The two overstuffed chairs with their silver and gold cushions had been drawn up to either end of the couch. Micah sat in the chair closest to Damian . . . that is, my triumvirate. He was in a black suit, but with a deep pine-green T-shirt that made his chartreuse eyes more green than yellow. Normally the shirt made his eyes look very green, but Damian was sitting too close to him and he had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen.
Asher sat in the big overstuffed chair on the end closest to Richard and Jean-Claude. It was in front of the faux fireplace. In spite of the potential disaster of the Mother of All Darkness rearing her scary head tonight, Asher was the most happy and relaxed that I’d ever seen him. Well, me personally. I had memories from Jean-Claude’s long-gone past, but for this time and place Asher was a very happy boy.
He was curled in the chair in that boneless comfortable way that Jean-Claude could do, or Nathaniel. Asher wore a pair of leather pants as painted on as Jean-Claude’s, but his boots were plain midcalf black. Asher had topped the outfit with a black T-shirt made of some shiny, clinging material, so maybe T-shirt wasn’t the right word for it.
His shoulder-length gold hair was browner wet from the shower, but against the black of the shirt the gold shone through more. I knew the contrast would grow as his hair dried.
The fact that he was willing to be seen so publicly with his hair wet enough that he couldn’t hide the scars on his face said more than almost anything about how good he was feeling. It was nice to see. Jean-Claude glanced at me, and I caught a smile. I wasn’t the only one happy to see our moody boy more upbeat. I fought not to glance across at the other moody boy with his werewolf bodyguards. Funny, they were both behaving great. Haven seemed to be trying to make up for both of them. Maybe we were only allowed so much happy without moody to balance it? Someday I’d like to try everyone being in a good mood at the same time, but it wouldn’t be today, or rather tonight.
Asher’s two werehyenas were on one side of his chair, but he seemed more interested in Jean-Claude and even Richard, who he’d asked if he could touch outside the bedroom. Richard had wisely said, “Define touch.” Which was guy-speak for no. Jean-Claude had told Asher not to push it, though in much more polite words, but it amounted to the same thing. Asher hadn’t even gotten upset, again a first.
I’d made Nicky go farther into the underground to the area where the wereanimals kept food for fresh changes. Food was livestock, most of it pretty small, or fresh meat. He hadn’t wanted to leave my side, but since he was one of the major sore points for Haven, having him standing beside me in his half-lion form, especially all naked, was probably not going to help things.
Micah had two guards at his back, too, but like me he didn’t have enough leopards to go around. He had Lisandro, tall, dark, and handsome with shoulder-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was around six feet tall; only Claudia was taller, though the guard beside him gave Lisandro a run for his money. Abraham, Bram for short, was new to St. Louis. His hair was shaved close and tight to his head, leaving the high cheekbones and sculpted look of his face very bare. It managed to look both stark and like some walking piece of art, as if the bone structure were too perfect and hair would just have distracted from it. His skin was so close to black that it shone with blue and purple highlights in bright light. I’d never seen anyone so dark. In leopard form he was a blond. It turned out that it wasn’t the genetics of the host human that dictated the color of the animal form. It was the genetics of the shapeshifter who’d infected them. Micah and Nathaniel were brought over by black leopards, so their animal form was black. Bram had been brought over by a yellow leopard, so he was yellow. The same held true for wolf fur, which was why Richard had the reddest fur of anyone in his pack; he’d contracted lycanthropy in a bad vaccine batch, and not from a pack member.
Micah had explained, “That’s why some extinct subspecies still exist as strains of lycanthropy when the real animal is completely wiped out.” Cool.
Bram still stood military straight. The haircut was from that, too. He hadn’t been a civilian long, but once he couldn’t pass a blood test without the lycanthropy showing, he was given a medical discharge. One of the new werehyenas, Ares, was on the lookouts at the top of the Circus along with wererats who were sniper trained. Asher had called him to come when we weren’t sure if the other werelions would just go away and let their leader come inside without them.
Ares had been part of a group of snipers and their spotters who were sent in when the bad guys had a shapeshifter on their side. The snipers used silver-coated ammo to take out shapeshifters from a nice safe distance. Apparently, a werehyena had figured it out and gotten very not nice, not safe, and oh-so-close. Again, once Ares’ blood test showed the lycanthropy, it was policy to do a medical discharge even though he’d gotten the “disease” in the line of duty. Ares still had a golden tan from somewhere hot and dry, his yellow hair buzzed as short as Bram’s, but beyond a certain military bearing they weren’t much alike. Bram had said, “Snipers think differently than my specialty.”
“And what is your specialty?” I’d asked.
He’d given me a little smile and said, “Up-close work.” And that was all he’d say.
Micah looked small with Lisandro and Bram looming over him, but I guess no smaller than I looked with Claudia and Domino behind me, or for that matter sitting with the two six-feet-and-over guys on either side of Nathaniel and me. Micah had a gun at the small of his back, too. One of the things I had liked about Micah from the very beginning was that he was a shooter. We both had spent years being the smallest person in the room, and when everyone in the room is more than human-strong, and either as trained a fighter as you are or better, you want the gun. And the rule is, if you carry a gun you must be willing to use it. If you hesitate with a gun you might as well not carry one, because hesitation will get you killed quicker than not having one at all. There are people every year who get their own gun taken away from them by a bad guy and then the bad guy shoots them with it. If you carry, you have got to be willing to pull the trigger; if you think you’ll hesitate, then don’t carry. Micah didn’t hesitate, and neither did I. We liked that about each other.
I knew that everyone at my back was armed and would not hesitate. If Haven wanted to die tonight, he’d come to the right place. I felt that part of me that helped me look down the barrel of a gun and pull the trigger open up, or close down, inside me. I felt distant and empty. It was almost a clean feeling: no distractions, no doubts, just what had to be done. I wasn’t quite to that white-static center where I pulled the trigger, but I was headed that way. The moment I felt myself go all distant and empty, I would know that part of me had decided to kill Haven. Part of me wanted to keep him alive, but it wasn’t as big a part of me as I’d thought. I felt a little bad about that, but not a lot. A year ago, I’d have poked at the feeling, but not now. Now I waited to see if Haven would give me a reason to keep him alive or give me an excuse to kill him.
We’d actually gone to little earbud headsets for the guards, and for me and Jean-Claude. I had to green-light the shooters. A voice on the earbud made me jump; I still wasn’t used to it. “Eagle here, darling.” Bobby-Lee’s southern drawl was almost startling after so many months without him. He’d been away on some hush-hush job for the wererats. They did mercenary work to bring in money for their group. Bobby Lee had been away for a long time. He’d come back more tanned than when he’d left, thinner, too, and worn around the edges. The old British saying was You’ve been in the wars. Probably closer to true than I wanted to know.