Chapter 1: The Curse Awakens
The air in the vault tasted of ozone and old dust, but beneath that was a newer, sharper scent.Musk. His own. It had been clinging to him for days, getting stronger since Cairo, a primal underline to his usual cool confidence. Sly Cooper ignored it, his blue eyes narrowed in concentration, every line of his raccoon’s body taut as a wire.
The security grid was child’s play. A dance he’d done a thousand times. The real challenge was the idol itself, sitting on its pedestal in the dead center of the obsidian room. The thing was ugly—a lumpy, sinuous carving of some forgotten god, all exaggerated hips and a leering grin. The Thieves’ Codex called it the Seed of Apsu. A fertility idol. Supposedly it could make barren fields bloom and dying herds multiply. Sly wasn’t interested in agriculture. He was interested in the twelve karats of flawless ruby set as its eyes.
A job was a job.
His paws, sheathed in his signature gloves, didn’t tremble. But his body… his body was a live wire. A strange heat had been building in his core since he’d slipped into the museum, a restless, itchy energy that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with the low, sympathetic hum coming from the idol. The obsidian walls around him seemed to pulse, the etched sigils writhing in the gloom cast by a single, flickering emerald lamp overhead.
“Just another trinket,” he muttered to himself, the sound swallowed by the thick air.
He took the final step, the pressure plates sighing under his negligible weight. The display case was open. All that stood between him and a very hefty payday was six inches of empty space.
He reached.
His fingers closed around the cool, strangely porous stone.
The world exploded in a silent, invisible wave.
It wasn’t light or sound. It was a sensation. A blast of pure, undiluted want that shot up his arm, shredded his nervous system, and detonated in the base of his spine. He gasped, a strangled, wet sound.
His body convulsed, back arching violently. Fire raced through his veins, molten and urgent. It pooled, immediately and catastrophically, between his legs. A savage ache, a crushing weight, as if his very essence was being concentrated, condensed, made undeniable. He looked down, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing.
His balls, nestled in his fur, were swelling. Not a little. They were becoming impossibly heavy, taut orbs of desperate potential, a physical demand that weighed him down. And his cock… it was already hard, a throbbing, insistent heat pushing free of his sheath, standing at a full, painful mast against his belly fur. It felt huge. Alien. Thrumming with a life of its own.
The Idol fell from his limp fingers, clattering to the pedestal with a dull thud. Its ruby eyes seemed to wink.
A roar filled his ears. Not in the room. In his blood. In every primal cell. It wasn’t a thought. It was an imperative, etched into his DNA by the idol’s curse.
BREED.
The command was absolute, obliterating reason, obliterating Sly Cooper the master thief. Need clenched his gut, a cramp of raw hunger far more basic than any he’d ever known. His vision tinged red at the edges. He smelled everything—the dust, the oil from the lamp, the humid stone, and overwhelmingly, his own potent, pheromone-laden musk. He needed to spill it. He needed a vessel. He needed warmth. Now.
He spun, instincts hyper-aware, scanning the shadows not for guards but for a shape, a scent, a target.
The vault door, twenty feet away, hissed open on silent hydraulics. A shaft of sterile white light cut through the cloying green gloom.
A silhouette stood there.
Slender.Curved. Backlit into an exquisite mystery of form.
The scent hit him a second later, cutting through his own animal stink. Jasmine soap.Gun oil. A hint of sharp, clean sweat. Fox.
Carmelita.
The name surfaced from the drowning depths of his conscious mind, a life raft he couldn’t reach. Interpol Inspector Carmelita Fox. His nemesis. His… something else.
She took a step into the vault, her pistol held in a perfect two-handed grip, sweeping the room.“Cooper! I know you’re in here. The silent alarm was tripped ten minutes ago. Give it up. It’s over.”
Her voice. It was a trigger. The part of him that was still Sly recoiled, formulating a quip, an escape plan. The beast that had awoken within him heard only the challenge in her tone, saw only the perfect, arresting sway of her hips as she moved, caught the delicious, maddening scent of her—female.
He stepped out from behind the pedestal, into the refracted green light.
Carmelita’s gun snapped to him. Then her eyes went wide. The professional fury on her face dissolved into blank, utter shock. Her jaw went slack. The muzzle of her pistol dipped, just slightly.
“Dios mío…” The whisper was barely audible.
She was seeing it all. The unnatural, swollen heaviness distorting his lower form. The thick, rampant erection that left nothing to the imagination. The way his fur was matted with a light sheen of sweat. The fever-bright glaze over his usually sharp blue eyes. He wasn’t just aroused. He was transformed. A living embodiment of fertility run amok.
“Sly… what… what did you do?” Her voice was a mix of horror and a fascination she would never admit.
“Didn’t… do anything…” he managed to grit out, each word a battle. His own voice was a rough growl, unfamiliar to him. “Touched it… the idol…”
Her eyes flicked to the ugly carving on the floor. Understanding, cold and clinical, tried to reassert itself in her gaze. Interpol training. Anomalous artifacts. Curses. It was a file, a case. But the sight of him kept shattering that clinical distance.
He took a step forward. It was not the graceful, silent step of a thief. It was a heavy, deliberate stalk. The air between them crackled. His scent rolled towards her in a wave—dark, spicy, overwhelmingly male. He saw her nostrils flare. Saw a tremor run through the hand holding the gun. Saw, for a fleeting second, something other than shock or duty in her green eyes. A primal recognition. A flicker of answering heat that she violently suppressed.
“Stay back, Cooper!” she barked, tightening her grip on the pistol, finding her training again. “I’m taking you in. And… and we’ll get you medical.”
“Medical,” he echoed, the word tasting stupid on his tongue. The ache in him was a pounding drumbeat. Breed.Claim.Now. The fox was right there.Warm. Alive.Perfect. His muscles coiled, tensing for a spring. Reason was a thin ghost. The hunger was everything.
“It’s not a request,” she said, her voice hardening. “Now, slowly, on your knees.”
He didn’t kneel. He took another step.And another. The distance closed. Ten feet.Eight.
Her resolve solidified. This was the Carmelita he knew. The one who wouldn’t hesitate.“Stop! Final warning!”
He was five feet away. He could see the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat. Could smell the subtle shift in her scent, fear and something else mingling. The gun was a black hole pointed at his chest.
His instincts made the calculation in a microsecond: lunge, disable, take. The thief’s mind, fighting its way to the surface, screamed a different strategy.
With a Herculean effort that made his temples pound, Sly forced his gaze away from her, from the mesmerizing curve of her body. He looked at the emerald lamp in the ceiling.
“Carmelita,” he rasped, the name an anchor. “Light.”
He threw his cane.
It wasn’t aimed at her. It sailed past her ear, a whirling blur of polished wood and steel. It struck the emerald lamp with a crystal ping.
Darkness plunged into the vault. Not total—the open door provided a slim bar of light from the corridor—but it was enough.
Her shout of surprise was cut off by the sound of his movement. Not towards her. Away. He was already moving, every muscle screaming in protest, his new, heavy anatomy a grotesque handicap. He bounded past her, his shoulder brushing the doorframe, his scent enveloping her for a split second in the dark.
He heard her spin, heard the sharp report of her pistol—once, twice—the shots zipping into the obsidian where he’d just been.
Then he was out, into the bright, cool corridor, the curse a fire in his loins and a riot in his brain, the shock on Carmelita Fox’s face seared into his memory, and the urgent, animal need to find a release pounding in time with his racing heart. The chase was on, but it had just become something utterly, terrifyingly different.