Chapter Three #2
He thought about Danny and the jaguar. About how easy it was to want someone who made you feel small.
He didn't understand it, not really. His own experience with wanting was so tied up in confidence and certainty that the idea of pining for someone who couldn't be bothered felt alien.
But he'd seen it enough. Behind his bar he'd seen every version of desire there was: the healthy and the destructive, the consensual and the coerced, the love that built people up and the obsession that hollowed them out.
He'd watched people walk in broken and walk out held.
He'd watched people walk in whole and walk out shattered.
That was the risk of the place. People came to feel something real, and sometimes what they felt was more than they were ready for.
He finished the inventory, signed off on the night's numbers, and shut down the POS system.
He checked the taps one final time. He grabbed his sneakers from his locker and pulled them on, his feet were still sore from the barefoot walk home the previous night, and the concrete had been less forgiving than he'd pretended.
He pocketed his phone and his keys and his wallet.
He didn't bother with a shirt. His apartment was four blocks away and he liked the night air on his skin, even though it was cold by human standards.
The alarm beeped when he set it. The door locked solid behind him. The key turned twice, the same way it always did, and Amani stepped out into the warm dark of four in the morning.
He texted his mother: Heading home. The frittata was good.
He started walking.
The warehouses were dark on both sides of the street, their loading docks locked and quiet.
A security camera blinked its red eye on the corner of the nearest building.
The glow of downtown threw everything into the familiar orange half-light that turned shadows into suggestions and made the dark spaces between buildings look like doorways into nothing.
He was halfway down the second block when a sound made him slow.
Not a sound, exactly. A smell. Thick, murky, wrong. Like stagnant water and old fish. Like something that had come from the bottom of a very deep, very cold place.
Salt water.
His feet stopped before his brain caught up. Every hair on the back of his neck lifted. Somewhere deep in his chest, in the place where the lion lived, something ancient and predatory woke up and said move.
But he didn't move. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk at four in the morning, two blocks from the safest building in Vegas, and he looked at the black van parked under the streetlight ahead of him.
It was idling. The headlights were off.
Three figures stepped out of the darkness between two warehouses, and Amani knew them by their smell before he could see their faces.
Sharks. The wet, rotting stink of them filled the air so thickly he could taste it on his tongue.
They moved the way sharks always moved: unhurried, confident, certain that whatever they were about to do had already been decided and the prey just hadn't figured it out yet.
He recognized them. Not their names, he'd never bothered to learn the names of scumbags, but their faces.
They'd been to KK. They'd been banned after what they did to the panda, Rodney, banned and told not to come within five miles of the building.
And there they were, two blocks away, in the middle of the night, waiting for him.
His pulse hammered. The lion roared in his chest, demanding he shift, demanding teeth and claws and the raw physics of being a predator with four hundred pounds of muscle behind him.
But the sidewalk was concrete and the streetlights were bright and there were human security cameras on every warehouse on this block.
Shifting meant exposure. Shifting meant humans seeing a lion tear apart three men in the middle of an industrial district.
Shifting meant an incident that Lady Leo's entire operation was designed to prevent.
So he did what a lion did when it couldn't shift and couldn't run. He stood his ground.
"You were banned from Kinky Kritters for what you did to Rodney," he called to them, and he was proud that his voice didn't shake. "You aren't supposed to be within five miles of this place."
The one in front laughed. An ugly sound, without any joy in it.
His face warped into something grotesque, more teeth than a human mouth could hold, the grin of something that had evolved to kill in deep water and had never quite lost the instinct on land.
"You think your mommy's rules matter at all to us, little boy? "
Amani hissed. Then he lunged.
It was stupid and brave and exactly what a lion would do.
He threw himself forward, all speed and fury, aimed at the shark five feet in front of him.
And something hit him from behind. The concrete rushed up to meet his face.
Two of them were on top of him, their weight crushing and their hands impossibly strong, and the sidewalk bit into his cheek as he thrashed and screamed and fought with everything he had.
Under his hip, his phone cracked against the pavement, the screen shattering with a sound he felt more than heard.
"Get off me!"
They didn't. One of them pinned his arms. The other sat on his legs. The third crouched beside his head, and Amani felt the prick of a needle going into the meat of his shoulder, a brief, searing heat that raced through his veins like fire.
The orange sky above him started to dim.
The last thing he heard before the darkness took him was one of the sharks laughing, and the van's sliding door opening, and somewhere across the city his mother's phone lighting up on her nightstand with a message that would never be answered.
Come for brunch tomorrow. I'll make pancakes.