“You’re strong in morph, Dekka, but that gas shell is more than two and a half feet long and weighs just about a hundred pounds,” Sam interjected. “Is Armo stronger than you?”

“This could be a suicide mission,” Dekka said. “I’m not sending Armo. I’ll manage.” She ended with a hand chop signaling the matter was decided. No one argued further.

“So, let’s walk through it again,” Malik said. “I do my thing, just a one-second blast, just enough to scare the hell out of any unmorphed humans with Vector. Shade zooms in and issues the warning. Hopefully any humans in there make a run for it. Then Sam does his thing. Francis takes Dekka and our new toy. In and out. The timer is set for six minutes. Bang.”

Dekka nodded. Vector Plan #3. Maybe the third time would be the charm.

Or maybe this was the last round. She closed her eyes and saw Williams, except now it was her, Dekka, her flesh erupting . . . her tongue swelling . . . her throat torn by screams of pain.

Dekka. Herself. Begging for death.

Two defeats. A third would very likely be the end of the Rockborn Gang.

“Oh, my God. That’s an entire red velvet cake.” Cruz stared at the object, all covered in white frosting, kept fresh beneath a glass bell jar. Untouched perfection.

“We should bring that back for everyone to share,” Armo said doubtfully. “Right?”

“Well,” Cruz said, “I am a little worried that it might be stale or taste bad. So we should probably sample it first.”

They were an extremely unlikely pair of burglars. A seven-foot-tall mass of muscle and white fur, and Jennifer Lawrence, Cruz’s morph of choice at the moment. JLaw seemed like a good choice; after all, what red-blooded male didn’t like her? But Armo had not seemed terribly impressed, and of course why would he? He knew who Cruz really was, and she was not Jennifer Lawrence.

“Let me get plates and forks.”

“I can’t eat with a fork,” Armo admitted, holding up one of his big claw-tipped paws. He grinned and gleefully stuck his rail-spike black claws into the cake at roughly the middle and scooped a huge piece into his other paw and began eating.

“Yeah, okay, I can do that, too, if we’re going all barbarian.” Cruz dug JLaw’s hand into the cake and scooped out a smaller piece, red crumbs falling to the floor, icing smearing her fingers. She licked the icing one finger at a time and looked up to see Armo watching her. Then she laughed because a cupcake-sized chunk had fallen to his chest and was now sliding down his white fur.

Cruz snagged the escaping piece, and without thinking about it, really thinking only that Armo’s claws were not much good for delicate work, she fed the cake into his muzzle.

He looked at her through big gold-and-black eyes and licked her hand with his bluish-pink bear tongue. And then, time just seemed to stop. Cruz knew time had stopped because she was no longer breathing. He towered over her and she looked up at him.

Then he said, “I would kind of like to kiss you someday.”

And that did not help Cruz’s breathing issue at all.

“I mean, not now because, you know: bear.” Armo sounded flustered, as if thinking he’d embarrassed her. “I don’t quite have lips right now. Also you’re not you.”

A squeaky laugh came from her. “I should be JLaw all the time. I get the nicest compliments.”

“What’s JLaw?”

“Jennifer Lawrence. JLaw. The actor. You know. She was in Silver Linings Playbook.” Nothing. “Or American Hustle.” Still nothing. “She was in The Hunger Games.”

“Oh, yeah, I saw that.” He nodded his big shaggy head. “That girl. She had a bow and arrow.”

“That’s her. I thought maybe you’d . . .” She shrugged, not quite sure how to finish that thought. She’d thought what, exactly? That he would be attracted to a movie star and forget that she was really just Cruz? She finished lamely. “She’s gorgeous. You know, like you.”

Dark eyes fringed in white fur contemplated her. “I don’t like when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act like you have to hide, or be some famous movie star.”

Cruz sighed shakily and looked away. “It’s just, I know what I look like to people. I look like a guy trying to pass himself off as a girl. I mean, in my head . . . But what’s in my head isn’t what people see.”

“I’m not people.”

“I mean, when this is all over I can start on the hormones and then, you know, maybe, if I have the money, I can do reassignment surgery. Then I’ll look more like how I feel inside my head.”

Tags: Michael Grant Gone
Source: readsnovelonline.net