Penny returns to her archeology lab to study the silver coffin she discovered in Alaska. She very much misses her shapeshifting lover, Wolf, still working there as a wilderness guide. Falling asleep beside the artifact, Penny experiences a shapeshifting episode as a wolf and meets up with Wolf in a beautiful world. They make passionate love in what Penny believes is only a very real dream.
Wolf experiences the same dream, but he’s certain there’s more to it. He travels to be with Penny, and together they test out their theory of the artifact being a door to another world. But a mysterious stranger has been watching their erotic activities and wants to know how the artifact works.
Can Penny and Wolf elude him and continue to enjoy their shapeshifting and lovemaking without interruption?
It’s just not fair!
Penny Redfern wanted to return to her lover in Alaska with every fiber of her being.
It wasn’t fair Wolf stayed in the beautiful wilderness while she had to return to the lower forty-eight in order to complete her doctoral dissertation project. It wasn’t fair they had to be parted so soon after they’d begun their torrid love affair.
Most of all, it wasn’t fair that her advisor and mentor had left her with all this boring paperwork to fill out.
“Snap out of it,” she scolded herself. She searched for her pencil and measuring tape in her desk drawer. “The dumb thing can’t measure itself, and Bev said she’d help me when she got back from the conference… The conference that I should have been invited to as well since I was the artifact’s actual discoverer, but somehow I wasn’t because I don’t have my doctorate yet and it was a PhDs only fest. The nerve of them! Grr!”
The disappointment at her accomplishment being ignored both by the press and the archeological community still stung six weeks after the fact. Penny wished she could transform herself into a white wolf like her boyfriend in Alaska and run about campus and howl her frustrations away.
She sighed. Wolfgang Weis was lucky to be a shapeshifter. Whenever it got too dull to be a human, he could always metamorphose into a wolf and trot out into the wild and enjoy himself, whether by running along a beach or through a wooded glade. Here she was stuck being a grad student all alone in a lab on a Friday night.
Of course she was documenting a very important find, the silver coffin, but still… It wasn’t fair.
“I don’t know why Bev allowed the press to name this thing a coffin. We don’t know that it is one—or even if it can be opened like a coffin. It’s silly and a bit depressing. So depressing it makes me talk to myself.”
Penny sighed again and rose to go measure their find. This had to be the hundredth time she’d recorded the metallic oval, capsule-like object’s dimensions. Every time she or her advisor had measured it the dimensions seemed to be slightly off. Even the laser device they used to get extremely precise measurements said it was a centimeter off from the time before they’d measured it with the same apparatus. It was crazy.
The metal-looking thing was practically as light as a feather—or feathers—depending on the day, too. It just didn’t make any sense that its physical dimensions shifted as easily as Wolf did during a full moon.
“I’m in the wrong profession,” Penny announced to the metallic object lying on the work table in front of her several minutes later. “You’re not a Viking longboat like we thought at first, nor a coffin from any culture on Earth. You’re a mysterious artifact from the great beyond. I would have to be a physicist or a shaman or something else to determine what you really are.”
She dutifully recorded the coffin’s measurements onto paper and into the computer log on her laptop. As expected, they weren’t quite the same as the day before. They were slightly off again—like Penny’s boss was, the infamous Dr. Beverly Rostenkowski. Bev had proposed all sorts of wacky theories in the past, such as the Vikings must have found the Northwest Passage over a thousand years ago, and this time the eccentric academic had actually stumbled upon something. Or, more accurately, Wolf and Penny had.
“Alas, we’ll always be just a footnote in the textbooks.” Penny frowned. She re-focused on the task at hand and found a slight variance in the artifact’s width measurements. How did the darn thing change size? Why did it change size?
Penny hummed as she made the notations and cleaned up her work area, preparing for the lonely trip home to her cramped apartment. “Hmm… You can’t be changing size and weight because of temperature. We’ve kept you in a stable environment since we returned. I can’t laugh off the feeling that you’re really a shapeshifter just like Wolf... Constantly in a state of flux between two worlds.”
She dropped her pencil as her jaw dropped open. Two worlds. She was either losing her mind or she’d struck upon a brilliant idea worth following up. Everything about the silver coffin seemed unearthly—not of human origin. Was it extraterrestrial?
“Oh, crud, I’m really losing it.” She shook her head and turned off the spotlights above the work surface, readying herself to leave the lab. “I haven’t had sex in weeks, and I miss Wolfie so much it hurts. I want to call him now, but he’s probably out guiding someone to a great fishing spot or where to observe Kodiak bears or something. The time difference is such a bother.”
With a long sigh, she switched out the work light over the table and headed for the door. She grasped the handle and turned. Odd, it seemed stuck.
