Mafia Lion’s Plus Size Obsession (Company 417 Shifters, #43)

Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Vittorio

Mark is directly outside of security when I arrive. He grabs my bag from me and the first thing he says is, “Are you hydrated?”

“I’m good. How close?”

“To here? There’s no real risk yet. But it’s not right here we’re worried about. There are already a hundred homes gone.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. It’s bad. They even let Xander make a firebreak.”

If that’s the case, this fire is really bad. Xander is a dragon shifter. They aren’t even out to the world of humans yet except for certain members of various government agencies such as the Fire Authority. “Any effect?”

“Yeah, it helped the fire from spreading toward the coast but that’s it,” he says.

“And what’s our strategy here?”

“I didn’t get the full picture. I was sent for you but there’s a town fully cut off from the rest of the world right now, surrounded. There’s natural geography helping them right now but not for long. We’ve somehow got to get past the fire and get everyone out or clear a path for their escape.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Marcus is a lion shifter. In some ways in lion society, he’s like my father. He’s not mafia or anything like that but when two prides of lion shifters are at odds, Marcus’s family negotiates the process to keep the peace. There are dozens of kings in charge of dozens of prides. Marcus and his family keep them from killing each other.

It’s a specific role in lion society. It’s a lot like my father does with two different crews yelling at each other over territory. He deals with the situation before bullets fly. Marcus deals with situations before the shifting and the fighting starts. The prides would be constantly at war if not for his family and their legacy. It’s sort of how my father keeps all the smaller operators from constant war.

But ethical.

“Any accidentally created lakes around?” I ask.

“I wish,” he says.

The lake is a reference to an earlier fire. The whole town was in flames. It was a ghost town, a tourist attraction. There were still a few dozen people at risk. Company 417, because of the shifters involved, broke through a dam and flooded the valley to put out the fire. I’d give a whole lot to have a lake available now, I can tell you.

“We might lose someone,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He knows I’m not talking about civilians. If there’s one thing about shifters, it’s that we won’t stop even when we should. Because there is healing in the shift itself, we tend to think of ourselves as immortal. The key is not to die before you shift.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Am I really quoting Shakespeare right now? Is that Shakespeare?

“I hope it’s not you, Tor. It’s good to see you.”

It takes me a moment to realize he’s saying he hopes I’m not the firefighter we lose. “It’s good to see you, too, Marcus. We need to find a way for it to be nobody. Are they going to leave it to us?”

“That’s why they sent for you. For everyone. It’s entirely a Company 417 operation. We get anything we ask for but it’s on us.”

“We get to shift openly?”

“We get almost anything we ask for,” he corrects.

“Air support?”

“As long as it’s safe for the pilots to fly. They’ve been dropping water and supplies.”

“How long before the fire reaches the town?”

“We thought we had two days. They’ve been flying a helicopter into town and evacuating but only two passenger guys, something about the smoke, heat, and radar, I don’t know. They’ve been evacuating for two days straight and only about a hundred people.”

“How many are still in town?”

“Almost a thousand.”

“And we have two days to get them out or get the fire out?”

“We thought we did, Tor,” he says. “But the word is now that we’ve got something like eighteen hours.”

I let out a long sigh. “This really sucks,” I say.

I thought I’d be getting laid tonight. Instead, the lives of a thousand citizens are suddenly on my shoulder.