Bullet

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.

“Ca

“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 Sköll and Hatí; 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.