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“But if it were . . .”

“But it’s not,” I said.

She smiled. “But if it were, I’d say two things.”

“You’re going to say them anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said.

I waved her to go ahead.

“First, it’s nice to see you letting yourself follow your heart with someone new. Second, you don’t know this man very well. Be careful who you give your heart to, Anita.”

“I haven’t given anyone my heart, yet.”

“Not yet,” she said.

I frowned at her. “You do realize that you’ve told me to follow my heart and not to follow my heart.”

She nodded.

“Those are contradictory bits of advice,” I said.

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then which piece of advice do you want me to follow?”

“Both, of course.”

I shook my head. “Let’s go save Gregory and worry about my ever-sordid love life later.”

“I can’t promise that we’ll save Gregory, Anita.”

I held up a hand. “I remember the odds, doc.” I followed her out and into the darkened living room and tried to believe, really believe, in miracles.

29

WE DECIDED TO do it on the deck out back. My deck backed to a couple of acres of mature woodland. No neighbors. No one to see us. The deck was also twice the size of the kitchen, which was the only part of the house without carpeting. Once a shapeshifter changed on carpet it was either steam clean it yourself, or hire it done. I was not the one who suggested that Gregory would ruin the carpet; it was actually Nathaniel. He was, after all, the person most likely to be vacuuming between housekeeper visits. I wasn’t even sure I knew where the vacuum was.

Gregory was curled in the center of the deck, his head in his brother’s lap, his arms wrapped around the other man’s naked waist. Only the curling yellow hair, paled by moonlight, covered Stephen’s upper body. He’d stripped to the waist in preparation for the change. He was going to go out into the woods with his brother. This presupposed that Gregory would survive the change. We had a fifty-fifty chance, not bad odds, if all you were about to lose was money, but when it was someone’s life, fifty-fifty just didn’t sound that good.

Stephen looked up at me. His cornflower blue eyes were silvered with moonlight. He looked pale and ethereal. His face was raw with emotion; his eyes held an intelligence and a demand that Stephen didn’t often show. He was submissive, fragile in every walk of his life, but in that moment he laid a demand on me with his eyes, his face, the pain that showed in the set of his shoulders, the fierce way he touched his brother, who was still huddled in his lap, just a fall of long pale curls and paler skin. Gregory was naked in the hot summer night, and until that moment I hadn’t noticed. The nudity didn’t make me think of sex, it made me think how terribly vulnerable he was.

Stephen looked up at me and asked with every line of his body, the desperation in his eyes, what he was too submissive to say out loud. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know what he wanted. Save him, save my brother, he screamed at me from his eyes. To say it out loud would have been redundant.

Vivian, who was as fragile as Stephen, as submissive, said it out loud anyway. “Please, try and call his beast, at least try before they use the drugs.”

I looked at her, and there must have been something in my face that frightened her, because she dropped to her knees and crawled towards me. It wasn’t that graceful stalk that the leopards could do. It was like a human crawling, awkward, slow, head down, eyes rolled up. She was displaying the leopard version of submissive behavior, and I hated it. Hated her feeling the need, like I was some ogre that needed placating, but I let her do it. Richard had shown me what happened in a were-group when the dominant refused to be dominant.

She leaned against my legs, pushing her body against me, head down. Normally, leopards would roll around my legs like huge cats, but tonight Vivian just pressed against my legs more like a frightened dog than a luxuriating cat. I leaned over to touch her hair and heard her murmuring under her breath, so soft, “Please, please, please.