“What kind of issues?” Benito asked.

“Do not shoot him, Benito,” Rafael said.

“The room is too small, and you are too close, my king.”

“Anita, call your leopard, remind him who he is,” Bram said, and he knelt, very slowly, down beside us as the tiger turned and snarled at him.

“I’m sorry,” Micah said. “I don’t like how many people are in the room, or the guns.”

Bram kept his hands up, gun pointed skyward, but he was less than three feet from us; he might not get the gun down, pointed, and fired this close before the weretiger was on him. He wasn’t just risking his life; he was offering it.

I wanted to say, Bram, don’t, but my own tiger chose that moment to start running up that long corridor inside me. She was coming to take care of us, to give us claws and fangs to fight back. The spatter pattern on the floor was growing more decorative, and the trickles down my arm had finally met the spatter so it was beginning to pool. I was hurt, bleeding. It made it hard to argue with the tiger as she raced to help.

“My black tiger is coming, Micah.”

The weretiger snuffled my neck again, but it wasn’t a growl he breathed out against my spine this time. It was almost a . . . purr. “She smells good to this body.”

“She won’t be good if you bring her; she’s pissed that we’re hurt.”

He bent over me, and it was as if he hadn’t realized what he’d done until that moment. “Oh, Anita, I’m so sorry, I’ve never hurt you like this before.”

“You might dismount before her tiger forces the issue, my friend,” Rafael said.

“Please, Micah, she’s close, and she’s not listening to me.”

He started to pull out of me, moving his hips back, but his body still mostly inside me. I saw my tiger leap like a piece of darkness made furred and muscled, snarling, and she crashed into me. It was like getting hit by a freight train, except my body was the tracks and the train and the prison she was trying to break. The impact drove me upward, shoving me into the weretiger on top of me, sending us both careening across the room and into the wall. His body took the impact or I’d have broken something.

My human body was stunned, breathless, smashed against the furred body behind me, but the tigress could move. She sprang to her feet, but something about my being stunned let her stand in my human body, so that we were suddenly in the hallway facing back toward the doorway, snarling, crouched on the balls of my feet and fingertips, as if I couldn’t remember if I was four- or two-legged.

The weretiger that was Micah spilled through the doorway on all fours, the massive humanoid upper body hunched as it looked at me with eyes like fire. I screamed at it, and it was a tiger’s scream that felt like it tore my throat just to make the noise, but it was as if the tigress had figured out how to drive and I couldn’t get back behind the wheel. All I could do was watch as she launched us at the black figure in the doorway.

Bram was there to block my arm, to stand between me and my prey. I tried to slash his face, but the claws I could “see” in my head passed through him as if they weren’t there. I tried to throw a left hook, but my shoulder wasn’t working right, and Bram just pushed my arm down and moved into me, forcing me back not with blows, but just his size. He was taller than me and he shouldn’t have been. My tiger was bigger than that; it was . . . wrong.

My tiger snarled and it came out of my mouth, but it hurt as if my throat couldn’t, or shouldn’t, make the sound. I dropped to my knees and could see Micah past Bram’s legs. He was still in tiger form, but he reached out for me with a clawed hand still stained with my blood. “I’m sorry.”

He collapsed slowly to the floor, hand still reaching for me. I started to crawl toward him, but Bram knelt down and stopped me. “I don’t know if he’s himself yet.”

I understood the words, and my inner tiger agreed he was too dangerous to approach, but me, myself, I wanted to touch him. The black tigerman looked at me, and then from one blink to another his eyes changed from orange and yellow to Micah’s chartreuse leopard eyes. He slid to his side and looked at me as the black fur began to slide away and his human body melted upward through the black-on-black stripes.

I went to him when he was back to being my Micah, and no one stopped me as I knelt by him. He put his hand in mine and looked up at me. “I love you, Anita.”

“I love you more,” I said.

“I love you most,” he said. His eyes started closing, eyelids fluttering as he fought it. His eyes closed; his hand went limp in mine as he passed out.

I kissed his cheek and whispered, “I love you mostest.”

49

THEY PUT ME in the room next door to Rafael while they looked at my shoulder. Adding insult to injury, Rafael wasn’t healed. Once the endorphins from the sex, the magic, and then the emergency with Micah had passed, his back had started to hurt again.

Dr. Lillian looked at my shoulder, shaking her head. “I spend far too much time patching you up, Anita.”

“Some of the other guards get hurt more than I do.”

She frowned at me. “They’re guards, you are not. It’s their job to risk injury, not yours.”

“Patch me up, doc, I need to meet the FBI.”

“You need to rest and heal,” she said.

“No time, gotta catch the bad guys.”

She gave me a flat look out of her pale eyes. “The tough-guy act is getting old, Anita.”