The rest of the pool area was filling with people as the day heated up. A couple of families played in one corner, the kids laughing and splashing. A few young couples lounged in chairs with magazines and drinks. Lots of stylish swimsuits and tanned bodies glowing with health. A waitress circulated taking drink orders. This was all perfectly normal.
Twenty yards or so to my left, a woman was taking a picture of the scene with her cell phone. Something to send back home. Weather’s great, wish you were here. Was it my imagination, or was the camera lens pointed right at me?
She lowered the phone and winked at me.
Or maybe she didn’t. Was I being paranoid again? I should have laid back down and convinced myself I was being paranoid. But I watched her leave and realized why I was so bothered: That was Sylvia. She looked totally different, floral skirt wrapped around her hips, black string bikini top, bag slung over a bare shoulder. Her brown hair was pinned up with a carved wooden clip. She wasn’t doing anything threatening. Just
I sat back again, breathing calmly and telling Wolf to settle down. We weren’t cornered. The ice was melting in my margarita. I took a drink and wondered if I should follow Sylvia, to find out what she was up to. Or would that only piss her off?
At this point, I couldn’t possibly roll over to get some sun on my back. You didn’t turn your back on an enemy, never ever.
So much for a nice, relaxing time by the pool. With Sylvia gone I should have felt better, but the feeling that someone was watching me increased. It felt like bugs crawling over my skin.
At least the sun was warm. Pleasantly warm. The presence of the swimming pool kept the air wet enough to be comfortable rather than scorching. If I could just doze off, revel in the show’s success, forget about everything else...
Then I saw him, sitting on a lounge chair, leaning forward, elbows on knees, watching me through stylish sunglasses. When he caught me staring back at him, he smiled, then stood and walked toward me.
I recognized the swept-back dark hair, the square jaw, the alluring eyes, the knowing smile. It was Balthasar, King of Beasts, stalking toward me like a lion on the veldt. He may very well have been a lion; I smelled the musk of fur on him.
He didn’t need to be out here working on his tan, because it was already perfect. As was the rest of him, really. I could have labeled the muscle groups on his torso, if I’d known what any of them were called. Some bodies were meant for Speedo. His was black. It was all I could do to not melt through the fabric of my lounge chair. I managed to lie there calmly, watching his approach with an air of detached interest, and not feel too self-conscious about my vampiricly pale skin.
“Hello,” he said and gestured to the chair beside me. “Mind if I join you?”
“Go right ahead,” I said, and he did. He stayed sitting up, looking at me.
In wolf body language—and in the body language of most of the lycanthropes I knew about—the most submissive posture a person could adopt was on her back, belly up, gazing beseechingly at the dominant looking down on her. Kind of like the position I was in relative to Balthasar right now.
I sat up, putting myself on an equal footing with him, and felt a little better.
“You seem to be enjoying your stay,” he said, taking off his sunglasses. He had fabulous green eyes. Emerald green.
“I am, thanks.” About two inches separated our knees, we sat that close.
“I have to ask—I’m on pins and needles. Are you coming to the show?”
“Ah, so you did set up that little performance last night.”
He narrowed his gaze and might have purred behind the smile. “I can’t take credit for putting Nick up to that. But I can’t say it was such a bad idea, either. If I had known how attractive you are in person—” He finished the thought with a suggestive tilt to his head.
“Thanks,” I said, still trying to gain some kind of footing. He had to want something, right? He had to be here for a reason. “You should have come to the show last night and we could have had a nice chat.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. If I expect you to come to my show, that’s the very least I should have done. But I do hope you’ll consider joining us.”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I’m getting married this evening.”
He made an appropriate expression of surprise. “You are? Lucky man. Where is he? I’d love to meet him.”
I gritted my teeth behind my smile. “He’s off playing poker.”
Balthasar tsked sympathetically. “He’s a brave man, leaving his beautiful fiancée alone in Las Vegas.”
I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted Ben to meet Balthasar. I told myself it was because I didn’t want Balthasar finding out Ben’s a werewolf. I blushed fiercely.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “The matinee’s in about two hours. Why don’t you come to that? I’ll make sure you get the best seat in the house. You can come backstage after and meet the cast.”
My first impulse was to say no. But this was the offer I’d been looking for, and I had the time to kill this afternoon. I briefly thought of Odysseus Grant’s warning. But if Grant wanted me to pay attention to his warnings, he had to give me more information than vague pronouncements of doom.
I smiled. “I love backstage passes. I’ll be there.”
“Excellent! I’ll make sure will call has tickets for you.”
“I should warn you, I’m going to ask you lots of questions.” Him, and his performers. Assuming they had human vocal cords when I met them.
“I look forward to it. I’ll see you this afternoon.” He stalked off like a cat through his jungle domain. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Flustered, I sat back in my chair and downed half the margarita in a go.
When I gave my name at the box office, they were all ready for me with my ticket and instructions on waiting for an usher to take me backstage after the show. Legitimately, for a change. Inside the theater, I found myself fidgeting, anxious. If I hadn’t known the act was full of lycanthropes before, I would have discovered it now. Here, the merged scent of fur and skin was unmistakable. The feeling that I was invading another pack’s territory was unmistakable, and it made me antsy. I had to concentrate to calm down, to force my muscles to relax. There was a contradiction.
The curtain went up, and the show began.
Balthasar’s show had all the glitz and chaos that Odysseus Grant’s lacked. Strobe lights and spinners in every color blasted over the stage. Spots tracked across a chrome-trimmed set at super speed. Fog from an industrial-strength fog machine oozed and morphed, adding to the sensory overload, and a pounding rock extravaganza poured through a top-flight speaker system. The whole effect pumped up the audience’s anticipation to a pitch.
The cynic in me saw it all as artificial hype, priming the audience to be excited no matter what happened.
The music rose to climax and crashed together at the moment Balthasar leaped out to center stage via some unseen access. He smiled and punched his hands into the air, fog swirled around him, the lights went wild, and the crowd cheered. He looked even better amid the fog and lights. The audience’s screams had a definite feminine tone to them. Balthasar remained in that pose for a moment, as if absorbing the adulation of his audience.
Turning around, he got to work. At a gesture, a tiger ran onto the stage from the right. It bounded up a riser and leapt—almost covering the entire distance to the other side of the stage. At another gesture, a second tiger did the same thing from the left. Then another from the right, and a fourth from the left. All four tigers perched where they landed, so Balthasar was now surrounded by the terrifying, man-eating beasts. One of the tigers yawned, showing thick, sharp teeth, to prove the point.
He ran the tigers through their paces. They performed leaps, did acrobatics, wrestled with each other, wrestled with Balthasar, all on cue, with a focus that was uncanny. It wasn’t natural. And of course it wasn’t—they were were-tigers. It was supernatural.
Once it started, the pace of the performance didn’t slow down. Which was the point. He didn’t give the audience time to question what was happening, or to wonder about anything but the amazing feats they were being shown. Like, those tigers were definitely on the small side.
Balthasar sent the tigers away and brought out a lion. A couple of bespangled female stage assistants, shapely and smiling, wheeled out some props: hoops mounted on posts taller than Balthasar. The King of Beasts touched them with a lighter and they roared to flaming life. The lion jumped through them all, back and forth, landing each time with a flick of his tail and a shake of his mane.
His act had magic in it as well, flashier than what Grant performed. Balthasar levitated leopards, made a panther vanish and reappear, locked himself in a box full of cobras and escaped, unscathed, proving he was the king of
This went on for an hour without interruption. If nothing else, my own recent stint onstage had given me a newfound appreciation for people who did this every day, sometimes twice a day. The sheer amount of energy it took to be onstage and keep an audience’s attention was phenomenal.
With all that had already happened, I couldn’t guess what he’d pull out for the big finish. Exploding jet planes? King Kong?
As it happened, the last number told a bit of a story. The painted backdrop lifted into the rafters, revealing a set elaborate even by the standards of the rest of the show. A Babylonian ziggurat —or a really great mock-up of one—rolled in from the back. Another dozen flaming torches sprang to life around it. At its base, two stone pillars were set about an arm’s span apart. Chains and manacles dangled from them.
I wasn’t sure where they came from—maybe from behind the ziggurat or some other piece of stage dressing— but a group of human warriors dressed in leather and headdresses decorated with feathers and bones sprang out and attacked Balthasar. He seemed surprised at the appearance of the stage-dominating structure, but now he looked determined, like he should have expected this all along, like he’d been fighting his way through a jungle and this was the inevitable goal of the journey. He tossed one warrior, who rolled away, but the others sprang at him, subdued him, and dragged him toward the chains.
The warriors were also lycanthropes, other members of Balthasar’s troupe, I assumed. I watched, my heart racing in spite of my determination to be cynical.
Once they had him chained to the pillars, the warriors departed. Then came the cabana boys with the bullwhips.
Things got a little weird.
The boys—young men, really, lean and smooth-skinned where the warriors had been hulking and bearded—wore nothing but loincloths. They approached Balthasar. One ripped his shirt off, and the other toyed with him, running a finger along his shoulder. Balthasar thrashed at the end of the chains, like he might pull his arms out of his sockets rather than undergo this torture. Shirtless now, his muscles rippled for all to see. He snarled, and the boys laughed.
A woman appeared. She might have risen out of the floor through a trapdoor. It was hard to tell—no doubt intentionally—with all the fog and strobe lights. Also because of all the fog and lights, it was hard to tell exactly how much or how little she was wearing. She had gold around her neck, jewels pinned in her luxurious dark hair, and strings of glittering beads hung in a strategic arrangement around her chest and hips. It had to be some kind of illusion, but she looked like she might lose it all if she turned too quickly. She went barefoot, but gold anklets decorated her feet. Like everything else, her ensemble had an exotic mystique.
She sashayed to Balthasar and ran red-painted nails down his chest. He writhed at the touch, baring his teeth in either pain or pleasure. She brought her face close to his, making as if to kiss him. He leaned forward as much as he could, craning his neck, yearning for that kiss, but she dodged, stroked his arms, teased again—and this time, he smiled.
I shouldn’t have been turned on by all this, but I couldn’t deny the allure of Balthasar’s perfectly formed body, flexing and sweating at this woman’s touch. And the idea of what I would do if I had him chained up for
Okay. Enough of that. This was voyeuristic spectacle, designed to titillate and discomfit all at the same time. Nothing more.
Behind him now, one of the boys cracked his whip, and Balthasar flinched, arcing his back, teeth bared. The woman, still holding his arms, threw her head back and seemed to laugh, but I
