"I will help you not be puzzled, necromancer. I came tonight to make you mine. To shatter your triumvirate and make you my human servant. I do not need to share blood to own your soul."

I was trying to breathe past my pulse again, and having trouble doing it.

"You won't touch her," Richard said, and his voice sounded gravelly, the beginnings of the change in the sound of his words.

"I think you are right, wolf. I think it would be a battle with you by her side. I am not ready for battle, not yet. But there are others who know what Jean-Claude has not done."

"Who?" I managed to ask.

"Do I need to say the word?" she asked.

I opened my mouth to say it, but Richard said, "It's against your laws to say it out loud. A killing offense, Jean-Claude said."

She laughed, and the darkness tightened around the bed like a giant's fist. You knew, could feel, that it could crush the bed and everyone on it, if it wanted to. "That is not the trick I have come to play, wolf, but fine: Harlequin. They know you are not safe. They know that I am close to waking. They fear the darkness."

"Everyone's afraid of you," I said. The wolf had begun to relax under my grip. You could only hold on to emergency mode for so long. Apparently, we were talking, not fighting. Fine by me.

"True, and I would have taken you tonight. I planned on it."

"You said that already," Richard said, his voice a little more human, but sullen.

"Then let me not repeat myself, wolf." Her anger was not hot, but cold, as if an icy wind danced across my bare skin. Richard shivered beside me. I didn't think I'd have to caution him to be nice. That flex of power explained it nicely. "By tomorrow they will be upon you, and I do not want them to have you."

"Have me, how?" I asked.

"I will allow Jean-Claude to have you, because you are already his. But no one else. I would prefer you were my human servant, but Jean-Claude is acceptable. No one else, necromancer. I will destroy you before I allow the Harlequin to make you their slave."

"Why do I matter to you?"

"I like the taste of you, necromancer," she said, "and no one else can have you. I am a jealous Goddess, and I do not share power."

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. I nodded as if that made sense to me.

"A parting gift, necromancer, wolf." The shadowed form vanished, but she wasn't gone. The darkness suddenly had weight and grew thicker, as if the night itself could become so thick it would eventually crawl down your throat and choke you. She'd done almost exactly that to me before. The scent of jasmine and rain was thick on my tongue.

The wolf growled and Richard echoed her. "Can you bite that which you cannot find?" Her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "My mistake was trying to be too human for you. I do not repeat mistakes."

The wolf crouched, but Marmee Noir was right, there was no body to bite here now. I had to find a way to visualize a target for my wolf. I struggled to believe that my wolf could bite the night itself.

Richard grabbed my shoulders, turned me to him. His eyes were still amber and inhuman. He kissed me. He drew back enough to say, "I can taste her power in your mouth."

I nodded.

He kissed me again, and this time he stayed with our mouths pressed together. He poured that warm, rising energy that was shapeshifter into me. He pushed it into me through our mouths, his hands, our bodies. I kept my grip on my wolf, but the rest of me I gave to Richard, and gradually I could taste pine, and leaf mold, rich and thick and foresty. I smelled the musk of wolf fur. I smelled pack. I smelled home, and the last taste of jasmine vanished under the taste of Richard's power, Richard's wolf, and finally, at the end, simply the taste of Richard. The sweet, thick taste of his kiss. The dream ended with a kiss.

Chapter Thirteen

I WOKE ON the floor of Jean-Claude's bedroom with Nathaniel staring down at me. I glanced to my right and found Richard on the floor with Micah beside him. There were guards in the room, and the smell of burning.

Richard's first words were, "You all right?"

I nodded.

His second words were, "What's burning?"

"The bed," Micah said.

"What?" I asked.

"The cross in its bag that you have underneath your pillow got hot enough that it set the pillow on fire," Micah said.

"Shit," I said.

Claudia appeared above me with a fire extinguisher in her hands. "What the hell happened, Anita?"

I stared up at her, and there was a lot of her to stare up at. She was one of the tallest people I'd ever met, and lifted weights in a serious fashion. Her black hair was in its usual tight ponytail, her face free of makeup, and still strikingly beautiful.

"That bitch queen vampire came again, didn't she?" Remus said.

I tried to sit up, but if Nathaniel hadn't caught me, I'd have fallen back to the floor. The last time I'd fought off the darkness, I'd been damn near killed by my own beasts trying to tear their way out of my human body. Apparently today I'd just be weak. I could live with that.

Remus was standing scowling at the foot of the bed. He was tall, muscled, and blond, but his face was a crisscross of scars, as if he'd been badly broken and put back together again. When he was angry enough, his face mottled, and you could see the pale lines against the flushed skin of his face. He almost never made eye contact with anyone. I think because he didn't want to see in others' faces what they thought of his own. But when he got upset enough he'd meet your eyes, then you could see how lovely the eyes were, all green and gray with long lashes. Tonight I got a good dose of the eyes.

I leaned into the warm curve of Nathaniel's body and said, "Yeah, it was the Mother of All Darkness."

"At least your beasts aren't trying to tear you apart this time," Claudia said.

"Yeah," I said, "at least."

Then I felt something stirring inside me, as if something big and furred had brushed the inside of my body. "Oh, shit," I whispered.

Nathaniel leaned in and sniffed just above my face. "I smell something. Cat, but it's not leopard." He closed his eyes and breathed in deep. "It's not lion."

I shook my head.

Richard said, "She said it was a parting gift."

I looked inside myself, in that place where the beasts waited. There was a gleam of eyes, then a face came out of the shadows. A face the color of night and flame: tiger.

"Oh, shit," I said louder, "tiger."

"Crap," Claudia said.

To my knowledge there was only one weretiger in the entire St. Louis area. Christine worked as an insurance agent and was miles away. She'd never get here in time for me to share my beast with her and keep it from tearing me apart. Either Marmee Noir had decided it was time for me to finally be a shapeshifter for real, and she'd chosen tiger, or she meant to kill me. If she couldn't have me, no one could. Possessive bitch.

But I was better at controlling the beast than I had been the last time she tried this. I called the other animals. We could play metaphysical tag for a while, at least. The black panther looked frail compared to the great striped beast. The wolf growled and flared its ruff of fur. The tiger stared at them, waiting. The lioness came from the darkness last, almost the same size as the tiger. They were animals that should never have met in the wild, never have tried their great strengths against one another. But the inside of my body was a lot weirder than any zoo. The beasts stared at the newcomer, and we waited. By calling them all at once, I kept myself from trying to turn into any single one of them. But eventually my body would choose, and when that happened there had to be a weretiger in the room.