Rafael

by K. Hamilton, Laurell

  “I think Anita could win on the mat,” Claudia said.

  Helios, who was blond and six feet tall, in obvious good shape, grinned. “I didn’t say she couldn’t win on points, but she can’t pound me into the mat, and you can.”

  “Anita can’t win unless she sucker punches you first,” Kane said as he strutted his way through the full set of free weights with a few machines and big metal frames of the squat rack. He was six feet even just like Helios, but where the former teams guy was starting to let his blond hair grow out, Kane still had his hair shaved down to dark stubble with that high widow’s peak at the front so that the skin went back from it sharply, which always made me want to ask if he’d started shaving because he was going bald, or if it was just a fashion choice. I knew it wasn’t a military buzz, because Kane had never worn a uniform, he didn’t have the discipline for it.

  “Kane, we’re here to work on your form in the weight room, not make trouble,” Helios called after him.

  Kane blinked big, dark brown eyes at me, because he was close enough for that kind of detail. “It’s not going to be any trouble,” he answered the other man, but his attention was all on me. The lack of hair left his face unadorned so you could see he had good bone structure and was handsome, almost prettily so; the body that showed around the tank top, exercise shorts, and jogging shoes wasn’t bad, but it was more a body that was lean because he was built that way than lean because he worked out and watched his nutrition.

  Claudia handed me my towel, and I used it to wipe down the weight bench. She started taking the weight off the bar.

  “I thought I was going to do reps with that,” Kane said.

  “It’s three times Anita’s body weight. She did two reps with it after a full workout with me in the weight room, and then starting back with pyramid sets. You can either do a full workout with weights of my choice for you, or you can just jump right to doing chest press with three times your body weight.” She gave that smile that was more a snarl again. Claudia didn’t like Kane, because he was supposed to be one of the guards and she didn’t think he was good enough. I agreed, but Kane and I were feuding over a man, sort of. It’s always hard to be the ex-girlfriend when the new boyfriend is a jealous bitch.

  I picked up my water bottle and started trying to rehydrate.

  “That’s not fair,” Kane said, and that handsome face scrunched down into the sour lines that were usually how he looked, at least around me. It stole all his pouty good looks and showed him for what he was—unpleasant.

  Claudia stopped taking weights off the bar long enough to give him a look. “Not fair, really?” There was a dangerous undertone in her voice. I don’t mean dangerous as in violence, but in the you’ve-just-mouthed-off-to-your-coach/martial-arts-instructor/drill-sergeant/dad way.

  Helios was hurrying toward us, saying, “He didn’t mean it.”

  Claudia turned her head enough to aim the look at Helios. He stopped moving toward us. “Are you his babysitter today?”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” Kane said; he hadn’t understood the look or the tone in Claudia’s voice.

  “No, ma’am,” Helios said, both of them ignoring Kane’s comment.

  I started taking weight off the other side of my bar. If I was careful, I wouldn’t drop anything on myself. My arms were still letting me know that I’d used them, but they weren’t trembling anymore.

  Claudia put up the weight in her hand. Her side was clean, so she could turn her full attention to the men. I kept putting up the weights on the other side of the bar and staying out of it.

  “Who told you to bring Kane to the weight room?” she asked.

  “Bobby Lee.” Helios looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then he stood to attention, shoulders back, hands at his sides. He looked at the far wall of the room, rather than directly at Claudia.

  “What were his exact orders?” The bodyguards were a lot less formal than the military, but we had so many of them now that it just saved time and confusion to use some of the military jargon.

  “Take Kane to the weight room, work on his form, because it sucks. If it still sucks after you’ve worked with him, I’m going to personally smoke both your asses.” I’d never heard Bobby Lee say anything that harsh to me, but then he never had to tell me to work harder in training.

  “So, you’re Kane’s battle buddy today,” Claudia said, still in that you-done-fucked-up tone.

  Helios swallowed visibly, but stayed at attention as he answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s a battle buddy?” Kane asked.

  Claudia said, “Anita, tell Kane what a battle buddy is.” She didn’t even look behind her, she just assumed I’d answer.

  I didn’t come to attention, but I did pause in the middle of putting up the last weight. “A battle buddy is a military term for someone who has your back as a friend and/or has seen combat with you, so they have your back as a brother in arms. It also means someone that an officer, or drill sargeant, has assigned to a soldier who is a screwup or lacks training. Their battle buddy is supposed to help train them, or make sure they don’t screw up.”

  Helios’s eyes flicked to me and then back to the invisible point on the wall. The eye flick meant I’d either surprised, interested, or impressed him with my answer.

  “You were never military. How do you know that?” Kane asked.

  “I asked someone,” I said.

  “Anita, what happens if the screwup the battle buddy is supposed to be babysitting continues to screw up?” Claudia made it sound like an order, and technically I was her boss, but in the weight room and in fight practice she was the expert—that made her the boss.

  “The battle buddy gets punished along with the screwup.”

  “I am not a screwup,” Kane said; he almost yelled it, his hands already in fists at his sides.

  I sniffed the air before I could stop myself. His anger smelled like food. I could feed like an energy vampire on two things, lust and wrath, two of the deadly sins. I’d met real vampires that could feed off fear, violence, even death. In the grand scheme of things, I’d gotten lucky on my menu.

  “Ma’am, may I intercede before he does anything more that we’ll both regret?” Helios asked.

  “You may,” Claudia said.

  “I don’t need your help,” Kane snarled, half turning toward the other man.

  “I’m helping myself, not you,” Helios said, and he dropped out of attention, just relaxing into himself, or his ordinary stance.

  “We’re werehyenas, we shouldn’t have to take orders from rats!”

  “Narcissus, our Oba, told us to train with the other guards; that means taking orders from whoever is higher rank. That includes Claudia, Bobby Lee, and Fredo.”

  “It’s not natural for different animal groups to work together,” Kane said, but at least he wasn’t yelling. His anger was fading, too, which was just as well. I’d fed off him once, and that was enough. I’d done it to make a point that I was dominant over him, but the lesson hadn’t sunk in for Kane, just like a lot of lessons didn’t sink in for him.

  Helios stepped not just closer to Kane, but so he moved the other man back a little from Claudia. I don’t think he wanted to know what the punishment would be if Kane took a swing at her. “I’m learning a lot from all the training here in St. Louis. I’m a teams guy, I came in here with serious skills, but Jake has hundreds of years of fighting practice. I’m learning things from him that no one else could teach me. I don’t care if he’s a werewolf.”

  “Jake has only lived that long because he’s tied to his vampire master. He’s a slave to the vampires.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re Asher’s moitié bête, his animal to call, just like Jake and his master,” I said, and instantly regretted saying anything.

  “You stay out of this!” Kane said, and he was instantly angry again. I had that effect on him.

  Helios tried to move him back away from both of us, but Kane went wide around the bench toward me. I
wasn’t armed, not even with a knife, because I was in the gym underneath the Circus of the Damned. If I wasn’t safe in our inner sanctum, then something was wrong. I hoped that something wasn’t six feet of tall, dark, and stupid.

  Helios moved so fast it was just a blur and he was between me and Kane. The military trained the special forces to be better than the best; add to that the extra speed of a wereanimal and they were scary good.

  “Back it up, Kane,” Helios said.

  I used Helios’s body to hide the fact that I was backing up and around the weight racks. I did not want Kane to take a swing at me with me pressed up against the weights with nowhere to go. I’d beat him once hand to hand, but I’d sucker punched him while he was still arguing about the rules. Professionals act while amateurs are still asking what the fuck just happened. Sometimes being a professional doesn’t mean throwing the first punch, it means avoiding the fight altogether.

  “Are you going to hide behind one of your guards, Anita?”

  “She’s supposed to hide behind us. We’re her bodyguards,” Helios said.

  “Then why does she train with us? Why is she always down here training?”

  I was far enough out into the room now. I figured between Claudia and Helios they could wrestle Kane without involving me. He’d been training harder in the fighting part of things since I kicked his ass. He didn’t work harder anywhere else; I think he wanted a rematch, but I didn’t. He was at least cruiserweight, or even heavyweight, and I was bantamweight at best, and if two fighters are equally trained, size matters.

  “I’m a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch; I train so I can go up against the monsters and survive.”

  “She just called us all monsters, the kind she executes.”

  “I’ve seen what happens when one of us goes rogue,” Helios said. “We are monsters. We need people like Blake who can take us out when we go full beast mode.”

  “Why are you taking her side? Did she fuck you like she fucks all the other men?”

  “That’s out of line,” Helios said.

  “So, you did fuck her!”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Kane, it’s not my fault that Asher is bisexual and not just gay the way you want him to be,” I said.

  “He’d be gay if it wasn’t for you,” Kane said, and he had moved so he could see me around the other man.

  “Asher is Asher, he’s over six hundred years old, I didn’t change any of his sexual preferences.”

  “Liar!” He screamed it at me.

  “I’m not sleeping with your boyfriend, Kane.”

  “But he still wants you!”

  “And that is not my fault,” I said.

  “Lying bitch!” Kane moved toward me and Helios stepped in between us. Kane pushed him hard enough to make the other man stumble. Helios made a fist, and part of me wanted him to take the swing.

  Kane seemed to see it, too, because he calmed for a second and said, “Sorry, Helios, it’s not your fault, it’s hers.” And the calm was gone as if it had never been, he was right back to being furious—at me.

  “Let Asher sleep with other women, and maybe he’ll get me out of his system.”

  “No! It’s not women he wants, it’s just you, he’s only hetero for you.” I tried to see something in his face that I could reason with, but there was nothing but the jealous rage. It pinched his features down so that the handsome was all gone. Some people really are pretty when they’re angry; Kane wasn’t one of them.

  “You act like I’m the only woman he ever slept with, Kane. I know he slept with Dulcia, the leader of your old hyena clan.”

  “Only because Jean-Claude told him to seduce her.”

  “What about Belle Morte and Julianna?”

  Kane made a sound low in his chest, and an eerie high-pitched growl spilled out of his human lips.

  “Anita, just go, hit the showers. He’ll calm down once you’re gone,” Claudia said.

  “Asher is bisexual, Kane. You can’t change that about him.”

  His human words came out with that hyena squeal threading through them, so the sound raised the hairs at the back of my neck. “I can love him enough so he won’t need anyone else.”

  “You sound like a woman who marries a gay man convinced she can love him straight.” I shouldn’t have said it, but I was just so tired of him.

  He started rushing me, but Helios was there wrapping his arms around him from behind. I expected Kane to fight Helios then, but he just kept staring at me, trying to get at me like a dog on a chain.

  I looked at the big man who was almost foaming at the mouth with rage. The anger didn’t smell good to me now, as if he’d gone past healthy anger into something more, or worse. Whatever was twisting Kane up inside was nothing I wanted to feed on.

  Claudia got close enough to me to lower her voice over Kane’s yells. “Go, I’ll make sure he’s got a battle buddy with him at all times.” There was a very serious look in her eyes; she was acknowledging that I might not be safe alone with Kane.

  I didn’t argue, just took my towel and left my water bottle by the weight bench. I didn’t want it badly enough to get that close to Kane when he was having one of his fits. I was beginning to believe that his possessive jealousy of Asher was just that insane, as in something was broken inside Kane that needed either talk therapy or medication, or both. Crazy in love wasn’t just a phrase for Kane and Asher, which was one reason I wasn’t sleeping with Asher. Under other circumstances we would have fired Kane and sent him to another city to be someone else’s problem, but thanks to Asher having made him his beast half, if Kane left, then so did Asher, and though I wasn’t sleeping with him, there were others who were, or who were working their way back to it. There were people here who were in love with Asher; too bad we all hated Kane, and he hated us right back.

  2

  I TURNED A corner toward the locker rooms and nearly ran into Rafael. He had to catch me in his arms, or I’d have smacked face-first into his chest. I was more bothered by Kane than I’d thought, since I didn’t sense Rafael’s energy with his main bodyguard, Benito, right beside him. Even without the otherworldly energy they were both tall: dark, muscled, and handsome for Rafael, more sinister for Benito. They both had short black hair and brown eyes, but Benito had deep facial scarring from something that looked like more than acne, but it wasn’t just the scars. I had other people in my life who had facial scars, and none of them seemed like a villainous henchman in a superhero movie, but Benito did. Maybe it was the fact that he worked so hard being scary as Rafael’s main bodyguard.

  I started to push away from Rafael, partly because I was startled and partly because that had been my reaction to getting close for so long. Luckily for all of us I’d worked on my issues enough to let myself realize that a hug might be nice, not for romance, but because Kane’s hatred of me was beginning to be unnerving. It never feels good when someone hates you, but when it’s for things you can’t change, like being a woman and having a past relationship with someone’s boyfriend . . . you can’t fix that.

  But there was another reason not to take a hug from Rafael; he wasn’t one of the loves of my life. He was supposed to be powerful food for the ardeur and that was it, but because I didn’t know how to be regularly intimate with someone and not date them, the lines were getting blurry between us and I didn’t know how to handle it. If he was just my friend and sexual snack, was it fair to turn to him for emotional comfort? Where is the line between friend with benefits and boyfriend?

  Because I didn’t have an answer, I let myself relax against Rafael’s body, let the strength of his arms wrap around me. Honestly with my back to the room with Kane in it I should have moved so I could see him coming, but with Rafael looking in that direction and Benito with us, if Kane tried anything, I was betting on us. Then I wondered, was I trying to bait Kane? I hoped not, because that would be childish and dangerous for both of us.

  “I hear someone ranting in the weight room,” Benito said.

/>   “It’s Kane,” I said, as Rafael said it with me. He hugged me tighter to his body and I slid my arms around his waist to find his back wet with sweat, and the chest where my cheek tried to nestle was a little damp, too. It made me pull back a little, laughing.

  “I was working out, too,” he said, laughing with me.

  “Let’s move toward the locker room,” Benito said. “I don’t want us in his sight line when he exits the room.”

  Neither of us argued. We just put my arm around Rafael’s waist and his arm across my shoulders and let the bodyguard herd us away from the sound of raised voices. We’d been lovers long enough that we knew where all the arms and legs and noses went when we did most anything. I’d never been this physically comfortable with anyone that I wasn’t in love with before. It felt weird, because some part of me had still believed that this level of physical comfort was supposed to come only after the in-love part; that it could come just through being together often enough sort of bothered me.

  Kane wasn’t shouting anymore, but then he couldn’t see me or any of the other people he was jealous of; once the object of his hatred was out of sight, he was better.

  “He’s dangerous,” Benito said, almost like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  Rafael hugged me one-armed as we walked. “You need to have a guard with you at all times, Anita.”

  “So I’m not the only one that thinks Kane’s jealous rages are getting scarier,” I said.

  “They are getting worse,” Benito said.

  “If he were not Asher’s hyena to call, I might urge something more permanent be done before Kane hurts someone I care about,” Rafael said, kissing the top of my head.

  “I even agree with you. We wouldn’t even have to do anything but let Kane get all ragey at the wrong person and let nature take its course,” I said, “except if Kane dies, Asher may die with him.”