“How can you be sure of that?”
Edward leaned over and pushed the door open as a sort of hint that I needed to get in now. “Call it experience,” I said, and climbed in the open door. He was still frowning at us as we drove off.
I had Alex Pinn’s cell number and I’d called it, but he didn’t answer it. A man I didn’t know answered it. “Alex’s phone, whom may I say is calling?” It sounded way too formal, and I was betting an assistant of some kind.
“This is Anita Blake, to whom am I speaking?”
Edward glanced at me as he pulled out onto the highway, but he didn’t ask questions he knew I’d explain later.
“Then, this is the phone of Li Da of the Red Clan, son of Queen Cho Chun. Why are you calling our prince?”
“I think that’s private between Alex and me.”
“You are not alone?” He made it a question.
“No.”
“Can the person with you not be trusted?”
“He can be, but I share as few secrets of the clan with outsiders as I can.”
The man was silent for a moment, then said, “That is wise.”
“I do my best. What is your name?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m talking to you and it’s polite to know someone’s name when you address them.”
He hesitated and then said, “You can call me Donny.”
“Call you Donny,” I said.
“It will do until we see how much you can be trusted.”
“Okay, Donny, where’s Alex and why are you answering his phone?”
“Li Da is with our queen. She knew you would call him.”
“She did, did she?”
“Queen Cho Chun said you would not be able to resist the call of each other, and she was correct.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was trying to feed the ardeur, basically a metaphysical booty call, but from the moment I’d accidentally tied Alex to me, his mother had been pushing for it to be more. She’d have preferred he settle down with a nice little weretigress, but she wanted me to choose among the clans and make Alex my official tiger king, which would make the red clan the top cat in the world of weretigers. I had no intention of doing that for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones was that neither Alex nor I wanted it. Not to mention that Jean-Claude and all the other men in my life would probably get pissy if I ever actually married anyone, especially if that one wasn’t any of them. But I’d found that all the clan queens were pushy bitches, and serious as a heart attack about bloodlines, power, and marriage.
“Look, Donny, Alex is your clan prince, that’s true, but he’s also my tiger to call.”
“Come to our meeting place, and if you can call him away from our queen’s side then he is yours, but if you cannot then you are not the Mistress of Tigers.”
I swore softly under my breath. “Are you all aware that I’m in your city trying to solve murders? I’m trying to save the lives of other weretigers.”
“None of the dead are clan tigers; they are all survivors of an attack. Their deaths are unfortunate, but not clan business.”
“Do you understand that if they finish up the lone tigers that aren’t part of a clan, they may turn on the clans themselves?”
“We can defend ourselves, Anita Blake.”
“Pretty to think so, but no tiger clan has faced these guys in hundreds, if not thousands of years. They wiped out all of you guys in your homeland, all the weretigers regardless of clan color.”
“Legend says we were unprepared. We will not be this time.”
I listened to the certainty in his voice and knew it was a mistake, but I also knew that nothing I could say over the phone would change his mind. I even knew that it wasn’t his mind I had to change; it was Queen Cho Chun that I needed to convince. This was her certainty, her arrogance.
“Fine, Donny, just tell me where to meet and we’ll go from there, but I really do need to see Alex sooner rather than later.”
“You would feed on our prince as if he were the lowest prostitute on the street. We do not approve of how you treat him.”
Again, I knew it was the queen talking, but I let it go. Donny was a good little mouthpiece, and arguing with the help never changed any boss’s mind, so I didn’t try.
“That’s between Alex and me,” I said.
“What affects our prince affects the clan.”
I was beginning to see why Alex had stayed the hell away from his clan for years before I met him. He was a reporter, and a good one. He’d done an amazing piece on the war in Afghanistan that had won a Peabody, which was a very big deal if you were a journalist. He was also in deep cover pretending to be human. He wore brown contacts to hide his yellow-gold eyes with their rim of orange red, like the sun rimmed in fire. He was pure clan; his eyes and hair proved that. The hair he passed off as a funky dye job, but the eyes, he had to hide those.