"Let me up, Noel."
He raised his face, so I could see how frightened his eyes were behind his glasses. "You are about to have another animal to call."
"Nathaniel is my animal to call."
"He's your animal for Damian and you, but Richard is your animal with Jean-Claude."
Richard and Haven were circling in the bare area just in front of the far hallway. They feinted with legs and hands, but they weren't fighting. They were getting the measure of each other. Once they had it, the fight would get serious. I didn't want that.
Noel gripped my arms, turned my attention back to him. "Joseph thinks that something about the vampire marks is giving you an animal to call to match each of your beasts."
"That's not possible."
"Everything you do is impossible, Anita. My Rex thinks it is possible. He hopes that if you feed from more than one lion, your power won't bond to any one person."
Travis collapsed to his knees beside us, blocking my view of the growing fight. He was cradling his arm tight against his chest. The side of his head was bleeding into his brown-gold curls. "But if you do have to bond to a lion, Joseph would prefer that the strongest preternatural power in his territory not bond itself to a lion who would try to take over his pride."
It seemed stupid having this conversation flat on my back with a nearly perfect stranger on top of me, but I couldn't figure out how to sit up without getting rough with Noel, and Haven had been rough enough. "Why did Joseph send you to me?"
Travis shrugged, and winced, his shoulders hunching around his arm. "Our first task is to keep you from bonding with blue-boy over there. Whatever it takes, to stop that from happening."
I looked at them both. "You're kids. You don't want to be bound to my life, to me, forever. You don't want that, you can't want that."
"I'm only five years younger than you," Travis said. "Hell, I'm two years older than Nathaniel."
"But Nathaniel needed me. You got drafted."
Noel pushed himself up on his arms, which meant I was able to get to my gun, not that it would help, but it was still a thought. His lower body was pressed a little closer to my lower body, but for once it wasn't erotic. It wasn't anything. "Our lion group, our pride, works, Anita, it's our home. I felt blue-boy's power, just walking down a hallway. You can feel it now, coming off him in waves." Noel licked his lips. "Joseph is powerful, but I'm not a hundred percent certain he's more powerful than what's behind us."
"Let me sit up, Noel."
Noel glanced at Travis, and the other man gave a small nod, then hunched over his arm again. Noel moved back so I could sit up, but he stayed kneeling between my knees, I think so he was close enough to grab me if I tried to go to Haven, again.
Richard and Haven were fighting now. Fighting with a capital F, if you're not planning to kill each other. It was a kind of fighting that I would never be able to do. Pounding the shit out of each other, and being able to take the damage. It was guy fighting, for the sake of a point, yes. I'd asked for help to move Haven and protect the other men. Haven's fist got past Richard's arms, and Richard staggered back two steps, but hunched his body, so that the blows Haven tried to rain on him hit only shoulders and arms. Richard, on the other hand, landed two solid body blows that doubled Haven over. Richard followed with a fist to his chin, and only Haven throwing himself backward kept the next blow from hitting. Richard didn't give him time to recover. He came at him with a flurry of blinding kicks that put the other man into a defensive crouch against the far wall. Richard was winning. I realized in that moment that I hadn't thought he would.
Noel touched my face, turned my gaze back to his scared face. "Anita, please don't touch him, not until you've at least tried one of us."
I checked Richard's progress one more time. Haven was against the wall, simply trying to keep the kicks from hitting him, not even trying to fight back now.
I looked at Travis and his wounds. Noel's eyes so scared. The lions' pride worked; they were one of the few wereanimal groups in town that let their people lead nearly ordinary lives. No power struggles, no hiring bodyguards. Joseph's people were people first, animals second. If Haven stayed in town, hooked up to the power that I had through Jean-Claude's marks, would the lions' world go up in flames?
"You don't think Joseph would win the fight?" I asked.
"He is not the fighter that your Ulfric is," Travis said. Travis said it like it was just true, and no big deal. That was the biggest difference between wolf and lion culture; all the big cat shapeshifters seemed to be less about combat, and more about what was best for the group. The wolf culture was much more about strong is right, weak is just dead. Someone had suggested that it was because the werewolf culture passed through the Vikings' culture, more than any other shapeshifter society. Maybe. Real wolves certainly weren't more vicious than lions, or leopards.