The more vampires I met, the better a master Jean-Claude seemed in comparison.

Padma made a gesture, and first Gideon touched his shoulder, still standing behind him, and then Thomas raised a slow hand. He said, “If I had a choice, I would not help him do this.”

“I believe that,” I said, and then there was no air for talking. There was nothing but power. Padma was the storm now, a hot wind blowing out of the edge of a painful hell to make Damian, Nathaniel, and me scream. Micah reached out to the other leopards in the city and fed that power into us. There was a moment where I could draw a breath, but it was as if every beast inside me were trying to come to the surface at once. Padma was muttering in French under his breath. I couldn’t understand the words, but my beasts could and they clawed and fought inside me like a crowd with one narrow door and a fire behind them, except that the door they fought at was the inside of my body. I screamed, and then Micah was there, and Richard’s wolf, and they chased back two of the beasts, soothed and calmed them with what we’d learned from the weretigers. They should have been able to calm them all regardless of beastie form, or that was what we’d discovered was possible, but it was as if the tigress and lioness inside me spoke a different language that none of us could speak. Padma spoke it.

I reached out for tiger and found Crispin curled in bed with Gina and her boyfriend. I felt him look up, and felt Domino farther away with Nicky, and knew that Domino was already hurrying this way with the werelion.

The only good thing was that I was the only one writhing in pain. Padma’s attack was narrowly focused on me. His voice came through the pain. “I control all the beasts you carry, Anita; I am the perfect weapon against you.”

There were no claw marks on the outside of my skin; this was different power, and it was my skin that pushed out as if things were fighting to get out through my body. I watched a claw stretch up against my skin like some horrible baby caught inside me. It felt like the claws were ripping up things that no hand should have ever been able to touch with my skin still intact, and I screamed. The pain had to come out somehow, and my body couldn’t free the beasts clawing inside me.

Crispin was suddenly above me, pale blue tiger eyes wide. He’d been born with the eyes of his beast. His short, curly white hair stayed the color of his tiger form as his eyes never changed. I hadn’t heard or felt him come into the room; the pain was too much, it was eating the world. He held my face between his big hands and forced me to look at him. He was my white tiger to call, and he’d been trained since puberty to help the women of the white tiger clan not to shapeshift while they were pregnant.

He soothed the beasts, all of them, and I was left breathing too hard, lying on the bed staring into the calm of his pale blue eyes. He smiled down at me. “Better,” he said.

I swallowed and realized my throat was raw from screaming. “Better,” I whispered.

The image of Belle and Padma blurred, as if I were staring at it through a pane of frosted glass. The big bad vampires were growing dim again. Belle’s voice came. “Together, Padma.”

And the lioness inside me was suddenly flinging herself against my body as if she were trying to use her shoulder to smash through a door, but the door was me. The impact made my body rise on the bed as if I’d honestly been smashed into. Hands were everywhere holding me down, trying to soothe, but there was no lion, and with both Padma and Belle’s energy I needed a match to their power.

I heard Nicky’s voice before I saw him. “Anita, I’m here, I’m here!” He was stripping out of his clothes as he came, handing his guns to Domino, who was right behind him. Crispin rolled off me so Nicky could press his naked upper body against mine. His blond hair was cut longer on top so that a long fall of it hid most of the right side of his face like some anime character’s haircut. It was only as he lay above me so the hair fell forward that I could see the scars where his eye had once been. It was just a slick rush of scars. His one brown eye stared down at me.

“Give me your beast, Anita,” he said. He kissed me as if he’d crawl inside my mouth, and I kissed him back and stopped trying to control my lioness. I released my control and let all that heat, all that power, go into Nicky. I’d learned how to be gentler when I brought their beasts, but there was no time for gentle, there was just Padma’s lion and mine thrusting upward, spilling into Nicky’s mouth, clawing out of my body and into his. There was no sense of Belle’s lioness. There was a moment when the pain ate the world in black-edged fog, and I could feel huge claws piercing my stomach and into Nicky’s like some macabre conjoined twin, and then Nicky’s body exploded, one second human, the next a lionman above me. That thick, warm liquid that always happened when they shifted to animal form was everywhere. I blinked it out of my eyelashes, but I was still too hurt to wipe it away.

Nathaniel’s hand cleaned the worst of it off my face, as Nicky’s strangely dry body collapsed on top of me in a spill of thick golden fur. The animal form rose out of all the mess and liquid, but the fur was never wet. His mane was coarser fur tickling along my face in a pale brown-and-gold ruff.

His voice came breathless with the pain of such a violent change, but he gasped it out. “See . . . you should . . . keep me beside . . . you always.” He managed to raise his head enough that I could see his face, a strange mixture of lion and human, but the eyes were a deep rich gold with an edge of orange around the pupil.

“I need my lion,” I said, and my own voice was breathy and pain-filled as if I’d run a very long way and it had all hurt.

“You need . . . me,” he said, and that was the worst thing about what I’d done to Nicky; he would have stayed glued to my side if I’d allowed it. He seemed to have almost no will of his own. That was why he was called my Bride, like those pitiful women in the Dracula movies, the Brides of Dracula. The movies showed them as baby vampires, and some vampires could do that to other vampires, but my ability went past species barriers. Theoretically, anyone I could attract could be made into a Bride. Nicky had been a sociopathic assassin, and now he did what I told him.

I said the only thing I could think to say. “Thank you, Nicky.”

He smiled, and it was his human smile caught in the half-man face. A shining smile, excited that he’d pleased me.

“I tasted the white tiger when he touched you,” Padma said, “so I will not try white, but there are other colors of tiger, Anita.”

“Gideon is a standard-issue weretiger,” I said, and my voice was steady. Good, I was tired of sounding afraid.

“True enough, but then I didn’t have a lion when I helped her call your lion, did I?”

I lay there on the ruined silk sheets with the clear, thick liquid over us like someone had smeared the bed with thin Karo syrup, and tried to think past the fading pain.

“She is my human servant,” Jean-Claude said. “It is against all our laws to try to steal her away from me. We are not allowed to break the link between vampire and servants, or animals to call.”

“Just as we are supposed to kill all baby necromancers,” Belle said, “because if we do not, they become something that can control us. You should have told us the moment she created a vampire servant, Jean-Claude. You should have told us when she gained the ability to call all manner of beasts.”

“Did you think you could hide her growing powers forever?” Padma asked.

“She is my human servant. You all agreed not to kill her just because she was a necromancer,” Jean-Claude said.

“She killed the Father of the Day, Jean-Claude,” Belle said. “Did you think we would not feel both his regaining his power and then his death?”