“I don’t know,” he said, as if thinking were hard. He rubbed his face against my hand again. “As long as you touch me, I don’t think I care what else happens.”

I squeezed Micah’s hand. He reached out and touched the other side of Mephistopheles’ face. Our leopards rose and poured down our hands. Normally they would have slid into and out of each other as if we could be rubbed inside and out by warm, muscled fur, but our beasts poured down our hands and into Mephistopheles. It shouldn’t have worked. He was tiger, and Micah and I as Nimir-Raj and Nimir-Ra were so not, but the muscled fur flowed into him and through him so that it was like a metaphysical ribbon flowing from us to him and tying in a soft, eager, silken knot inside him, around the golden tiger that looked up at us like a golden haze around his face.

“They’re not going to make it to the bedroom,” Claudia said, and she was walking away from us. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this again, not this soon.”

I said, “It’s not the ardeur.”

“Not yet,” she said and kept on walking. The other guards spread around the room so that Jake wasn’t left alone, and Pride was a little closer to them.

There was a prickling rush of energy and the scent of pine and forest was thick on my tongue. Richard flowed from wolf to human, gentler and more instantaneously than I’d ever felt. He knelt on knees and one hand, nude and human, his hair spilling around his face. The look that had been in the wolf’s eyes made me dread seeing his human eyes when he raised his face to the light. There was a moment of anger and resentment in his face, and then I watched him struggle to control himself. He succeeded. The effort showed, but that didn’t make it any less good. He said, “I know that I was supposed to be your king, Anita.”

I don’t know what I would have said to that, but Richard looked away from us and to Jean-Claude and Envy. He went to the other man and left us to our own devices. I waited to be jealous, but I wasn’t. Part of it was that he’d used up that part of me that wasted that kind of emotion on him. The other part was that look in his eyes made me remember why we weren’t together, and why Micah was the one holding my hand.

Our beasts wove in and out of the three of us like some sinuous sea creature. It was as if someone had a fur glove and was caressing us all over and over, except it was warm and alive. I felt the weight building low in my body, and knew if we kept doing this it was going to work for me.

“If we’re doing more than this, we need to do it soon,” I said in a voice that was already breathy with anticipation.

“Do you need sex to make him your tiger to call?”

“I didn’t with Domino or Haven.”

Mephistopheles opened his eyes and said, “This is amazing, but God, please tell me I’m getting sex, too.”

We stared down into those lovely eyes, that handsome face, and I remembered the last wereanimal who had said something similar to me over and over again: our dead Rex.

“Sex, ma petite, no more holding back. They are ours, or they are not.”

“Ours,” said a growling voice, and I knew it was Richard. Just the sound of his voice made me glance at them. Jean-Claude was still holding her, but Richard on his knees was sliding a pale silken thong down her thighs. Richard liked giving oral sex. The thought of it tightened things low in my body so sudden and sharp that Micah had to steady me.

The energy that had been so warm, so alive, suddenly spiked and Mephistopheles cried out. His hands reached out, clutching at the front of my belt and Micah’s arm. His eyes were closed and I doubted he even knew what he’d grabbed. It was sexual because sex had caused him to reach out, but it was more about holding on so he didn’t fall.

Micah steadied the other man, grabbing wrist to wrist. To me he said, “What made you react like that?” But he glanced behind as he asked it, and he turned back to me with an “Oh.”

I glanced back too and found Richard kissing his way up her thighs while Jean-Claude peeled the party dress over her head to show that there was no bra to match the thong. She was just suddenly naked except for the silver spike heels. Jean-Claude grabbed a handful of her curls and laid his lips against the side of her neck. He’d wait for Richard to bring her, and then at that critical moment he’d bite her and because she wasn’t tied to him as I was, it would be like a double orgasm. The only vampire in St. Louis who could roll me like that was Asher.

The thought made me search the room for him. He had moved back to the far corner, as far away from us as he could get and not step off the carpet. His hair spilled around his face, leaving it half in shadow, the other half in stark light, so that his beauty was the beauty in the painting above the fireplace. The illusion that all the sadness to come hadn’t happened. He leaned against the wall, his hands behind him as if he didn’t trust what he might do with them. Nathaniel liked to watch, but Asher only enjoyed it if he knew he could play later.

Micah saw where I was looking. “He looks lost again,” he said.

Mephistopheles’ hand convulsed on my belt so hard it almost pulled me over on him. Our faces were close and it just seemed natural to bend over and kiss. His lips were soft and warm, and he tasted of honey. Had that changed? He hadn’t tasted this good a few minutes ago, had he?

He let go of Micah’s arm and his hands went to my belt buckle. He started sliding the leather through the metal, his face uncertain, his eyes looking up at me, waiting for me to say no.

There were sounds from behind us that let me know without looking that Richard was making progress with Envy. I wanted to be doing something of our own before he hit that golden moment. He was new, and I wasn’t good with new unless I raised the ardeur, but I was good with familiar.

I leaned over Mephistopheles and whispered against his lips, “I promise you sex. I promise you intercourse, but I don’t know your body yet. I want to do what they’re doing for foreplay.”

His eyes flicked behind me and he frowned. “We’re short a vampire,” he said.

“Not for long,” I said, and I called to Asher. There were more ways to gain power and solidarity than metaphysics and magic. Love mattered, in the end. A house without love would always fall, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in the end without love nothing could endure.

Asher pushed away from the wall with a smile on his face that lit my heart and made me smile back. Jean-Claude breathed through my mind, “Thank you, ma petite.” I had a moment of feeling his hands on the other woman. Her body began to buck in small precursors to the orgasm from Richard’s mouth between her legs. Was I jealous? Maybe a little, but I watched Asher walk toward us and the new tiger didn’t protest it; I pushed the jealousy away. It wasn’t who we were. There was enough love, enough sex, enough for everyone. When there’s enough, you don’t have to be jealous of anyone.