“If that’s a nice way of saying he’s not pretty, then I’ll agree with you.”

“Kane is handsome in his own way, Angel,” Dev said.

“Why do you defend him?”

I studied Dev’s face, watched the discomfort cross his face, and wondered if he was attracted to Kane, too. If so, then Kane’s jealousy would be a double blow to him. There was such pain in his blue-hazel eyes. He let us see it raw and unfiltered for a heartbeat and then he closed his eyes, smiled, and hid behind that joking surfer-dude charm that was as fake as my cop face. Micah reached out to him, too, so that we were both holding his hands, and the moment we both touched him power flared across our skin. It raised the hairs on our arms, danced down our spines, and woke our beasts. I could feel Micah’s leopard, and I could see mine, staring up at me down that long tunnel where my mind showed me my inner beasts. I knew there was no tunnel, no landscape for the leopard to pad through, but it was part of what my human mind did to make sense of the impossible. Now, because I was touching Dev, another shape looked up at me. My golden tigress started trotting after the black shadow of my leopard, but if my human body couldn’t give release to one shape, it certainly couldn’t do it for two. It had been a while since my multiple beasts had tried to come forward together, and it never worked well. Cats don’t like to share.

It was as if the thought wanted to prove I was lying, because gold was joined by black, blue, white, and red so that the full rainbow of tigers stood gazing up at me, and the moment they were all there, the gold stopped moving. The tigers just stood there looking up, waiting. My leopard rose up, not as some mind game inside where you see dreams, but as power, rising as Micah’s beast rose in a spilling wave of power and magic, as if invisible velvet fur could flow as easily as air not just across our skins, but through the centers of our bodies. Our beasts could swim through both our bodies like great furred leviathans, but they didn’t take the logical route where Micah and I were touching each other; they flowed down our hands and into Dev. His tiger should have fought them off, but it didn’t. The great golden cat rolled onto its side and rolled in the power as if it were being petted.

It had happened once before, when we first met Dev, but never again. I’d thought it was just some metaphysical hiccup, but Dev’s face showed the same shocked pleasure now that it had that first time. The power flowed through the three of us in a continuous velvet rub of magic. I felt something deep in my body begin to build, and knew if we didn’t stop there might be more than just metaphysical pleasure.

“Let’s tone it down,” I said in a voice already gone breathy.

“God, let’s not,” Dev said, and dropped to his knees, hands holding tight to ours. His eyes were fluttering as if he were having trouble focusing on anything but the sensations flowing through his body.

“It isn’t that kind of party,” Micah said, trying to make a joke of it, but his voice was almost as breathy as mine.

I’d known the gold tigers were spread out like a fan around us, but it wasn’t until Fortune said, “That shouldn’t be possible,” that I realized there were others standing around us, so that we stood in a circle of weretigers.

“She smells like all of us at once,” Angel said.

“They both do,” Fortune said, and moved in closer to Micah, sniffing near his hair. That I hadn’t known.

“What would happen if we touched them?” Angel asked.

“No,” I said.

“No one touches us,” Micah said.

Thorn reached out toward us. His short curls were so dark a blond that I would have called it brown, but the day I said so he’d been deeply insulted.

“Don’t,” I said.

But it was Thorn; he didn’t like being told no. His hand touched my arm and the power flowed over his hand, but not into him. It was like he could brush the electricity of it, but the power didn’t make him part of the circuit.

“Touch them both,” Angel said.

“No!” Micah and I yelled together.

Thorn put his other hand on Micah’s arm, and the power spilled over and through him, but Micah growled, “We said no!” The warm, comforting power suddenly grew claws and slashed out. Thorn staggered back from us, and blood blossomed on the front of his shirt.

The power went back to being warm and sensuous, but we could break the circuit now, as if Thorn had interfered with something and freed us.

Thorn was pulling his T-shirt up, showing that there were claw marks on his stomach, when Dev slammed into him so hard that he didn’t just go down; he slid across the floor. Dev was on him before he could recover, lifting him to a sitting position with the handle of the bloody shirt around his neck. Dev growled so close to his face it looked like he was going to take a bite out of it. “Mine,” Dev growled, “mine!”

Thorn blinked at him as if he couldn’t hear him yet, but I saw one of his hands come up and caught a silver flash.

“No!” I yelled, but there was no time to do more. The men were across the room and whatever was going to happen would be over before anyone else could get to them.

21

I SAW DEV’S body react to the blade a second before I stumbled as I rushed toward him. My side hurt. He was my golden tiger to call, which meant I gained power through him and he through me, but there was a price. I actually glanced down to see if I was bleeding, but I wouldn’t be. It would hurt like I was, but I wasn’t actually cut; knowing that helped keep me moving forward, ignoring the pain.