WE COULD HEAR Leduc yelling at someone when the three of us stepped up onto the little porch outside the office.
“The lawyer is here,” Olaf said.
“You can hear what he’s saying?” I asked.
“And what she is saying.”
“I believe you can hear it’s a woman, but how do you know the woman is the lawyer?” I asked.
“She is saying things that only lawyers would say.”
I’d have asked for more details, but I’d listened to enough lawyers to know exactly what he meant. Edward opened the door to the office to a woman’s voice threatening to sue Leduc, his department, the city of Hanuman, and I think she mentioned the state cops when Edward and Olaf stepped far enough into the room for me to see the person who went with the voice. She was about Edward’s height, though about two inches of that was the heels peeking out from her pants suit. Her makeup was understated. Her dark hair was cut short and styled so that all the waves in it had been tamed. I could never get my hair to do that.
Milligan and Custer were watching the argument like it was a tennis match. Angel was standing in the doorway to the cells, one hip leaning against the doorjamb so that the swell of her hips was more pronounced, or maybe it was the pencil skirt. I’d have wanted to take off the high heels that went with it by now, but I knew that Angel would wear them all day. It was an outfit, and she wouldn’t ruin it by changing shoes.
“I’m following the letter of the law,” Leduc said.
“Sheriff Leduc, are you really telling me that you’re fine with following this particular law to its conclusion?”
“My job is to uphold the law, and that is exactly what I intend to do,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Dukie. Don’t be such a hard case,” Angel said from the doorway.
Dukie? I thought.
Angel put a smile on her crimson lips that made Duke almost smile back at her. Then he seemed to catch himself and aimed a frown back at the lawyer. I was betting if I called him Dukie, he’d have included me in the argument.
“What are we arguing about?” I asked.
“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 leaned 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.