My beast stretched inside my body, I'd had the sensation before, but I'd never been able to feel it as if my body were somehow hollow and this long shape stretched the length of me. It made me shiver, and it was hard to breathe for a moment, as if something truly was inside me and had reached up high enough to compromise my lungs. The pressure lasted for a moment, then it was gone, but I hadn't liked the sensation of it.

"You smell of blood," Nathaniel said, and there was an edge of growl to his voice.

"It's your blood," I whispered, and my heart was already beating faster.

"But it's in your mouth," he growled, just above my lips. His mouth was suddenly on mine, his tongue pushing between my lips. He kissed me, hard and long and deep, pushing his tongue so far into my mouth that it was almost like deep-throating. But his tongue was neither as long or wide as he was. But this had teeth that almost cut at my lips, a bruising force, that no amount of oral sex could equal. His tongue licked along the roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks. He was licking the taste of his own blood from my mouth.

The leopard screamed through my brain, he's eating us! I knew better, but something moved inside me, in places that nothing was supposed to move. I felt it, not like some liquid amorphous shape, but as if something very solid and very real was sitting in the center of my body and moving around. It stirred, and this time I felt something like a hand stretch upward, and something else stretch down. It hurt, and I was suddenly choking on Nathaniel's kiss.

He drew back, and the smile on his face was fierce and joyous, a savage beauty, as if the thoughts behind his face weren't very human anymore. "You taste good," he said, and his voice was painfully low. It didn't sound like Nathaniel's voice at all.

The leopard didn't react to that growl, it was gone from my head. But that thing in the center of my body stretched, stretched legs and arms inside my body. I could feel it touching things that should never have been touched. I screamed and stared up into his eyes and wondered if there was enough of Nathaniel in there to help me.

"Anita, what's wrong?" With leopard eyes and a voice of a stranger, but his face was all Nathaniel, all concern and worry.

"It hurts."

"What? Did I hurt you?"

I shook my head, and claws tickled along my ribs, and made me struggle underneath his body. "Help me!"

He rolled off of me and yelled, "Jason!" He had to yell twice, before Jason came out, dripping from the shower, a towel in his hand. He looked at us, and the smile was gone instantly.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know," Nathaniel said, still in that low voice, "she says something hurts."

The thing stretched again, stretched and stretched and my body stretched with it, as if it fit inside my arms and legs. It didn't hurt, exactly. It was as if my body were a glove and it was seeing how much room it had.

"Did you feel that?" Jason asked. His body had broken out in goosebumps.

Nathaniel nodded. "It's her beast."

Jason knelt by the end of the bed. "Yeah, but it's never felt like this before."

My beast stretched to the limits of my body, then found that there was nowhere else to go. I'd gotten a tiny piece of Richard's beast years ago, and somehow Belle's line had given me an animal to call—the leopards. Through that I was Nimir-Ra to Micah's Nimir-Raj. Nathaniel had been my pomme de sang , but now he was my animal to call, as Richard was to Jean-Claude. Now that part of me that was beast, cat, stretched inside my human body. I'd felt it as power before, more metaphor than physical, but this was very, very physical. I could feel it. Feel it struggling inside me, looking for a way out. It was as if I was a lycanthrope, except I lacked that last bit of the puzzle, that one last bit that would allow the beast to slip out of my skin and be real.

It shrank back into that small center of my body, where it stayed most of the time. But now it was like one of those leopards at the zoo in a small metal cage. It paced, paced, paced, and finally rushed the bars, slashing and clawing. But these bars were my body, and I screamed. I reached out, trying to grab something, anything that would help me. How do you fight something that's inside your body? How do you destroy something that is in the very meat of you?

Jason grabbed my hand, and I was suddenly breathing in the sweet musk of wolf. But it was as if touching Jason's hand acted like a conduit, and suddenly I could see Richard. He was in the bright sunlight of his kitchen, cooking something in a pan. He wore nothing but jeans, with a dish towel stuck into the waistband of his pants. His back was covered in claw marks, or really serious nail marks. It looked more like the result of good sex than an attack. His head came up, and he sniffed the air, and only then did he turn and stare behind him, as if he could see me. He said, "Anita, is that you?"

"Help me."

"What's wrong now?"

I squeezed Jason's hand, and it was like that extra bit of contact took me closer to Richard. It was like I hovered just in front of him. He reached out, and his hand brushed through me.

My beast reacted to it, screaming and clawing, going wild. It didn't want the wolf inside us, there wasn't room for it. There certainly wasn't room for both.

Richard drew his hand back, and said, "Anita, Anita can you hear me?"

I screamed his name, because screaming was all I could do. It felt like the leopard was cutting me up, trying to dig its way out, and it couldn't get out.

"Give your beast to someone else, Anita. Someone whose body can let it out."

I didn't understand what he meant. I started to tell him so, but he seemed to feel my puzzlement. Because he shared a memory with me. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; a memory with complete sensory surround sound is worth so much more. Saves so much time, shares the pain faster.

We were in the center ring of the Circus of the Damned. I reached out to Richard's beast, his rage, because if we couldn't control it, the council would kill him. I reached out to that rage. That power that he called his beast came at my touch. I smelled like home to it, somehow, and it poured into me, over me, through me, like a blinding storm of heat and power. It was similar to the times I'd raised power with Richard and Jean-Claude, but this time there was no spell to use the power on. Nowhere for the beast to run. It tried to crawl out of my skin, tried to expand inside my body, but there was no beast to call. I was empty for it, and it raged inside me. I felt it growing until I thought I would burst apart in bloody fragments. The pressure built and built and had nowhere to go.

Richard had crawled to me on hands and knees, bleeding. He'd laid his lips against mine in a trembling kiss. A sound came from low in his throat, and he was suddenly pressing his mouth against mine, until it either bruised or I opened my mouth to him. I opened, and his tongue plunged inside me, his lips feeding on mine. The cut inside his mouth filled my mouth with the taste of him, salty, sweet. I held his face in my hands, my mouth searching his, and it wasn't enough.

We moved to our knees, mouths still pressed together. My hands slid over his chest, his back, and something deep inside me clicked and relaxed. His power tried to spill outward, but I held it back... Richard's hands slid up my legs, finding the lace top of the black panties. His fingers traced my naked spine, and I was undone.

The power spilled upward, outward, filling us both. It flared over us in a rushing wave of heat and light, until my vision swam in pieces, and we both cried out with one voice. His beast slid inside of him. I felt it crawl out of me, pulled like a large, thick string, spilling inside of Richard, coiling into his body. I expected to feel the last bit of it spill between us, like draining the last drop of wine from a cup, but that drop remained.