"Then we’re clear," I said.
Jacob started the engine. "Yeah, we’re clear. You’ll kill us if you can, and if you’re sure it won’t get your people killed. We’ll kill you if you force us to."
"Great," I said, "we all know the rules then."
"Why aren’t you afraid?" Nicky whispered from behind me.
"Being afraid won’t help."
"People are brave, but you can always smell the fear, taste their heart speed up. But you aren’t. You really aren’t any of that."
"If I get afraid, or pissed, then my pulse rises, and my heart races, and my blood pressure goes up and it’s harder to control the beasts. Jacob was clear; I can’t afford to lose control in the car with you guys."
"So because you have to be in control, you will be, just like that," he said.
"Just like that," I said, and watched where Jacob drove so if I lived through the night I could take the police back to their client and arrest his, or her, ass.
"If I’d known what you were we might not have taken the job," Jacob said.
"Nice thought, but it doesn’t really help us out, does it?"
"No, we took the client’s money, we have to deliver."
"Then it doesn’t matter to me if you feel guilty or not, Jacob. In fact, I think it’s worse that you’re going to maybe kill the people I love, the people that make up my pride, and maybe kill me, and you’ll regret it, but you’ll do it anyway. That’s not honor, Jacob, that’s your conscience letting you know that you’re doing the wrong thing."
"It’s not my conscience, Anita, it’s my libido, my beast, and it doesn’t have a conscience."
He was right on that, but I also knew that wereanimals aren’t just animals. There is a person in there and there is a conscience. The beast usually didn’t care about it, and could make you do terrible things that you had trouble living with afterward, but this time Jacob and Nicky’s beasts were on the same side as their conscience. It made me hopeful, and I cursed it, because hope will keep you alive, yes, but it will also get you killed in ways worse than anything you can imagine. Hope is a bad friend when men with guns have you. But my lioness and their lions lusted after each other, sort of. Lust I trusted. Hope will lie to you, but lust is what it is; it never lies. Hope would keep me hoping, but lust might be a weapon I could use to pide them. Divide and conquer has been a strategy for thousands of years; there’s a reason for that.