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The two bodyguards at their backs looked right at home, too. Standing orders were that Pierce and Haven got four guards. I wondered if Haven, now unconscious, had two of his own? Probably.

“I want this to work, Auggie, if it can,” I said. “I need your word that you won’t spoil it.”

“Tell me exactly what you want me to swear to, Anita,” he said. His face was empty, pale with concentration. His eyes looked huge and even darker, like the sky before it goes black.

I thought about what he’d asked, then looked again to Jean-Claude. “Help me to word it, okay.”

“I will second Augustine on this, ma petite. Tell me what you wish him to swear to.”

“I want to really try to bond with Noel. I don’t want him to interfere with that, but I don’t want to bond to Noel the way I did with Micah and Nathaniel. I want to see if it’s just lions I’m hunting, or if Auggie’s lions are especially tasty.”

“If my lions are more tasty, it may not be because they are my lions, but because your power seeks something more dominant than what’s kneeling on the floor. I think in your Rex’s zeal not to give power to a rival, he has sent you food that your inner lioness will never accept.”

“My inner lioness,” I said, though it’s hard to be disdainful when you’re on your knees with men still hanging on to you. But I managed it.

“Inner beast, then,” he said, voice empty. His face showed nothing. He was finally acting more like all the other really old vamps that I’d ever met. Will the real Augustine please stand up?

“Are the lions more likely to want a dominant?” I asked.

“I thought you had read up on lions,” he said.

I thought about it, then nodded. “If a new male takes over the pride, second thing he does is kill the cubs. It means he doesn’t help the lion he drove off breed successfully, and it puts the females into estrus faster, so he gets to mate.”

Auggie nodded. “It makes the females of most wereprides very tough to impress.”

I shook my head. “You’re not saying that werelion prides are run like real lion prides? That the new leader kills the children? That’s ridiculous.”

He shrugged those big shoulders under the long cloak. “It has happened.”

I turned back to Noel and Travis. “You guys know about this happening for real?”

They both said, “No.”

“They’re too young to know what we did before we became legal.” This from Pierce.

“Are you saying that some men do kill the babies of the old Rex?”

“I’ve seen it,” Pierce said in a very clipped voice.

I almost asked, Which end of the fight were you on? but I didn’t. There was a look in his eyes, almost a flinching. Either he’d been a victim, or he’d done things that haunted him. I had enough nightmares of my own; I’d let Pierce keep his to himself.

“I guess that would make you want the strongest lion around,” I said, but my voice was a little thin. The pregnancy scare was too recent. How would it feel to go through nine months, then labor, and have some stranger kill your baby, after first killing your husband? I said it out loud. “If someone did that to me, he wouldn’t survive very long.”

“Prides with really strong females don’t get taken over much,” Pierce said, “because you gotta sleep sometimes.” He almost smiled when he said it.

I nodded. “That’s how I’d be thinking.”

“Your local pride has very weak females,” Auggie said, his voice still that empty master’s voice, so it could have been almost anyone talking. “Your Rex’s wife is weak, and since the females of the lions are just like the males, it’s forced him to reject a lot of strong women.”

“Are you saying that if someone killed Joseph, there wouldn’t be enough fight in his pride to do much about it?”

“His brother would be a problem,” Pierce said, “but other than that, yeah.”

“You would definitely have to kill both of the brothers,” Auggie said, “but after that the pride would be helpless.” He looked past me at the lions.

Noel was staring at him with a sort of soft horror. It was Travis who said, “Sounds like you’ve thought this through.”

“It’s why you brought dominants,” I said.