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broken with the Vampire Council. They were running from the Mother of All Darkness. The warm edge of pleasure began to fade under that revelation, and then came another.

One of the other tiger survivors was a golden tiger, and the animal to call of one of the other Harlequin. His master was kinder than hers. They’d been sent to see if Jean-Claude could really stand against the Darkness, and if I could really be Master of Tigers. She let me see his face in her mind. She betrayed him to me, because he and his master had done nothing to help her in all those long centuries. They’d respected the bond between servant and master, even knowing that her master had abused her for over a thousand years.

I whispered, “Bastards.”

“Yes,” she said.

I didn’t have to say a word; I thought, “Jean-Claude.” I just let him see what I knew. I felt his fear at the word Harlequin, but he directed Wicked and Truth and some of the wererats toward the huddled survivors. He knew which man they wanted, because she had given me the face, and I’d given it to him. I also knew her name. Yiyú. It meant Jade, Black Jade.

47

MINUTES LATER I was standing staring down at our other spy. His straight hair was cut short and was a pale, nondescript color. I was betting the hair was dyed. The eyes were a pale brown, almost lion amber. I remembered the eyes of the golden weretiger who had cut me up. Her eyes had been brown in human form, too. But in tiger form she’d had yellow and orange eyes like most tigers. Did only some goldens’ eyes change with their shift, like humans’? The eyes were uptilted and there was something exotic to the bone structure, but he couldn’t have passed for Chinese like Jade could.

I shook my head. “You’re not as old as she is.”

“How do you know?” he asked, and his voice, like the rest of him, seemed delicate. He was like most of the older weretigers, not very big. Taller than me, but then most men were.

“You feel younger,” I said.

He shifted in the metal bindings. They were a new type of cuff that was being tried by law enforcement for the preternaturally strong. We’d had some of our people try them and so far, they’d held. Wicked touched the weretiger’s shoulder with one hand; the other hand had a gun naked in it. The weretiger had given up, just let them capture him, but he was one of the Harlequin and that was supposed to mean something.

Truth had a short sword bare in his hand. The brothers were prepared. I felt pretty safe with them holding him. I knew his name was Topaz. I knew it matched the deep, golden yellow of his tiger color. Through Jade I knew a lot of things.

“He isn’t a gold tiger,” a woman’s voice said. I stepped back from the kneeling man, and turned so I could see who the voice belonged to. It was one of the two female red tigers. This one had red hair cut just above her shoulders, so that the end edges of the hair framed her face. Her hair was a red so dark it was almost a kind of black. Humans didn’t come with hair like that outside a dye bottle.

The woman’s skin and hair were darker than any of the other tigers, including my memories of Alex’s body, the first red tiger I’d met and accidently rolled. Whatever I did tonight, there’d be nothing accidental about it. Her eyebrows were black and blended with the dark red of her hair. Her eyes were the orange and yellow of fire, even at this distance. The white tigers could pass for human eyes if you didn’t know what you were looking at, but nothing would make those fire eyes human.

“He is not a gold tiger,” she repeated.

“Why not?” I asked.

She made a derisive sound, crossing her arms across the shining cloth of her own designer dress. I thought the dark red was an unfortunate choice for her coloring, but she hadn’t asked me. “Because gold is supposed to control us all. If there were a true gold tiger in this room, we would all be bound to his will. I feel nothing. He’s just a survivor with delusions.”

She had a point. I didn’t feel much of any energy from the kneeling weretiger. I believed Jade’s memories, but I’d seen no proof