and me scream. Micah reached out to the other leopards in the city and fed that power into us. There was a moment where I could draw a breath, but it was as if every beast inside me were trying to come to the surface at once. Padma was muttering in French under his breath. I couldn’t understand the words, but my beasts could and they clawed and fought inside me like a crowd with one narrow door and a fire behind them, except that the door they fought at was the inside of my body. I screamed, and then Micah was there, and Richard’s wolf, and they chased back two of the beasts, soothed and calmed them with what we’d learned from the weretigers. They should have been able to calm them all regardless of beastie form, or that was what we’d discovered was possible, but it was as if the tigress and lioness inside me spoke a different language that none of us could speak. Padma spoke it.
I reached out for tiger and found Crispin curled in bed with Gina and her boyfriend. I felt him look up, and felt Domino farther away with Nicky, and knew that Domino was already hurrying this way with the werelion.
The only good thing was that I was the only one writhing in pain. Padma’s attack was narrowly focused on me. His voice came through the pain. “I control all the beasts you carry, Anita; I am the perfect weapon against you.”
There were no claw marks on the outside of my skin; this was different power, and it was my skin that pushed out as if things were fighting to get out through my body. I watched a claw stretch up against my skin like some horrible baby caught inside me. It felt like the claws were ripping up things that no hand should have ever been able to touch with my skin still intact, and I screamed. The pain had to come out somehow, and my body couldn’t free the beasts clawing inside me.
Crispin was suddenly above me, pale blue tiger eyes wide. He’d been born with the eyes of his beast. His short, curly white hair stayed the color of his tiger form as his eyes never changed. I hadn’t heard or felt him come into the room; the pain was too much, it was eating the world. He held my face between his big hands and forced me to look at him. He was my white tiger to call, and he’d been trained since puberty to help the women of the white tiger clan not to shapeshift while they were pregnant.
He soothed the beasts, all of them, and I was left breathing too hard, lying on the bed staring into the calm of his pale blue eyes. He smiled down at me. “Better,” he said.
I swallowed and realized my throat was raw from screaming. “Better,” I whispered.
The image of Belle and Padma blurred, as if I were staring at it through a pane of frosted glass. The big bad vampires were growing dim again. Belle’s voice came. “Together, Padma.”
And the lioness inside me was suddenly flinging herself against my body as if she were trying to use her shoulder to smash through a door, but the door was me. The impact made my body rise on the bed as if I’d honestly been smashed into. Hands were everywhere holding me down, trying to soothe, but there was no lion, and with both Padma and Belle’s energy I needed a match to their power.
I heard Nicky’s voice before I saw him. “Anita, I’m here, I’m here!” He was stripping out of his clothes as he came, handing his guns to Domino, who was right behind him. Crispin rolled off me so Nicky could press his naked upper body against mine. His blond hair was cut longer on top so that a long fall of it hid most of the right side of his face like some anime character’s haircut. It was only as he lay above me so the hair fell forward that I could see the scars where his eye had once been. It was just a slick rush of scars. His one brown eye stared down at me.
“Give me your beast, Anita,” he said. He kissed me as if he’d crawl inside my mouth, and I kissed him back and stopped trying to control my lioness. I released my control and let all that heat, all that power,