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But I was better at controlling the beast than I had been the last time she tried this. I called the other animals. We could play metaphysical tag for a while, at least. The black panther looked frail compared to the great striped beast. The wolf growled and flared its ruff of fur. The tiger stared at them, waiting. The lioness came from the darkness last, almost the same size as the tiger. They were animals that should never have met in the wild, never have tried their great strengths against one another. But the inside of my body was a lot weirder than any zoo. The beasts stared at the newcomer, and we waited. By calling them all at once, I kept myself from trying to turn into any single one of them. But eventually my body would choose, and when that happened there had to be a weretiger in the room.

“Call Christine,” Micah said. He’d helped me learn this control. He knew what I was doing.

“Jean-Claude warned me that Anita might be collecting more kitty-cats,” Remus said, “so we went shopping.” He turned to one of the guards by the door. “Go get Soledad. We need her ASAP.”

The man went out the door at a jog. Remus turned back to me. “She’ll do what needs doing.”

“She’s a wererat?” I managed to say.

“She’s pretending to be one of Rafael’s rats, but she’s a tiger. We had to promise to keep her secret before she’d agree to stay in town.”

“She’s probably running from an arranged marriage. Tigers are weird about keeping it in the family,” Claudia said.

“What?” I said.

“We’ll explain later, promise,” Claudia said.

Remus said, “Most of the solo tigers I’ve met all hide what they are really well. Most of them can even hide their energy enough to pass for human.”

I wanted to look at Richard, but didn’t dare. Even the thought made the wolf stand up straighter and think about coming closer. Once Richard had played human for me, and I’d been fooled. I buried my face against Nathaniel’s arm, smelled his leopard, and the wolf quieted, but the leopard began to pace.

I still didn’t have a werelion to call my own. I wasn’t even sure we had a lion in the place tonight, but I should have known that Remus and Claudia would think of it. “We better send for the lions, too,” she said.

Remus just looked at the door. One of the other guards opened the door, then hesitated. “Which one?”

“Travis.”

The guard went. I would have protested the choice, but of the few lions we had he was probably one of the best. None of the local lions really appealed to me—they were too weak. My lioness didn’t want food, she wanted a mate. I’d worked hard not to give her one. Eventually she’d pick one whether I liked it or not. Or that was the prevailing theory. Since what I was doing metaphysically was pretty much impossible, it was just a theory. None of us truly knew how all this was going to turn out. I sat in Nathaniel’s arms and tried to think evenly about all the beasts. But Nathaniel was too close, and the scent of his skin too real. The leopard turned and began to pace up that corridor that led to pain.

I gripped Nathaniel’s arm. “I can’t hold them.”

Richard crawled to me and put his arm by my face. The musk of wolf was there, to slow the leopard and send it circling around, not trying to come out. But now the wolf paced toward the light. Not good.

Travis got there before Soledad. His blond-brown curls were tousled from sleep, his face still not wholly awake. He was wearing the bottoms of a pair of cotton pajamas, and nothing else. They’d dragged him from bed with no time to do anything. He was a college student and I wondered briefly if his Rex, lion king, had made him stay here with us instead of going to class.

He knelt by my legs and didn’t even react to the fact that I was nude. Either the guard had explained the problem or he could feel it. His sleepy face began to clear, and an intelligence that was both too acute and one of his best features began to fill his gold-brown eyes. He held his wrist out to me, and the lioness