"I said, shut up." I wasn't in the mood for one of Billy's harangues, and I needed to think. Okay, one problem at a time. It wouldn't do me much good to figure out how to get my body back if its throat had been cut in the meantime, so deal with Jimmy now and freak out later.

"What do you want, Jimmy?"

"Be silent, Tomas! You have done enough damage tonight. I will deal with this." Louis-César seemed behind on the action, but I wasn't about to take the time to get him up to speed.

"Shut up," I told him, and the expression of incredulity that passed over his face would have been funny in other circumstances. "Come on, Jimmy, what do you want to let… her… go? You wanted a deal, remember?" It was surreal, standing there in someone else's body and arguing with a giant rat, but all I could see was my body with Billy Joe's frightened expression. I couldn't rely on him to get us out of this: he'd never even made it to thirty before he ended up drowned like an unwanted kitten.

"I want out of here alive; what you think?" Jimmy glanced, not at the vamps at my side, but at the ones lounging around the fight. Okay, maybe they weren't his buddies after all. "And cutie here is going with me. Tony will forget about our little problem if I bring him Cassie, and that's exactly what's gonna happen."

"No way." I was not going to stand there and let Jimmy cart me off. None of my fantasies about Tomas' body had included taking up permanent residence. "Try again."

"Okay, fine. How about I slit her throat? Like that any better? Tony'd prefer her alive, but I'm betting even a corpse would get me outta the doghouse."

"If you harm her, I swear it will take you days to die, and you will beg for death before it comes." Louis-César sounded utterly convincing, but killing Jimmy, however slowly, wasn't going to bring me back to life.

"He's got a point, Jimmy. The only thing keeping you alive right now is Cassie. If you kill her, we'll deal with you before Tony gets the chance."

"So, what? I let her go, then you kill me anyway? I don't think so."

"You should recall that there are many ways to die," Louis-César put in, and I could have kicked him.

"How many times do I have to tell you to shut the hell up?" I heard the edge of panic in my voice and forced myself to calm down. If I lost it now, no way were Pretty Boy and Rambo going to talk Us out of this. Especially since Pritkin seemed to have disappeared, off chasing wererats probably.

"We will talk when this is done," Louis-César said quietly. "I do not know what is wrong with you…"

"Exactly. You don't. You really, really don't."

I smiled at Jimmy, but it only seemed to unnerve him. I figured out why a second later when I nicked my lip on a fang. Tomas' were fully extended, but I didn't know how to retract them. Great, bargaining for my life with a lisp—exactly my luck. "Okay, how about this, Jimmy? You give us Cassie, and we give you a head start. Say, two hours? I'll even promise to distract the vamps over there long enough for you to make a run for it. They're Tony's boys, aren't they? They'll stand there and watch us kill you, or finish the job if you get past us. But we can keep them busy and off your back for a while. Now, that's fair, isn't it?"

Jimmy licked his muzzle with a long, pale tongue, and his little rat ears twitched. "You'd say anything to get her back, then kill me or let them do it. Besides, if I don't take her to Tony, I'm dead anyway."

I sneered. "Since when do weres take orders from vamps? I can't believe you toadied to him all these years!"

Jimmy squealed; I guess I hit a nerve. "There's a new order coming, vampire, and a lotta things are about to change. You may be taking orders from us soon!"

I backpedaled. I wanted to hit his pride, not goad him into doing something stupid. "Maybe, but it won't do you much good if you don't live to see it, right? You don't know me, so you won't take my word. But what about Cassie's? How about if she promises to guarantee our good behavior?" Jimmy looked torn, like he really wanted to believe me, and I knew why. The bullet wound in his arm didn't look too bad, but the injury to his torso was another thing. The long white strip of fur down his front had a widening red stain, and his breath sounded labored and a little bubbly. Ten to one I'd hit a lung, and even a shape-shifter was going to have trouble healing that.

"Come on, Jimmy. It's the best offer you're going to get."

"Tell your muscle to back off if you want a deal, or she dies." He spat on the ground at my feet to underline the threat, and there was blood in it. Jimmy was running out of time and, as soon as he figured that out, so was I. His whiskers twitched, and I realized with surprise that I could actually smell his fear. It was a tangible thing, to the point that I felt like I could roll it around on my tongue like wine.

It was musky with a sweet undertaste, although the latter might have been from his blood. Now that I had noticed the heightened senses of this new body, they were proving very distracting.

I suddenly understood that Louis-César was not angry; he was furious: a simmering, peppery scent radiated off him in waves, and I had the feeling that as much of it was directed at me—or rather at Tomas—as at Jimmy. It was mixed up with the myriad scents suddenly hammering me from all around: the faint, far-off whiff of the sewers running beneath the earth, diesel fumes and cigarette butts from the parking lot and the reek of sauerkraut from a day-old reuben in a Dumpster. My body, on the other hand, smelled good, really good, and at first I thought it was because it was familiar. Then I realized with a shock that it actually smelled like a favorite meal, hot and fresh and ready to eat. I had never thought of blood smelling sweet, like warm apple pie or steaming cider on a cold day, but now it did. I could almost taste the blood running under the warmth of that skin, and feel how rich it would be sliding down my throat. The idea that I smelled like food to Tomas staggered me to the point that I didn't see what happened in front of me until it was half over.

A suffocating cloud of bluish gas billowed around us, obscuring the parking lot and causing my eyes to burn. Several shots went off, and I heard Louis-César shout for Pritkin to stand down. I think he was afraid that the maniac, who had circled around to come at the fight from a new angle, was going to hit me instead of Jimmy. Since I shared that opinion, I didn't interfere. I was about to go wading into the blue, trying to find me before I ended up dead, when my body came crawling out of the noxious cloud, crying and gasping for breath. I didn't understand what was wrong with it—I wasn't having any trouble breathing—until I remembered that Tomas didn't have to breathe and that I hadn't been doing so the whole time I'd been inside him. That made me start gasping like a fish, while my body crawled up and grabbed me around the ankles. "Help!"

"Am I okay?" I dropped to my knees, almost bowling us both over in the process, and began scrambling around in my clothes. "Tell me you didn't let me get cut up!" I could barely speak past the pulse in my throat, but other than for the thin-edged wound on my abused neck and the dazed, watering eyes, I seemed intact. "Stay here," I told a very confused Billy Joe. "I'm going after Jimmy." My head nodded and a hand flapped at me. I paused to hike up Billy's blouse before anything tumbled out, then crawled into the fray.

Pritkin was yelling something, but although I could hear him, I could also hear everything else, and I do mean everything. Conversations in the locker room were as clear as if they weren't happening half a parking lot away. Music, the ring of slot machines and an argument between a waiter and one of the chefs in the kitchen were all clear as a bell. The heartbeats of the few surviving weres, some of which I could hear trying to crawl away underneath the cars, the breathing of everyone around me and the sound of a small piece of paper being blown across the lot turned the quiet night into rush hour at Grand Central Station. Maybe vamps learned how to be selective and to differentiate between trivial stuff and more important things. I guess they have to or go insane. But I didn't know how, and although I could see Pritkin's grim face, I couldn't make out what he was angry about.