Harley laughed then, and it was a good, full-chested deep chuckle. Under other circumstances it would have made me smile, at least, but with a gun in each hand, and Lisandro’s blood still fresh on the floor, the laugh was unnerving. It didn’t match what was happening. It’s never good when the bad guy’s reactions don’t match normal human emotions. It means there’s something wrong with them, and that they won’t react like you expect. They become a sociopathic wild card. The kind of wild card that can get people hurt, or dead.
“You make friends easily, so we’ve heard.” His voice still held that edge of humor. “Put Lisandro on the table.”
The three Harlequin carried him to the table. There was no blood trail from his wounded knee; it had already healed. They lifted him like a piece of luggage and laid him facedown on the table.
“Face up, please,” Harley said.
They flipped him over without a word or a hesitation. They never even exchanged a glance between them. What the hell was wrong with them? The Harlequin in the woods hadn’t been like this; they’d been like Harley, like the red tiger Harlequin. Why were these three different?
Harley holstered his guns and came to loom over me. He had to be around six feet tall and from the ground he looked bigger, but they always did. I could see that his eyes were a soft gray. He knelt and picked me up in his arms, gently. He cradled me against his chest. It made me tense, for no reason other than that the gentleness was like the laughter; it didn’t match.
But this close to him, I could smell the sweet pungent scent of leopard. My leopard rose like a darker shadow, to begin to pad up that long path inside me.
Harley stumbled in midstep, and I heard him sniff the air behind his mask. “You smelled like wolf for your first captor, now you smell like leopard for me. I do not believe either is real. I think it is part of your sweet poisoned bait that lures the shapeshifters to you.” He was back to sounding oh so reasonable, but he leaned his face down toward me. I felt his chest rise in a long, deep breath, as if he wanted to catch the perfume of my leopard while he could.
My fear had made it good odds that one or more of my beasts would rise; the scent of his leopard had chosen who it would be. My leopard began to jog up the path.
Harley laid me, gently, on the table beside Lisandro. It had been a long time since I’d been laid flat on my back with my hands bound behind me; it wasn’t any more comfortable than the last time I remembered it.
Harley whispered, “If you shapeshift we will kill him.”
“I can’t change form,” I said.
He rose up enough to study my face. “You smell of the truth, but I smell your leopard. You can’t be a wereleopard and not shapeshift.”
“I promise you that so far I haven’t chosen an animal form.”
He stroked his black gloved hand through my hair. “Is your hair as soft as all those curls look?”
“No,” I said.
He laughed again. “You should have said yes; then I would have been tempted to take off a glove and discover the truth for myself.”
Touch increases all vampire powers. I wasn’t sure this was a vampire power, but the fascination I seemed to have over them once they touched me was interesting. “If you want to touch my hair, I can’t stop you.”
His face was close enough that I could see the skin around his eyes crinkle upward, and knew he was smiling. “Why do I want to take off my glove and touch your hair?”
I told him the truth. “I don’t know.”
“The compulsion is quite strong,” he said.
My leopard had stopped running, and seemed to be waiting for something, but I could feel her just below the surface of me like a diver waiting and counting the minutes before he can surface without getting the bends. You hold yourself suspended in the water, watching your bubbles rise, and waiting. The leopard had that feel to her, but there were no bubbles for her to watch, and leopards don’t keep time, not like that.
“Touch me.” I whispered it.
He undid a snap on his sleeve and rolled the glove backward over his hand. The glove was a part of the shirt. He touched my hair, kneading his fingers through the curl. My leopard purred, stretching against his hand as if he touched her domed head, instead of my curls. I saw her in my mind’s eye pushing her head against his hand like a big house-cat, but then she slid herself down his arm, against his body. I had a moment of lying there on the table and feeling that other energy rub along the front of his body at the same time, like being in two places at one time.
His hand convulsed in my hair, his body shuddering under the brush of the leopard. It closed his eyes, bowed his neck backward, as if it felt unbelievably good.
He opened his eyes and gazed down at me. His eyes were deep gold leopard eyes. “If you do that again, we’ll shoot Lisandro again.”
“We’ll all go deaf if you keep using the gun in this room,” I said, and my voice was amazingly matter-of-fact.
“Then we will use blades,” he said. He made a motion and I turned in time to see one of the silent Harlequin move in a blur of black. One minute standing still, the next a knife sticking into Lisandro’s upper thigh. I had been looking right at him, and hadn’t seen it all. God help me, they were fast.
Lisandro made a sharp muffled sound through his gag. His shoulders rose off the table as his body dealt with the pain of a huge-ass knife hilt-deep in his thigh.
“You said next time. I didn’t do it again.”
He motioned again and I turned in time to see the same Harlequin wrap his hand around the hilt. “Oh, shit,” I said. And he pulled the blade free in one quick pull. Blood welled out of the cut, staining his jeans farther up and on the opposite side from the knee injury. Lisandro looked at me, eyes wide enough to show too much white around the brown. The look was clear: Stop that.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, to that unsaid comment.
Harley motioned and one of the others went for the still-open door. It was like some kind of arcane sign language, or the small hand signals that special forces teams can use, but they weren’t hand signals that I’d ever seen.
The remaining two Harlequin stepped up so one of them could press hands down on Lisandro’s shoulders, and the other had his legs. My heart was beating too fast, too hard.
“Don’t hurt him anymore.”
Harley frowned down at me. He petted my hair again and ran his hand down the side of my face. “Why does it feel so good to touch you?”
“I swear to you that I don’t know, other than I’m the Nimir-ra for our local wereleopards.”
“You are human and vampire; you can’t be Nimir-ra.” But even as he said it, his hand cupped the side of my face. His hand was very warm against my skin.
“As far as we know, I’m the first human Nimir-ra in the history of the pard,” I said. I snuggled my cheek against the heat of his hand. He jerked back as if I’d bitten him.
“Stay with them,” he said, and turned and left the room.
The two remaining Harlequin exchanged the first look between them that I’d seen. There was someone in there. Someone that maybe didn’t know why they were suddenly alone with us, with me. “What are your names?” I asked.
They glanced at me and then back at each other.
“Why did the Mother of All Darkness forbid you from telling me your names?”
They stared straight ahead, holding Lisandro in place on the table. If I were really a shapeshifter powerful enough to just shift my hands I could have gotten out of the ropes, easily, which was why Lisandro was in chains and I was in ropes. I tensed my stomach muscles and sat up on the table. The Harlequin didn’t so much move as tense.
“Since you won’t give me your names, I’ll call you Thing One and Thing Two.”
They glanced at each other again. One of them had brown eyes, the other had blue. They were both shorter than Harley or the werewolf, but beyond that the masks and hoods and gloves made them all generic.