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some form of drug? Kyrie glanced behind her, to see Tom shaking his head violently. The fact that he was the approximate color of curdled milk, his normally pale skin looking downright unhealthy and grey, did not reassure her that by his shaking his head he meant he’d never heard of such a thing as a pearl.
    “Tom?” she said.
    He only shook his head again.
    “Right,” the middle one said. “You want to play rough, rough it is.”
    And suddenly a golden dragon took up most of the small brown room. And there were claws reaching for Kyrie. No. Talons. And someone’s fangs were close to her face, a smell like a thousand long-forgotten sushi dinners invading her nostrils. A forked tongue licked her ear and through the lips not fashioned for speech, through the accent that he showed even in English, she nonetheless understood the young man’s words as he said, “We’re going to have so much fun.”
    She’d never shifted when she was scared. The few times she’d shifted it had been just the moon and usually summer calling to her, the feeling of jungle in her mind, at the back of her brain.
    But as her fear closed upon her throat, making breathing almost impossible, as her heart pounded seemingly in her ears, as her blood seemed to race away from her leaving her cold as ice, she felt something . . .
    She wasn’t sure what was happening until she heard the growl erupt from her throat. A full growl, fashioned from melodies of the jungle.
    Lizards. Uppity lizards, at that. They dared challenge her? Try to grab her?
    Turning around, she swiped a giant paw across the tender underflesh of a clawed foot holding her. And then she leapt for the throat of the giant beast who was trying to claw her down.
    It was—the part of her that remained human, deep in the mists of consciousness thought—like the armada and the English ships. The Spanish armada’s huge, slow ships might be stronger and better armored. But they had no hope against the small English ships that could sail around them, landing shots where they wished till the giant ship was crippled.
    Kyrie grabbed the beast by the throat, hanging on, till she tasted blood—and what blood. It was like drinking the finest champagne straight from the bottle.
    The beast yelled and reached for her with its claws. It managed to scrape her flank, in a bright slash of pain. But she jumped out of the way before the creature could grab her, and she was on top of his head, as both his friends converged, trying to grab her. And she leapt at the soft underbelly of the red one—Red Dragon, the human Kyrie thought—in a mad dance of claws sinking into soft, unarmored flesh.
    And then up again, and leaping at the eye of the next dragon.
    That there were three of them was not an advantage. After all, three large, slower-moving beings only helped each other get hopelessly entangled while Kyrie danced upon them like a deadly firefly, in a frenzy of wounding, a joy of blood.
    She was vaguely aware that she too was bleeding, that there were punctures on her hide and that, somehow, one of them had managed to sink his fangs into her front leg—her right arm. But she didn’t care. Right then, allowed the madness she’d long denied, she jumped at the dragon’s eyes, swiping her claws across them and relishing the dragon’s shriek of pain, the bright blood jumping from the right eye. She jumped and leapt, possessed of fierce anger, of maddened, repressed rage.
    But while the beast exulted in the carnage, while the feline gyrated in mayhem, a small trickling feeling formed at the back of Kyrie’s mind. It was like the first melting tip of an icicle, dropping cold reason on her hot madness. The feeling, at first, was no more than that—just a trickling cold, protesting, demanding—she wasn’t sure what. The beast, in its frenzy, ignored it.
    Until slowly, slowly, the feeling became words and the words became panic in Kyrie’s mind. She was fighting all three dragons. She was keeping all