Nicky looked down, avoiding eye contact.

'What?' I asked.

'Lions don't have full spines like the other cats.' He looked up and he smiled, but his single eye gleamed. His eye had shifted to the rich yellow of his lion form. Something had stirred his own beast. He looked at me with his lion looking out of his eye at me and said, 'Male lions are more ribbed for her pleasure than spiked.'

I looked at that golden-yellow eye set in that handsome face and realized that the idea excited at least part of him, maybe all of him. I didn't know what to say to the eagerness I saw in his face, so I said nothing. We all stood there while the question was raised, and we all ignored it as hard as we could. In a few minutes I could stand on my own.

I fastened the heavy leather collar around the muscled velvet of Nathaniel's neck. It had a flat silver plate attached to the front of the collar. There was a word carved into the metal in swirling letters.

Ares said, 'Pussycat? Does that actually say Pussycat?'

'Yes,' I said, as I attached the heavy leather leash to the collar. It was my turn not to make eye contact.

'Pussycat?' he said, again.

'It's her nickname for him,' Nicky said.

'And Asher's for him, too,' I said.

'Asher mind-raped me like I was nothing and made me try to hurt you guys.' He shuddered. 'I've never had anyone roll me like that.'

'There aren't a lot of vampires that can call hyena.'

'Good,' he said. Then he looked down at the shiny silver plate and grinned. 'Pussycat. The cops are going to love it.'

I frowned at him. 'It was supposed to be private; at best he'd wear it at a fetish event. It wasn't supposed to be used around the police ever.' Nathaniel rubbed his cheek against my thigh, and I petted the thick fur. I pushed my fingers through the thickness and found his skin underneath fever-hot to touch. Most animals run hotter than human-normal 98.6100 degrees or higher usually. I hadn't touched that many wereanimals in full animal form. Were they all this much hotter?

I sent Nicky to bring Al around so we could finally get started hunting for Henry and Little Henry Crawford.

Ares stayed beside me, grinning ear to ear.

'What is so damned funny?'

'Does everyone have a cute nickname?'

'No,' I said.

'Aw,' he said, 'come on. Micah must have one, or maybe Sin?'

'Drop this topic,' I said.

Nicky came back with the police and it was time to introduce them to the big black pussycat at the end of my leash. I knew we'd won the day when some of them petted him, as if he were a big dog. But there were still more of them who wouldn't approach too close, let alone touch the huge leopard. Al had a jacket and a used rag from the Crawfords' truck so that Nathaniel could know what scent he was trying to follow. I saw Ranger Becker mouth the word Pussycat silently to herself as she read his collar. Her eyes flashed up to me, and she smiled, eyes shining so hard with suppressed humor that it showed in the odd light.

It was Travers who said, out loud, 'Pussycat?'

I rolled my eyes at him, and Nathaniel scented the wind and went very purposefully toward the trees. 'He's got the scent.' Nathaniel pulled against the leash hard enough that I started jogging to keep up. He moved faster, and so did I. He gave a small, eager noise, and we started running.

CHAPTER 24

We ran in the dark, unfamiliar trees, with me fighting to stay with him. He was faster in this form, as if the extra legs gave him more horsepower, or more all-terrain power. My human body struggled to bend and weave through the pines. Their needles were everywhere on the thin earth, the rocks, so that the world smelled like Christmas trees and the sharp, clean smell of leopard. Just as tattoos stayed on the skin under the fur, so the shampoo and soap he'd used earlier was still there intermingled with the scent of leopard. I could smell the leather of the leash handle as my hand warmed it. The pine needles had killed almost everything on the thin, rocky earth, so that as long as I ducked under the branches I could run full out, trusting that if I turned when he turned, followed his body like a guide through the trees, I'd be fine. I kept my free hand up to guard my face from the branches that he didn't have to worry about but my human form was tall enough to catch.

I felt Nicky to our left, but it wasn't the human part of me that felt him; my lioness knew he was there. It was the first hint I had that he was tied to me as my Bride, and as a lion; as a Bride he sensed me more than I sensed him, but the lion part of me was more aware of him. I glimpsed Nicky like a pale shadow under the trees. I tried to sense Ares, but I had nothing for him, no metaphysical tie and no connection to his hyena. I had to use my human eyes to look to our right and find him racing through the trees to keep up with us. I knew that Nicky could feel me, but Ares was as blind metaphysically to me as I was to him. We had to look for each other; maybe he could smell my scent more than I could his, but even without a stronger connection he was there, at our side, racing on long legs through the trees.

I heard yelling behind us, and I realized it was Al and all the other police. I hadn't thought about them until that moment. The world had narrowed down to the leopard at my side, the uneven ground, the swipe of pine branches against my upraised arm, Nicky like a satellite at our side and the noise and movement that was Ares.

I slowed, and Nathaniel pulled at the end of the leash. I had a sense of just how strong he might be and knew that if he didn't want me to walk him on the leash he would pull me off my feet and 'walk' me.

I said, 'Nathaniel, slow,' a firm command, the way I'd been taught years ago to talk to a big dog when you could tell by body language it was about to do something you'd regret. The very big cat slowed and looked back over its shoulder at me. There was some appeal on its his face. I couldn't read it, and I wanted to. I lowered my shields just a bit more and suddenly the night was alive with scent and sound and touch that hadn't been there before.

The smells were everywhere, like a thick, invisible blanket that moved and filled me with so ... there was something small and furry to our right. It was eatable and smelled like a mouse, but not. The pines were so strong that he'd filtered out the scent the way that a human would react to the constant hum of machinery; eventually you tune it out, but there were so many other things to smell: I would have said I could smell leaves, but there were sharp green smells, old brown smells, and it wasn't the leopard adding the color in my head, that was me, because my human mind had no words for the variety and difference in each scent. I added color, because I couldn't understand without adding some visual cue to all the smells. In human form I didn't have the part of the brain big enough to decipher things purely as smell. I was a primate and we're visual, so I tried to translate all that rich, wonderful information into colors that smell was sharp, hot, red; that one soft, peaceful, blue; spicy was brown and red; spruce was blue and green; pine was like an ocean of green that we kept having to swim free of to sense anything else. I knew the term nose-deaf for hunting dogs, but I'd never realized just how limited my world was to my beasts. How frustrated they must have been to be trapped inside this human body with its limited ability to scent the wind.

I'd always thought my beasts resented this less dangerous body no claws, no fangs, no way to climb and run the way they wanted to, but I stood there in the forest with Nathaniel's leopard trying to share everything he was sensing and my human brain could not translate it. I got glimpses of it, bits, pieces, and it was amazing, but I knew that it was like trying to explain color to the blind. How do you explain red without resorting to heat? Fire, but that's orange and yellow, even blue, and white-hot heat is a term for a reason. How do you explain red to someone who has never seen it? How did the beast explain scent to my nearly blind human nose?

It wasn't until the leopard rubbed its big head against my hand that I realized I was crying. I was crying because I couldn't understand and for the first time I understood, maybe, just how much I was missing.

Nicky wrapped one arm around me, leaving room for the leopard to rub and lean against my legs. I didn't so much pet him as let him roll the thick velvet of his fur underneath my hand. I wondered how much his leopard understood of why I was crying, but like any domestic cat he knew I was sad and that was enough. Nicky could feel my emotions and was compelled to try to make me feel better. It was part of the compulsion of being a Bride, though as I leaned into the muscled warmth of his chest underneath the leather jacket, I thought maybe we should start calling him my Groom. We'd come up with the term Bride because of Dracula and his Brides. He was the most famous vampire that had held the ability, but it didn't mean that the language couldn't change. I realized I was using the words and their meanings to help me pull away from that world of scent and alien sensations that Nathaniel's leopard had given me. I thought about slang, and how language evolves, because it was something that no animal would have given a shit about. It helped me stuff myself back into me, this body, this mind, these limited senses. I thought things as alien to the leopard and the lion inside me as the world of scent was to me, and it helped me ground and center into myself again.

Ares was standing a little to the side of us, looking out into the dark. 'God, they're loud.'

I raised my head from Nicky's chest and listened. The leopard leaned hard against my leg, and I expected to feel him go still under my head listening, too, but he didn't. He'd 'heard,' or scented the police coming closer minutes ago, while I was wrapped up in my tears, the touch of the two of them, and my human thoughts.

Nicky kissed my forehead. 'You got too much of Nathaniel's leopard in your human mind, didn't you?'

I looked up at him, brushing at the drying tears on my face. 'Yeah, how did you know?'

'I got some of the sensations you were trying to deal with, like bleed-over.' He rested his cheek on the top of my head and pressed me against his chest. The leopard licked my hand and made a small snuffing sound.

'I don't catch sensations from you like that.'

'You can't feel my emotions either, but I feel yours,' he said.

I frowned, thinking about it. 'Being my Bride, my Groom, seems really one-sided, as if I'm not supposed to give a damn about your feelings and needs, just you about mine.'

'Yes,' he said. His body snuggled closer around me and seemed to include the leopard at our feet in the motion, so that Nathaniel rubbed in between our legs, not trying to separate us, but making it a group cuddle. The energy was peaceful, comforting; the only person in the snuggle who thought we shouldn't be so happy about it all was me. It still bothered me that I had possessed Nicky so completely. As if he sensed it, and maybe he did, he said, 'I've never been happier than since you brought me to St Louis, Anita.'

I pulled my face back enough to see his face as I said, 'Doesn't it bother you that it's all vampire powers and mind tricks?'

'No,' he said, and he kissed me, softly, and whispered against my lips, 'I'm happy; why does it matter how it happened?'

I wanted to say, But it does matter, but I didn't. I let him kiss me again, let Nathaniel wind his leopard between our legs like a huge housecat. He started to purr and the sound of it vibrated up our bodies like some happy, contented motor wrapped in fur, muscle, and beauty, because he was beautiful in this form, too. I stood there tasting Nicky's mouth and feeling the pull and push of Nathaniel's body, and it just didn't seem that different from the three of us being in bed together when we were all human. Maybe I'd gotten too big a dose of leopard in my head.

'The police are almost here,' Ares said.