Page 250 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

That was Sunder, but his gray, craggy features had smoothed out a little, with lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes.

His horns were still there, but short black hair grew in crisp, spiky strands around them, covering his head.

Streaks of silver highlighted his temples.

What had disappeared were the tusks protruding from his mouth, and his rough skin was now almost as soft as that of a human man—just without any hair.

Woah, he’d shifted back to his peace-form.

I wasn’t sure if I should wake him or not, but I was pretty sure he’d want to know about this.

Nudging him gently against his shoulder, I saw him wake up with groggy eyes, eyes that were exactly the same in either form, I noted.

“Sunder, my love,” I said softly, “I think you shifted to your peace-form somehow.”

He came upright immediately, his eyes going wide as he stuck out his arms and looked at them.

“Akri, lights on, please!” he said, and then he was out of bed and across the room, ducking into the small attached bathing area.

I heard him exclaim in shock. Wrapping a sheet around myself, I staggered out of bed after him. Yup, he had a mirror in there.

I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw how he was poking at his flesh, holding out a strand of silver hair at his temple with a bit of consternation.

“I went fucking gray,” he muttered, almost sounding offended that his body had aged on him.

In his battle-form, that had been harder to tell, but I imagined it was strange for him to look in the mirror and not see a youthful face.

I thought he was handsome, a silver fox.

He didn’t look older than a well-preserved forty-year-old, so he had nothing to worry about.

“I think you look distinguished,” I said, smiling when he turned to look at me.

At first, he looked a bit upset. Then he started chuckling.

“I suppose I do, huh? Come on, we need to get to the Doc. I want him to figure out how this could have happened. It’s not supposed to, once the Crumbling starts.

” He yanked his kilt up around his hips, then grabbed my hand and started pulling me out of his quarters at a brisk pace.

Yelping, I rushed to secure the sheet more tightly around my naked body, but there was no stopping him now.

Thank God the hallway was empty, and so was the next, but that luck didn’t hold.

Near the med bay itself, a tall man was walking toward us.

I recognized him as the one with severe burns on his back.

He wore his boots and leather pants, but his torso was swathed in bandages.

Camila was at his side, and the male was holding onto her long braid as he talked to her in a teasing voice.

The two of them noticed us jogging through the hallway, and, to my surprise, the bandaged male shoved Camila behind him and pulled out a knife from somewhere. “Who the fuck are you?” he yelled angrily, holding the knife out defensively.

Sunder skidded to a stop on his bare feet. He didn’t seem worried, he was actually smiling really widely. “Thorin, it’s me, brother. I shifted to my peace-form!” With his free hand, he gestured down his body, indicating the changes.

Thorin’s glowing green eyes darted down Sunder’s body suspiciously, but then he looked at me, wrapped in my sheet toga, and he started to smirk.

“Oh, I see what happened, brother. Carry on.” He made a gesture down the hallway, his knife disappearing with some kind of sleight-of-hand motion.

“Good for you,” he yelled out after us as Sunder started dragging me along again to the med bay.

Camila waved at me as we passed them, her expression telling me that, just like Thorin, she knew exactly what we’d been up to.

“Say hi to Luka for me. We’re going to follow your great example and find a bed,” she teased.

With heat still scalding my cheeks from the interaction, we walked into the med bay.

The Doc, Luka, was sitting on a chair in one corner, a brightly tattooed woman in his lap and her arms around his neck as the two made out.

I thought her name was Noa, but I’d been introduced to so many people in the past few hours that I wasn’t sure.

Sunder barged in on them without hesitation.

“Doc, look, you need to take a scan right now.”

The two canoodling in that chair jumped apart, a dark purple flush riding high on Luka’s aristocratic cheekbones. Noa didn’t seem to feel any kind of embarrassment; she shot Sunder a distrustful look, her eyes scanning over him as she seemed to try to figure out who he was.

“Sunder!” Luka said, having no problem recognizing his friend, unlike everyone else.

“You are in peace-form!” As Sunder had demanded, the Doc was on his feet, a handheld device in hand, hurrying to run it over Sunder’s body.

He made humming noises as he did so, and I saw how my big Tarkan defender shifted nervously on his feet.

That’s when it happened, one moment he was soft-skinned, his features relaxed into an almost human-looking face, and the next, his battle-form was back.

His tusks grew from his mouth, his skin hardened to stone, and the short hair on his head receded into his skin.

Sunder groaned in disappointment. The Doc made another humming noise, but Noa’s eyes focused on my improvised toga, and she started to giggle.

“Yes, uh…” Doc said, his eyes going from Sunder to me.

“It seems like you should keep doing what you, eh… just did. Doctor’s orders.

” He started grinning as the words left his mouth, his eyes leaving Sunder to share a look with his own mate.

“I’m pretty sure you just discovered what you should be feeling when you’re in peace-form.

Now it’s just a matter of, eh… practice? ”

I was struggling not to feel a bit of embarrassment when the Doc was basically prescribing Sunder to have sex, lots of it.

Not that I was objecting, but it was starting to become rather a public spectacle at this point, and that was a little more than I’d bargained for. I was just a simple schoolteacher.

Sunder seemed to just stare at the Doc, as if he was trying to figure out what advice he’d just been given.

“Are you saying that I just forgot how to shift? It’s not a medical issue?

” he said. Luka started nodding immediately, and Sunder finally turned to look at me, his craggy gargoyle face breaking out in a grin.

“Well, I guess we'll just have to follow the Doc’s orders then, won’t we? ” he asked me.

I clutched the sheet more tightly to my chest. I was sure I was blushing down to my boobs, but I nodded. “I guess we should.”