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“Sort of,” I said. I looked across the room, past Micah’s head and found Cherry. “Is calling flesh like what I do when I call munin?” Munin were sort of the ancestral memories of the werewolves. Except that they were actually more like ghosts, the spirits of the dead. You could gain their knowledge, their skills, and their bad habits if you had the ability to channel them. I was a necromancer—all the dead liked me. The munin that liked me best of all was Raina, the wolf pack’s old lupa. I’d been the one who killed her—to keep her from killing me—and she delighted in the fact that she could take me over. I’d gained the power to control Raina when I accepted her, warts and all. When I called her, I didn’t fight her anymore. We’d worked out a sort of truce. But calling munin for healing was almost always sexual for me, because it had been sexual for Raina.

“It’s not sexual,” Cherry said. “Sensual, but not sexual.”

I trusted Cherry’s judgment on that. “Okay then, do it.”

Micah looked at me, those strange yellow-green eyes so terribly close.

“Do it,” I said.

He gave that wistful, sad, condescending smile again, like he was laughing at both of us, and crying for us, too. Unnerving, that smile. Then he lowered his mouth to my neck and the first of the scars. The first kiss was gentle against my throat; he breathed power against my skin, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. But the power hovered above my skin like cloth. Then the tip of his tongue slid along my skin, licking a hot, wet line down my neck. The power followed the line of that heat, sinking under my skin as he licked me. But it was when his mouth pressed over my skin, sealing him against me, sucking me into his mouth, between his teeth, that I felt the power shoved into me, forced into the scars. He literally breathed, bit, ate, the healing into me. I made small helpless movements. I couldn’t help it. We all have our erogenous zones in addition to the normal ones, places where if we’re touched our bodies react whether we want them to, or not. My neck and shoulders are two of my spots.

He leaned back, far enough from my neck to whisper, “Are you alright?” His breath was so hot against my skin.

I nodded, my face turned away from him.

He took me at my word, pressing his mouth back to my neck. There were no preliminaries this time; he bit me, hard enough that I gasped. My stomach knotted, twisting me onto my side, pulling me away from him.

“Anita, what’s wrong?”

“My stomach,” I said.

He slid the robe open, passing his hand over my stomach. “There was no wound here.”

Another wave of pain tore through my gut, bending me over double, to writhe on the floor. The need tore through me like something alive trying to rip its way out from inside my body.

Micah was there, smoothing my hair back from my face, that power that was building between us rolling through my body like a cat wading through me. He bundled me into his arms, his lap, pressed my face against his chest. “Get the doctor.”

His chest was smooth, warm. I could hear his heartbeat, feel it against my cheek. I could smell blood under his skin like some exotic candy that would melt on my tongue and glide down my throat. I worked my way up his body until I could see the big pulse in his neck. I watched that pulse like a man dying of thirst; my throat burned with the need, my lips dry, cracked from want of it. I had to feed. I knew in that instant that it wasn’t my thought.

I stretched out that part of me that Jean-Claude claimed and found him. Found him sitting in a windowless cell. He looked up as if he could see me standing in front of him. He whispered, “Ma petite,” and I knew where he was. I didn’t know why, but I knew where. He was in the St. Louis city jail, in the rooms reserved for things that cannot stand the light of day. I stared into his eyes and watched them fill with blue fire, until they cast their own light in the dim cell.

He reached out towards me, as if we could touch, and it was Micah’s power, Micah’s beast rolling through my body that tore me away from Jean-Claude.