Bullet Page 0,69
two guards at his back, too, but like me he didn’t have enough leopards to go around. He had Lisandro, tall, dark, and handsome with shoulder-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was around six feet tall; only Claudia was taller, though the guard beside him gave Lisandro a run for his money. Abraham, Bram for short, was new to St. Louis. His hair was shaved close and tight to his head, leaving the high cheekbones and sculpted look of his face very bare. It managed to look both stark and like some walking piece of art, as if the bone structure were too perfect and hair would just have distracted from it. His skin was so close to black that it shone with blue and purple highlights in bright light. I’d never seen anyone so dark. In leopard form he was a blond. It turned out that it wasn’t the genetics of the host human that dictated the color of the animal form. It was the genetics of the shapeshifter who’d infected them. Micah and Nathaniel were brought over by black leopards, so their animal form was black. Bram had been brought over by a yellow leopard, so he was yellow. The same held true for wolf fur, which was why Richard had the reddest fur of anyone in his pack; he’d contracted lycanthropy in a bad vaccine batch, and not from a pack member.
Micah had explained, “That’s why some extinct subspecies still exist as strains of lycanthropy when the real animal is completely wiped out.” Cool.
Bram still stood military straight. The haircut was from that, too. He hadn’t been a civilian long, but once he couldn’t pass a blood test without the lycanthropy showing, he was given a medical discharge. One of the new werehyenas, Ares, was on the lookouts at the top of the Circus along with wererats who were sniper trained. Asher had called him to come when we weren’t sure if the other werelions would just go away and let their leader come inside without them.
Ares had been part of a group of snipers and their spotters who were sent in when the bad guys had a shapeshifter on their side. The snipers used silver-coated ammo to take out shapeshifters from a nice safe distance. Apparently, a werehyena had figured it out and gotten very not nice, not safe, and oh-so-close. Again, once Ares’ blood test showed the lycanthropy, it was policy to do a medical discharge even though he’d gotten the “disease” in the line of duty. Ares still had a golden tan from somewhere hot and dry, his yellow hair buzzed as short as Bram’s, but beyond a certain military bearing they weren’t much alike. Bram had said, “Snipers think differently than my specialty.”
“And what is your specialty?” I’d asked.
He’d given me a little smile and said, “Up-close work.” And that was all he’d say.
Micah looked small with Lisandro and Bram looming over him, but I guess no smaller than I looked with Claudia and Domino behind me, or for that matter sitting with the two six-feet-and-over guys on either side of Nathaniel and me. Micah had a gun at the small of his back, too. One of the things I had liked about Micah from the very beginning was that he was a shooter. We both had spent years being the smallest person in the room, and when everyone in the room is more than human-strong, and either as trained a fighter as you are or better, you want the gun. And the rule is, if you carry a gun you must be willing to use it. If you hesitate with a gun you might as well not carry one, because hesitation will get you killed quicker than not having one at all. There are people every year who get their own gun taken away from them by a bad guy and then the bad guy shoots them with it. If you carry, you have got to be willing to pull the trigger; if you think you’ll hesitate, then don’t carry. Micah didn’t hesitate, and neither did I. We liked that about each other.
I knew that everyone at my back was armed and would not hesitate. If Haven wanted to die tonight, he’d come to the right place. I felt that part of me that helped me look down the barrel of a gun and pull the trigger open up, or close down, inside me. I felt distant and empty.