Damian said, his voice calm and even, the way you talk someone down off a ledge, “I don’t know what made me draw my knife on Bobby Lee, so I gave it to Domino until we figure this out.”

   I nodded, and let out a long, slow breath. My beasts were still huddled around my anger, eager to make it worse, so they could come out to play. The newest beast, the rat with its black eyes shining in the dark, wasn’t getting along well with everyone else. Rats would eat anything, including people, but they were prey animals, too. My beasts didn’t like having food inside with them, especially food that they couldn’t rend and tear and eat.

   We’d wanted to give me a beast that could come and help me in its natural form if I lost all my guards, but no one had asked how my inner leopard, wolf, lion, hyena, and rainbow of tigers felt about adding a new beast. It had never occurred to me to go into meditation as I’d been taught by my spiritual mentor, Marianne, and get everyone else’s furry opinion. This was the first time I’d taken a new beast on voluntarily, and could have asked first. It had never occurred to me to ask until this moment when they exploited a weakness of mine to be loud enough to demand to be heard. Fuck.

   “What’s wrong, Anita?” Nathaniel asked, and his voice sounded like him again. He was part of my calm center again.

   I shook my head. “One problem at a time. What did you mean about Damian and all this being your fault?” I asked.

   “I was angry, but part of me knew that Bobby Lee is better than I am at fighting, so I was scared and angry.”

   “I felt that,” Damian said, “and I knew I needed to protect you.” He sounded like he was repeating a memory, not something that had just happened.

   “And the anger may have been me,” I said. They all looked at me. “The emotions just now stripped some of my control away and let my beasts talk to me.”

   All the wereanimals in the room said in unison, “Talk to you?”

   “I translate it to words, but I’m not sure . . . Anyway, they’re upset about the newest addition.”

   “What do you mean, the newest addition?” Damian asked.

   “You mean the rat?” Bobby Lee asked.

   “Yes, apparently they see it as prey and it’s just one more thing that they can’t do. They can’t come out of my body and be whole, and now they’re trapped inside me with a prey animal that they’re not supposed to eat.”

   “I don’t understand,” Damian said.

   “That would be very frustrating,” Bobby Lee said.

   “Did they complain about the rat before you did it?” Nathaniel asked.

   “My control is really good now,” I said.

   Nathaniel looked at me. “Anita?”

   Domino came to stand in front of me. “You didn’t talk to them first, did you? You ignored them.”

   I opened my mouth, closed it, and shrugged.

   Nathaniel said, “Marianne taught you how to meditate and communicate with your beasts. I thought you were doing that regularly. I thought that was part of your new uber-control over them.”

   “If I said I’m sorry, would that help?”

   “Are you saying that your inner beasts’ anger transferred to Nathaniel and Damian?” Bobby Lee asked.

   “Maybe.”

   Nathaniel paced away from me, then back. “Anita, you can’t keep pretending that you don’t carry the beasts inside you.”

   “I don’t pretend . . .”

   “Control doesn’t mean you ignore your beasts. Control means you make peace, or something, with them. It’s a cooperation, not a dictatorship.”

   I shrugged again. “I’m powerful enough that most of the time I can dictate.”

   “Losing control once a month or more isn’t a curse, Anita. It’s a release,” he said.

   I shook my head. “I don’t like losing control.”

   “Well, that’s an understatement,” Bobby Lee said.

   I frowned at him.

   “Don’t give me grief when you just fucked up your inner menagerie.”

   “They didn’t complain when I caught the hyena.”

   “That was another predator and an accident. You let Rafael cut you up in rat-man form, hoping to catch what we have.”

   “I didn’t think they’d see a difference.”

   “You mean your beasts wouldn’t see it as different?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Why wouldn’t they see the difference between an accident and a deliberate act?” Bobby Lee asked.

   I didn’t want to say it out loud, because even in my head it sounded condescending and stupid. But sometimes if you’re thinking loud enough, the people tied to you metaphysically can hear you thinking. I thought I had control of that, too, but I was going to be wrong again.

   Nathaniel stared at me. “You didn’t think they’d know the difference. Even a real leopard knows what an accident is, Anita.” His face let me see just how disappointed he was in me.

   “That’s pretty species-ist, Anita,” Domino remarked.

   “No, it’s human-centric,” Bobby Lee corrected. “She still thinks of herself as human first.”

   “No,” Damian said, “I can feel . . . She thinks of herself as human, period.”

   “Just because you don’t shift into animal form doesn’t make you human,” Nathaniel said.

   “I think it does.”

   “So the fact that I shift to leopard means I’m less than human?” And there was the anger again, him speaking for my beasts, or maybe just for part of me that I couldn’t accept.

   “No, of course not,” I said.

   “But being human is better,” he said.

   “I didn’t say that. I would never say that.”

   “You’re still relieved that you don’t shift,” he said, and his lavender eyes stared into me as if he saw my thoughts and feelings laid bare, because he was right. I was relieved that I didn’t change form. I did think it was better. Did that make me the species equivalent of a racist? Did it make me human-centric? Maybe it did.

   “Wow, okay,” Domino said, “that’s a lot of truth to share all at once.”

   “Can you feel what she’s feeling, too?” Nathaniel asked.

   “I hear her thoughts more than her feelings.”

   Nathaniel turned to Damian. “Are you her thoughts, or her feelings?”