Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,225

him.

Pierette stumbled in the doorway, as if she’d barely gotten out of his way or he’d bumped her, but I knew he hadn’t touched her. Shit. Now that Bobby was safe, did Pierette think the honey trap for Olaf was back on?

Olaf stopped short of the outer door. Milligan and Custer were standing on one side of the room, arms a little out from their sides, feet already positioned for pushing off to give that first blow. Olaf’s energy burned through the room so that my lioness began to sniff the air, taking in the hot scent of him. The scent of wolf and hyena spilled into the power-laden air, but it wasn’t the same as the wolf scents of home. Those were evergreens and thick woods with deep leaves under cool trees. This was desert, dry and parched. This hyena had the same scent, like they were from the same land, and they were. Milligan and Custer had been attacked by the same werewolf pack somewhere in the Middle East, a pack that had at least one werehyena of the striped variety as opposed to the spotted that was the usual type in the wereanimal community.

“Now that you have saved his life, we can finally talk of other things,” Olaf said.

I’d have liked to say I didn’t know what he meant, but as he stared at me and lowered his glasses enough for me to see his eyes gone hot and orange, my lioness spilled upward. She drew the scent of him deep inside her and thought very seriously at me that it was time to decide if he was a cub killer or if he was in line to try out to be our king. I thought very hard at the lion inside me to explain that I had more than enough kings waiting at home. There was a second figure standing beside her in the dark. It was huge, even standing next to her, with a thick dark mane. The lioness knew exactly what she wanted, and what she needed me to do was decide if the big man standing by the door could be that.

Olaf sniffed the air in the room. “Where is the male lion? I can smell him.”

I started to say it was me, but a voice spoke through the door behind him.

“Right behind you.” It was Nicky.

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“YOU ARE NOT the lion I am sensing,” Olaf said, turning so that he could keep an eye on both Nicky and the two SEALs.

It was Nicky’s turn to raise his face and take a deep hit of the air in the room. It hadn’t been a very human gesture when Olaf did it, and it wasn’t any more human when Nicky did it. It had bothered me when Olaf did it, but not when Nicky did it. But then I loved him, and I was sort of afraid of Olaf, which colored my interpretation of things. Weirdly, knowing that made me more patient with both of them. Or maybe it was my lioness that didn’t want to be angry at them. We had two big males in the room who could match the shadow male that she created inside me. She’d done it once before; it was like she was showing her wish.

Nicky gave a smile that was more snarl than happiness. “I’ve smelled that lion before.”

“Who is it?” Olaf said, voice gone even deeper with the nearness of his beast.

“Follow the scent. You’ll figure it out.”

Olaf raised his face to the air again, but this time he parted his lips so that he could draw the scent in over the roof of his mouth like a flehmen response in a real lion: Males will try in this way to scent females in heat. In human form Olaf didn’t have the parts either between his lips with their frame of black beard and mustache or inside his head. Human beings just didn’t dedicate enough of our brains to translating scent. Even if we could smell it, we couldn’t understand what we were smelling. We’d sacrificed too much of our brainpower to sight and abstract thought.

He moved farther into the room, still scenting the air in that not very human way. I started moving back toward the cells. I needed Leduc to put Bobby back in his cell so the rest of us could go somewhere more private to talk about my inner lion. But the moment I tried to move back from them, the big male