Bullet ab-19

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Are you going to try to keep up with her?” Lisandro asked.

  “If I say yes, then what?”

  “We’ll start taking bets.” That Lisandro would say it, and not God, or Dino, or Graham, said that Ares had been snotty with more than just me. It wasn’t just me being a girl and small, it was him.

  “How do we score it?” I asked.

  “Stamina,” Lisandro said. “Loser quits first.”

  Ares looked at Lisandro and then to me. He was frowning as if trying to see something that he was missing. “You’ve never seen me work the heavy bag.”

  “No,” Lisandro said, “but I’ve seen her.”

  Again, Ares looked at me. “She can run; that doesn’t mean she can hit.”

  Lisandro shrugged. “If you think you can outlast our negra gatita, put your money where your mouth is.”

  “What does that mean? Negra is black, but I don’t know the second word.”

  “It means black kitten,” I said, with my pulse almost even again.

  Ares studied me. “And you’re okay with them calling you their black kitten?”

  “They’re wererats, Ares,” I said.

  He frowned at me.

  “They’re not calling me their little black rat. Think it through,” I said. I went to find some tape for my wrists and some gloves.

  37

  THE BAGS WERE in a smaller room off the main area. Ares and I were taped up and gloved, and I had pads on my feet and shins, too. We had a heavy bag apiece, close to each other, but not too close. We weren’t just going to be using our upper body on the bag, or I wasn’t. If you’re going to kick a bag, you need more room.

  Ares made fun of the fact that I was wearing padding on my legs and feet. I ignored him and started hitting the bag. I punched like I’d been taught: Lead with your shoulder, your whole body turning into it and that twist of the wrist at the end, and aiming not to hit the bag, but to hit through the bag to the other side. You always visualized whatever blow, throw, or any force as a few inches deeper. The goal was always through your target, not on top of it.

  Ares worked the bag the way he’d run, fast out of the box, heavy hitting, trying to make the bag move. I started slower, getting a feel for it, hitting fists, arms, working in close, then out. I started kicking, trying to kick through the bag. The last time I’d worked on the bag, Haven had been on the other bag. I pushed the thought away and kicked using the side of my leg, the front, switching legs.

  Ares was flashy. I was punishing. He made his bag move more, but mine moved. His combinations were faster, but it wasn’t about fast, it was about lasting. I let the world narrow down to the bag, to my fists, my feet, my legs, my arms, my body getting up close with the bag and hitting those short jabs, the knee work you needed to use if you had to fight your way clear of a grapple.

  My pulse was in my throat, sweat running down my body, and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. I started fumbling at the pads on my legs.

  Ares said, “Pay up,” in a triumphant voice.

  “I’m not quitting,” I said. “I just want the pads off my legs.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I need it,” I said.

  Nicky helped me unfasten the leg protection without a word, or a question. Without the padding, every blow of my leg on the bag jolted more, scraped more. I tucked my arms in close to my body and kicked, first one leg and then the other, over and over. I picked one leg and kicked over and over until the bag moved for me and my leg felt bruised, and then I changed legs. When my legs started to hurt through all the endorphins, I moved in and used my hands and the gloves. I punched, hit, threw elbows and every other part of me into the bag. I forgot about Ares, I forgot about the bet, I forgot about everything but the bag in front of me and hitting the shit out of it.

  The world started graying out, my vision going in starbursts. Exhaustion miasma ate the edges of the world. I grabbed the bag with both arms and leaned so I didn’t fall down. All I could hear was my blood thundering in my head. I blinked, trying to clear my vision. I blinked and through the stars and gray I saw that the other bag was empty. Ares was sitting against the wall. I’d won.

  I let myself slide down the bag to my knees and put my head down. The world was still gray with white starbursts. I needed water, or something with more electrolytes. Or maybe I just needed to pass out. I put my head between my legs to see if I could keep that from happening.

  I felt a hand on my back and knew it was Nathaniel before I heard him say, “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I heard myself say, and it was mostly true. I got to all fours, my head still down. Nathaniel started to take my arm and I just looked at him.

  He sat back on his knees and said, “No one here would think less of you if I helped you stand.”

  “I would,” I said.

  He sighed but didn’t try to help me as I debated on whether I could stand.

  “You won’t be in the practice ring with me today. You won’t be able to lift your arms enough to use a knife.”

  I turned slowly to find Fredo in the doorway. I had to fight to focus on him through the gray and white. “Rain check,” I said.

  He smiled. “You’re on.”

  I heard Lisandro say, “See, negra gatita.”

  Ares said, “I get it. Cats eat rats, and you’re calling her a cat.”

  “We’re calling her our cat,” Lisandro said.

  I crawled to the wall and put my back against it while I waited for my vision to clear and fought not to throw up. People with nifty nicknames like negra gatita didn’t puke from exhaustion and dehydration, or we tried not to.

  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.”