Dires suddenly filled the room.
Between the surge of furred bodies slicing the other Trogs to bits, and the wild blasts flying around, he lost sight of Aria. He’d fallen partly behind a display pillar, and now he crawled between it and the wall. He closed his eyes and reached for a form he hadn’t used in a very long time.
As the dark fur chased over his body, Lucas shook like a leaf. He was dangerously close to depleting all his resources.
The guard’s tunic and pants shredded as he transformed, and he almost forgot to remove his crystal from around his neck—the thong wasn’t long enough for a Dire throat. Lucas removed the last bits of clothing. His lock pick set was in the pocket, but as a Dire, he had no place to carry it. Short of trying to wind the thong around his wrist where it would be too obvious, he had no way to wear the crystal, either. With reluctance, he decided he’d have to abandon them.
Lucas peered out from behind the display case to see that the doors to the storage rooms had been blasted open. Dires were everywhere he looked. His guise would save him from immediate shredding, but they would know on the first sniff that he wasn’t one of their pack. His appearance alone, however, should be enough to get him out the main door and up the stairs.
As he rose from his hiding spot, intending on making the dash for it, he saw the Torshin. The tall form stood at the room’s other end, staring down at something lying on the floor.
Aria.
A strange, thin coil shot from the Torshin’s hands and wrapped around her collar. Aleash.Before he could do more than snarl, the Dragona tried to attack Demeti, but he sent a pulse along the line, and into her. It knocked her to the ground, where Aria screamed and writhed.
Lucas’s Dire body crouched, ready to pounce. He stopped himself just in time. His teeth and claws couldn’t hope to stand against those blasts. And dying wouldn’t help Aria.
Looking at the raw energy pulsing into her, Lucas doubted his living would help her much, either. But he had to try. How had she ended up wearing that damned collar? The Torshin’s words indicated he intended to take her as his own.
Lucas couldn’t just leave her to that fate.
Why not?The question reverberated through him. Why would a woman he’d only met in his dreams matter that much to him? Besides, no way that link was real. She’d been adream, for effing sake. His imagination went wild, driven by lust. Any resemblance to this living, breathing—effing gorgeous—Dragona had to be pure myth.
But his entire body vibrated with the desire to help her. Lucas gritted his now very sharp and pointy teeth. Somehow, this stranger had her hooks into him, and deep.
He should run. Head for the stairs. Get away while he could.
Instead, he turned toward the storage rooms.
If he wanted to be any help at all, he needed to blend with this group of ruthless thieves. And that meant altering himself to appear—and smell—as one of them.
He’d never tried to blend with a Dire pack. They were creatures that relied so heavily on scent that it would be risky as hell. When he took on another’s guise, his natural scent was overtaken by the new one, but never completely eliminated. It subtly altered the end result.
Dire noses were good at detecting subtleties. Lucas swallowed, took a deep breath, and stepped into the room.
No one even looked at him. The Torshin was busy with his new toy, and the Dires were ransacking Udo’s stash.
Lucas’s stomach clenched, and he had to keep his gaze averted from Aria’s pain. If he was to help her, subterfuge was key.
Well, it was the only plan he could cobble together, anyway. Because he had no idea how to go from a Dire hiding among a pack, to getting her away from that Torshin.
One step at a time...
He paced into the closest storage room with as much swagger as he could muster, staying a bit apart from the other Dires to keep his scent away.
They were so focused on their task that nobody even glanced at him. The storage room was a maze of shelves loaded with goods of all kinds. Lucas’s inner thief drooled at the riches.
But, sadly, he wasn’t there to steal.
He was there to kill.
He’d only done it once before, and it had been an accident—an overdose of the poison from his claw. That the thug would have killed him in an instant didn’t alleviate the guilt he’d suffered. But this time, if he wanted to infiltrate this pack, he’d need to do it deliberately.
Identical Dires running around would be a dead giveaway. Emphasis on the dead.
This is so not a good idea.Even if he managed to impersonate a Dire in beast form, he’d be stuck in it. His brain guided the morph via visualization, and he’d never seen the human version of whatever Dire he emulated. Morphing blind was dangerous as hell—his natural body would try to reassert itself as he shifted, especially as he was near the end of his resources.
It sounded like a particularly ugly way to die.
