“No games, Anita. We heard what happened to your local Rex. We know that you need a new Rex, and you haven’t chosen a lion to call, which was one of your old Rex’s bones of contention.”

“You have spies in with us,” I said.

“We have spies everywhere, Anita; don’t feel special.”

“Oh, it’s not special I feel, trust me.”

“The Mother of All Darkness is trying to turn the council back into her puppets. We must stop her.”

“How? How do you fight something with no body of its own? How do you fight something that can jump from body to body?” I asked.

“By being powerful enough to cut her off from each body in turn, until she is nothing but spirit and spite. We believe she will fade then.”

“But you don’t know,” I said.

“If I said we were sure, you’d know I was lying.”

“How do we cut her off from their bodies?”

“The way you cut her off from Belle Morte.”

“No one in that room told you.”

“Belle told us, Anita. She has turned to us to hide her.”

I just stared at him.

“Why do you look surprised?”

“I’m not sure, but Jake, we used the powers of Belle Morte’s own line to free her. We don’t carry the power of anyone else.”

“Now who’s lying?”

“I’m not.”

“Anita, you carry the power of every line that’s attacked you. You collect vampire powers like butterflies. The Master of Beasts attacked you and now you can call all manner of wereanimals. The Dragon barely touched you from a distance and you can feed on anger. I heard you even did her nifty trick of using the vampire’s own aura against them to cut like glass.”

“Only once, and Jean-Claude was driving the metaphysical bus.”

“We want him to gain the powers, too, Anita. We need him to be powerful enough.”

“Enough for what?” I asked.

“To head the council in America.”

I shook my head. “Damn, word does travel fast. You must have spies in every major city.”

“Not every city, but the ones that are powerful enough to be helpful, yes.”

“So I choose from the boys. Who’s the girl tiger for?”

“You can choose anyone you want, but knowing your preferences the girl is more for Jean-Claude.”

“More for—what does that mean?”

“It means this works better if you like everyone in your circle of power. Your line of power is based on sex, lust, even love, so your liking everyone who sleeps over is a good thing. Maybe even a necessary thing for you.”

“So how does this work? I just go out there and pick the cutest one? It’s not like picking kittens from a litter, Jake.”

“If you could wrap your head around it, I think you and Jean-Claude taking them all back to your room and seeing which ones you like best would be the fastest and surest way.”

I just looked at him. “So we go from Hello, my name’s Anita and this is Jean-Claude to Let’s all go back to our room and fuck? Aren’t they related to each other, as in a little too closely related to screw each other?”

“We don’t want them to screw each other. We want them to screw you and Jean-Claude, and your other men.”

“You’re a little short on girls then,” I said.

“We can get more if they make it here alive.”

“So someone is killing the clanless weretigers because they suspect what you’ve done.”

“Someone, probably another Harlequin, has figured out that we saved the gold tigers, but they don’t know how weak the bloodline has gotten. So they’re just killing every weretiger they find.”

“I haven’t heard anything about it.”

“They’re only hitting the clanless. They know the bloodlines for the clans, and they know about Cynric. They aren’t worried about them. Please, Anita, take Nathaniel to bed with them, or Micah, whoever you need to feel better about this, but we need you to bond with a gold tiger, as soon as possible.”

“Why is that so important?”

“Because once you have all the colors under your control, you will gain an astronomical amount of power and so will the tigers.”

“Bibiana said that, too.”

“Once you have a gold tiger to call your own, the others will not be able to resist you.”

“Then why didn’t the gold tiger who tried to kill me and her master rule the tigers?”

“Because she was just gold.”

“I thought gold automatically gave you all the other colors.”

“No, if it’s a one-off, it’s just like all the other tigers.”

“How are you so sure that giving me a gold tiger will give me all the tigers then?”

“Because you already have a white and black.”

“I’m not sure whether they’re my tigers to call, or closer to what Nicky is,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter, you have power over them and the blue.”

“Cynric was sixteen and I was his first sex. Any sixteen-year-old boy would have bonded with me.”

Jake laughed. “I think you underestimate yourself, but it’s a good point. What I mean is that you call to all the colors you’ve met, including the red.

You were little queen enough to put out a countrywide call to all unmated males. You damn near caused a riot with our gold males. They were ready to get on a bus, or a plane, whatever it took, and come to you. We had a hell of time stopping them. Soledad’s mistress couldn’t call all the males, and neither could Soledad.”

I thought about it, then said, “We help you with the tigers, and you help us with the assassins.”

“Rafael’s rats are on it now. If your Ulfric didn’t insist on playing human, he’d have had guards with him.”

“He likes being a normal person, but I think he’ll be willing to have guards until this is fixed.”

“It may not be fixed by autumn, Anita.”

“Jake, if people keep trying to kill us for another two, three months solid, the problem will be fixed, because eventually one of us will be dead.”

“You’re really calm when you say that. Most people would be afraid.”

I shrugged. “I’ll be afraid when I have to be.”

“So, you and Jean-Claude and whoever else you wish to include will take the gold tigers?”

“If we’re fighting the council and the Mother of All Darkness, we need all the power we can get.”

“I remember you as arguing more the last time I was in town.”

I shrugged again. “Maybe even I get tired of arguing.”

“Or maybe circumstances have worn you down,” he said.

It was my turn to give a little smile. “That, too. If you were going to offer the tigers to Jean-Claude, too, why not include him in the talk?”

“He’s your master, Anita; if you wanted to include him you would. If you want to share information with him, you simply think it and let him hear your thoughts. This way he was able to talk to more of the American Masters of the City while I told you all this.”

“Labor division at its best,” I said. I stood up. He stood up. “Introduce me to your tigers, Jake.”

“They aren’t mine,” he said.

“You’ve known them since they were born. Don’t you feel anything for them?”

“I’ve watched them grow up; of course I do.”

“Then how can you just offer them to us like they’re not really people with their own free will?”

“They were raised for this moment, Anita.”

“You make them sound like farm animals.”

“I don’t mean to, but we didn’t keep them hidden and protected for thousands of years out of the goodness of our hearts, Anita. We did it because we needed them. We needed them so we could give them to you, and you could make them food.”

“My animals to call aren’t food,” I said.

“Pretty to think so, but food is just energy that you eat, and they are energy that feeds your and Jean-Claude’s power base.”

“You do think of them like livestock,” I said.

“We have married them, bred them, and watched over them like our special little flock of sheep for over a thousand years, Anita. When the new Master of Tigers emerged, there was no guarantee that he, or she, would be a kind master. We had to stay detached because when the moment came to give them to someone, we had to be willing to do that. If I loved them the way you love children, I might not have been able to do that. Do you understand that?”