not reach the part behind on her back.

“I need some help,” she whispered, handing the needle back after burning it again.

The physician got to work, but looked at her like she was a ghost. The rest looked at her weirdly too. Kiran was at a loss for words. He glanced down at the jacket in his hands, designed in a way he had never seen before, but he noticed something. A name.

“Gwyneth…” he mumbled.

“Just Gwyn.”

Kiran looked up, seeing his sweaty and exhausted-looking mate, and while her behavior and the contraptions she had brought with her disturbed him deeply, he could not ignore the ancient instincts coming to life inside him. He wanted her healed, fed, and then put to bed. It was all he could focus on. “Gwyn, I’m Kiran, King of The Wolves.”

“Like the one in the forest?”

Kiran shook his head. “Those are… we call them The Dark Wolves. Wild people. They have lost themselves.”

“How?”

“We do not know. All we can focus on is protecting the people.”

“Werewolves?” she inquired.

“Werewolves. Humans,” he clarified.

“Witches?”

“Well, our witches can’t make fire from nothing like you.”

“That’s not… I am not a witch,” she assured him.

“So you are a healer?” he asked.

“Is that what your witches do? Heal?”

“Yes, and predict futures.”

“So, more like oracles?”

“They have many names. But they can’t command fire,” he revealed.

“I can’t command fire. It’s… Fuck. How did I end up here?”

“Here? Where do you believe you are?”

“You will think I’m a nutcase if I tell you.”

“A what?”

“A crazy person.”

The way Gwyneth spoke was quite peculiar. While their language was the same, her word choices and sentence structure were very different. Yet despite being human, his mate possessed strength. She is a leader, he thought, and that was perfect considering he needed a queen, not a submissive individual.

“I am already thinking that. Why would a woman dress like a man and do such unusual things?” he pointed out.

“I’m not dressed like a man.”

“Your hair is incredibly short, and you wear pants.” He pointed to the aspects that made her stand out.

“Where I come from, it’s normal. And short hair makes some things easier.”

Her words intrigued Kiran. He wanted to know more about her. “Where do you come from?”

“You won’t believe me, and you will probably have me hanged for saying such crazy things. Don’t witches get killed?”

“No, why would we? They are excellent healers, and did you not state you weren’t a witch?” he reminded her.

“Yes, but you might believe that I am,” she countered.

“But is that a bad thing?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“In my world, it once was.”

“Why?”

“It… made people feel afraid because some, mostly women, had knowledge they should not have. People often tend to fear those they do not understand or do not want to have any power.”

Kiran understood that. It was sometimes the same in his world. “Here we do not hurt witches. Tell me how you came to be where you are. Let me help,” he offered.

“Why?”

“Do you not want my help?”

“You’re a stranger, and you kidnapped me.”

“I have provided you with help,” he reminded her.

“Old kind of help.”

“What?”

“Never mind. All I’m saying is I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t have to, but right now I’m thinking you are a crazy person, and often those crazy people we lock away. At least if they are completely lost.”

“And I am one of those?” she challenged.

“Depends on if you will tell me where you are from. Right now, you cannot make me think weirder of you.”

“Wonderful…”

The physician finished his work, bandaging her wound. He left, and Gwyneth took a deep breath.

“All right,” she conceded, sitting up higher and groaning. “I am from the future.”

The room turned dead silent, and everyone stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

“Or maybe not even the future because my future has no… werewolves,” she told them.

“It doesn’t?”

“You do not exist.”

Kiran frowned. She was confusing him deeply, and Kiran glanced at the people behind him, who all shrugged. He turned to his mate, not wanting to think that after all this time waiting for her, he had ended up with a crazy one. Would it make him want her less? Probably not, but it would be difficult to present her as his queen if she had lost her mind.

“You don’t believe me,” she whispered and looked away, and Kiran felt a sting in his heart, not liking that his mate thought he was not there for her.

“I am listening,” he assured her.

“But you don’t believe me. You think I have lost my mind, and why wouldn’t you?” she asked before turning to him. “But it is true.”

“Why don’t you continue the story?”

“It isn’t a story. It is reality. Though this one shouldn’t be.” Gwyneth pointed to the ground to make her point clear.

“It is real,” he said, fearing more and more that she was an insane person.

“No, not to me. Where I come from, such things do not exist!”

“Then how are you here?”

“That’s the thing…”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, and Kiran felt even worse when he saw the broken look on his mate’s face.

“How can you not know?”

“While alternate dimensions might have been proven in theory, they have never been obtainable.”

“Di… what?” Kiran asked.

“It’s like other worlds.”

“You have traveled far?”

“No, no, you can’t travel to it like on horseback. It’s hidden.”

“Hidden worlds?”

“Hidden worlds. In my time, the world is chaotic. It’s unclean, and it is dying.”

“Dying?”

“Us humans have not treated it well, and we have infected it so badly that it is deteriorating. We wanted to fix that.”

“How?”

“By going back in time and stopping it from happening. And some very smart people made that possible. With the new knowledge we had, we knew we could go back and stop all the destructive processes from happening. We could fix it all and create a new and better world.”

“And you were… going back in time?”

“I was supposed to protect the people who had the knowledge of how to save the world.”

“You’re a fighter? A woman?”

“What? Can’t a woman be a fighter here? Is this place misogynistic as well?” she challenged.

“Mysogin… what?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gwyneth groaned, shaking her head.

“A woman can fight. We have a few, but not many want to. And I have never met a human female fighter.”

“Well, now you have, and they are quite common in my world. It’s a good mix of both men and women.”

“Interesting.”

“I was the leading Protector… or fighter. I was supposed to guard the ones who could fix everything once we arrived in our old-new time.”

“How far back were you going?”

“Hundreds and hundreds of years back. We were divided into different small groups, going to different time periods to fix things. But something happened…”

“What?”

“There is a reason my world is dying. It comes from greed.”

“Greed?” Kiran understood how that emotion could cause a lot of disturbance. He knew many greedy people as well—people wanting to get close to him only because of the power he possessed.

“People have exploited each other and the world’s resources. If we went back and changed everything, the power they held would disappear,” she explained.

“So, they did not want you to go back and fix the humans’ mistakes?”

“No, and so they broke into the lab…”

“The what?”

“A laboratory. Know that word?”

Kiran nodded, and Gwyneth continued, “Anyway, they broke in—”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure. But they ruined the process of getting us through the portal. Some scientists were fighting each other over the control panel.”

“Huh?”

“The thing that controlled it all, and they messed up the settings.”

“What?”

“The equipment! They messed up the equipment that made the Jumper…”

“Jumper?”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake!” she shouted and stood up. “It is not important! What is important is that I used to be in the year 2356, and there were no werewolves! I was going back to when the Roman Empire was at its peak, and I was going to protect the scholars and the translators, the botanists, everyone in my group from any harm. It all got ruined. I got shot… I mean hurt, and I ended up falling through the Jumper… I mean the portal, the transporting portal, and I ended up here. Where men can change into wolves, and eyes glow, and… and I’m sounding insane… I’m losing my mind.”

Gwyneth placed her hands on her hips, while Kiran turned to the others, who shook their heads lightly, obviously thinking as well that Gwyneth had lost her mind. There was no other explanation, and Kiran felt unsure about how to handle the situation or his mate.

“Gwyneth?” he called.

“Gwyn!” she corrected.

“Yes, Gwyn.”

“You think I’m insane.” She sighed and went to sit down before pushing a hand through her short, blond hair. “I sound insane. I can hardly believe it myself… Time traveling was hard enough to believe. Now I have to make someone else believe in dimensions and other realms. I know how it sounds. But it is all true.”

Gwyneth met Kiran’s eyes with her own blue ones, which stared at him with such intensity, he could do nothing but believe her. Or at least he believed that she believed it was true. Maybe it was. The way she dressed and spoke, and the things she carried on her, could it really be so weird she was from another world? he wondered.

She isn’t crazy, his wolf said.

You’re only saying that because you cannot be rude to our mate, Kiran pointed out.

But you believe it a little.

I believe there might be some truth to some things. I am still not sure if I trust everything that comes out of her mouth.

His wolf huffed, not liking that he was showing so little trust in Gwyneth, especially because of how bad she looked. “Maybe there is some truth to it all.”

“It is all true!” she replied harshly and looked him right in the eyes, which was something very few could do, but he had never experienced a human being able to.

“All right. If that is what you believe…”

“But it isn’t me who needs to believe it. If you think I’m crazy, will you not lock me up? Will I ever see daylight again?”

Kiran glanced at his men, who he easily read, and he knew they wanted him to do exactly that. None of them had the same reason or need to believe Gwyneth like he did. But he shook his head a bit before turning to Gwyneth. “You have been through a lot in one day.”

“Right, blame it on my state,” she mumbled.

“How about we all use the night to think it through? But it will not leave this room,” Kiran ordered and looked at the others, who all nodded.

“Sure. Will I spend the night chained to a wall in the dungeons?” she mocked.

Kiran looked at his mate, feeling very confused. Why was that her suggestion? “Of course not. You will sleep in a bed.”

“In a dungeon?”

“In a room. A warm room.”

“Why? Do you believe me?” she asked.

“I don’t know what to believe. But I don’t think there is any need to chain you to a wall or keep you in the dungeons.”

He was not sure his words were completely true, considering what Gwyneth had been saying and how she had been acting. And knowing now she was a fighter, that might bring some troubles, but he could not get himself to lock her up.

“Can I get my things back?” she asked.

“Pack it up,” Kiran commanded, and they all did, before they threw the interesting bag to him, which was all black and had been designed in an interesting shape so it followed the curve of the back.

Gwyneth stood up, holding out her hand, waiting for him to return the bag, but he didn’t. “Let’s go get you something to eat.”

He walked past her, and she looked after him, seeming confused. “My things!”

“Right in my hand,” he reminded her before he left the throne room, hearing her following him.