“Ease down,” I said.

They all ignored me; not good.

“It’s Damian’s blood, not mine.”

That made some of them glance at each other, as if looking for a clue, but most of them stayed with their guns nice and steady. One gun moved a fraction and was pointing at me; how could I tell? When you’ve had enough guns pointed directly at you, you get very sensitive to that kind of thing.

It was Ricky again. He’d used up all my goodwill at Danse Macabre last time I saw him. “Unless you’re going to shoot me, move the gun off me, now,” I said in a low voice.

“If that’s Damian’s blood, then you’re more dangerous than he is.” His voice was as steady as his hand, but there was an edge of anger to that calm.

One of the other guards, naked in the doorway, said, “Ricky, are you pointing your gun at one of our main protectees?”

Harris moved in front of us to act as a meat shield. Barry had his gun out, but neither of them wanted to draw down on this many of their fellow guards. I sympathized, but I also knew I’d be reporting their lack of enthusiasm for protecting my life. Since that was one of their main jobs, it wasn’t reassuring.

I called out over the broad shoulders of my meat shield. “Ricky, the last time I saw you, Echo was telling you you’d fucked up, and now you’ve pointed a gun at me. You just don’t want this job, do you?”

“You show up covered in blood and tell us it doesn’t belong to the vampire—what are we supposed to think?” he asked. He even sounded like he might believe it. Maybe I had scared him more the first time we met than I realized. Sometimes, once you’ve used basically vampire powers on someone and let them keep the memory of what you did, they never get over it. I know I’ve held grudges against real vampires for shit like that.

I heard other sounds and knew the guards were closing around Ricky. They’d report what he’d done, because the only thing that hurts a bodyguard’s reputation worse than having a client die on their watch is one of their own security specialists killing the client.

“You all smelled the fresh blood, but we were right on top of you before you reacted to it.”

“Yeah.” It was Bobby Lee wearing a pair of boxers and holding a Smith & Wesson M&P loose in his hands. His body was lean and muscled in that way that long-distance runners get sometimes; there was almost no body fat to him, so he looked impressively cut, each muscle showing under his skin, but it was a little too lean, and I wondered if he was eating enough. Bobby Lee was one of the men most likely to be sent out of country on mercenary work for the wererats that had nothing to do with us, and everyone deals with the stress of that kind of work differently. His short blond hair was still on end, but his gold-framed glasses showed that his medium-brown eyes were steady. He was always steady, was Bobby Lee, but I’d be talking to some of the other guards I trusted to see if he was doing okay.

“I didn’t make Damian bleed. I just woke up in the mess with him.”

“Well, darlin’, if you didn’t hurt him, who did? Because this is too much blood to be losing.” He always had a slight Southern accent, and every woman was darlin’; when he was under stress, the accent got thicker and he started adding honey chile and sugar.

“It’s a long story, Bobby Lee, but if you want to help these two walk us to Nathaniel and Micah’s room so we can use the shower, I’ll fill you in.”

“Happy to help, ma’am. Can you give me a minute to get dressed and rearmed?”

“Sure.”

He smiled, and then his brown eyes swam to black. His rat eyes in his human face. “Just so you know, darlin’, the blood doesn’t smell like vampire. It smells warmer than that.”

I felt the jump of energy through the guards as their beasts flashed through them. I was suddenly looking at amber, orange, red, brown, and more black—wolf, lion, hyena, rat. I fought with everything I had not to shiver or show any sign of fear. Damian had gone so still that if I hadn’t been holding his hand I wouldn’t have been able to feel him there at all. I felt more from Nathaniel on the other side of him, even though we were both holding hands with the vampire and not each other.

The guards’ energy whispered through me and I could see my own beasts inside me the way you see dreams in your head. My wolf, my lion, my hyena, my leopard, and my newest beast, rat, all looked up and their energy ran over my skin and spilled out toward the energy in the hallway. I had enough control now to make sure that was all that happened, and I was happy for that as I looked at them all, because smelling like fresh blood around a bunch of wereanimals isn’t always good for your health, even if you had your own monster to throw back at theirs.

“And just like that, we don’t know whether to fight you, fuck you, or eat you.” Ricky again, though he was unarmed now with other guards on either side of him in a way that they usually reserved for bad guys.

“Two out of three isn’t happening, Ricky boy, but that first one, maybe we should meet on the practice mats and see what happens.”

“And when I start to win, you’ll use your magic and cheat.”

“If we meet on the mats, I promise not to eat your anger, or raise the ardeur.”

“You’d fight me fair?”

“You’re six feet plus to my five-three, so I’m not sure there’s any way to have a fair fight between us, but if you mean I won’t use any preternatural abilities that we don’t both have, then yeah—a fair fight.”