We found her pressed against the far wall. She wasn’t very tall, dainty like me, like Meng Die, with the same straight, shining black hair, except hers was long, sweeping past her waist to caress the swell of her ass. She was even wearing one of those short Oriental-style dresses, in bright royal blue. Her eyes looked brown and human from here, but the power knew better, the black tiger knew better. I told the power and the tiger about contact lenses, and we wanted to see her closer. We wanted to see her eyes.

I tried to sweep through her the way I had Domino and Cynric, but she stayed by the wall. I—we—concentrated on her, and still we could not make her come to us. I had Victor put me down, and I walked through a forest of hands and bodies, as I left the other tigers. I walked toward her. The other tigers had already parted like water when a fast boat slices it open, leaving the woman alone against the wall.

Her lips were painted as red as mine had started the night, though I’d left most of mine on Victor’s mouth. Her lips were parted, her breathing faster, her heartbeat speeding, just from refusing the call of all that power. But the fact that she had been able to stand against us said more than anything else, that she was more powerful than any tiger I’d tried yet.

I walked toward her, the black tiger’s energy riding on the strength of the white, and blue, so that each color grew and fed off the power of the others. The black tiger was like a dark image blurring and growing more solid around me, as if I, Anita, were somehow already inside it. My human hand reached out, encased in a huge, black, phantom paw.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

“You’re a black tiger,” I said in a voice that was almost an echo, as if my words were bouncing off the shape I could see around me.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You’ve been hiding in plain sight, pretending to be a survivor of an attack,” I said.

“Yes.”

I held my hand out to her. “Take my hand.”

Her hands came out from behind her body where she’d been leaning on them, as if she’d needed the weight of her own body to remind her hands not to touch me. “I want to.”

“Then do it. Touch us.” I stretched my hand out toward her, with that shadow of black around it that I could see behind my eyes. Could she see it?

Her fingertips touched ours, and I wrapped my fingers through hers, drew her hand into mine, and my black tiger flowed over her skin, down her arm, and found her beast. It was as if I’d tried to pick up a stray kitten and found out I had a full-grown tiger on my hands. Her power didn’t just pour into mine, it came like a tidal wave trying to drown me under the crushing burden of all that power.

I was on my knees, her hand still locked in mine. I’d thought Bibiana in Vegas was powerful, but she was nothing to this. I’d never dreamed of anything this powerful from a wereanimal. It felt more like vampire, and the moment I thought it, I knew. She belonged to someone. Someone old, and that someone was pushing power through her and into me.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “Cheat.”

“Can you not tame me as you did all the others?” she said, and her voice was derisive.

My black tiger reached out and found Domino. He came to me and my tiger, and we felt him come like some vibrating thing, so full of energy.

The woman looked past me and said, “Do not help her, brother.”

“You are not my sister,” he said, and he knelt behind me. The moment his hands touched my shoulders, bare skin to bare skin, it was like touching a live wire. The power jumped and crackled through me and into her. She cried out and fell to her knees in front of me, and I used our joined hands to spill her in against me.

Her face was inches from mine, my hand in the back of all that silky hair. Her face was a mixture of fear and need. She’d been so lonely without another black tiger, so lonely. Others had their color, but she had no one. She drew in the scent of us, because we both smelled like home. We were what she had been mourning for more than a thousand years. That was the true strength of the ardeur, that it could see into your mind, your heart, your soul, to the thing you wanted most, and if I could I would give it to you, and it would be exactly what you wanted most. How many people can resist their heart’s desire?

Domino’s arms came around me so that we both held her, and drew her into me for a kiss. She whispered, “Master, help me.” My lips touched hers before I realized she wasn’t talking to me.

Her vampire master shoved his power into me, not like I was a necromancer, or another vampire, but as if I were just another black tiger to call, because that was his beast. Not just tiger, but this tiger. My tiger snarled at him, a huge, black beast, and he laughed at us. That laughter tried to spill out of her mouth and down my throat, but I kissed her. I kissed her because she was soft and fragile in my arms. I kissed her, because Domino was solid at my back, his strong arms folding over us both, so that he gave me not just the strength of his black tiger, but of his white, and the vampire on the other side of this tug-of-war wasn’t ready for that. He faltered, a metaphysical stumble, and my two tigers spilled into her mouth, and down the long, shining curve of power that connected him to the woman in my arms.

I had a moment to see his face, upraised, startled. He was close by; he’d sent her to us like a Trojan horse. No, he hadn’t believed that any of us could be a danger to the tie that bound them. His skin was both dark and pale; he looked as if he’d begun life as someone very dark, but vampires grow pale with age, as if the centuries try to lick them down to bone and blood. His eyes weren’t brown, they were black, his hair short and tightly curled, his lips full and soft. I kissed the woman in my arms, but I thought of him as I did it, and he raised fingers to his own mouth as if he felt that distant kiss.

Her arms traced over me and Domino, her mouth feeding at mine, until small, eager noises fell from her lips and into mine. I pressed her to the floor; she wrapped her legs around my waist, while the kiss grew between us and her bright red lipstick smeared across our faces like blood. Her dress was pushed up around her ass, which was pale and bare. She proved she was wearing nothing under the dress as she ground herself against my body and the extra friction of my dress.

Normally that would have freaked me out, but Jean-Claude was there, and so were Richard, Nathaniel, Damian, and Micah, and they liked girls just fine. They helped calm me, and the black tiger inside me already saw her as beautiful.

I was in more control than I’d ever been of the ardeur. It was a weapon at last. Then two things happened that I hadn’t expected. He drove his power into her so hard and sharp that it tore her mouth from mine, and spasmed her body underneath mine as if he meant to kill her if he could not keep her, but she was his animal to call; the death of one might mean the death of both. Then the power hit my black beast, and I realized he wasn’t trying to kill her, he was trying to tame her, and me, but he’d used pain and sheer force to tame her once before, long ago. I offered something so much better than violence.

I ground my hips against hers, pinned her to the floor underneath me, thrust my beast into her not to harm, but to pleasure. Even then I think I would have kept control, but I wasn’t used to other women. I didn’t understand that some of them were easier to bring than I was. One moment I was riding the edge of sex, using it to push back the threat that the vampire had used on her for centuries, and the next her orgasm caught me. I was too tied to her, too far into that line of power that connected her to her master vampire. I couldn’t pull out in time, couldn’t separate us, so that I rode her pleasure and Domino’s weight was suddenly on top of me, as the pleasure spread. His weight pressed me harder against the most intimate part of her, and her body began to dance under my body again.