“You look pale,” the White Wolf took a fruit from his pouch and handed it to her, but he stayed there waiting for her to eat it rather than go back to the fight.

“Thanks,” Lacey peeled back the skin on what seemed like a banana. The peel was just as good as the inside, but they didn’t taste good together, so Lacey nibbled on the peel first.

“This is no time to nibble,” Poe pushed the fruit toward her impatiently.

“Leave her to it,” the White Wolf brushed Poe’s hand away from the fruit. “She knows what she’s doing.”

“I really don’t,” Lacey admitted as much to herself as him.

“You just made the earth ripple with a tidal wave, the sky spit like a viper, and you don’t know what you’re doing?” Poe protested; his eyes so wide that Lacey wanted to laugh.

“I’ll take over, Poe,” the White Wolf brushed Poe off and took the shield from him. “Go send some arrows their way.”

“Through the storm?” Poe looked skeptically at him.

“He means well,” the White Wolf told her, uncapping a waterskin and handing it to her.

“Is it over?” Lacey asked hopefully. “Are they maybe retreating?”

“No,” he huffed at her, almost a laugh, but not quite. “They have pulled back for the moment.”

“Waiting out the storm since it keeps zapping them when they poke their heads out from behind their side of the hill,” Poe explained.

“You do know what you’re doing,” the White Wolf argued gently with her, his ears on a swivel. “It’s all instinct. It couldn’t be taught to you.”

“Does anyone else have magic?” she asked him, looking down at her fruit rather than into his very disconcerting eyes.

“Some of us have mild versions of magic,” he told her, half his attention on telling Graham and Poe to watch for goblins trying to go around the storm.

“I’m sorry,” she waved at him. “I shouldn’t distract you. It’s the middle of a war zone. There’s no time for chit chat.”

“Hardly chit chat,” he quirked a smile. “Thanks to you, our foes have retreated for a brief respite. The magic has probably depleted enough for a break. If the Queen wished to push back and resume the fight, she would simply dispel the storm. Since she has not, she is likely brooding about what to do next.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?” Lacey laughed at how simply he seemed to take it all.

“Worry is irrelevant,” the White Wolf shook his head. “I have watches set up and our fighters know their jobs. You bought us time at the expense of your exhaustion. The least I could do is serve you.”

“You aren’t more interested in planning a counterattack?” Lacey prodded, in awe of the casual nature of his attitude. He could be intense and moving at breakneck speed one moment and laid back like a surfer dude the next.

“The goblins and us have been fighting for more generations than any of us has histories beyond,” the White Wolf shook his head. “We have fought on the same hills or ones just like them. We have tested counterattacks, sneak attacks, pincher movements, and even underground infiltrations. To try something again would be quite redundant.”

“Weird,” Lacey finished the last piece of peel and took a drink of water.

“Each side knows the other so well that it is only when some new variable enters the equations that we have any chance of changing the lines we have drawn in the sand,” he cast one more glance over the wall and then sat down next to her with his back against the wall.

“I’m a new variable,” she nodded her head.

“And thus, many of us are excited to see how this something new changes anything,” the White Wolf took the waterskin from her offering hand.

“I don’t understand how you can be so cavalier?” Lacey took another bite of the inside of the yellow fruit.

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“Once again, worry is irrelevant,” he chided her, wiping his lips from having taken a drink from the waterskin. “This life is all I know. Some days are quiet, and we go about our business of raising livestock, growing crops, and making babies. On other less fortunate days we are burying our fathers, daughters, and friends after a grueling day on the battlement. My grandfather courted your grandmother just here where we sit right now.”

“And now you court me?” she found herself asking. “Wait! If your grandfather courted my grandmother, then are we somehow related?”

“Your grandmother was foolish enough to turn my grandfather down,” the White Wolf teased. “I’m hoping you will not be as much of a heartbreaker as she.”

“Wait, you are courting me?” Lacey’s heart skipped a beat, as she looked upon him in quite a different way.

“Of course,” his eyes sparkled with mischief and Lacey had to hurry to swallow the bite of fruit in her mouth without choking. It didn’t work and she found herself coughing as he laughingly handed her the waterskin back.

Lacey went to take a drink and couldn’t get past the thought of his lips being right where hers were going be on the lip of the waterskin. That was the thing that finally had her blushing furiously. That was just too many lips for a person who’d been too busy for love for most of her life. She pushed the waterskin back to him and the look in his eyes convinced her that somehow he knew exactly what was going through her mind when he surely couldn’t.

“You don’t have magic?” Lacey tried to change the subject as she wrangled her heart back into a regular rhythm.

“I can work some basic puttering magic, but nothing like what you can do,” the White Wolf shrugged. “I can make potions for dispelling magic and simple healings, but I cannot take the essence of the world and make it obey my whims.”

“No fireball potions?” she eyed him skeptically.

“I believe your grandmother taught my grandfather the recipe for something called a Molotov Cocktail, but no one is willing to give up the alcohol necessary to make it,” his lips twitched, and her gaze flitted from those pretty lips to his dancing eyes. “Most of our alcohol doesn’t flame as well as she suggested either. We’d have to steal something called whiskey from your world to make them and that is both dangerous and difficult.”

Lacey didn’t want to ask about her world. She was much more fascinated with his.

“The Goblin Queen likes to send goblins into your world for what she calls supply runs,” the White Wolf looked back out over the battlefield. “We try to close the incursions.”

“Why?” Lacey asked, another bite of fruit starting to ease the emptiness she felt.

“The Goblin Queen is a foreigner like you,” he pointed out. “She knows how to use the things that the goblins come back with, but we do not, not really. These things are much more dangerous in her hands than they could be in ours. We don’t even know what that last goblin was after.”

“It was simple medical tools,” Lacey told him. “Surgical stuff. Though why would she want that?”

“Melt it down for armor, I suppose,” he offered. “Would it work for that?”

“It might,” Lacey shrugged. “Unless she was a doctor in our world.”

“We don’t even know what that would be,” he capped the waterskin and slung it back on his shoulder.

“A doctor is a healer,” Lacey explained, trying to think of why a goblin would want surgical tools if not to melt it down. Did they have enough juice to melt it down anyway? Probably. If they could melt steel into swords, surely they could melt down surgical stuff.

“I’m not the only one who can make potions for healing, so that is unlikely,” he said. “It is probably for armor of some sort.”

“You could have done the same,” Lacey argued. “You could have tried to find metal to melt into weapons or armor.”

“Why bother, when we can pull the stuff off the higher levelled goblins when we take them down?” he shrugged again. “Her side makes armor. Graham makes mostly weapons. They are traded freely between sides when one side or another wins. We have no need to steal from another world.”

“Then why were you there?” Lacey finished her fruit as they talked like a couple just taking a walk on a rainy day.

“To close the incursion,” the White Wolf answered, then admitted, “mostly.”

“Mostly?” she prodded him.

“Fine, if you must know,” he looked down at his fingers that were playing with the edge of a sleeve, “I was looking for you.” Then he changed the subject. “An incursion can only be closed once all who have gone through have also gone back. The goblin went through. I followed. Once both of us went back through the portal, it closed.”

“Except that I came through too,” Lacey said.

“So that incursion will repeat itself as long as more of us are on one side or another,” he tried to explain but it sounded quite convoluted. “No one knows when the first portal happened or why, but we’ve figured out the rules of them as much as we could. Portals open because of an imbalance. The first time someone went through a portal, they probably didn’t come back, so the portal opens up again, maybe to give them a chance to return. It will almost always open near where the imbalance exists.”

“The next portal should open near me, since I’m technically an imbalance,” Lacey figured.

“Exactly,” he seemed excited that she got the idea.

“At least I’m not stuck here forever,” Lacey tried to joke about it, but something in it fell flat between them. The truth was that, other than Gran being over in her world, there wasn’t much in that world that she wanted. It wasn’t that she knew this place well enough to know that she wanted to be here, but she knew she didn’t want to be there.

“You feel stuck here?” he challenged her gently.

“No,” she admitted, sticking her still-sticky finger in her mouth to try to stop up her embarrassment. “Are you kidding? I have magic and power here. I’m totally useless in my world.” She didn’t miss the hurt in his eyes this time around. “I mean, I don’t really feel the need to go back, if you know what I mean.”

“Because here you have power?” he asked, and she looked down to avoid his eyes. That wasn’t why, but she couldn’t admit that, could she? Was he just flirting with her? Why flirt with her anyway?

She shrugged and he looked away.