Darkness Unmasked (Dark Angels 5)

“What effort can you put into it when you are all but exhausted?” He raised an eyebrow, expression amused. “Trust me, given the risks involved, I want nothing more than your maximum.”

I laughed softly, then rose on tiptoes and dropped another quick kiss on his lips. “Believe me, when you give in—and you will give in, reaper—I’ll give you one hundred percent, exhausted or not.”

“A promise I will hold you to.”

“As long as you do hold me, I don’t care.” I reluctantly returned my attention to the building in front of us. “Can’t you just pull the information about the storage locker from the mind of whoever is manning the reception desk?”

“I could, but our sorcerer appears to have telepathic abilities, remember, and while it is unlikely he would sense any psychic intrusion on my part, it is a risk we should not take, given he is most certainly aware of my presence on this quest.”

I frowned. “Does that mean clouding her perception is out?”

“No. Clouding is more a sensory intrusion than a mental one, and therefore it is safer.”

“Then I guess you’d better make whoever is inside think we’re cops.”

“That I can do.” He placed his fingers under my elbow and lightly guided me across to the thick shrubs that lined one side of the nearby parking lot. “If you wish to alter your facial shape, you will not be seen here by either the cameras or those driving by.”

“Good idea.” While Azriel might be able to stop people from noticing his comings and goings, the last thing we needed was some poor driver spotting what I was doing and having a freak-out. While humanity was as aware of shape-shifters as they were vamps and werewolves, very few knew of the existence of us face-shifters.

I flexed my fingers, then closed my eyes and pictured my own face—from the silver of my hair, the lilac of my eyes, the slight uptilt of my nose and defined cheekbones, to the fullness of my lips. Then I replaced it with more rounded features, thinner lips, and very short black hair. A black so rich it shone blue in the sunlight.

Once that image was frozen in my mind, I reached for the magic. It exploded around me, thick and fierce, as if it had been contained for far too long. It swept through me like a gale, making my muscles tremble and the image waver. I frowned, holding the image fiercely against the storm. Power began to pulsate, burn, and change me. My skin rippled as my features altered, and my hair suddenly felt shorter and somehow finer. As the magic faded, my knees buckled, my legs suddenly weak.

Azriel gripped my arm and saved me from falling.

“Damn,” I muttered, leaning against him briefly. “That never seems to get any easier.”

“Given you continue to function barely above exhaustion, it is unlikely to.”

“It’s not like I can do a whole lot about that,” I muttered, and forced my knees to lock. “What I need is for the bad guys to stop creating havoc for a month or so.”

“A situation that is unlikely. I am actually amazed that your father has let the lack of progress on finding the second key slide for as long as he has.”

“He could hardly force me to look when I was all but dead in the hospital. Even he isn’t that callous.”>His voice was dry, and I chuckled softly. “Oh come on, she might actually be nice.”

“She’s taking her mother on a date. What does that say about her?”

“Hey, your mother will be there, too, remember.”

“Yeah, but my mother has become a conniving witch who plots incessantly to get me married.”

“What makes you think her mother isn’t?”

“Because,” he grumbled, “it was apparently her idea, not her mother’s. Besides, the word from the pack is that she doesn’t approve of wolf clubs. Hates what they represent.”

“She’s a werewolf, isn’t she? How the hell can she disapprove of the clubs?”

“Who the fuck knows? Maybe she’s a prude.”

Was it even possible to be a werewolf and a prude? It certainly wasn’t a likely combination. “If you think it’s going to be that bad, don’t go.”

He snorted. “My mother will make my life hell if I don’t go. Trust me.”

I grinned. Stane was afraid of his mother. Imagine that. “And the storage container?”

“Oh. Yeah.” There was a brief whoosh of sound, and I had the mental image of him scooting from one screen of his massive computer “bridge” to the other. “I couldn’t find anything listed under John Nadler’s name, but I did find one under Genevieve Sands.”

Who was one of Nadler’s heirs, according to the information I’d gotten from a ghost. Nadler was the man behind the consortium that had been buying up the land all around Stane’s shop. Not that he wanted the land, per se; he just wanted to control what lay underneath it—a major ley-line intersection. Such intersections were places of great power and could be used to manipulate time, reality, or fate. But they could also be used to create a rift between this world and the next, and we very much suspected that whoever had stolen the first key had used the power of the intersection to access the gray fields and find the gates.