“Did something happen at the club tonight?” I asked.

“Yes, and no, as in it went according to plan. My voice bespelled the audience, but it was the manner in which the women reacted to me when I walked among them as host. It just seemed . . . different.”

“So did you do that to Lita on purpose?” I asked, looking at the woman who was still motionless behind him.

“I meant to see what my touch and gaze could do without any added power, oui. She is a wereanimal, which should give her more immunity than a pure human, and she is an animal that I have no tie to, which should have helped her resist me, but as you see . . .” He used our clasped hands to motion at her.

“Have you actually mind-fucked her?” I asked.

“It would appear so.” He didn’t sound happy about it, though.

“If you’ve rolled her past a certain point, then you can’t undo it,” I said.

He sighed, which he didn’t always do, since he didn’t always breathe. “I will have to be most cautious at the clubs.”

“Cautious?” Kelly said. “You barely touched her, and look at her. I’ve seen you onstage, Jean-Claude; you touch the audience more than that.” She motioned at Lita with the hand that wasn’t holding a gun. She’d put the AR on her own shoulder like an awkward purse.

As if she’d heard her name, Lita took a long shuddering breath, and blinked. She looked confused, and then she saw Jean-Claude. “You son of a bitch, you fucking son of a bitch, you rolled me like some kind of human tourist!”

Jean-Claude smiled. “She remembers what I did, that’s good.”

Lita’s hands were in fists at her side. “You bastard, how is that good?”

“It means he didn’t mind-fuck you,” I said.

“The hell he didn’t!”

“If he had, you wouldn’t remember that he’d done anything to you. You’d have just woken up and remembered whatever happened just before he touched your face, or maybe not even remember that he’d even spoken to you.”

“So you mean the fact that Lita remembers what Jean-Claude did means he didn’t actually roll her?” Kelly asked.

“Oui.”

Lita shook her head. “No, no, I was helpless, fucking helpless, and you’re saying that wasn’t mind-fucking me?”

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

Lita began to curse, first in English and then in Spanish in a long nervous torrent. She turned to Kelly. “Get me out of here, away from them both.”

“I’ll take you to Claudia,” Kelly said, and led the other woman toward the long curtain. Dino raised it for them. “Ladies.”

Kelly turned just before going through the curtains. “I’d noticed that I’m having a harder time ignoring you, and you aren’t supposed to have the ability to call lions either. You might want to ask some of the other wereanimals and see if they’ve noticed it, too.”

“I will do that, and thank you for telling me.”

She nodded. “Now that I know you weren’t doing it on purpose, I figure you needed to know.”

Dino let the drapes fall back in place.

“You may go with them, Dino,” Jean-Claude said.

Dino glanced at me.

“Go on, Lita may need someone to comfort her,” I said.

He grinned at me. “You are the best wingman ever, Anita.” He let the drapes fall shut behind him, whistling softly under his breath.

“I feel I have missed much today,” Jean-Claude said.

“Dino and Lita have a fuck-buddy date after work tonight,” I said.

“Fuck buddy, I dislike the term,” Jean-Claude said.

“Me, too, but fuck date sounds worse,” I said.

Nicky chuckled.

We both looked at him. “What?” I asked.

“You two, the great incubus and succubus eating the souls of little vampires and wereanimals out through their dicks, and you both think the term fuck buddy is crass.”

We both frowned at him.

“Oh, come on, that’s funny.”

Jean-Claude started laughing first and eventually so did I. It was funny, but the fact that Jean-Claude’s powers of seduction were growing wasn’t. How was that going to work with the weretigers tonight? Hell, how would it work with the rest of us? That thought was so not funny I stopped laughing. Jean-Claude even sexier than before? We were all so screwed, maybe literally.

19

LEFT TO HIS own devices Jean-Claude would have made the small get-together with the weretigers something formal, with more jewelry; left to my own devices it probably would have been a backyard barbecue. So we compromised. We didn’t dress up, or add jewelry, unless we wanted to, and most of us were in our work clothes. Everyone at the mixer tonight had met everyone else, so we’d seen each other in work clothes, fancy clothes, and a lot of us had worked out in the gym together; some of us had even had sex together, so it wasn’t your typical matchmaking scenario. Most of the clan tigers and all the Harlequin vampires and their animals to call worked for us as guards, which meant most of the people in the room were armed and on our side. The only extra guards were the ones who routinely went with Jean-Claude, Micah, and me. Nathaniel was mingling with the tigers he didn’t know as well, with Nicky just following along behind him both as a guard and to help scout prospective housemates.

I wasn’t sure if that made things more awkward or less, because it was all so casual; maybe it just made it different. By the time we all settled around the living room on the two couches, the love seat, and the two big comfy chairs, I was regretting agreeing to it. I’d fought through some of my earlier panic when I realized that I was blaming Cynric for things that weren’t his fault. Now I just felt stupid for running from the truth into a supernatural dating game. I needed to call Marianne, my magical mentor and accidental therapist. She was a witch and the wise woman for her werewolf pack in Tennessee. She’d helped me learn control of a lot of my metaphysical abilities, and turned into my counselor in a lot of other areas. But I’d agreed to this, whatever this was, and now I felt like I had to at least pretend to go through with it. Besides, Nathaniel’s point about trying to add someone who could date people besides me in our poly group was logical. I just forgot for a moment that sex and romance aren’t about logic; they’re about feelings, and that is one of the least logical things of all.