Livingston hadn’t seen the look that Olaf had given Kaitlin. Olaf was good at hiding in plain sight most of the time. I gave Kaitlin a little push toward her jacket, which Livingston was holding out to her. She moved and took it from him.
“Perhaps I could make an exception for you, Kaitlin,” Olaf said.
She was putting on her jacket as she said, “What kind of exception?”
“Blondes. Perhaps I should try blondes just once.”
When he said once, he looked at me. I knew what once with a woman meant for him. The thought of him taking all that intelligence, skill, and perky beauty away through torture made me sick to my stomach, and then the fear rose. I was afraid of him and what turned him on. His desires were so terrible, there was no way of taming what he wanted, no way of channeling it into dating. I saw the truth of him painted on his face aimed at another woman to get from her the kind of reaction he’d once gotten from me, and I hated him. Hated the complication of him, the fact that someone like him was one of only a handful of preternatural marshals who were as good as I was at this job. What did it say about me that someone like Olaf was one of my few equals at killing, or that I had more official kills than he did? Nothing good.
Behind us Newman was thanking Livingston for his help. If Kaitlin hadn’t been spooked, only Olaf and I would have known how much of Olaf’s mask had slipped. He enjoyed showing it like that in the middle of things to unsettle you, but only if he wasn’t hunting you at that moment. If you were just prey, then he hid like a lion in the tall grass waiting until the antelope came a little closer. Kaitlin had gotten moved to my old category. It was more like a cheetah walking among the antelopes in plain sight, no cover, no pretense. The antelopes just didn’t know when the cheetah was going to start running and which one it was going to run after. I was not a goddamn antelope.
I worked so hard to have control of my inner beasts, but in that moment, I wanted Olaf to remember that I wasn’t food anymore. Yeah, he was bigger and stronger than I was, but that didn’t make him king.
It was like the thought called my lioness, or maybe the thought came from her. Not in a human one-for-one way, but in her own way, she understood me and my world better than any of the other animals inside me. She’d made herself known to me in ways that were more about communicating than about trying to break out of the prison of my body and become more real. In the past she’d communicated her needs, and they hadn’t been my needs, but this time I agreed with her: Fuck you and your king of beasts, we both know who does most of the hunting.
Olaf sniffed the air and shifted his gaze from Kaitlin to me. “I smell . . . I like your new perfume, Anita.” He’d changed what he was about to say so that he didn’t give our secret away. Yes, the others knew we both carried lycanthropy, but that wasn’t the same thing as telling the humans that we smell like lion. Only lycanthropes—Therianthropes—seemed able to smell that phantom perfume when the beasts moved close to the surface.
“I’m wearing it just for you,” I said, and my voice was an octave lower than normal.
“What’s going on?” Kaitlin asked as she looked from one of us to the other.
Livingston rubbed his arms as if he was cold, but I was betting the skin on his arms was running in goose bumps. He’d sensed the power in the cell with Bobby and me, but that had been much closer to the surface. If he could feel it now, he was even more sensitive to it than I thought.
“You need any more help, Marshals?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but thanks for offering. We’ve got this.” I was looking straight at Olaf when I said the last part.
“Do we?” Olaf asked, and his voice was a little lower, too.
“We do,” I said.
My lioness stalked up that long path inside me, each footfall carefully placed like she was creeping up on a gazelle at a watering hole. We would not be able to sneak up on him, I thought. My lioness stared at me with those golden amber eyes, and I suddenly knew just what she meant: Olaf would not expect us to fight him. We were sneaking up on him in plain sight.
“If you both say so,” Livingston said, and then, to the other men, he added, “Duke, Newman, why don’t you step outside and see us off?”
“You go ahead,” Newman said. “I just want to double-check something with my fellow marshals.”
Duke started to protest, but Livingston took his shoulder and started talking about something to do with this year’s chances for the local sport’s team. It was enough to distract Duke and get him through the door.
“You should go with them, Newman,” Olaf said.
“I’m good right here.”
I had a moment of hesitation. On one hand, I didn’t want to be alone with Olaf more than I had to be; on the other hand, I wasn’t sure I wanted Newman at ground zero. The lioness gazed up at me with golden amber eyes, and thought/asked/translated my feelings that Newman was our cub, a big grown male cub, but still one we wanted to protect. She was right. I was treating Newman like a child, and he wasn’t one. My confusion puzzled her, and she began to fade into that darkness inside me, but she left me with one thought: She wanted a mate but not one that would kill the cubs. No, it wasn’t a word-for-word translation, but that was the gist of it.
I stood there, just me, the scent and the feel of her fading around me. But even with her gone, I still had the message. “Go out with the others, Newman.”
“Blake, are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said. I was strangely calm as I stared at Olaf.
He was still sitting down; even with my lioness thick on the air, he hadn’t thought either she or I was danger enough to stand for. “You heard her,” Olaf said.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Newman said.
“Go, Newman,” I said. “We just need the room for a few minutes. It won’t take long.”
“It’d better not. I can’t distract Duke for long.”