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I didn’t want to ask, but it was as if I couldn’t stop my mouth from forming the word. “What?”

“Mine.”

47

I SCREAMED, AND I shut it down. I shut it all down. No more birds from Merlin. But in my panic, I shut down the tie with Auggie and Jean-Claude. For an instant, it was just me and her inside my head. I felt rain on my face, cool and warm. The moon rode full and bright, and I was too tall, and too male. I thought it was Jean-Claude’s memory, but the hand I could see was too rough, too dark. Whose memory was I trapped in?

“Mine,” she said again.

Oh, yeah, her. So why was I inside the head of the man she was about to eat? Why wasn’t I inside her body?

Something moved in the moonlight. Something huge and pale, like some muscular ghost, sliding along the ground toward me. The head moved, and the eyes caught the moon, shining at me. I stared into the face of that great cat, and knew that nothing like it had walked the earth for thousands of years. “Cave lion,” I thought, “huh, they were striped.” The cat crouched to spring.

A wolf appeared between me and it. A white wolf with a dark saddle and head. Me, my wolf. This was a dream, which meant I was unconscious. Weird.

The wolf’s hackles rose, and it gave that low, bass growl that all the canids use when they aren’t kidding anymore. The wolf looked fragile beside that crouching figure. We were out of our weight class by a few hundred pounds.

I smelled wolf. I smelled pine, and forest loam. I smelled things that never grew here in this land, where the Mother of All Darkness had taken Merlin, or whoever he’d been once. I smelled the trees of home, the earth of pack land. I smelled the soft musk of wolf.

The cave lion tensed, and I knew this was it. The wolf braced for the spring, and the body I was wearing readied a spear that would not help.

Something touched my hand. I grabbed for it, without thinking, and the night exploded into white, hot light. Light, and pain, a great deal of pain.

Voices. “Let go, Anita, let go!”

Hands touching the pain. I tried to jerk away. It felt as if the blood in my hand had been replaced with molten metal. I knew that pain. A different voice, “Anita, let go!”

“Open your hand, Anita, just open your hand.” Micah’s voice.

My left hand was a lump of agony. I couldn’t even feel my fingers. How could I open it, if I couldn’t feel it? All I could feel was pain. It made me open my eyes. My vision was ruined, spotted, gray and black and white, as if I’d looked into a bright flash of light.

I had a moment to see the ring of faces: Micah, Nathaniel, Jason, Graham, and Richard. I saw them, but all my attention went to the agony that was my left hand. I looked at it, and on the outside it was fine. A thin gold chain trailed out of my fist. My hand looked fine, but I knew it wasn’t.

There were heavy drapes behind us. We were still at the Fox. They’d just carried me out of the box, and put me somewhere where the audience couldn’t see. I knew why there were no vampires kneeling with us. The Mother of All Darkness had tried to take me, again, and some fool had given me a cross to hold.

“Open your hand, Anita, please.” Micah whispered it again, stroking my hair.

I found my voice, and whispered, “Can’t.”

Richard cradled my hand in his, and started trying to pry my fingers open. He peeled a finger up. I whimpered, then bit my lip. If I started making noises, I’d end up screaming, or weeping, loudly. They’d managed to hide me away from the crowd. If I started screaming that would all be for nothing.

“I’m sorry, Anita, I’m sorry.” Richard whispered it over and over as he pried my hand open.

“Curse if you want to,” Jason said.

I shook my head. Bad burns hurt too much for cursing to make anything better. I forced myself to feel past the pain. I could still feel my hand, but distant, as if the hand around the pain were almost asleep. The pain overrode everything else—as if the nerves just couldn’t handle it all so they transmitted