nothing?”
“I didn’t say it gained her nothing, I just agreed that being first lioness is an empty title.”
“Okay, what does it gain her to fight Kelly?”
“I don’t know, but I know she sees some goal. The Harlequin are very goal driven whether they’re the vampire masters”—he made finger quotes around the word masters—“or the wereanimal companion.”
I might have asked more, but there was a very purposeful knock at the door. I hadn’t heard any conversation first; either I’d been too busy talking to hear it, or Magda had just come up and glared at the door guards until they let her knock.
“Come in,” I said.
Magda didn’t peer around the door; she just walked in like she owned the room. She was tall for a woman, five-ten, which meant she’d have towered over people back in the day. Her hair was blond, cut so it fell below her ears but never touched her shoulders. The hair was blunt cut, which would have worked with straight hair, but she had waves to hers, so it was just messy like someone had started to style and cut her hair but stopped partway. Her vampire master had absolutely straight hair, as black as hers was yellow. Her eyes were blue-gray, changeable as the sky. They looked bluer now, because she was wearing blue satin pajamas. It had never occurred to me that Magda would own jammies, let alone pastel blue ones, and satin, just not what I’d pictured. Even dressed in something soft she filled the room not with height, but with attitude. She turned those human eyes on us, but it was like her lion was the one seeing out, and the lion thought everything it surveyed belonged to it. Not all the Harlequin were like that, but she was; even the male lion Giacomo didn’t have that air of command to him. It was like a constant slap in the face of any alpha around her, as if she knew she was the strongest, fastest, bestest in the room, unless you could persuade her you were better, but until then . . . it was her room. Magda made me tired, even when I wasn’t. She was like a constant pissing contest waiting to happen. Part of that was a lion thing, but she had more than her share of it.
I was already remembering why I didn’t spend much time with her and she hadn’t been here five minutes yet. How was I ever going to sleep with her on the other side of me? It must have shown on my face, or maybe my scent changed; whatever the cause, Magda picked it up.
“You are not pleased with something I’ve done, and I’ve done nothing yet, not even spoken.”
“Your energy is sort of . . . loud,” I said.
Travis was sitting straighter beside me, not hugging anymore. He was tense; the question was, why?
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
Travis was watching her less like another lion and more like a gazelle. No wonder he had problems with the other lions, and no wonder Magda did, too. They just had opposite problems.
“Okay, I need to sleep and the two of you need to work together to make that possible,” I said.
“We will sleep on either side of you and our lions will mingle with yours and help heal you,” Magda said.
“Yes, but not if your energy makes me feel like I have to prove I’m dominant to you all over again.”
A frown appeared between her yellow eyebrows. You didn’t see a lot of natural yellow eyebrows, not even on blondes. It softened her eyes even more, I think, or maybe black eyebrows would have given them more color; who knew?
“I have done nothing to challenge you, Anita. I acknowledge you as Regina to our Rex, and have never said otherwise.”
“You offered to sleep with Nicky,” I said.
“It’s customary when entering a new pride to offer yourself to the Rex.”
Travis finally said, “No, it’s not.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and they were suddenly gray as rain clouds. “It was once,” she said, voice growing lower, as if the next sound she made would be a growl.
“That was then, this is now,” I said.
She turned that unfriendly gaze to me. “I am more aware than you will ever be that this is a future unforeseen and very unlike the past I knew.”
“I’m not going to apologize for killing the Mother of All Darkness, Magda.”
She looked genuinely puzzled.