Werewolf Knight 2: A Reverse Portal Fantasy, page 1
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Chapter 1
For as long as I could remember, there was no scent I loved more than the smell of autumn leaves. It’d been a good decade since I was in high school, but the familiar scent of dry foliage crunching underfoot brought me right back to my school days. That, coupled with apple cider and cinnamon doughnuts, bonfires and pumpkin pie, was a recipe for pure nostalgia. The year might have started in January, but to me, autumn was the time for new beginnings.
And who better to share a perfect New Jersey autumn day with than my beautiful companions, Sybil and Tabitha?
We zoomed through the reservation in my little red Jeep with No Doubt blasting over the speakers. The windows were down, and the road was clear. It was a perfect day to cruise through the woods that our little town was so well known for, and moments like this made me proud to show off to the girls where I was from. The scene ahead of us as we zoomed down the main road was something out of a fairytale with trees as tall as skyscrapers and leaves of red, gold, and yellow that floated lazily through the crisp air. Despite the sunlight that glared down through the trees, it was still a little bit chilly.
“Can we play Just A Girl again?” Tabitha asked from the backseat.
I looked over at Sybil, who was in the passenger seat, and the witch shot a smirk back at me.
“Tabitha,” Sybil replied. “We listened to it fifteen times on the way to the fair. I never want to hear that song again.”
“Fine,” Tabitha huffed and sidled into the middle seat, so that she was in perfect view in my rear-view mirror. “But I’m going to teach one of the bards in Lupercalia to play it.”
The noblewoman was wearing black leggings that hugged her hips and thighs, and accentuated her perfectly tight little ass. Paired with her Lupercalian leather boots, it gave her a kind of punky look that helped her to blend in with the locals. She had foregone her usual billowy Lupercalian blouse for a tartan flannel shirt over a black tank top, a look that had drawn the eye of more than one fellow fair-goer.
“There are plenty of other songs,” I laughed. “I’m sure you’ll hear another tune that you like just as well.”
“Please, Goddess, no,” Sybil said and rolled her eyes.
“Like you can complain,” Tabitha retorted. “You’ve been doing that silly dance for months.”
“Ladies,” I said. “We’re here to have fun.”
“You’re right,” Tabitha agreed as she leaned back in her seat. “Sisters first, right?”
“Right,” Sybil agreed.
The two ladies grinned as Spiderwebs started, and Tabitha started to sway in her seat. Now that the girls had been traveling back and forth between Jersey and Lupercalia with me for the past few months, they’d accrued an entire new appreciation for rock music, action movies, and even a wardrobe of contemporary, and sometimes matching, outfits.
One place where Sybil and Tabitha diverged was their use of makeup. Sybil preferred to keep her naturally luminous skin untouched, whereas Tabitha had fallen in love with black eyeliner. The noblewoman had quickly learned how to hypnotize almost anyone with perfectly smudged ashy-black liner that made her look mysterious on most days and, at the worst of times, kind of deadly. The blonde was a real femme fatale with her shock of near-white hair and dark eyes that made the pink of her cheeks and the plumpness of her lips pop.
“Hank, do you think you could slow down a little?” Sybil said in a quiet voice a moment later. “I’m a little nauseous… I think I might’ve eaten one too many cider doughnuts at the fall fair…”
“You don’t say,” Tabitha drawled from the backseat. “According to my calculations, you scarfed down exactly nine of those doughnuts. No more and no less. So, would you really say that’s one too many? Or, arguably, seven too many?”
“At least I didn’t start screaming bloody murder when the Ferris wheel stopped when we were at the top,” Sybil replied. “I’m pretty sure everyone at the fair was watching us.”
I looked into the rearview mirror and saw that Tabitha had turned a beetroot pink.
“If I hadn’t alerted the man who controlled the Ferris wheel, we could’ve been trapped there forever,” the noblewoman insisted.
“Hank told you that it would stop to let the other riders off and let new ones on,” Sybil said and rolled her eyes. “And no one else was screaming.”
“Fine, you’ve got me,” Tabitha sniffed. “My one weakness is heights. I can’t help it.”
“A fear of heights isn’t that uncommon,” I said as I slowed down. “There’s even a name for it.”
I looked quickly at Sybil and hoped she could keep the nine cider doughnuts in, at least until we reached our destination. We were close, but I could pull over if I had to. There was plenty of room along the side of the road, but I had to make sure I didn’t wait too long. It was like being back in college and racing back to the dorm before one of us got sick all over the car seat. Back then, it had been a fun while drunk game. Now, however, I definitely didn’t want to have to clean any puke out of the Jeep.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Tabitha sighed. “This world has a word for everything.”
“I’m glad that I can always rely on you for protection, Tabitha,” I added.
“Thank you,” she sighed. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect us, even if it does quiet an entire fairground.”
It had been my sister Ava’s idea to take the girls to the town fair that took over our local park every autumn. Of course, she’d thought that it would be a novelty because it was a local attraction that was exclusive to our town. Little did she know that the girls were witnessing something beyond their wildest imaginations. Sybil had gorged herself on the delicious snacks that encapsulated the season, whereas Tabitha had revealed a pretty impressive fear of heights.
“I will say this,” Sybil offered. “You might be scared of heights, but you looked like a true master when you were riding that magic cow.”
“The mechanical bull?” I laughed. “Yeah, that was insane. I’ve never seen anyone stay ten minutes on one of those things, and I’m pretty sure that nobody at the fairground had, either. And I definitely don’t remember ever hearing people cheer like that.”
“Thank you,” Tabitha replied with a smile. “But I’ve been riding my whole life, and I’ve been on more stubborn animals than that… mechanical bull. I certainly wasn’t going to let it defeat me.”
Tabitha’s ride on the mechanical bull had been not only one of the most impressive feats of stamina that I had ever witnessed, but also one of the sexiest things I had ever seen in my life. I’d pulled my squire in for a long kiss once the operator had finally kicked her off, and I’d happily have done more if we hadn’t been surrounded by several thousand people
“Tabitha,” I asked when I realized the road forked ahead. “Would you check the maps app and see which way we need to go?”
“Of course,” the blonde answered and picked up my phone.
If I didn’t know any better, I never would’ve guessed that she’d grown up in a palace with no electricity as part of a long lineage of werewolf shifters. I could have passed her on the street and mistaken her for just an average, but very hot, American girl who was busy on her phone.
“Take a right,” she said authoritatively. “Oh, and Hank, you got another email notification saying that you’ve been quoted on a television show again.”
“I’ll tend to that later,” I chuckled. “For now, let’s just focus on getting to this house.”
Since I’d defeated Wenderoth at the Obsidian Temple two months ago, life had changed dramatically both in my new home of Lupercalia and my old hometown in Jersey. I’d turned my victory over the vampire into a coffee bean estate in the Lupercalian countryside, or “moon beans” as they were known in Lupercalia. The beans from the Lupercalian soil were a thousand times better than anything grown on Earth, and once I’d convinced my sister to give up on the book side of the store and sell nothing but coffee, we’d made more money in that two-month period than we had since we’d opened.
And the money was just the start.
When the New York Times sent one of their most popular food critics to give the moon-bean brew a try, he had not only extolled its virtues in one of the most popular newspapers in the country, but he’d also interviewed us about the beans.
I’m sure the newspaper had been expecting some story about fairtrade beans or some poor village in Africa that I’d saved by buying their one crop, but I’d told them the complete truth. I’d explained that the beans were from a magical kingdom called Lupercalia where the nobility were werewolves who were sworn to protect the Kingdom and its people from things like vampires and cyclops, and when I wasn’t working in the shop, I was going on quests to save this Kingdom at the behest of the Moon Goddess.
Obviously, nobody believed a word of it. When I told the interviewer, he’d only nodded at me and slurped down cup after cup of the moon-bean brew while he jotted note s in a beat-up leather-bound notebook. It was the most far-fetched story I could tell him, but it was also completely true. Even though nobody believed a word of it, it had proven to be one of the best marketing moves of the century, practically.
Subsequently, the interview went totally viral. People got my picture from the paper and made memes of my face on top of a werewolf body holding a cup of coffee. The coffee cup had morphed into a bunch of different things as the weeks went by, as these memes often do, but I had become a kind of internet seal of approval by then. Whatever I was depicted with was instantly deemed to be high-quality or superior in some way to the alternative.
And it wasn’t just limited to culinary items. My image had been used to promote A Series of Unfortunate Events over the entire Harry Potter series, some obscure, Eastern European soft drink I’d never even heard of, and even self-help posters. There was one such poster that said ‘the desire to destroy myself’ along the top, and beneath that was my werewolf image with a text-box that said, ‘the desire to live my life to the fullest and revel in every moment as it passes me by’.
It felt like everyone was now using the meme, from well-known brands to old high school friends, and now I was recognized in supermarkets and gas stations as some kind of arbiter of taste, all due to that viral interview. It all felt like a bit much sometimes, but I couldn’t argue with the publicity or the money it brought in.
Heck, I’d even commented underneath one of the memes early on when I’d try to explain that my fur was actually darker and my face morphed into a wolf’s. The comment alone had accrued over two hundred thousand likes. We were the envy of every content creator or branding expert that had reached out to us following the success of our coffee, and we hadn’t even had to try.
“Are we almost there?” Sybil asked. “I feel like we’ve been in the car for hours.”
“That’s pretty rich coming from someone who traveled everywhere by foot or on horseback before I came around,” I smirked. “Tabitha, what’s our ETA?”
“Five minutes,” she smiled. “I have a good feeling about this place. I like how secluded it is already.”
“It took us a while to get here from the main town,” Sybil replied.
“That’s because I wanted to show you guys the scenic route,” I laughed. “You know we’re only fifteen minutes away from the shop, right?”
“I’ve been sitting through this car ride for nothing?” Sybil protested and placed a hand over her mouth. “Even after I told you I wasn’t feeling well?”
“I, for one, think it’s been very beautiful,” Tabitha purred from the backseat. “Maybe if you’d held off on the doughnuts, you could’ve focused more on the beautiful autumn scenery rather than trying not to puke.”
“I guess you’re right,” Sybil shrugged.
“Come on, guys,” I laughed. “Quit the moaning. This is one of our most exciting quests yet!”
“The quest for a new house!” Tabitha sang.
That was another great perk of the coffee business. With all this money, it didn’t make much sense to stay in my tiny rental house. And now that I had Tabitha and Sybil with me, I didn’t want us all to be squeezed into my tiny bedroom with all my Incredible Hulk-themed paraphernalia. My girls deserved nothing but the best, and luckily, I was now in a position where I could give them just that. I was looking for a place with a swimming pool, basement cinema, billiards room, and all the other modern day luxuries that the coolest houses had.
And of course, I’d find a way to sneak some Hulk stuff in there. I was after a life of luxury, but I still had to make my mark in some way. I couldn’t just let hoards of cash and internet fame swallow me whole.
“Where are the houses?” Sybil asked.
“Beyond the trees,” I assured her as I took in the dense thicket of trees and shrubs that lined the road.
“Is this it?” Sybil asked and pointed toward a large boulder that sat at an intersection with a smaller road.
I slowed down and eased to the side, even though there was no one else on the road at the moment.
“Pennington Drive,” I read. “Looks pretty promising so far. Hey, Tabitha, check the map and see how many homes are on Pennington Drive.”
“Of course,” the blonde said and did some quick thumbwork on the phone. Suddenly, she raised her eyebrows, and a surprised look came over her face.
“And?” I asked.
“Only one,” she replied. “Number one Pennington Drive.”
I felt a smile spread across my face.
“Wait,” Sybil smiled. “Does that mean…”
“Yep,” I replied. “If we moved here, we’d be the only house on the street.”
It was crazy to even think about it. I’d spent so many years learning the intimate details of my neighbors’ lives, from the schedule for watering the lawn to which kids would have to go to summer school, that I wondered if I could even handle this much privacy.
But as I looked at the sign and then at my girls, all I could imagine was how wonderful it would be to live in such isolated and peaceful luxury. We wouldn’t have to listen to any more school buses rumbling down the street or leaf blowers all day on Saturday.
I was excited as hell.
“Let’s see what the rest of it looks like,” I said as I turned up the drive.
The pleasant road curved slowly through the trees, and I heard both girls sigh as they drank in the sight of the countryside in autumn. The perfectly smooth pavement made one last turn, and a large iron gate appeared in front of us.
“It looks like a palace!” Sybil gasped, and Tabitha poked her head between us to get a better view.
“Now, now,” the blonde purred. “I think I’ll be the judge of that. I did, after all, grow up in a palace.”
I brought the car to a momentary halt as the nine-foot iron gate started to open by itself.
“Yep,” Tabitha nodded. “You’re right. This is very much like a palace.”
Sybil playfully rolled her eyes at Tabitha’s expertise, and the two of them broke into a fit of giggles. I could barely keep myself from giggling as well. The whole situation was completely crazy. Never in my dreams did I imagine I’d own a property with a gate, much less a property that came with its own road.
I drove forward through the gate down a tree-lined slope, and my heart was racing as the outline of a building came into view. Even from afar, it looked massive, and I felt like there was no way this could be my life. How could I be a real potential buyer for this property, and not some kind of prankster who tricked the real estate agent into letting me take a look inside this mansion? Yet, here I was, flush with cash and with two beautiful women by my side, ready to make a bid, if the house lived up to the agent’s claims.
The house was a massive colonial that had been built as a vacation estate in 1928 by some stock market guru just before the crash. The man hadn’t skimped on its construction, which I’m sure he regretted when the economy had tanked. But the various owners over the years had done their part to maintain and update the property, so the white siding and black shutters looked like they could have been installed yesterday, and the two brick extensions that had been added in later years blended seamlessly with the original building. There was even the obligatory brick wall covered in ivy on one of the extensions, and I tried not to grin as I pictured myself trying to climb the vine as a kid.
“I’ve never seen grass this green,” Sybil said. “And so dark.”
“Neither have I,” Tabitha said. “Is it really that green? Or did they paint it?”
“Oh, it’s that green,” I assured the pair. “And it takes an army of yard guys to keep it looking that good, I’m sure.”
The pavement gave way to cobblestones, and I spotted a silver SUV parked in front of the house, near the long row of perfectly trimmed shrubs that lined the cobblestone drive on both sides.
“Looks like the real estate agent is here,” I noted. “Now remember, we don’t want to seem too excited. Just play it cool.”
“Of course,” Tabitha replied as I parked next to the SUV.
“Okay, deep breaths,” I urged.
We all took deep breaths and then climbed slowly from the car. Once I was in the crisp, perfect air, I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to find my poker face. It was hard, I had to admit, because I had such a good feeling about this place.
