“Like I said, that part isn’t up to me,” I said. “I’m strictly here for you, Bobby. Troy is going to have to take his chances with Duke.”
“Are you really not going to kill me?”
“I’m really not going to kill you.” I was smiling by the time I finished speaking.
Bobby uncurled his fingers and reached toward me. It seemed totally reasonable to touch my fingers to his until we were holding hands through the bars. “I just want to hug you. I want to hug everyone.”
Leduc’s voice came from the office again. “I think we can manage that.”
Angel moved out of the doorway for the sheriff. Apparently her flirting with him hadn’t gotten to that point. Good to know. I moved back out of the way so he could unlock the cell door. Bobby stepped back from the cell door like he’d gotten in the habit of backing up.
Leduc stood there just inside the cell, looking at the younger man, and said, “I’m happier than I know how to say that you didn’t hurt Ray, and you’re getting out of here.” Then he held his arms wide, and Bobby got a huge grin on his face that made him seem years younger, as if some weight had lifted. They hugged, Leduc patting Bobby on the back as they ended it.
I was standing almost behind the open cell door, so when Leduc let Bobby out into the little hallway, Bobby went the other direction for the hug fest. He hugged everyone, including Olaf, which was fun. The bigger man just stood there with his hands sort of out to the side as if he was so unaccustomed to being hugged that he didn’t know how to do it.
Bobby hugged Angel and kissed her on the cheek, and she returned the favor. When he came to me, he leane
d down so that I could bury my face in the bend of his neck the way I had in the cell when we’d almost gotten shot. His skin was warm, smelling of soap and shampoo, of him, and underneath all that was the faint hint of leopard. My inner leopard looked up from deep inside me, flashing dark gold eyes as she sniffed the scent of him. We liked Bobby, and then I realized, we realized, it wasn’t just his leopard we were sensing. I turned still in his arms to find Pierette at the doorway, almost hidden behind Olaf’s big frame. Her eyes showed leopard green before she slipped her sunglasses on to hide the leopard eyes in her human face.
Bobby sniffed the air and then snuffled next to my face, searching for the scent, or confirming it wasn’t me. Something about the movement against my neck tickled, so I laughed and squirmed against him before backing off with a laugh. Heat marched down my skin, and it wasn’t coming from Bobby.
It wasn’t Angel, who was standing farther into the hallway past us. It smelled like sunburned grass and hardened earth waiting for the rains to fall under a merciless sun. Some inner beasts smelled like the lands they had originated in, not like fur and skin—lions were one of those. I looked at Olaf, and he had his sunglasses on, too, but I didn’t need to see his eyes to know they’d changed to lion.
Bobby shivered beside me, rubbing his arms. “What is that?”
The fact that he had to ask instead of being able to figure it out said either he was that weak or he had no practice with other shapeshifters. Maybe both. Olaf turned and went for the door, taking his skin-dancing energy with him.
Pierette stumbled in the doorway, as if she’d barely gotten out of his way or he’d bumped her, but I knew he hadn’t touched her. Shit. Now that Bobby was safe, did Pierette think the honey trap for Olaf was back on?
Olaf stopped short of the outer door. Milligan and Custer were standing on one side of the room, arms a little out from their sides, feet already positioned for pushing off to give that first blow. Olaf’s energy burned through the room so that my lioness began to sniff the air, taking in the hot scent of him. The scent of wolf and hyena spilled into the power-laden air, but it wasn’t the same as the wolf scents of home. Those were evergreens and thick woods with deep leaves under cool trees. This was desert, dry and parched. This hyena had the same scent, like they were from the same land, and they were. Milligan and Custer had been attacked by the same werewolf pack somewhere in the Middle East, a pack that had at least one werehyena of the striped variety as opposed to the spotted that was the usual type in the wereanimal community.
“Now that you have saved his life, we can finally talk of other things,” Olaf said.
I’d have liked to say I didn’t know what he meant, but as he stared at me and lowered his glasses enough for me to see his eyes gone hot and orange, my lioness spilled upward. She drew the scent of him deep inside her and thought very seriously at me that it was time to decide if he was a cub killer or if he was in line to try out to be our king. I thought very hard at the lion inside me to explain that I had more than enough kings waiting at home. There was a second figure standing beside her in the dark. It was huge, even standing next to her, with a thick dark mane. The lioness knew exactly what she wanted, and what she needed me to do was decide if the big man standing by the door could be that.
Olaf sniffed the air in the room. “Where is the male lion? I can smell him.”
I started to say it was me, but a voice spoke through the door behind him.
“Right behind you.” It was Nicky.
73
“YOU ARE NOT the lion I am sensing,” Olaf said, turning so that he could keep an eye on both Nicky and the two SEALs.
It was Nicky’s turn to raise his face and take a deep hit of the air in the room. It hadn’t been a very human gesture when Olaf did it, and it wasn’t any more human when Nicky did it. It had bothered me when Olaf did it, but not when Nicky did it. But then I loved him, and I was sort of afraid of Olaf, which colored my interpretation of things. Weirdly, knowing that made me more patient with both of them. Or maybe it was my lioness that didn’t want to be angry at them. We had two big males in the room who could match the shadow male that she created inside me. She’d done it once before; it was like she was showing her wish.
Nicky gave a smile that was more snarl than happiness. “I’ve smelled that lion before.”
“Who is it?” Olaf said, voice gone even deeper with the nearness of his beast.
“Follow the scent. You’ll figure it out.”
Olaf raised his face to the air again, but this time he parted his lips so that he could draw the scent in over the roof of his mouth like a flehmen response in a real lion: Males will try in this way to scent females in heat. In human form Olaf didn’t have the parts either between his lips with their frame of black beard and mustache or inside his head. Human beings just didn’t dedicate enough of our brains to translating scent. Even if we could smell it, we couldn’t understand what we were smelling. We’d sacrificed too much of our brainpower to sight and abstract thought.
He moved farther into the room, still scenting the air in that not very human way. I started moving back toward the cells. I needed Leduc to put Bobby back in his cell so the rest of us could go somewhere more private to talk about my inner lion. But the moment I tried to move back from them, the big male inside me gave a coughing roar that vibrated through me, staggering me. I reached out to grab hold of something and found a hand to hold. Energy flowed down that hand to calm my inner lions. I knew whose hand was soothing me before I turned and saw Angel.
She drew me in to her body, putting her other hand against my face so that we stared into each other’s eyes. It must have looked like a prelude to a kiss to the rest of the room, but it was Angel soothing my inner beasts. The male lion vanished first, because he wasn’t really there. My lioness on the other hand snarled up at Angel’s calming energy. She didn’t want to be soothed; she wanted the reality of the inner beast she’d created, and just feet away from us were two of them. Except that Nicky was out of the running, because he was my Bride. It meant he was metaphysically compromised and could never be my lion to call the way that Nathaniel was my leopard to call, which left only one lion in the room as far as my lioness was concerned.