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There was fear and unease in the girl’s body language as Vesper explained, and she was suddenly relieved that she’d been the first to tell the child about Luperci and that she was in her natural form (though it was rare for her not to be in neutral territory). She couldn’t have imagined what would’ve happened if the wolf ran into an Optime-formed canine first; the shifters must have looked grotesque and deformed with two legs and two long arms. Ves had long ceased to think of them as ugly (there was no way that Myrika could be anything but gorgeous in any form), but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be strange to someone ignorant of their existence.
The wolf seemed wary about her offer to shift, and so Vesper held off on that, instead pricking her good ear to hear the question. “Luperci have a lot of advantages,” she confirmed. “Some of them get stupid and try to act like humans, but others know how to use all their forms—natural, oversized, or two-legged—to their advantage.” She knew this was relatively frightening, too, but the sooner the girl learned she needed to work twice as hard to make it here, the better.
“I don’t know about Luna,” the hybrid said, “but the thing that makes wolves turn into Luperci is like an illness, and one that has spread to almost the whole world; it’s strange you haven’t seen one yet. A long time ago, there were only a few, but they can change wolves into them through contact of blood and, uh”—she grimaced—“sex.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a blessing or a curse, just something that happened, and something we all have to deal with.”
She realized how all of this sounded and inclined her head, standing up on all fours. “This probably just sounds like a scary story for pups, but—I’ll go ahead and shift half-way, okay? I will look bigger but not too different yet.” She took a step back just in case and then spurred on the change with that telltale clench of her abdomen, her bones rearranging but slightly—mostly obvious on her forepaws with an elongated dewclaw—to accommodate the added muscle mask of the Secui form.
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