He looked confused, and then he began to collapse as his knees buckled. I was set back on my feet as he sat down heavily on the benches in front of the lockers. His hands dropped to his lap, as if he had lost strength in his arms. His face was soft and confused. The heat of his wolf was gone, siphoned away with his anger. Oh, he was still a werewolf, but he wouldn’t be able to shapeshift until he recovered a little more of himself; until then it was almost like being human. Some of the guards I did trust had been working with me in private, discovering the limits of this new ability to feed on anger by touching someone. I could drain from a distance, too, but it wasn’t as powerful or as satisfying a feeding.

“What did . . . what did you . . . do to me?” he asked, and he couldn’t quite make his eyes focus on me, or much of anything.

I felt so much better. “I fed on your anger.”

“What . . . are you?”

“Wrong question, Ricky,” I said.

“What?” He was still fighting to focus his eyes, his hands limp at his sides.

“It’s not what am I. It’s who am I?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m Anita Blake.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said, softly, trying hard to look at me without his gaze wandering to the side.

“You’re lucky, I’ve gotten better at eating anger; when I first started doing it I took people’s memories, so it was like being rolled by a real vampire, but you remember everything that just happened, don’t you, puppy?”

“Don’t . . . call me that.” He managed to focus his eyes.

“Then prove to me that you’re more wolf than puppy. The next time I ask you what make and model a gun is, I’ll expect you to know. Don’t ever wave your junk in the face of any of the female guards again, unless you know, absolutely know, they want you to do it. Don’t ever call any of your fellow guards chickie, or whore, ever again. Just because a woman thinks you’re a horse’s ass doesn’t mean she’s a whore; it just means she sees through your bullshit.”

“I didn’t know who you were,” he said, but the anger was already back.

“Anger, back so soon, puppy, maybe I’ll just make you my bitch for feeding on rage.”

His eyes showed fear for a minute; that scared him.

“Oh, you don’t like that idea at all, do you?”

“No,” he said, and there was a little bit of snarl to the word.

“Then learn your guns, respect your fellow guards regardless of gender, and don’t be a sleazebag about the women you’re fucking.”

“Anything else . . . ma’am?”

“Yeah, be careful who you piss off here; not everyone is as nice as I am.”

That made his eyes widen and that flash of fear return. He buried it under the anger again, but it was in there, behind the bravado and the macho posturing.

I shut my locker, gathered up a towel, and headed into the showers. The men cleared the way for me with silence, or “Ma’am.” There were other men, nude or in towels, in the doorway to the showers; apparently we’d had more of an audience than I’d realized. That was okay; I didn’t have a problem with all the men now, nude or clothed. I’d been scary and that was what they’d remember, not that I was small and a woman. Peppy followed behind me, smiling. Girls rule; boys drool.

44

I HADN’T REALIZED just how much stuff had dried in my hair until I tried to get it out. I was still peeling it out of my curls when Peppy told me she’d wait for me. “If you’re done, go ahead, and tell Micah that I’m running late, trying to get cleaned up.”

“Having trouble getting it out of your hair?” she asked.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“You had so much in your hair that it looked straight and paler. Long hair is a pain in the ass when it’s got that much in it.”

“Micah’s in medical talking to Rafael.”

“He’s with our king?” she asked.

“Yeah, is that a problem?”

“No, no, just . . . I’ll get Micah the message.”

“Thanks,” and I went back to literally scraping with my fingernails down the length of my hair, before shampoo did me any good. It had just made the stuff sort of gelatinous before, so I’d scrape it off and try again. Maybe I’d start packing some of those plastic hair coverings like they wear to crime scenes. It had to be an improvement over this.

When my hair was finally clean I wrapped the oversized towel around me; since it was meant to cover men that were closer to seven feet tall and four times as broad as I was, I was covered from under my arms to my ankles and had enough material to wrap around me tight and secure. I gathered up all the hair stuff to put back where I kept it and stepped out. I knew just from the noise level that the shower was a lot emptier than it had been when I went into it. What I didn’t know was that Kane, Asher’s new lover and Dev’s nemesis, was in the showers near the door to the locker room.

Kane stood with his back to the room. He had serious tan lines low on his hips and in a narrow line across the tight roundness of his ass. The contrast between his skin tones let me know that he tanned darker than Micah did, or his base skin color was paler than Micah’s, so the contrast was greater.

“Are you staring at my ass?” he asked.

I looked up and saw he was looking over his shoulder at me. He was almost bald, but it wasn’t because he’d lost all his hair; it was because he cut it down to black fuzz. The way his hair looked shaved down that short made me almost certain that if he grew it out it would be curly. He had two deep areas on either side of his head where his hair had receeded from a sharp widow’s peak, which again raised the question of baldness, or fashion choice. The lack of hair bared the bone structure of his face and let you know he was handsome, bordering on pretty, especially for a six-footer.