Hit List

believe it was because he’d been somewhere the accent existed, more like it was a piece of home they couldn’t take from him.

I didn’t even tell him not to call me darlin’; it was nothing personal, and he seemed to need all his down-home charm like a shield against whatever had taken the shine from his eyes.

“Staying,” I said.

He smiled, and gave a small nod. Lisandro, tall, dark, handsome, with his black hair in a ponytail trailing down his shoulders, stepped up beside him. He wasn’t quite as pretty as Bernardo, but he was ballparking. He looked like the proverbial Hispanic leading man. He was married and had two kids. He coached their soccer teams. We’d had sex together once for a sort of emergency feed to keep Marmee Noir from doing bad things. To keep his wife from trying to kill us both, we’d agreed it would never happen again. Actually, we just pretended it hadn’t. Worked for me. “Why is Raborn against you?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

Lisandro gave me a look.

I smiled. “I’m not lying, I just met the man.” I turned to Edward beside me. “Tell him.”

“He took an instant dislike to Anita.”

“Maybe it’s just being a woman and being better at the job than he is,” Socrates said. His skin was the color of coffee with a little cream added. Hair was short, clipped close to his head, just long enough on top that he could style it, but today he’d chosen not to, so that the hair formed tiny little curls. It looked . . . cuter than his usual, but he’d actually explained that this was natural, and cops didn’t like you styling your hair on the job. He was an ex-cop, so he’d know. He wasn’t as tall as the other two men, less than six feet by a few inches. He tended to round his shoulders, slumping a little, as if he’d gotten his height early in life and never lost the habit of trying to hide it, even though he wasn’t the tallest kid in the room anymore.

“You think it’s as simple as that? Raborn is a misogynist?”

He grinned at me, filling his dark brown eyes with that spark he could get. “That’s a big word just to say he doesn’t think much of women.”

I grinned back, and shrugged. “Hey, I’m not just another pretty face. I have a vocabulary.”

“You gotta watch the big words there, ma’am, we humble bodyguards don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ares said.

I turned to him. He was just under six feet, blond and brown-eyed. He’d lost the desert tan he’d come to us with. He’d been out of military on medical discharge for a while, but he still couldn’t quite lose the ma’am and sir, or the shoulders-back, spine-straight stance. He’d tried letting his hair grow out, but finally he’d cut it short again, keeping the top long, but his hair was as straight as Socrates’ was curly, so the longish top spilled a little over and to one side of his face. He had a habit of pushing it away from his face, as if it bugged him. I was betting next trip to the barbershop he’d be evenly short. Socrates had tried to help him style it when the top was longer so it was in sort of anime spikes, but that just wasn’t Ares. If he hadn’t caught lycanthropy, he’d have probably been lifetime Army.

But the real anime hair was Nicky’s. He was white-bread enough to have yellow-blond hair, shaved short on the sides, but long on top so it spilled out over one half of his face, in a long triangle of straight blond hair. With Ares right beside him it was more apparent that there was some body or wave to Nicky’s hair. Ares’s was straight as the proverbial board. Nicky’s overly long fall of hair had a sort of curve to it. It made the two of them look like they were going out to a club, or to an anime festival, but Ares dyed his hair so he could remind himself he wasn’t in the military anymore, and Nicky grew his out to hide that he was missing an eye.

The woman who raised him, who was technically his mother, had taken his eye when he was fourteen because he tried to say no to her sexual abuse. Women are less likely to be active abusers, but when they are, it’s usually more violent. Nicky’s childhood had been bad. He had one lovely blue eye, but the other was just a smooth empty socket of scar tissue. The hair hid it completely, and managed to look like a fashion statement at the same time. The hair might have made people take him less than seriously, but he was six feet even, and the body that went with the rest of him made certain that anyone who knew what they were looking at wouldn’t underestimate Nicky. All the guards lifted weights as part of their training, but either Nicky hit them harder or genetics made him bulk up, because even in jeans, T-shirt, and a light jacket, the swelling of his shoulders and biceps showed. He wasn’t the tallest guy waiting for me in the hallway, but he was the biggest.

“Hey,” he said, softly.

I smiled at him. “Hey.” That was it, not the most romantic, but there was more emotion in those little words than in anything I’d said to anyone else. Nicky was my lover, and my Bride, in that Dracula, Prince of Darkness way. It made us closer than just dating ever would have. Thanks to my having to have private time with Olaf, and then uniformed cops arriving on the scene, I hadn’t gotten to really greet him. It had been a wave, and a hi, and oh, cops.

Domino stepped away from the wall so I had to look at him. I think I’d left Nicky and Domino for last because they distracted me. Domino’s hair was black and white curls, mostly black today, with just a few white, which meant that the last couple of times he’d shapeshifted he’d done black tiger. His hair tended to reflect whether he’d last shifted into his white tiger or black tiger form. I wondered if Ethan’s hair would change color with his shift. Domino had sunglasses that hid his eyes, because his eyes were always tiger eyes. They were deep reddish orange with spirals of gold through them, which was actually more black tiger than white genetically. He was only about an inch shorter than Nicky, but he tended to like boots with heels, so that added a couple of inches. Nicky was more a jogging-shoe kind of guy, but then he wasn’t insecure about his height, not in the least. Domino wasn’t insecure either, he just liked boots. He was one of my tigers to call. It was a different bond than with Nicky; Domino had free will. He could argue with me, fight, and tell me I was wrong. Nicky could do those things to a point, but if I gave him a direct order he’d do it. Domino followed my orders, but he had a choice.

With the jacket on, Domino looked much less muscled than I knew he was, but then clothes can hide a lot of good things, and I knew that what lay under his clothes was very good.

I was in the midst of giving Domino the smile he deserved when Ares said, “I feel ignored.”

I glanced at him. “Sorry.”

He grinned at me and took a breath to say something, but his eyes went behind me. Everyone looked behind me and it wasn’t entirely friendly. I turned to find Raborn coming up behind us. He’d closed the door to Clark’s office and she was on the phone.

“What do you want, Raborn?” I asked.

“Who’s in charge of the muscle?” he asked, and he made sure his tone was offensive.

Nicky shoved a thumb in my direction. “Anita is.”

Raborn gave him a look that said clearly, I don’t believe you.

“It disappoints me, too,” Ares said with a grin, “but she’s it.”

“What does ‘it’ mean?” Raborn asked.

“The boss, the big cheese, the head honcho, or honchette,” Ares said. “She’s it.”

“Why would you listen to her?”

Ares looked at me. “Do we have to explain ourselves to him?”

“No,” I said, “we don’t.”

Ares gave Raborn a big grin that filled his olive-green eyes with glee. “You heard her.”

“You all fucking her?” Raborn asked.

I felt Edward tense beside me. “That was over the line, pardner.” His Ted voice was a little strained around the edges. But it was the other men who were scary in that moment. They went quiet, but it was the quiet that a predator will use when it hunkers down in the long grass beside the trail. It was a tense, waiting quiet, and the energy coming off all of them raised the hair on my arms and tickled down my spine.

“Easy, guys,” I said.

“He doesn’t get to talk to you like that,” Domino said in a low voice.

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. I sighed and looked up at Raborn. “Do you want me to bring you up on sexual harassment charges?”

“Since when is the truth grounds for harassment?” he asked. His eyes were angry, defiant. I thought in that moment that Socrates was right; it was the fact that I was a woman. Cops usually thought policewomen were only two things: bitches or sluts. I had a reputation for both.

I stood there and thought of several replies, none of them helpful. Raborn said, “So it’s true then?”