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.