Page 11 of Lion's Legacy of Flame

Things get very violent.

And very dark.

And very dangerous.

Not to me. Dangerous to others.

This is where some people recounting the events might issue a trigger warning.

Steele’s eyes grow pretty damned wide. Of course they do. Who expects to see a two-hundred pound man turn into a twenty-two-hundred-pound lion at a food bank? Well, I suppose this place isn’t exactly a food bank. You get the point, though. The closest thug pulls a gun and points it at me. Honestly, there’s no chance this man is going to kill me.

I don’t mean that he won’t shoot me. He very well may shoot me. It would take a military grade heavy machine gun to do any real damage to me while I’m in my lion. That’s why I can’t claim as much moral high ground as I wish I could. I let him fire. I feel a barely discernable, slight sting. Then I roar, leap forward, andsend him hurtling through the air with a backhanded swipe of my paw.

I hear a crunch and a whistling sound. Something broke from the impact of my paw, and I hear him wheezing. It’s possible I broke a rib that then punctured a lung. The man crashes into a mostly empty shelf. He hits his head, and I hear more crunching. Maybe his skull. I don’t know. A few things fall onto the floor, bags of flour, I think. He’s out cold. The man will probably never wake up.

I hear more shots and feel a few stings in my side. I turn, leap, and land in front of another man. He fires wildly to the left and then to the right. I don’t want him hitting anyone other than me, so I break his arm with a swipe of my arm. He screams but then either shock sets in or the pain makes him freeze. I knock him down as I leap up over him and land on top of the third man.

I feel his breastbone breaking from my weight. He screams and tries to lift his arm to shoot at me but I lean down and bite. My head and half his arm come up with me. I incline to get off the man’s chest but by now, the blood rage is upon me. Nobody threatens the woman I love and walks away unscathed.

Lions don’t lose control amid rage. We rarely lose control at all. I suppose that means I have no excuse for what I’m doing. I’m levelheaded. Rage motivates us but it doesn’t control us. Don’t take that to mean that it’s safe to enrage us.

I rake my claws over the man’s face. When I leap from his body, I sink my claws deep into his flesh, so blood, skin, and muscle are torn when I leap. I land on the last man, and a moment later, his mangled body is on the floor. The man with the punctured lung is struggling to breathe. I let him struggle. The man with the torn-off arm is whimpering and bleeding out. The man whose breastbone I broke is unmoving as well.

I’ve just killed two or perhaps three men without even thinking about it. The other one or two will die before I am done.There’s no justification. No legitimate justification, anyway. I could have protected her without killing.

I ought to feel bad about it.

I do not feel bad.

I quickly look around. Steele is a few feet from the exit, and two leaps bring me right in front of him. He looks defeated. Good. I want to close my mouth over his neck and feel his bones splinter under my bite. It’s a miracle I resist, and the only way to guarantee I resist is what happens next.

I swipe his legs so he falls, and then I rake my claws over his back. It will take a long time to heal and he will hurt for a while. Then, I back off and shift. “You could have avoided all of this,” I say.

I stand on two legs, human now.

He stares at me in shock, no less terrified of my human body. “And now, you’ll donate half a million dollars, Steele. You’ll donate half a million dollars and you’ll have your engineers get together with Claire to make sure nothing you do interferes with her vision for the community. Do you understand?”

He stares at me and stands up. Then, he nods almost imperceptibly as he hurries for the door. I catch him and then I hear a whimpering sound of despair. I look to my left and see Claire watching us. “I’m not going to kill him, Claire,” I say. To him, I say, “As long as you understand. Do you?”

He nods and I glare at him. It doesn’t take long for him to squeal the words, “Yes! Yes, I understand!”

I throw him toward the exit. I get the satisfaction of watching him stumble and then fall down. I can’t pretend I’m not happy about that.

I’d be happier if he didn’t just get up and walk out afterward.

I stand there watching and then decide it might be a good idea to make sure that he’s gone. I get right to the door but stop when Claire says, “Brady!” She sounds panicked and I turnaround, ready to fight. She runs to me and grabs my arm, pulling me back inside. “You’re naked, Brady,” she says in a more measured tone. “You’re naked. You can’t follow him.”

“We sometimes forget we’re naked. It doesn’t mean the same thing to us.”

She nods and takes my hand. She pulls me inside and then to a hallway. She keeps pulling and, as stupid as I am, I get it in my head that she intends to take me somewhere to make love to her, something I’ll of course be happy to do. She does indeed bring me somewhere but it’s not to make love to her. We end up in a room about fifty feet by fifty feet. It has clothes on racks and shelves.

She grabs clothes for me quickly and efficiently and soon I’m wearing a surprisingly fashionable outfit. “These are much nicer than I would expect you to have.”

“Dignity is important,” she replies simply, “and too many places forget that. I try to develop relationships with brands so that they send some things here when they send them to the outlet stores.”

“That’s a very good thing to do,” I say.

“Yes, it helps people to feel like they’re… No. No fucking way. Brady, we’re not going to talk about the clothes and pretend nothing happened.” She doesn’t say the words angrily at all. It’s her normal, beautiful voice. It’s her normal beautiful tone. “There are… there are four dead men out there.”

---