Eli’s face tightened, just a smidge. If he was showing that much, I figured he was terrified. He said, “We came close to seeing how you react without Beast assisting you. And it wasn’t pretty.”

Deep inside, I felt Beast growl. She didn’t like that idea. But Eli had a point. If I couldn’t draw on Beast in a fight for some reason, I’d be using my own skinwalker fighting skills and my own pain-damping abilities. I’d gotten used to having Beast as part of me. I wasn’t used to fighting so alone and hoped I’d never have to find out how well or poorly I did without her totally. But in the middle of a fight hadn’t been the time to find out how that situation worked.

If I had access to Beast, but needed to shift into an animal by day, I had no way to shift back until night. It was a quirk in my shifting that had proven problematic in the past. I did feel better, stronger, as much because of the food in my system as the vampire blood.

Once upon a time, drinking vamp blood was a way for a suckhead to attempt to bind me magically. I considered myself, the darkness of the cavern of my soul home, and the fact that a forced binding would never work, which was one big point in my favor. I gestured with a pancake-laden fork for Eli to go on.

“If vamp blood works well enough, it gives us an extra defensive weapon for you.”

I slid a hand to my wound, feeling the thick scar tissue and muscle there. “I don’t think I can take a direct hit here yet.”

“Understood. Eat. Drink. Then decide.” Eli shoved a pitcher of electrolytes at me.

I ate. I drank. And I felt better moment by moment. “Okay,” I said when I finished my third stack of pancakes. “Lift some weights, stretch, and spar. But you go easy on me this time.” It wasn’t something I had ever asked of him and Eli paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, considering.

“Wimp.”

“Totally. All I need is pom-poms and a tutu. Maybe a teddy bear.”

Eli laughed, a real, full-on laugh that warmed my whole heart, and ate.

* * *

The room tumbled end over end and I landed flat on my back with a wham and an “Ooof” that drove the air out of my lungs and made my body spasm with electric shocks of agony. Crap, crap, crap, I thought, tensing against the pain.

My Beast tried to force her way to the surface to take the fight back to Eli, but I was hurting and the purpose of this exercise was to fight with her down, firmly in place and submissive. From the way she was pacing across my mind, like a cat in a cage, I understood that she didn’t like our little test. She didn’t like being unable to force her energies into me when I was being bruised. She didn’t like not forcing a shift on me, into her form, Puma concolor, but she hadn’t been able to do that earlier, when I was dying. Eli was right. I—we—needed to know this.

Waiting game, I reminded her as she squirmed beneath my mental hand. We are ambush hunters.

She growled at me, but subsided. I finally found a breath of air. It hurt going down, as if someone had yanked a rosebush into my lungs. It made a painful sucking sound too, and Eli chuckled, the evil man.

Want to ambush-hunt Eli. We are Beast. We are stronger than human.

Yeah, but we need to be able to hide what we are, and practice makes perfect, I thought back. And we need to figure out what happened today when you didn’t shift.

Seeing eye, she thought. Seeing eye and green magics.

Some magical whammy for sure.

Jane has practiced dying many time, Beast thought at me, snark in her thoughts.

Thanks. I gave some snark back and pressed down on her, holding her still, practicing what I had been working on for the last few weeks, in the meditation exercises that had been assigned to me, holding her in place with a mental hand, not letting Beast assist in a fight, not letting her take over our form, not letting her be alpha. It was important that she learn to stay hidden, or we might end up a captive, taken prisoner, and used by the European Mithrans, the biggest of the baddest suckheads. And they’d be here in a few months. Or, if I was lucky, in a few years.

Beast subsided and I blinked the sweat from my eyes. I had missed the mat again, surely Eli’s intent, and was lying halfway into the hallway. I managed another breath and dropped my hands flat to the wooden floor, faceup, staring at the ceiling twelve feet overhead. The corners were dusty. And the ceiling needed a paint job. And . . . there was a tiny attic access in the corner that I had never paid attention to. Interesting.

“Better,” Eli said, and he tossed me a towel. It landed on my face, also his intent. “Your eyes didn’t start to glow, even when you landed.” I could hear the insulting laughter in his voice when he asked, “Did it hurt, babe?”

I patted my face, neck, and upper chest with the towel and left it on my belly to absorb more sweat through my workout shirt. “Oh yeah. I hurt.” Eli chuckled again, and I added, “You don’t have to enjoy it so much.”

“Sure I do.” He moved to stand over my right side, his face faintly amused, sweat trickling down his temple, his dark skin sheened with perspiration. He smelled of sweat, testosterone, deodorant, and sour clothes. In the New Orleans’s humid heat, sweaty clothes soured quickly, and I was pretty sure the concept of autumn was Mother Nature’s big joke this far south, leaving us in a muggy, wet hell forever.

Eli lowered a hand, palm up, as if offering to help me up, and kept talking. “I take joy where I can find it.”

I had heard the story before and I finished it for him. “One day this old soldier told you, ‘Never pass a watercooler without taking a drink, because you never know when your next one will come.’”