"He’s okay," I said.
"Oh, come on, don’t play coy. He’s hot."
"Enough, Nick, this is business."
"Just because it’s business doesn’t mean it can’t be fun."
"Nick would enjoy killing your waiter, Anita."
"Yes, I would," Nick said, and smiled when he said it, all the way up to his baby blues.
"Sociopath much?" I asked, smiling sweetly, my gun still pointed at the other man, because I wasn’t sure what Nick would do if he saw my arm move in his direction.
"All the damn time," he said, cheerfully.
"What do you want?" I said, trying to keep an eye on both of them for movement and knowing the moment they flanked me I was not going to win. I could take one of them, but not both, not like this. My pulse tried to speed up, and that made the lioness that had been behaving herself so nicely begin to walk up that metaphysical path. If I lost too much control of my body, she’d ride my pulse and breathing as near the surface of me as she could get. The beasts found my inability to shapeshift very frustrating, and that could lead to some very painful moments for me while they tried to claw their way out. I hadn’t had any of them do that in a while, but the bad guy would have to be a werelion. Worst choice possible; I might have thought the bad guys did that on purpose, but the first one had been genuinely surprised to smell lion on the air. It was just a bad coincidence.
I heard Nick take in a deep breath. I didn’t have to see the movement to know he was sniffing the air.
"Don’t move toward her," the first man said; "we’re all going to be very calm, and that way we walk out of here without hurting any of the nice people."
"She smells like lion," Nick said, "but it’s different, somehow."
"Shut the fuck up, Nicky." The first guy was angry, and that made his power flare again, which made my lion trot faster. I tried to call my necromancy stronger, to calm all this hot-bloodedness, but Nick chose that moment to let me know that he was powerful, too.
Nick’s power smashed into me like a blow. It stole my breath, so that the blood in my head was suddenly loud and roaring. The lioness snarled, because it wasn’t just me it had hit.
"We’re working, Nicky, not dating," the first man said, and there was an edge of growl to his voice that you might have mistaken for just a low bass voice, but I knew better. My lioness knew better.