Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I’m here to save a life and right an injustice,” the lawyer said.

  Angel said, “Marshals, meet Amanda Brooks, tilter at windmills, the Coalition’s very own Ms. Don Quixote.”

  “That would be Doña Quixote,” I said, but I held my hand out toward Ms. Brooks.

  She half smiled, but her face was set for the fight with Leduc, so she never quite looked at me, as if the fight was more important. I wasn’t offended, because I had my own version of that look.

  I let her shake hands with Edward and Olaf as I explained to Leduc that we had a confession from someone else.

  “Muriel didn’t crack,” he said, and it was a statement.

  “But Todd did,” I said.

  He nodded. “I still can’t believe that they would do that to Ray.”

  I just looked at him pleasantly; no reason to muddy the waters by agreeing that I didn’t think they had done it either. I wanted Bobby out of jail and home until the judicial system could catch up with the warrant in my pocket.

  The lawyer said, “Wait. You have a confession to the crime that my client is accused of. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” I said.

  “I’m happy that Mr. Marchand is going to go free, but this would have been a good test of the warrant system versus due process,” she said.

  “It still can be, because he’s not going free just yet,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Edward and I explained to her that the warrant of execution was still live and had Bobby’s name on it, because the confessed killer was human, and we were all a little fuzzy on how to proceed now. I ended with “According to the judge who signed the original warrant, there doesn’t seem to be any precedent for vacating a warrant on the grounds that you have the wrong person.”

  Edward added in his best Ted voice, softly puzzled and pleasant, “Fact is, the crime looks to be just normal human beings pretending to be a Therianthrope, so the crime itself doesn’t fall under the execution-warrant system.”

  “It’s not a supernatural crime, so the preternatural branch shouldn’t be here,” Brooks said.

  “That’s true,” I said, “but we are here, and the warrant is live, and suddenly we’re in legal limbo.”

  “You are not in limbo,” Olaf said.

  We looked at him.

  “Legally you are still bound to kill the person named on the warrant within seventy-two hours from the moment the warrant is live.”

  “And the fact that legally my only option is to kill someone I now know is innocent just because he happens to be a wereanimal—sorry, Therianthrope—is why the supernatural-execution system needs more legal options.”

  “You complicate things, Anita. The law is clear.”

  “Marshal Jeffries, are you seriously telling us that you could go in there and kill Bobby Marchand knowing that he is innocent of this crime?” the lawyer asked.

  “You know that rule in court that you don’t ask questions unless you know the answer will help your case?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s not always possible, but yes.”

  “Otto’s answer won’t help you.”

  She looked at the big man. “Are you seriously telling me you would kill an innocent man?”

  “I do my job to the letter of the law as written,” he said, and he gave me a look that even hidden behind sunglasses was chilling, or maybe that was just me, because Ms. Amanda Brooks didn’t seem to be afraid of him.

  “The entire warrant system is just a due process and civil rights nightmare,” she said.

  Edward and I agreed with her. Olaf just listened to us talk after that. I think he was still upset because he and I weren’t going to get to torture and kill anyone together this time.

  “Go tell Bobby the good news,” Edward said in Ted’s thickest down-home-on-the-range accent. He even put a big smile with it.

  “Oh, he heard you,” Angel said from the doorway, where she was still leaning seductively.

  I’d have looked like I’d broken my hip if I’d stayed leaning that long; she made it seem just right. She wasted a smile on me and then turned it behind her toward the cells and Bobby.

  I was smiling by the time I got to the doorway. Angel didn’t move, just turned that red-lipsticked smile back toward me. I expected her to move out of the way so I could get past, but she smiled at me with a glint in her eyes that almost dared me to comment. I ignored the challenge in her face and squeezed past her hip, rubbing my arm along the promising swell of it. If we hadn’t had a lawyer and other cops watching, I might have put more body English into it, or then again, I might not have. I could see Bobby in the cell beyond her, and he was my goal. He was standing at the bars smiling, and I was smiling back like an idiot.

  “Am I really getting out of here today?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  His smile faded. “I thought . . .”

  “You are getting out, but we can’t let you out of your cell today. We’re thinking tomorrow.”

  He wrapped his fingers around the bars. “You said you knew who killed Uncle Ray. Why aren’t they in here and I’m out there?”

  “They’re in jail,” I said.

  Edward poked his head in the doorway without having to push his way past Angel. “They’re human, so they’ll be processed like any other criminal.”

  Deputy Troy Wagner, or maybe ex-deputy Troy by now, spoke from the other cell. “I haven’t been processed like normal, and I’m human.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a jackass,” Leduc yelled from the other room.

  “I’ve told Duke that I don’t want you punished for what you did, Troy,” Bobby said.

  “I’d take it as a good sign that you haven’t been processed yet,” I said.

  Troy looked at me, face uncertain. “Do you think I deserve to go to jail for what I tried to do to Bobby, Marshal Blake?”

  I shrugged as much as the body armor would let me. “It’s not up to me. I’m strictly about the supernatural stuff, so you’ll have to ask the sheriff.”

  Leduc yelled from the office again. “I’m still thinking about it.”

  “If I get out tomorrow, then so should Troy,” Bobby said.

  “Like I said, that part isn’t up to me,” I said. “I’m strictly here for you, Bobby. Troy is going to have to take his chances with Duke.”

  “Are you really not going to kill me?”

  “I’m really not going to kill you.” I was smiling by the time I finished speaking.

  Bobby uncurled his fingers and reached toward me. It seemed totally reasonable to touch my fingers to his until we were holding hands through the bars. “I just want to hug you. I want to hug everyone.”

  Leduc’s voice came from the office again. “I think we can manage that.”

  Angel moved out of the doorway for the sheriff. Apparently her flirting with him hadn’t gotten to that point. Good to know. I moved back out of the way so he could unlock the cell door. Bobby stepped back from the cell door like he’d gotten in the habit of backing up.

  Leduc stood there just inside the cell, looking at the younger man, and said, “I’m happier than I know how to say that you didn’t hurt Ray, and you’re getting out of here.” Then he held his arms wide, and Bobby got a huge grin on his face that made him seem years younger, as if some weight had lifted. They hugged, Leduc patting Bobby on the back as they ended it.

  I was standing almost behind the open cell door, so when Leduc let Bobby out into the little hallway, Bobby went the other direction for the hug fest. He hugged everyone, including Olaf, which was fun. The bigger man just stood there with his hands sort of out to the side as if he was so unaccustomed to being hugged that he didn’t know how to do it.

  Bobby hugged Angel and kissed her on the cheek, and she returned the favor. When he came to me, he leane
d down so that I could bury my face in the bend of his neck the way I had in the cell when we’d almost gotten shot. His skin was warm, smelling of soap and shampoo, of him, and underneath all that was the faint hint of leopard. My inner leopard looked up from deep inside me, flashing dark gold eyes as she sniffed the scent of him. We liked Bobby, and then I realized, we realized, it wasn’t just his leopard we were sensing. I turned still in his arms to find Pierette at the doorway, almost hidden behind Olaf’s big frame. Her eyes showed leopard green before she slipped her sunglasses on to hide the leopard eyes in her human face.

  Bobby sniffed the air and then snuffled next to my face, searching for the scent, or confirming it wasn’t me. Something about the movement against my neck tickled, so I laughed and squirmed against him before backing off with a laugh. Heat marched down my skin, and it wasn’t coming from Bobby.

  It wasn’t Angel, who was standing farther into the hallway past us. It smelled like sunburned grass and hardened earth waiting for the rains to fall under a merciless sun. Some inner beasts smelled like the lands they had originated in, not like fur and skin—lions were one of those. I looked at Olaf, and he had his sunglasses on, too, but I didn’t need to see his eyes to know they’d changed to lion.

  Bobby shivered beside me, rubbing his arms. “What is that?”

  The fact that he had to ask instead of being able to figure it out said either he was that weak or he had no practice with other shapeshifters. Maybe both. Olaf turned and went for the door, taking his skin-dancing energy with 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.

  73

  “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 inside me gave a coughing roar that vibrated through me, staggering me. I reached out to grab hold of something and found a hand to hold. Energy flowed down that hand to calm my inner lions. I knew whose hand was soothing me before I turned and saw Angel.

  She drew me in to her body, putting her other hand against my face so that we stared into each other’s eyes. It must have looked like a prelude to a kiss to the rest of the room, but it was Angel soothing my inner beasts. The male lion vanished first, because he wasn’t really there. My lioness on the other hand snarled up at Angel’s calming energy. She didn’t want to be soothed; she wanted the reality of the inner beast she’d created, and just feet away from us were two of them. Except that Nicky was out of the running, because he was my Bride. It meant he was metaphysically compromised and could never be my lion to call the way that Nathaniel was my leopard to call, which left only one lion in the room as far as my lioness was concerned.

  Angel put her forehead against mine, because more skin contact was better for most metaphysical powers. The lioness snarled and lashed out, claws extended. It made me stagger against Angel; she wrapped her arms around me while I fought the sensation of phantom claws trying to cut me up from the inside. There was never any real physical damage from the inner beasts, but it hurt as if there was for seconds, minutes, while my body had to realize we weren’t really hurt.

  “Are you all right there, Marshal?” Leduc asked from the cell area.

  I had to breathe through the pain to answer him. “Yeah, just . . . I’m fine.”

  The lawyer actually moved around to distract Leduc. Ms. Brooks had been around enough shapeshifters to know an issue when she saw it. She started to try to argue that Bobby should be released into her custody now, today, which was ridiculous and had no legal standing, but she restarted her fight with the sheriff. It gave me time to stand up straight and pretend nothing had happened.

  Angel spoke with her mouth touching my face so that her whisper wouldn’t carry to any of the humans and might not carry to Bobby. “We need to get you out of here.”

  Pierette came to stand with us as if it were a group hug and whispered, “We all need somewhere private to discuss things with the big werelion.”

  It took me a second to realize she meant Olaf and not Nicky. Out loud I said, “We need to leave at least one of you guys here with Bobby.”

  “The case is solved,” Leduc said, “and as soon as we can get the legalities worked out, Bobby is going home. We don’t need the Coalition to babysit anymore, do we, Bobby?”

  “It was my doubts that made me lose control of my beast,” Bobby said. “I don’t
doubt myself anymore. I know that I didn’t kill my uncle.”

  “If you weren’t a Therianthrope, you’d be able to walk out now,” Ms. Brooks said.

  I nodded and walked into the cell area like my lioness hadn’t just sideswiped me. The dull ache of it was just that, dull. I wasn’t hurt. “Sorry, Ms. Brooks, but Bobby has to stay in the cell tonight. Hopefully sometime tomorrow he’ll be home and clear.”

  “You know he’s innocent now. Why should he spend another night in jail?” she asked.

  “Because he’s still a shapeshifter accused of a murder. I can refuse to execute him even with the warrant in his name, but until we’ve cleared him more publicly, he’s probably safer behind bars.”

  “Are you saying that people who have known me all my life would hurt me?” Bobby asked from the open door of his cell.

  “I’m saying that legally let’s not tempt fate. You stay in overnight and part of tomorrow, and by then we’ll figure something else out.”

  “But no one is going to execute me?” he asked.

  “You don’t have to worry when any of us come back here now. We aren’t here to kill you.”

  “We will be working to get you free as soon as possible,” Ms. Brooks said.

  “You know he has no legal right to counsel under the supernatural system,” Leduc said.

  “And yet here I am,” she said.

  “You’re here, but you have no legal rights, because Bobby has none,” Leduc said.

  “Which is monstrous,” Ms. Brooks said.

  Leduc shrugged, spreading his hands wide. “You heard the marshal. He has to be locked up for his own safety as much as anyone else’s.” He shooed Bobby back into the cell and closed the door with a resounding clang.

  Bobby put his hands around the bars. “You promise that I’ll get out tomorrow?”

  I wasn’t sure whom he was asking, but I answered. “Yeah, you’ll get out tomorrow.”

  “Anita, you can’t promise him that. It might take a couple of days,” Edward alias Ted said from the doorway.