Damian dropped his bag on the floor in front of his couch and decided to sit down for a minute. He was, in this moment, so fucking done. Three and a half weeks camped out in the desert trying to spy on an underground compound, all for nothing. Even his night-time forays in wolf form to sniff around the above-ground sections had been useless.

He didn’t want to think about the paperwork that this disaster was going to require.

In a movement that was almost ingrained him now, he reached for the rum bottle in the old trunk he used as a coffee table and screwed the cap off. The smell of the alcohol hit his nose, promising sweet, if temporary, relief from the sense of wrongness that had been riding his nerves like a noknika for the past month. Actually, at this point, he’d take one of those fanged monsters over his current state of mind—a monster, no matter how mythological, was something he could fight.

His own emotions were a bit more difficult. Since Oscar had put the idea into his mind, he hadn’t been able to get the thought of Nevada Ashes out of it. And the more he considered it, the less the shame troubled him, and the stronger the absolute need grew to just touch another shifter, to smell their scent and listen to their voices. Even if he could never admit what he was. Would it be enough to soothe that empty space inside him or would it only make the longing worse?

At this point, did it even matter?

Damian took the bottle with him to the kitchen table and lifted the lid on the laptop. The browser was still open from last night’s drunken session with the Nevada Ashes website—at this point, he’d seen all the pictures, watched all the ‘interviews’. He could have practically quoted the stated specialties and hard limits of each of the advertised shifters. He knew that the ones wearing the white bracelets were the least expensive, and the ones wearing the blue would be the most.

He kept coming back to this one shifter. One of the few omega males on the site. He didn’t even look like Val, the omega Damian had left behind in Montana Border, but his image had stuck itself in Damian’s brain like a virus.

Maybe he should just go and get it out of his system. There was no way a night in Nevada Ashes was going to feel as good as being able to go home. And if it sucked as much as he hoped it would, it was entirely possible that this mood he’d been suffering with might just…evaporate. And he could get back to living his life and sleeping in the den he’d dug.

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he booked a Saturday night with the young omega with the beautiful blue eyes and shy grin. Three hours should be enough to purge him of all this need, but just in case, he added a fourth. After all, it was only money and he wasn’t short, even at the hourly rate the blue bracelet advertised. It wasn’t like he had a family to spend it on.

A return ticket and hotel room booking later, life was looking better than it had in a long time. He even almost didn’t dread tomorrow’s mountain of paperwork.

The last thing he did before he went to bed was to open the safe, where his false documents and a few other oddities of his job rested for safekeeping. The small black case he was looking for was almost invisible in the back of the safe, but his hand knew the feel of it. He tossed it on the vanity counter in the bathroom and undid his pants, letting them sag down about his hips.

Inside, two vials of a clear liquid sat inside their elastic pockets. New sterile syringes still in their packaging and tiny sharp needles long enough to go deep into muscle filled the rest of the space. With the ease of long practice, he screwed a needle onto a syringe then drew up a full cc of the clear liquid and jammed it carelessly into the muscle of his ass. The injection site immediately began to burn and tingle, but he knew that would wear off soon enough. The hours of puking that would follow the burning were only temporary too, but once that was past, his scent would have changed enough that he could walk among shifters and not even the sharpest nose would know what he was.

What he had been.

He cleaned up, threw the used needle in his sharps bucket, and put everything away before setting himself up comfortably in front of the toilet to wait for the storm to begin.