38

FRESHLY SHOWERED, FRESHLY dressed, with guns and knives back in place, I was ready to meet the gold weretigers. Or as ready as I was going to be, because honestly, I still didn't want to. I had enough men in my life. I didn't want more. I wasn't monogamous, that was okay, but there's not being monogamous and there's having so many men in your life that you can't possibly do justice to any of them. I was either at that point, or perilously close, and now we were going to add more. It just sounded like a bad idea to me.

Nathaniel had made me drink a Powerade from the cooler near the locker rooms, but he'd also insisted on stopping at the kitchen so he could make me a protein shake. They were designed to replace things a hard workout would take out of you, and the interesting thing was if you didn't need the shake, it tasted bad, but if your body needed it, chocolate tasted like chocolate. It tasted very good today.

I sat at the small kitchen table while Nathaniel and Nicky made shakes for all of us, including Stephen and Gregory. Dino had dressed and come with us, leaving Fredo to do knife practice with the other guards. He was our teacher for short-blade work. For sword work it was Wicked and Truth. The sword training wasn't mandatory for the wereanimal guards, but it was for the vampires, because it was still possible to be called out in an old-fashioned duel. Besides, Fredo was right, most people were afraid of knives, and a sword is just a damned big knife. Truth had told me once that the only thing people fear more than a sword is an axe. He'd actually offered to teach the guards axe work, but there weren't enough takers for a regular class.

I sat and sipped my shake and thought nothing. It was like a roaring emptiness in my head. It reminded me almost of the place my head went when I killed. It told me better than anything else that whatever was wrong  with me wasn't fixed. I was warm and showered and stretched and even achy from the heavy bag, but I wasn't all right. I was better, but that's not the same thing as being all right. I thought the thought, and then I let it go. I used to hold on to thoughts like that, like hiding dirty clothes under the bed, but now I just let the thought go. I didn't judge it or worry at it; I just thought it and let it drift away.

My phone was ringing. I knew it was my phone because it was vibrating in my back pocket, but it was playing "Cat Scratch Fever" by Ted Nugent. When I slid the phone open it turned out to be Micah's ring tone.

"Hey, Micah," I said.

"Are you feeling any better?"

That was an easy answer. "Better, yes."

"Nathaniel let us know that you were done with your workout. I'm sorry I missed it."

"You were busy shopping for weretigers," I said, and my voice was oddly uninflected, so that what I'd meant to be humorous wasn't.

"We've narrowed it down," he said.

"How narrow?" I asked, and still I didn't really care.

"Three."

"The girl is one of them," I said.

"Yes, do you mind?"

I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and said, "It's fair, and God knows we have enough men."

"Okay, we're in the living room when you can get here."

"We're getting a protein shake in the kitchen, then we'll be there."

"You don't seem to care, Anita."

"I don't."

"You should feel something about this. We are shopping to keep one or more of them."

"We're keeping them all here at the Circus for their own safety. You're just picking which ones we're going to try to sleep with," I said.

"Usually, you get angry about this, or embarrassed, but I'm not sensing anything from you."

"There isn't much to sense right now," I said.

"Have the Atlanta police called back?" he asked.

"Not yet."

"We'll be waiting for you."

"We'll be there."

"You and Nathaniel?"

"And Dino and Nicky," I said.

"Anita, I love you."

"I love you, too," I said, but even that didn't have much feeling to it. I felt like something had died inside me, something that let me feel was just gone.

We hung up, but a few minutes later Nathaniel's phone rang with the same song, and since he had put the ring tone on my phone I was pretty sure Micah was calling him to check up on me. Once upon a time it would have annoyed me, but I was being difficult. Maybe in a different way from my normal difficult, but this attitude wouldn't exactly win over the weretigers. But honestly, I was all out of wanting to impress anyone.

Nathaniel went to the edge of the kitchen and spoke low, and again, I just didn't care.

The chocolate shake thingie was down to the slurpy dregs. I went to the sink, unscrewed the top, and started rinsing it out. We'd discovered that if you left the drink in the screw-top cups that helped stir them up, you never really got the cups clean. The remains of the protein powder solidified in the cracks and crevices, and you just had to throw out the cup. I cleaned it, then put it on the draining board beside the sink. The movements felt automatic. It let me know that my arms were still a little shaky from trying to beat the heavy bag into submission. I should have felt good about outlasting Ares on the bag. I should have been excited about the run and my all-time personal best on the track, but I wasn't. I wasn't unhappy with it, but I wasn't happy, either.

Nathaniel said, "I'll clean it for you."

"It's done," I said.

He touched my arm, then turned me to look at him. "Anita, what do you want to do?"

I blinked at him. "I don't understand the question."

"What would make you feel better?" He leaned his butt against the sink, and looked nifty in his black jeans and black T-shirt. I realized that from the boots to the clothes, we were both dressed like we'd started the night in the same closet. We matched. He'd probably laid out my clothes for me today, so I shouldn't have been surprised. I stared down at the shirt and realized it was low-necked, not as much as some I owned, but enough  that there was a lot of creamy goodness going on in the front of my shirt. The moment I realized I hadn't really seen what I was wearing all day, that sort of scared me.

"Am I in shock?" I asked.

He laid his hand over mine where I was gripping the sink. "I'm not sure, but I think it hurt you to have to . . . kill Haven." He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into a hug. I kept gripping the sink and stayed stiff in his arms. He laid his head against my hair. "Anita, please, talk to me."

I let go of the sink and wrapped my arms around his waist. I held on and didn't know what to say. I said the truth. "I don't know what to say."

"Say how you feel."

"I don't feel anything."

He held me tighter, kissing my hair, pressing me against him. "He had to die, Anita."

"I know that."

"But you didn't have to do it. Any of the guards would have done it."

I pushed against him, until he let me go. I backed away, shaking my head. "I did have to do it. It was my fault. I thought I'd tamed him. I thought it would all be all right and I was wrong. I was so wrong, Nathaniel, so wrong."

"He wasn't willing to share," Nathaniel said.

"It was more than that and you know it. The signs were all there. He attacked you and Micah and got pissed because I helped you win the fight. He kept wanting me to put him first in my bed if not in my heart."

"You told him that wasn't going to happen," Nathaniel said.

"I know that. I didn't lie to him. So how did we end up with him trying to kill you and Travis, and killing Noel? How did we end up with Haven dead? How could I have let it get that out of hand, Nathaniel?"

"You did not make Haven do any of this," he said.

"But I'm supposed to be this uber-dominant of all the wereanimals, and I've just finished failing the lions so badly. How can I add more wereanything? I can't handle what we have already. How can I add more when I don't know what went wrong with the lions?"

"Haven went wrong with the lions," Nicky said.

I looked at him. "You told me just a couple of hours ago that if I'd let you fight him, you'd have killed him, and Noel would be alive and Nathaniel wouldn't have gotten hurt."

"I didn't say that," Nicky said.

"You said that I felt guilty about mind-fucking you and that made me not want to let you and Haven work things out, or something like that."

"But it shouldn't have been necessary for me to fight Haven. If he'd had his pride well organized I would have just been more muscle, but he let his personal feelings get in the way of being a good Rex. He let his obsession with you ruin everything else."

"Gee, Nicky, that makes me feel so much better."

He sighed, frowning. "I don't mean it like that. I mean that Haven wasn't a good Rex, you know that. The fact that he tried to beat Noel and Travis to death for having sex with you when they hadn't had sex with you says that he was letting his feelings blind him."

"I didn't have sex with them, not until last night anyway. I still don't remember everything I did last night, but I know I did something with Noel."

"A strong wereanimal can tell when someone is lying, Anita. We can smell it, taste the pulse speeding, like a furry lie detector."

"I know that," I said.

"But Haven couldn't tell that Travis and Noel were telling the truth about not sleeping with you."

I looked at Nicky. "Say that again."

"Haven was a powerful werelion. He should have known that Travis and Noel were telling the truth, Anita."

"Yes," I said, "he should have. Why didn't he know?"

"He let his emotions overwhelm what he smelled, or tasted," Nicky said, and that was an insult among the wereanimals. To say someone was nose-blind, or couldn't taste his way out of a wet paper bag, meant essentially that he was doing the human equivalent of refusing to see the truth.

Gregory said, "Some men don't want to believe that it's them you don't want. If they want a woman badly enough and she doesn't want them, then they want another man to blame." He said that very smart thing and took another sip of his protein shake. The twins together sipping on their shakes looked like an ad for a sexy malt shop.

"As long as there's another man who stole you away," Nicky said, "then the man doesn't have to look at himself."

"There's nothing wrong with him," Stephen said from the table. "It's that you prefer the other man, not that there's anything wrong with him."

"I could see that if he picked a fight with Nicky, but why Travis and Noel?"

"He knew I'd kick his ass."

I looked at Nicky.

"I think I would have, but more than that, Haven thought so, too."

"I forbade you to fight him," I said.

"You gave me the option that if he or his lions attacked me, I could fight back."

"I was afraid you'd let them kill you if I didn't give you the option."

He gave that half-shrug. "I don't know, maybe; you had told me not to fight him, but the last time Haven got up in my face in the gym I told him what you'd said. I told him that if he attacked me in the practice ring I'd be able to fight him. That if he attacked me first we could settle it."

"What did he say?" I asked.

"Nothing, and that's my point. If he thought he could win against me he'd have pushed it, but he didn't."

"I was there that day," Dino said.

I looked at the big man. "Do you think that Haven was afraid of Nicky?"

"Haven was a good fighter, but so is Nicky. There's more than one reason that none of the werelions but Nicky are on guard duty here, Anita."

"I thought we just didn't trust them," I said.

"That, but Bobby Lee, Fredo, and Claudia looked them over. They didn't like what they saw."

"How so?"

"They were muscle, and they were ruthless, but for one-on-one fair fighting we didn't see them in the same league with us."

"With the wererats?" I asked.

"No, with the level of training that Rafael demands from his people. Any of the guards here have to keep up those standards regardless of their animal group."

I raised eyebrows at that. "Graham and Clay meet standards."

Dino smiled. "They aren't our best hand-to-hand fighters, and Clay seems weirdly awkward with anything but a gun, but they do the training. They hit the gym just like the rest of us. Rafael wouldn't trust the safety of Jean-Claude and you to any guard he didn't trust."

I thought about that. "Of the other werelions, who's the best? Who do you guys like?"

"Payne is too much like Haven," Dino said. "He's a thug and not a deep thinker."

"Jesse is okay," Nathaniel said.

"I think he'd be softer if he were in a pride that let him," Dino said.

"I agree," Nicky said.

"What about the women?"

"We haven't seen them," Dino said.

"Haven ran his pride like some of the ultramale prides do," Nicky said. "The women are second-class citizens, almost cloistered away from any other wereanimals. Most werelions take a lot of pride in the fact that their lionesses don't want or need to go outside the pride for sex."

"Most animal groups stay within their own animal, right?" I asked.

Everyone agreed.

"There's a reason for that," Stephen said quietly. "If we go outside our animal groups, we can have misunderstandings just based on being different beasts."

I almost let it go, but in the end I did the girl thing and said, "You and Vivian aren't having troubles because you're a wolf and she's a leopard."

He looked away. "I know that." His tone, his body language all said,  Leave it alone. I did the guy thing; I left it alone.

"So the fact that so many of the St. Louis wereanimals interdate is unusual?" I asked.

"Very," Dino said.

"Haven saw your rejection of him for Nathaniel and Micah, and all the rest of us, as a direct challenge to both his maleness and his lion," Nicky said.

"I couldn't make him my one and only, and he didn't share well enough to sleep in big kitty piles with us."

"No, he didn't," Nicky said.

"Am I missing something here?"

"Anita, you can't save everyone," Nathaniel said.

"I'm a cop, I know that."

"Do you?" He took my hand in his, and I let him this time. "You're blaming yourself for Haven and Noel, but the only thing you could have done differently would be to have killed Haven sooner."

I met those serious lavender eyes. I studied his face. "You believe that, don't you?"

"Even if you'd let Nicky fight him, Haven would still be dead."

"But Noel wouldn't be," I said.

Pity, sorrow filled his face as he took both my hands in his. "Anita, how  do you think I feel? Noel died saving me. If it had been one of the guards, I'd be sad, but it's their job. It wasn't Noel's job to die for me."

"God, Nathaniel, I hadn't thought . . ." I hugged him. "I'm sorry; I'm being a selfish bastard. It wasn't your fault. You didn't ask Noel to do it."

Nathaniel pulled me away from him enough to see my face. "It isn't your fault, either, and you didn't ask Noel to give his life for mine."

We stared at each other, inches away, our hands on each other's arms. There was pain in both our faces.

"I don't mean to be callous," Nicky said, "but whatever you're feeling, get over it. We need both of you to meet the tigers and be charming and sexy. Guilt is not sexy."

I gave him an unfriendly look, but Nathaniel said, "He's right."

I looked back at him. "How can you just . . ."

"Forget?"

I nodded.

"I won't forget, but we need to make this city, this territory, as safe as possible. That means we need the tigers, Anita. We need for you and Jean-Claude to be the Master of Tigers."

"I don't know if I can do this, be this."

"Just go make nice with the tigers that Micah picked, that's all, don't worry about more."

"I could have sex with them, I think, but it's the idea of keeping them. They're strangers and suddenly they get to be in the bed with us, too. I'm not getting enough alone time with you and Micah now."

He smiled then and drew me into his arms. "I miss it just being the three of us, too."

"Should my feelings be hurt?" Nicky asked.

I looked at him, but he was smiling. "Yes, they should be," I said, "but they aren't, are they?"

"No, because my primary drive is for you to be happy. Micah and Nathaniel make you happy."

"Aren't you allowed to work for your own happiness?" I asked.

"I don't think that's what a vampire's Bride is for," he said, and he sounded so calm about it.

"What are they for?" I asked.

"Cannon fodder, unquestioning obedience, I don't know."

"You were afraid of what I did to Jamil and Shang-Da in the hallway."

He frowned and looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, that scared me."

"But if you have to obey me, then if I asked, you couldn't refuse me, could you?"

He frowned, thinking about it. "I think I'd let you do anything you wanted to me, but I'd rather not. That was so much power and it felt so good when you shared, but I wouldn't want to be the wereanimal you were sucking energy off of."

"Is that where all that energy came from?" Dino asked.

The three of us nodded.

"It was more powerful than the ardeur when you share that," Stephen said.

"I wasn't feeding off their sex. I was feeding off their lives, their energy. It's more power because I'm taking more away, I think."

"Did they understand what they were volunteering for?" Nicky asked.

"They offered it to save their Ulfric," Nathaniel said.

"They're his Skoll and Hati; they're supposed to be willing to give their lives for their Ulfric," Stephen said.

"After seeing the looks on their faces afterward, I don't think they'll want me to feed from them again."

"They were scared of you," Nicky said.

I nodded. "My allies shouldn't be afraid of me."

"It's better to be loved than feared, but if you can't be loved, then fear will do," Dino said. "I'm butchering the quote, but I like what it says."

We all looked at him, and we must have looked surprised because he said, "Hey, I read."

"I didn't know you read Machiavelli," I said.

"He was an interesting guy," Dino said.

"That's one way of putting it. But honestly, Dino, even though I do it myself, I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys."

"No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool."

Nathaniel said, "Just go meet the weretigers, Anita, no strings, no expectations. Just meet them and we'll go from there."

"Sounds fair," I said.

"But . . . ," he said, smiling.

I shrugged. "Let's do this."

"You're feeling all monster because you killed Haven," Dino said.

"I hadn't thought that, exactly."

"Yeah, you had," he said, and that big, dark face had way too much going on in the eyes. He was so big and so much muscle that sometimes you forgot that there was a good mind in all that heavy packaging.

"It's not that I killed Haven. It's that I was able to look him dead in the eyes, the same eyes that I'd looked at during sex, and I looked into those eyes and pulled the trigger. I stared him in the eyes and turned his brains to mush. How could I do that? How could anyone do that and not be a monster?"

Nathaniel put his arms around me, and I let him. I held on, because I believed what I'd said.

"I would say, I could have done it, but we all know without your control I'm a sociopath," Nicky said, "so that isn't comforting."

"If it was a woman I might hesitate," Dino said, "but if she had a gun I could do it."

"Don't look at us," Gregory said. "Guns are not our thing."

Stephen just nodded.

"I couldn't kill someone I loved," Nathaniel said, "but I'd kill to protect someone I loved, and that's what you did, Anita." He kissed my forehead and put his hands on my face, sliding his fingers into my hair so he could make me look at him. "You protected me."

"There were guards all over the place, from what I hear," Dino said, "and any of them would have done it for you. It wouldn't have cost them this kind of pain."

I turned from Nathaniel, his hands still in my hair, so I could see Dino. "That's why it had to be me. It was supposed to matter. It was supposed to hurt."

"You were raised Catholic, right?" Dino asked.

"Yeah, why?"

He shook his head. "Nothing. One more quote, and this is Nietzsche: 'Is it better to outmonster the monster or to be quietly devoured?'

"What?" I asked.

"You heard the question, now answer it," he said.

I took a deep breath in and let it out slow, laying my head against Nathaniel's chest with his hands still cradling my head. I hugged him once and then pushed away so I was standing on my own. "I won't be quietly devoured."

"So you vote monster," he said.

I thought about it. "If there are only two choices, yeah."

"Me, too," he said.

"Me, three," Nathaniel said.

We went around the room and everyone voted to be a monster. "Haven picked on Travis and Noel because they let him devour them slowly," Dino said.

"They weren't good enough monsters," Nicky said.

"Travis is still alive; don't talk about him in past tense," I said.

"If he wants to stay that way, he needs to get better at fighting back," Dino said.

"Can I order him to start going to the training sessions?" I asked.

"You're the local Regina, Anita, and they're fresh out of kings; you can order Travis to do anything," Nicky said.

And there it was again, being in charge of someone's life to a point that I didn't want. But Dino and Nicky were right; Travis had to learn how to defend himself better or find a pride that was a little less lionlike.

Nathaniel took my hand and started leading me toward the door. "Travis is safe here, so worry about him later."

"You really are okay with me adding more people to our bed," I said.

He grinned at me. "I like making new friends."

I frowned at him.

He kissed me, soft and sudden. I couldn't frown while he kissed me; I couldn't do anything but kiss him back. When he drew back I was left staring up into those eyes. "You really are a little excited to meet them, aren't you?"

He put his forehead against mine and whispered, "I like watching you with other people, and you know that."

"Does Micah like watching?" I asked.

"He likes watching us together, and he likes Jean-Claude. He likes Jason."

I closed my eyes and leaned in against him. "I just want to sleep between the two of you for like a couple of days."

"We get through this, and we will."

I moved back enough so I could see his face. "Promise," I asked.

His face went very serious and he said, "Promise."

I nodded and stepped away. I stood up straight, because I'd been  huddling in on myself. I could do this. We could do this. And then when this was over we'd find a bed for just the three of us and sleep until I wasn't tired anymore. It felt like I'd need about a hundred years to catch up, but I'd settle for eight uninterrupted hours. Sometimes you take what you can get.