Stephen came down the hallway. He should have been at the apartment he shared with Vivian. No, wait, it was daylight out and since he worked nights he often spent the day here being snack food for vampires among other things. He wasn't on my food list. Stephen was cute enough but just not that kind of friend. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His curly blond hair was loose around his shoulders. He always looked younger in his street clothes. He took one look at my face and asked, "What's wrong?"

The phone went to voice mail. "s.h.i.t." I waited for the beep. "Richard, it's Anita. Come back to the Circus. We have a.s.sa.s.sins in town with a contract to kill you, me, and Jean-Claude. You aren't safe. Call me back, d.a.m.n it." I hung up.

"Text him," Graham said.

"What?" I asked.

"Text him. Some people check their texts a lot more than they do their voice mail."

I hadn't had the phone that long. I handed it to him. "I don't know how to text. Help me."

Normally, he'd have said something smart, but wisely he just started working the phone. "What do you want me to tell him?"

"a.s.sa.s.sins in town. You're in danger. Come back to the Circus."

"How do you spell a.s.sa.s.sins a.s.sa.s.sins?"

"Let me, faster if I type and spell," Stephen said, and took the phone. He typed in what I said. "Sent." He put that cornflower-blue gaze on me. "Now back up and tell me, why are there a.s.sa.s.sins in town and how do you know?"

I shook my head. "I don't have time to explain. I need to find Richard and get him back here."

"I'm supposed to be your replacement for Nathaniel's healing, but if you need me . . ."

I started to dismiss him. I didn't think of him as a fighter, but the first time I'd met him he had waded into a giant snake gone amok in the Circus of the d.a.m.ned. He'd risked his life to help kill it. Funny how I'd begun to think of him as someone who helped me do my hair and makeup for Jean-Claude's fancy events, but not as a fighter. He was about my size, as delicate in his own way as Vivian, but he was also a werewolf and that meant something.

"Thanks, Stephen, but I think staying with Nathaniel will be great. I need to find Richard and bring him back here; after that we'll have a meeting or something." I was already moving down the hallway. Nicky followed me. I almost told him to stay at the door, but truthfully I would eventually have to go outside the Circus, and of our guards he wasn't a bad choice. He might be creepily overattached to me, but his fighting skills were excellent and the only thing that kept his killing in check was my conscience. He didn't seem to have one of his own. I couldn't stay in here forever. I had a job. I'd taken last night off, but I had clients to see this afternoon. Of course, all it would take was one of the a.s.sa.s.sins signing up as a client and they'd get to be alone with me. Or would have; now I'd need guards with me. s.h.i.t.

A small screaming part of me was saying something in my head that I was trying really hard not to listen to. Richard is in danger. Richard is in danger. The only comfort about him not answering his phone was that if he was really hurt I'd know it, the same way I'd known that Nathaniel got shot in the shoulder. I'd feel it. Richard was okay. He was safe, for now. The only comfort about him not answering his phone was that if he was really hurt I'd know it, the same way I'd known that Nathaniel got shot in the shoulder. I'd feel it. Richard was okay. He was safe, for now.

Then I realized I was being slow. I hit the phone screen and got my contacts list back up. I'd call Jamil, or Shang-Da. They were his main bodyguards, his Skoll and Hati. One of the three would pick up their d.a.m.n phone.

Nicky was already on his own phone. I heard him talking to Bobby Lee about the a.s.sa.s.sins. He was right. I should have told our men first. I had to pull myself together and work this emergency. I'd fall apart later.

Jamil's number was first alphabetically, so I hit it. He picked up on the second ring. "Anita, what's up?"

"You need to bring Richard back to the Circus, now."

I heard his voice twice, like a weird echo, as he said, "That's going to be a problem."

I turned to find him coming down the hallway with Shang-Da by his side. "Why aren't you with your Ulfric?" I asked.

"He's on a late lunch date. We don't go on the dates."

I pushed the whole date thing away. I'd worry about it later, if at all. I told them what was happening. "Well, s.h.i.t," Jamil said.

"That about covers it," I said.

"If he's with the doc, he won't answer his phone," Jamil said. I wanted to say, Richard is dating a doctor? Richard is dating a doctor? but it didn't matter. It wasn't like we were monogamous. but it didn't matter. It wasn't like we were monogamous.

"Contact him mind-to-mind," Shang-Da said.

"I'll try. He's been keeping me out the last few months."

"Maybe, or maybe you both quit trying," he said.

I didn't try to argue. We'd decide who was right and wrong once I knew Richard was safe. I felt Jean-Claude coming toward me. He didn't try to shut me out. I pushed the thought away. I opened that link between Richard and me. Shang-Da was right; I'd stopped trying a while back. It was just easier that way.

I smelled trees, leaves, pine, forest. It was how I always found him by scent, as if wherever he was he smelled of the wolf pack's land. I felt him behind the wheel of his four-by-four. I saw him glance up, as if somehow I were hovering near the roof of his truck. We always looked up to see each other-the way we had for the council, come to think of it. That made me lose focus for a moment, and I had to fight to see him. I knew he was already close to his house, because of the trees by the road. I had a moment of seeing him looking up at me, and of seeing the road through his eyes.

He pushed me out a little, so that he was driving with only himself in his head. "Sorry," he said to the empty air, "but hard to drive that way."

"Sorry, but there's a contract killer out for you, me, and Jean-Claude."

"The council works fast."

"Maybe, but it doesn't matter who ordered it, Richard, just come back. We stay underground until we have a plan."

"I can't hide forever."

"Just for now, please, Richard. I've had enough emergencies for one day."

He started to do the turn to the last road. He caught a flash in the trees. I had a moment to feel him see it, and then the windshield cracked in front of him, and he was fighting the truck not to go into the ditch.

I screamed, "Gun!"

The second shot hit him, and I fell to my knees in the hallway. It didn't exactly hurt; in fact, my shoulder and half my chest felt numb. I couldn't catch my breath. It did hurt to breathe. Nicky was holding me. His face was frantic. "Anita!"

"Shot." I gasped it out, there was no air. They'd hit his lung, but his heart still beat, strong and thick in my head. I could see sunlight through the trees as the truck went over the side of the road, and there were trees, and we were falling, and there was no air.

CHAPTER 29

JEAN-CLAUDE'S FACE ABOVE me. "Ma pet.i.te, what have you done?" He looked into my eyes and he saw it, felt it, but he dragged me away from it. He shut the link down. He left Richard bleeding and alone.

I gasped air in with lungs that worked, and said, "No! They'll kill him. They'll drag him out of the truck and kill him." I dug my hands into his white shirt.

"If he dies, I can keep us from dying with him, but if I open the link between us all to feed him enough energy to heal in time, if it does not work, one or both of us will die with him."

"We can't let him die knowing we didn't even try. Let me feed the energy; you pull me back if it doesn't work."

I watched the struggle in his eyes.

"Jean-Claude," I said.

He nodded. "What energy will be enough to get him up and moving in time? Nathaniel is still hurt; you cannot give the energy of your own triumvirate. It could kill them both."

"He is our Ulfric and we are sworn to protect him with our lives," Shang-Da said, kneeling all that long, dangerous body down next to us. "If by my life, or my death, I can save him . . ."

"Do it," Jamil said, and he was kneeling closer to my face.

"There isn't time for s.e.x," I said.

"We saw what you did to Chimera. We felt the power you took from that feeding. Do it," he said.

There should have been time to look into his handsome face, admire the cornrowed hair and all that he offered, but the one thing we didn't have was time. I said, "I'm sorry."

"I know," he said.

I put my hands on his arms, bare skin to bare skin, and just as when I'd done it the one and only time to Chimera, there was no time to find the power, or worry over morals, it was a moment of do or die. To raise zombies I put energy into the dead; the more energy the better the zombie, the more completely the dead will rise. This power was almost a polar opposite to that. One second it was just Jamil's warm skin under my hands, and the next my necromancy spilled down my hands and onto that dark, muscled skin.

Jamil's brown eyes widened. His lips parted. He whispered, "G.o.d, it hurts." Then his smooth dark skin began to run with fine lines. I was taking back whatever it was that let me fill out a corpse so it was plump and smooth and rosy-cheeked. I took that from Jamil, and he stayed on his knees and let me do it. The first time I'd done it I'd thought it was watching decades catch up with the man, but watching Jamil's skin collapse around his bones, I realized it wasn't time I took from it, but literally life. I fed on the very essence of what made his body move and function. I fed on him, and the rush of power was as strong as and felt better than I remembered it. I think I'd been afraid to remember how good it felt. Afraid that if I remembered, I'd crave it.

The power poured down my skin and into my body. It spilled into Jean-Claude where his body touched mine, so that rush of life and energy, and everything Jamil was, filled us both. It was as if every fiber of my body filled with his essence, and I spilled that into Jean-Claude, until it felt as if our bodies should have glowed like stars with it. Jean-Claude opened that window inside me, inside us, and I was suddenly back in the truck with half my upper body not working, and one lung gone to a painful emptiness inside me. I could hear the men, at least two of them, crashing through the trees toward the truck. Jean-Claude helped me feed the power into Richard. His body convulsed on the seat of the truck, the energy almost too much for his wounded body to take in. He coughed blood, and so did I, spilling it around Jamil's withered skin. That spark that was Jamil's beast reacted to the scent of fresh blood and gave a surge of heat. I felt the balance of it. I could drain all of his life, or I could leave something behind to save later. It made me hesitate.

Richard opened the pa.s.senger door and fell out into the bushes. We had to get away from the truck before they got here. I felt him crawling through the underbrush, fighting to get farther away, but we could use both arms now. I realized I was afraid to take all I could from Jamil. I knew how to put it back, theoretically, but I'd never done it.

Jamil was suddenly gone, pulled away, and Shang-Da laid his hands against mine. I didn't have time to think it was brave of him, I just fed. I fed on him without hesitating. I fed on all that strength and warmth and life, and Richard was on his knees, and then on his feet and moving farther into the trees. If he could get far enough away he could shapeshift and heal the rest of the damage. He was willing to do that, but there would be moments during the shift where he would be helpless, and we couldn't afford that.

The power needed to go somewhere, and I found Nathaniel still in his bed, still cuddled with Stephen, and I poured the energy into him. Poured it in until his body ran with fur, and the last of the injury was washed away in a roll of muscle and skin and leopard. The power was so much, so much, as if the two of them together made the same kind of energy that I'd taken that first time. It had been enough to heal so many. I found the lions lying in their beds. Rosamond was very still, with Jesse curled beside her. The power filled her, making her body flow with fur until a great lion filled the bed and chased Jesse out of it. Kelly sat up in bed with Payne naked beside her, her arm in a cast, which meant it was badly broken. I spilled the energy into her and watched her body become the lioness I'd seen in my head, the huge paw cracking the now-useless cast.

I thought of Claudia and the power found her. I shoved the power into her, too, and her skin ran to black fur, and she cried out as the energy forced her broken body to heal almost too fast. I knew even as it felt good, it also hurt. I was losing the ability to be gentle with it. So much power, so much energy. Jean-Claude helped me reach out for Richard again. He was far into the woods now. Far enough he couldn't hear or smell them now. He took the energy we offered and his body shifted into a huge, s.h.a.ggy wolf. I'd always seen him in wolfman form, never this, and I felt him think that in this form he'd be less likely to be reported to the police as a stray werewolf. He'd be able to hunt in the woods and not frighten people. He didn't say any of it, he thought it, and I thought it, too.

One minute I was padding through the leaves on all fours, the world alive with smells that I'd forgotten, the next I was in Jean-Claude's arms. He held me close, rocking me. "Ma pet.i.te, ma pet.i.te." "Ma pet.i.te, ma pet.i.te." And just from the level of emotion in him I knew that what we'd done hadn't been without risk, that there had been a moment, or two, when he'd felt both of us going. And just from the level of emotion in him I knew that what we'd done hadn't been without risk, that there had been a moment, or two, when he'd felt both of us going.

I pushed at him, so that I could turn in his arms to see what I'd done to Jamil and Shang-Da. They looked like mummies, shriveled and dead, corpses desiccated in some dry desert, but they weren't dead. Jamil was making a high keening noise.

"G.o.d," Nicky said, "they aren't dead." He was pressed against the far wall, as if he weren't sure he wanted to be near me right that moment. Maybe there were things terrible enough that even my hold on him couldn't make him see it as all right. I found that oddly comforting.

"No," I said, "they're not dead." I crawled toward Jamil.

"Ma pet.i.te, you gained a great deal of power, but we cannot afford to lose more vitality, or you will kill one of us."

"There's power in raising the dead, Jean-Claude. You should know that by now." Obsidian b.u.t.terfly, the vampire that I'd learned this nasty, useful piece of information from, had thought she was a G.o.ddess, for real, and part of what made her think that was that she gained power from taking life and from giving it back. Jamil's eyes were dried and blind, but as I leaned over him, he screamed, high and buzzy, but louder. Maybe he smelled that it was me, and he was afraid of me now. I didn't blame him for being afraid, because I could have killed him with this second touch just as easily as helped him. Both would be energy. Both would feel good.

I prayed. I prayed that I could give this back and gain energy through it. I'd never actually reversed the process. I'd only seen it done. I touched his face, and it felt like dried leather; the strong bones of his face felt fragile like sticks, as if I could have broken his bones if I held his face too tight. I was as gentle as I knew how to be, as I called my necromancy. This was a type of that energy, and it hadn't occurred to me at the time, but Obsidian b.u.t.terfly was the first vampire I'd ever met who could work with this kind of energy.

There was a rush of warm wind as if early summer suddenly filled my skin and the man underneath my hands. It was like watching one of those films where flowers bloom, except this was his skin, his flesh, his very bones filling back out, blooming into the strong, muscled, handsome man I'd known. He came to himself, eyes wide, and screaming. When he could move, he pushed me away and scrambled on hands and feet backward, away, until he hit the wall, and then he screamed again. He held his hands out in front of him as if to ward me off.

I should have felt bad that he was that afraid of me, but the energy felt too good to feel bad. I laid my hands on Shang-Da's shriveled face, his shiny black hair reduced to straw. That warm wind raced over my skin and into him. The energy filled him, plumbed him, like water returning after a horrible drought. He gasped back to himself, coughing and staring up at me with his brown eyes wide and panic-filled. I'd never seen him panic over anything.

"Your eyes," he whispered, "they're black and full of stars."

They weren't my eyes. They were Obsidian b.u.t.terfly's eyes. All power comes with a price. I turned to Jean-Claude and found his eyes filled with a night sky that had spilled over South America when the conquistadors had conquered the New World. I felt Richard's wolf in the woods miles away, and I knew that his eyes weren't wolf amber, they were night-sky black.

Damian staggered around the corner, wiping the blood of a fresh feeding from his mouth. His eyes were filled with blackness and stars.

CHAPTER 30

SOME OF THE other shapeshifters took Jamil and Shang-Da to a back room to lie down. Jamil wouldn't look at me. Shang-Da did, but it wasn't a good look. It was more as if he were considering how he would kill me if he had to, and considering for the first time that he might not be able to. One of them dealt with his fear by being afraid, the other by estimating his chances. Either way, I'd damaged what relationship I had with the two werewolves. I could have pointed out that they'd volunteered, and that it did save Richard's life, but I wasn't comfortable enough with what I'd just done to be that logical.

I let them be led away like children lost in the mall when security finally finds them and takes them back to Mommy and Daddy.

The black-star vision did what it had last time: It helped me see things more clearly, as if everything were sharp-edged like it can be in an emergency. You see everything, and you notice things you might not have noticed otherwise-like I knew that Nicky had a knife tucked into his boot on the right side, because his jeans didn't lie quite right. It was a small knife; normally I wouldn't have noticed the slight rise along the seam of his pants.

I rose up to look at his face, and he wasn't afraid now. His face wasn't calm, though; it was considering. "What?" I asked him.

"The energy rush you shared felt amazing. Did it feel even better to you?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah, you do. It felt good the way killing something with teeth and claws feels good. It feels good to feed."

Jean-Claude stepped between us, took me by the shoulders, and made me look at him. "Ma pet.i.te, you have saved our Ulfric. You saved Richard's life. You have done no lasting harm to the other wolves."

I looked up at him, wondering if I'd see through some illusion with the new vision. He looked the same as he always did; amazing. "You really don't use any vampire wiles to make yourself this beautiful," I said.

He smiled. "I told you long ago, ma pet.i.te ma pet.i.te, that I do not try to appear to you as other than I am."

I nodded.

Damian came to stand beside us. The black eyes looked even more startling in his face, I think because he didn't have black hair to balance it. It was just pools of darkness in all that white skin and red hair.

"It was almost better than blood," he said, and his voice was distant. That was the real danger to some of these powers; it wasn't that it felt bad. It felt so good, good enough that if you weren't careful you might crave that power rush. If I craved it and gave in to it, I would be the monster. I didn't want to be the monster. I didn't want Jamil and Shang-Da to be afraid of me, not like that. But if the choice had been Richard dead or them afraid, I chose them afraid. Was that monstrous? No, not yet, but I was beginning to understand that the only difference between being the monster and being powerful was choosing not to be the monster. Not today. But there would always be tomorrow, and another chance to choose.

My cell phone rang. This time it was the peal of church bells, so I knew it wasn't a regular caller, or Nathaniel would have figured out a ring tone for them. I reached for it without thinking. Jean-Claude and Damian just watched me reach for it. I think they were being cautious, and I just needed something ordinary. "Blake here."

"Is this Marshal Anita Blake?" a man's voice asked.

"Yes, and you are?"

"Marshal Finnegan."

I stood up a little straighter. s.h.i.t, please don't let the Marshals Service need me now. Black glowy eyes and hit men out to get me, how would I explain it? "What can I do for you, Marshal Finnegan?" My voice sounded even and unemotional, business as usual. Good for me.