shapeshifter energy. It was someone powerful enough that it raised the hair on my arms and crawled down my back, to see if it could find my own beasts. Those shadows inside me moved almost like a hand caressing deep within my body. God, he was powerful. Either he was a bad guy letting me know he was here, or he'd picked up my own beasts and thought I was a real shapeshifter. Some of their societies encouraged them to mark territory. One of the ways to do that without a fight was simply let the power out. It was a safe way of saying, Don't fuck with me. Or, it was a bad guy, and a threat. I wouldn't know until too late, so I treated it as bad guy: better paranoid than dead.
I smiled sweetly up at Ahsan and said, "I'm sorry, Ahsan, it's been great talking to you, but I've got to get back to work. I need the check."
"Can I have your number?"
"How about you give me your number, when you give me the check?"
He wasted more smiles on me, but hurried back through the busy restaurant to get the check and scribble his number on something. But at least the nice waiter wouldn't be standing at my table when the bad guy walked up. There was the remote possibility that it was a sort of preliminary flirting attempt. Some of the really powerful lycanthropes were always searching for a mate to match their power. It helped you control your animal group and keep other shapeshifters from trying to mess with you. But this felt like too much for flirting. The only reason to do the power that was making the air thick and hot and hard to breathe was to mark his metaphysical territory and tell me that he was bigger and badder than I was. Fine with me. I took my gun out from under my arm, as discreetly as I could, and put my hand under the table, gun and all.
I didn't try to draw my own version of shapeshifter power. One, I wasn't as powerful as what was coming toward me. I knew that just from that roil of power. Two, sometimes when I drew my power out it got out of hand; just because I didn't change shape didn't mean the beasts inside me didn't want out. They did. They'd damn near torn me apart from inside before I got a handle on the control. But it wasn't just the pain; there was always the chance that one day I'd shift for real, and a crowded restaurant wasn't the place for it. Also, if it was some misguided macho flirting attempt, then I would let him know he'd misread what I was, and maybe he'd go away.
There was so much power that I couldn't tell what direction he was moving in from. It was like being in the middle of some kind of heat storm. Fuck this; I had a power colder than this, and I'd used it before to keep my own beasts from rising, because lycanthropy is a thing of life, so hot-blooded it's almost more alive than the rest of us. I drew my necromancy, which was always with me. It was like opening a fist that I always had to keep so tightly closed. It was a colder power, closer to vampire than wereanimal. It swept outward through the tables; a few sensitives shivered, but it wouldn't hurt them. It wouldn't do anything to them, because nothing dead walked during the day aboveground, at least not in this town. I used my power like cold water on the heat of his power, because sex I knew; he tasted male. It worked even better than I'd hoped, like water on fire, so that the "blaze" he'd thrown out around him like a distraction went out, and only the core burn was still bright. I saw him walking through the tables toward me, and his body was edged with a wavering shine of power like some kind of ghostly heat. It was an interesting effect, as if my necromancy pushed his power back. I hadn't visualized it working quite like that, but I filed it away as useful.
I looked at him, and he looked back. We looked at each other across the few yards of space. The moment our eyes met, I knew this wasn't about romance, even shapeshifter romance. He was tall, a shade over six feet, unless