me the black tiger scented something else. Something that was hers, that was ours was here.
The power searched outward until it found the weretigers who had no clan, but were just survivors of attacks. The power eased through them like a warm wind, and they were tiger and they were tasty, but the black tiger was seeking something else, like calling to like.
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