“He’s right,” Dev said. “You say you don’t hold it against us if we aren’t as brave as you are, but you do. I panicked a little in Colorado with all the zombies, and you decided I wasn’t as strong and brave as you needed me to be.”

   “I asked you to come this time, didn’t I?”

   “Only because some of your favorites couldn’t come along, like Bobby Lee.”

   I didn’t know what to say to that, because he was right.

   “We’re staying,” Dev said.

   “We’re all staying,” Fortune said.

   “Nolan says that Van Cleef isn’t directly involved in this one; do you believe him?” I directed this question at Edward.

   “Yes, I do,” he said, but not like he was happy about it.

   “Then we stay, solve the vampire problem, and we help Nolan work the kinks out of his new unit, and then we go home.”

   “You don’t understand, Anita. Just because this isn’t Van Cleef’s unit doesn’t mean it’s not his handiwork.”

   “What difference does that make?” I asked.

   “It means nothing is simple, nothing is what it seems, and the monsters won’t be the only ones we’re fighting against.”

   “Come on . . . Ted, you know I bring my own monsters to the party.”

   “If half of what I read in your file is true, Blake, you are one of the monsters.”

   “Don’t believe everything you read, Nolan.”

   “I thought monsters were taller,” Donahue said, smiling at me.

   “The rest of us are all taller than Anita,” Dev said, smiling back at her.

   Donahue frowned, then looked at all of them. “So you’re all monsters?”

   “Oh, yes,” Kaazim said, “we are all monsters.”

   Everyone nodded, including me, and finally Edward joined us. “There’s only one way to find out if your new unit is good enough to fight monsters, Nolan, and that’s to fight some.”

   Nolan stopped arguing with Edward and with us. I wasn’t even sure what had convinced him to stop being pissy, but I didn’t care. If we were going to hunt vampires here, I wanted the guns, and that meant we needed Nolan and his weird clout. Thanks to Nolan and maybe even the mysterious Van Cleef, we were allowed to load our potentially illegal firepower into the vehicles, and divided our people up between the three vans. We were in Ireland; we had the firepower we needed to hunt vampires and win. Winning meant saving lives. Winning meant we survived. Winning meant the monsters died. It was simple math and anyone who didn’t understand that vampire hunting was just that simple wasn’t going to be very good at the job. Not being good at most jobs meant you got fired; not being good at my job meant you died. I hadn’t come to Ireland to die or get any of my people killed; I’d come to win.

36

   BRENNAN DROVE OUR van but didn’t like the fact that Nolan got in back with Edward, me, and some of our people. He pushed the point up to arguing with Nolan about it, but one of the pluses to being military is that when your Captain tells you to do something, eventually you just do it. Period.

   “What’s his problem?” Dev asked, as he settled down on the other side of Nathaniel, who was snuggled up against me. Damian was at our feet, still curled up in the lightproof bag. It felt almost like there was more than just him in the bag, as if Nathaniel had stuffed in padding. I’d ask later when we were more alone. Right now we were about as not alone as we could possibly be. Nicky sat on the other side of me, so that I was snuggled between him and Nathaniel, something I normally enjoyed, but not at work, and not with Dev on the other side of Nathaniel. It was the broadness of the shoulders of all three of them that made us all have to sit very close to each other. I didn’t mind, though it probably would have made more sense to have either Nicky or Dev change places with Kaazim or Jake, who were slender in comparison. Pride was on their side of the van, too, but his shoulders wouldn’t help the issue. I wanted Nathaniel beside me and I knew that Dev preferred to sit beside either me or Nathaniel. Nolan was watching me too closely for me to want to get into an explaining match with Dev about why he couldn’t sit beside either of his sweeties.

   Dev repeated, “What is Brennan’s problem?”

   “He is afraid we’ll lose control of our beasts,” Kaazim said as he found a seat beside Jake.

   The van doors were closed from the outside and I heard a click, almost like we’d been locked inside. If Nolan hadn’t been inside with us, I’d have been more suspicious. Apparently, I should have been, because Edward looked at Nolan.

   “And you’re back here with us, because . . .” Edward said.

   “To let you know I trust you.”

   “But you still locked us in.”

   The energy in the van flared. I was suddenly sitting in the middle of Nicky’s beast. I could smell heat and sun and that heavy musk that meant male lion. My lioness lifted her head in the dark and gazed up the long tunnel of my body with eyes that were so dark an amber they were almost orange. I started doing my deep, even breathing exercises, because the last thing I needed was to have an issue with my own inner beasts with Nolan right there. Nathaniel’s energy rose, but not like Nicky’s did, but then if it came to fighting our way out only one of them would be helping do that. Dev’s lion responded to Nicky’s, not just because they both held lion in them, but because Nicky was his Rex, his king. They were pride together, and that meant a lot to the two of them.

   My lioness started padding up that long, dark corridor inside me, attracted to all the male lion energy. Damn it.

   Pride’s energy flared from across the small space and his gold tiger spoke to me and Dev, because that was still his original beast. The wash of gold tiger helped slow down my lioness but woke up the shadow of gold inside me. Her base color was white with pale golden stripes, but I knew she wasn’t a white tiger, because when that rose inside me she was almost completely white with few, if any stripes. It was like snow with muscles and teeth. Gold was like honey that could bite.

   “Guys, tone it down until we need the muscle,” I said, and my voice was breathy.

   Jake and Kaazim didn’t flare any more than Nathaniel did. His regular job was stripping onstage and shapeshifting onstage. He had to have nearly perfect control of his inner leopard to be safe around the customers at Guilty Pleasures. The other two were just older than dirt and had the control of millennia of practice.

   I smelled other tigers and knew it was either Domino or Ethan in the other vehicles thinking at me, asking what to do. I lowered my shields so that I could hear better. I saw the other interior from a higher height than I had, and it was only the more dominant thinking that let me know it was Domino until he moved his hand enough for me to see it, too. I’d never tried this much mind-to-mind with him, and it wasn’t a perfect match yet. Mind-to-mind takes practice, and we hadn’t. Ethan was looking at Fortune, and I knew her blue tiger had triggered his, so she wasn’t trying to be as calm as her Harlequin counterparts here. I thought soothing thoughts at both of them. Nathaniel sighed beside me and said, “God, I can’t keep fighting,” and his inner beast spiraled upward like sweet smoke to join the rest. I managed to say, out loud, “Unless you want these expensive rides torn apart, start explaining why you locked us in, Nolan.”