Page 86 of The Firebrand
“Fuck you. You got me. That’s all you’ll get.” He kept up the twitching, though, causing the knife to draw blood again. “Fuck. Stop cutting me, bitch.”
Sabine gripped him tighter. “Then stop tweaking, you jerk.”
“Guess you’ve never been to the Cubes. Believe me, you’ll tell us where you were going,” explained Ram.
Sabine disarmed the shifter with her blade still jammed against his throat. She tapped her D-chip, containing him in invisible bonds. Standing over Ram, who cushioned the drugged victim, she said, “The female looks pretty out of it to me.”
The deserted side street was filthy, but Ram didn’t care if his crisp, clean pants were collateral damage. He smoothed the damp hair from her forehead. Gritting his teeth, he glared at the still-jittery shifter. “We have to wait until she comes out of the drugs a little so I can fog her memory.”
“Can you scrub her, Ram?” asked Sabine.
“I can confuse her if her will isn’t too strong,” he added. “That’ll be good enough. She’ll think she imagined all this. If she needs the real thing, we’ll get Rein or Dax.”
“She’s waking up.”
The female tried to sit but collapsed into Ram’s arms again, her eyes rolling in her head. She shifted to the side, gagging. “Oh my God.” A hand clasped to her stomach, she retched. “What happened?”
“Here goes,” said Ram. “I’ll plant the suggestion that she fell and hit her noggin. You push her back through the portal to Earth. You know, sexual side effects come with my gift, but that can’t be helped.”
“Just do it.” Sabine looked around, not wanting company.
Ram angled forward, a warm smile to soothe her, a palm on each temple. His eyes morphed from translucent to vivid green while he locked her in his gaze, mesmerizing her, clouding her mind, inserting false memories.
The female mumbled as her chin fell to her chest, “I feel … strange … so strange.”
She slipped into a trance-like state that would last only a brief time. In that instant before she saw anything else, Sabine grabbed her to transport her to Earth, where she would awaken in about five minutes with a hell of a headache, jumbled memories, and a strong desire to fuck someone.
He hoped the human chalked it all up to a head injury.
When his partner returned, Ram dropped the shifter’s illegal jumper into his pants pocket while gripping the guy’s arm. “Let’s get this motherfucking dog to the Cubes.”
Using their D-chips to access the portal, they bulldozed their captive into a cell and closed the bespelled iron door.
Sabine peered through the bars. “What’s your name?”
“You’ll get jack shit from me, nympho.”
“Like I haven’t heard that before. Anyone around here know who he is?” Sabine did a one-eighty, yelling out to the gaffers.
Several of the guards came over for a look-see. One of them, also a wolf shifter, said, “That’s Ulfur. He’s Luka’s. Quite a few of his pack have turned bad. Drugs are strangling them, and Luka is struggling to hold onto his position as alpha.”
“He’s all yours,” said Ram. “Kole will be calling with instructions.”
Sabine and Ram bounded up a flight of stairs to Kole’s office. Bounty blocked his door with her arms crossed over her ample chest.
When Ram didn’t say anything because his gaze was stuck to the vampire secretary’s breasts, his mouth frozen, Sabine glared at him. “He’s gonna want to talk to us, Bounty. We just dropped off a prisoner.”
“Okay, but he’s got a report to finish. He’s been putting it off. You’ve got a few minutes before I kick you out.”
Sabine hit her with a just-try-it look as she shoved past, charging through the door.
“We’ve got the werewolf Ulfur downstairs. He came through the Whorl with this.” Ram plopped the jumper on Kole’s desk. “You’ll never guess what he brought across with him.”
“I don’t playguess what.” Kole pounded a fist on the desk, scattering papers.
“A drugged human female.” Sabine blurted out the deets, shooting a warning at Ram as if he should know better than to bait the bear. In this case, the commander.
“The fuck you say. Why?”
