People look different out of their clothes, especially facedown on carpet. Short dark hair, curly, broad shoulders, darker complected, tall . . . It was the pile of ripped clothes on the other side of me with the pale trench coat on top that let me know it was Jesse the werelion. I had no memory of how he got out of his clothes. Did that mean we hadn’t had sex and he’d just collapsed here, or that I just wasn’t going to remember what I’d done?

Asher was lying near the fireplace on his side, wrapped around Meng Die, who lay on her back. Her shoulder-length black hair was spread around her like a fan, her body pale and perfect, and if they’d had sex together then all bets were off. It hadn’t been about who you were attracted to last night, apparently. There was someone else on the other side of the mound of clothes but I couldn’t see enough to know who it was, and since they weren’t touching me I stopped trying to look. I looked down my body and again nude I wouldn’t have been sure, but I thought Lisandro’s face was turned toward me. His long black hair had come undone from his ponytail and trailed across his shoulders, almost hiding scratch marks on his back. One of his legs was partially across mine, his groin still pressed against my hip. I’d had enough sex to be pretty sure he’d been doing me from behind and then collapsed beside me, and then the lights had gone out. That meant the scratch marks weren’t mine. A small blessing. He wasn’t one of the guards that willingly fed me. Something about a wife. Shit. Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I had to have sex with my boss because there was this metaphysical explosion and it was either fuck or kill each other. Yeah, that was a conversation disaster waiting to happen.

I debated on whether they’d wake if I tried to crawl out from between them. If they were vampires, I wouldn’t have worried, but wereanimals are like people; they just wake up.

“I do not believe they will wake, ma petite, if you wish to move.”

I turned my head, craning back over my shoulder. My neck hurt. I raised my hand to find a bite mark. Jean-Claude was sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs. He was nude, legs carefully crossed, his long black curls disarrayed on one side as if there were something in it that . . . I just stopped that thought in its tracks. I didn’t want to think about it, any of it.

I explored the wound and knew it was a vampire bite. As I started to crawl out from between Jesse and Lisandro, there were other sharp little pains in different places. Some of them weren’t in typical places for a vampire to take blood. What the fuck was that about?

There were bite marks over one nipple, and higher up the chest. I was on all fours, looking down the line of my body, debating whether my legs would hold me. There was dried blood between my thighs, but it didn’t have the feel to it of someone too large and too vigorous. It felt like I had multiple bites along both sides of my thighs. This many bites, I shouldn’t have woken up at all. That many bites should have bled me dry.

I had a moment of my skin running cold with fear, and then I suddenly felt a whole lot better about waking up nude, in the middle of what looked like a hell of an orgy. It was better than not waking up at all.

Jean-Claude was in front of me, his hands on my arms, helping me to my feet. I had a moment of looking into his face, unreadable, shut down, and then I wrapped my arms around him, put my head against his chest, and started to shake. He held me, kissed the top of my head, and murmured, “Ma petite, I am so sorry.”

“Not to complain,” I said in a voice that was a lot less solid than his, “but why didn’t I bleed to death from all the vampire feedings? I’ve got at least eight. That’s enough to drain me dry.”

He stroked my hair, and answered me, “I am not certain. I believe the ardeur saved you. There are multiple bites on most of the wereanimals, but none are dead. The ardeur is about life. I turned the Lover of Death’s urge to life. My last solid thought was that we would not feed on death; we fed on life, on love, and I would not have my people serve the dark. We would serve the light.”

I turned my head so I could look up into his face. “You really thought all that? I didn’t have time to think much of anything.”

He smiled at me. “It was in French, but that is the gist of what I tried to do with the power.”

I hugged him tighter. “Is it night again?”

“No.”

I frowned up at him. “You’re awake again. What time is it?”

“We all passed out from the ardeur, but I do not believe I died at dawn.”

“Sometimes you don’t die at dawn when you and I are touching, but we weren’t, were we?”

“Non, but there was a great deal of power to feed on, ma petite.”

I was almost afraid to look around, but I couldn’t be a coward. I couldn’t tolerate that, so . . . I turned in his arms and looked farther into the room. There were bodies everywhere. They lay so still that if Jean-Claude hadn’t told me no one was dead I’d have wanted to start checking pulses. Micah was on the other side of the room, as if he hadn’t moved far from where we’d all started with the werelions. There was a pile of bodies near him, like a prettier version of the plague engravings depicting wagonloads of bodies to dump. Micah lay partially on top of that pile. I thought at first that the body entwined with him, arms and legs, was one of the male guards, but realized that I had the only man with long, straight, dark hair by me. I looked at that muscular back, those shoulders, those arms, and suddenly could see that it was Claudia. Her head was on Micah’s chest, his arms and one leg around her, his head back against someone else’s back.

“Where’s Nathaniel?” I asked.

“In the hallway with Jason, J.J., and a few others.”

“Richard, Damian?”

Someone groaned, the bodies on the loveseat began to shift, and one tanned, muscular arm came out from all the paler bodies. Richard’s face, his hair wild around him, rose from the other bodies as if he were struggling to the surface of thick water. He looked bleary-eyed and confused for a second, and then I watched comprehension fill his face. I wondered if I’d looked as shocked.

He looked at the woman in his lap, and I realized it was the blond vampire, Gretchen. She was completely limp as he stood with her in his arms. His moving made the others slide into the spot he’d emptied on the loveseat. I recognized Byron, one of the vampire strippers at Guilty Pleasures. The woman who collapsed against Byron had bright red hair. It had to be Cardinal. Richard put Gretchen gently on the floor since there was no more room on the loveseat. His back was covered in scratch marks, some of them bloody. Were some of them mine?

He turned and there was dried blood coming down one side of his neck, and his thighs. He had a bite at the bend of his elbow, too. He, like me, should have been dead from blood loss.

He had more scratches on his arms, and even down the sides of his body. Someone, or someones, had liked nails. He had to pick his way between the bodies. I realized the big glass coffee table was missing. I glanced around Jean-Claude and found the remains of the table in the tangle of torn draperies.

“I do not think I will buy another glass table.” Jean-Claude said. “Metal, perhaps.”

Richard was almost to us; he just had to concentrate on where his feet went in the labyrinth of body parts. “I don’t remember anything after you turned the craving for death into the ardeur,” he said, still looking at the floor as he finished the last few careful steps.

“Me, either,” I said.

“Nor I,” Jean-Claude said.

Richard caught his foot on a leg that had been hidden under the pile of clothes. Jean-Claude and I both caught his arm, an automatic gesture. I got a sudden flash of memory: Jean-Claude and Richard kissing passionately. Richard ripping Jean-Claude’s black shirt away to show white skin through the tattered black, and then Richard’s part was gone. I was suddenly thrown deeper into the sensory memory of Jean-Claude behind me, inside me, and Noel in human form in front of me. I was going down on him, and the blond female lion was coming in to kiss him.