"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