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I hugged an armful of his braid to my chest as I said, “I stopped thinking about the Browns’ grief, their dead son. It wasn’t that I chose to ignore it. I wasn’t being callous, it just never entered my mind. It was just that they hurt me, and I got mad, but mad translated directly to food. If I killed them and ate them, then they couldn’t hurt me anymore, and I was hungry.” I met his eyes on that last word.

Some trick of reflected light made his eyes shine for a moment, like the eyes of a cat in a flashlight’s beam. He turned his head, and it was gone, his eyes lost in shadow again. The turn of his head tugged on his hair, and I had a second to decide whether I would let it go, or keep it. I kept it, and it put a strain down the line of his hair, a strain like pulling on a rope, and knowing it was tied tight.

His voice was a little breathy when he said, “You’re always hungry when you first change shape, especially if you’re new at it.”

“How do you keep from tearing into the crowd at the club?” I asked, and my voice was a little shaky, too.

He leaned back away from me, and it made the pull on his hair tighter, harder. “By channeling the hunger into sex instead of food. You don’t eat your mate. If you can fuck it, it’s not food.” His voice was lower, not deeper exactly, but lower.

“So how did I not eat anybody? I wasn’t thinking about sex with the Browns.”

“At first you are just the hunger, but after a few full moons, you can think, but you don’t think like a person. You think like your animal. A few more full moons after that and you can choose to think like yourself in animal form.”

“Choose?” I said, and began to pull him toward me, using his braid like a rope, but this rope was attached to his skull, and he didn’t come easily. He began to pull against me, and I knew that it had to hurt just a little.

His voice was low and soft. “Some people enjoy the purity of the animal. Like you said, no conflicts, no inner struggles. Just decide what you want and do it.”

“Undo your seat belt,” I said.

He undid his seat belt.

I pulled him to me with his hair tangled around my arms, like you’d coil a rope or a strings of lights. “Does anyone use the animal for a patsy, you know, crime? A lot of what keeps some people good is their conscience. The beast doesn’t have one of those.”

He was close enough to kiss, his face lower than mine, because of his braid holding him just a little to one side. “The animal is very practical,” he whispered. “It’s why so few people use their animal form when they commit murder. I don’t mean accidental kills, because they don’t have the control, but deliberate murder.”

I leaned over him. “Example.”

“Say, your uncle will leave you a fortune but he needs to be dead so you can inherit it. Unless your beast is hungry, it won’t kill your uncle for money, because the beast doesn’t understand money.”

I leaned close enough to almost kiss him. “What does the beast understand?”

He spoke with his lips almost against mine. “It will kill someone you truly fear, or someone who’s hurt you, especially physically. The beast understands being hit, being injured.”

I almost asked if he’d hunted down the man who beat him and his brother, but I didn’t. I’d seen his memories. If someone had done that to me, what would I have done? Bad things, most likely. And I didn’t want to fill the car with hurt and bad memories. I’d had enough of those.

I laid a kiss on his mouth, and he pressed me back against my seat. I found that still being seat-belted, I couldn’t move well. My arms were tangled in his braid so that it felt like I was being bound. I had a moment of panic, then I relaxed into it. Nathaniel would not hurt me, and it was my own fault about the hair being where it was. He hadn’t wrapped me up, I’d done that.

He drew back just enough to talk, his lips brushing mine. “What about your clients?”

I drew my head back as far as I could, which wasn’t far, and said, “I’m not offering to fuck you here and now.”

“You’re not?”

That made