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I shrugged. “Not a problem then.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean? That you’ll just kill him?”

It was my turn to look at him. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

He almost smiled, stopped, then frowned again. “Just kill him, just like that.” It was almost as if he were thinking it over, as if it had never occurred to him.

Merle said, “He’s a hard man to kill.”

“Unless he’s faster than a silver bullet, Merle, nobody’s that hard to kill.”

Rafael came slowly through the leopards, Claudia and Igor trailing him. “We’ve all been thinking of your leopards as lesser than us. What I just saw makes me envious.”

“I know how the wolves work,” I said. “And I know that they don’t have a sense of home. First Raina and Marcus made them afraid of each other, now Richard’s morals have him struggling to be safe. But you and yours seem pretty secure. How different is what I’ve done with my leopards from what everyone else is doing?”

“I’ve benefited from your loyalty, your sheer stubbornness. What I didn’t realize until tonight is that you didn’t save me just because I was your friend, or just because it was the right thing to do. You didn’t risk yourself and your people to save me from torture because of the kind of moral rightness that Richard is fond of. You saved me because you could not bear the thought of leaving me behind.” He touched my face, very gently. “Not from a sense of right and wrong, but because you are just that tenderhearted.”

I looked at him. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never that.”

He chucked me under the chin like you would a child. “Don’t make light of one of your better qualities. You love your people like a mother is supposed to love her children. You want what’s best for them, even if that makes you uncomfortable, even if you don’t like their choices.”

I had to look away from the wonderment on his face, like he was looking at somebody else that couldn’t be me. “You have never been their leopard queen in body, but you shamed us all tonight. It’s not seeing your closeness to Micah that will torment Richard, though that will burn. It’s that you gave us a glimpse of what we are all striving for, for our clans. Richard believes his moral rightness will get him where your leopards already are.”

I looked up at him. “My pard is not a democracy, and I have a hell of a lot more than just presidential veto when it comes to decisions.”

“Richard knows that, better probably than anyone, and that will gall him, Anita. It will make him doubt himself.”

I shook my head. “Richard always doubts himself when it comes to the lukoi. He’ll never have surety about them until he has surety about who and what he is.”

“First I have to accept the fact that you’re kindhearted, now I have to accept the fact that you’re insightful as well. I knew you were powerful, ruthless, and pretty, but that you have a mind and a heart besides is going to take some getting used to.”

“Does everyone pretty much think I’m just a sociopath who happens to have magical abilities?”

“It’s all you let people see,” he said, “until now.” He gazed out towards the circle of faces still turned to us. I saw a kind of hunger in their faces, and I knew that they had felt what I’d felt, a sense of true belonging, of being home within the circle—not of bricks or mortar—but of flesh, of hands to grasp, arms to hold, smiles to share. So simple, so rare.

All these months I’d been worried I’d fail the wereleopards. I thought failure meant them dying, or getting hurt. What I realized suddenly was that the true failure would have been if I hadn’t given a damn. You can bandage a wound, set a broken bone, but not caring . . . you can’t cure that, and you can’t recover from it.

23

THE LUPANAR WAS a large clearing 100 yards by 150 yards. The clearing appeared to be flat, but actually it sat in a large smooth valley between hills. You couldn’t notice it at night, but I knew that just beyond the trees that ringed the far side of the lupanar were steep hills. It had taken me more