I couldn’t risk it.

“No,” I told Grizelle. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stop now.”

Grizelle stopped, turned, and stood even taller in her disbelief.

“It’s only a few strokes more.” I sounded lame even to myself.

“My master’s back is in bleeding shreds already.”

“He raised a medieval dragon from its ashes. He must have some magic to overcome this.”

“Not for himself.”

I shook my head. “I can’t stop now.”

“You will.”

As Quicksilver circled stealthily around behind her, I watched Grizelle shape-shift so fast that in one blink she was her human self and the next she had stretched long and low into full Big Cat form, six hundred pounds and nine feet long.

She roared, making the walls vibrate. The carnivore stink of hot tiger’s breath alone almost drove me off my feet.

Her front fangs looked longer than scissor blades and her open maw as high as a human torso was wide. I’d seen enough domestic cats chasing birds to realize she was hunched to attack. One bound would do for both me and Ric.

I clasped my hands together in front of me, not praying, but calling the silver familiar to war. Would a thing made of Snow’s hair defend me now? Desert him?

Twin chains sped down my arms to my palms. Achilles was in the familiar’s magical mix now.

I held the most fully realized form of the silver familiar yet-a shining sword blade-in my conjoined hands.

As Grizelle’s enormous white-and-black-striped, furred body sprang into the air, Quicksilver attacked her rear flank and was lofted upward by his teeth.

My mind flashed options. First I should strike for a huge gorgeous green eye, then the throat if I missed that. If she still bounded over me I’d have one last chance to rip out the belly. What a shame… for one of us.

I braced myself at the foot of the bed feeling her shadow fall over me.

At that instant, the Big Cat’s huge body twisted and flailed in the air, falling back to the carpeting and struggling there. It was as if an invisible leash had jerked her back.

She half-shifted into human form as she writhed on the floor, snarling between any words she could get out.

“Fool!” She shook a rear leg and Quicksilver fell off, still watchful.

I saw blood seeping onto the rug from her left hip, but she disregarded it.

“I didn’t call this off,” she said in a human voice still too rough and tigerish to reassure me. “Remember that. You will pay.”

She shifted back to tiger form, watching me with suspicious lowered head, then turned and stalked out, blood staining the white fur on her left flank.

I sighed and sat on the end of the bed, lowering the sword that seemed glued to my hands. It softened into twin serpents and migrated up my forearms to become upper-arm bracelets.

Quick sat down, tilted his head quizzically, and whimpered at the bed.

I turned my head over my shoulder. Ric slept on, the flat dunes of his back gleaming silver with scar tissue in the lamplight. I eyed the ugly ridges still remaining.

“My job,” I told Quicksilver. I doubted even his proven healing tongue could outdo mine after the Brimstone Kiss.

He trotted away to stand guard outside the double doors Grizelle had broken. That dog never walked, just trotted or ran flat out. And after a tiger attack, he still had the stones to take up a position between it and me should Grizelle’s tiger self desire any reruns.

My relieved mind oddly at peace, I crawled back up on the bed to run a forefinger along one of the seven remaining welts.

I’d been going to tell Quicksilver, “My job, my pleasure,” but knowing every erased welt here would reappear as pain elsewhere made me lose my appetite for the pleasure part.

I made quick work of it, letting Ric’s satisfied murmurs override the whimpers of my conscience.

Last, I brought my trembling lips to the bandage covering the wide and deep neck wound the vampires had made. Through the gauze mesh, I tasted blood, careful not to siphon any up.

This was one old scar Ric could never hide and didn’t want to. It was also his oldest erotic zone. Having missed out on the forbidden thrill of high school hickies, my loving lips had made this site an “instant on” zone and didn’t I feel guilty about that now.

If my Brimstone Kissed lips could “cure” this most vicious and lethal wound, the only remaining sign of Ric’s being vampire bait…

A migraine headache from Hell assailed me with disturbingly mixed mental images and emotional sensations. I felt and saw my lips on Ric and Snow and then vampire lips on Ric in such fast succession that waves of love and hate, passion and compassion, sexual and blood lust made me shake as if being electrocuted.

The reaction’s speed had jerked me away from Ric before he could be contaminated by more than a sleeping murmur of reaction.

Some places even healing intentions couldn’t go.

I glanced again at the silver tracery of his back scars. He now bore a beautiful ghost tattoo and I was drained into a stupor.

I curled up next to him and went to sleep.

I AWOKE FACEDOWN in the bed with a warm hand slipped under my T-shirt, cupping my rib cage and primed to do likewise with my breast.

“You give great dream,” Ric’s voice whispered against my neck.

I rolled over to find dark eyes smiling into mine. Eyes, plural. The brown contact lens over Ric’s transmuted iris covered the silver perfectly.

This incredible moment-Ric conscious and acting normally-seemed like any lazy, ordinary intimate “morning after,” although we hadn’t had many morning afters during our brief love affair.

And we hadn’t been indulging in sex last night but a bizarre form of erotic healing. Something new under the sun popped up every day in the post-Millennium Revelation world.

How good to know that Ric’s return to full consciousness was also filled with pleasurable memories to counter the horrible ones sure to return someday soon.

“What’d you dream?” I asked him, unafraid of his answer at the moment.

He looked as lazy and satisfied as a tomcat in the sun. “Your lips and mouth had developed a magic touch, Delilah. Must have been wearing that crazy, hot Lip Venom again. I came at every kiss, over and over again.”

“Wow. The only way I can offer that in a waking state is we log a lot of time in the sack from now on,” I joked.

“Yeah.” He frowned and looked around. “Where are we anyway? Cushy, but not your or my home, sweet home.”

I used his distraction to run my hand around his hip, meeting no resistance, and up his back. Meeting major resistance. His entire body bucked away.

“Time to get going.” He jumped up to face me by the bedside. “What is this thing?” he asked, discovering the soft cotton straitjacket of a hospital gown hanging from his shoulders.

A tiny strawberry print was definitely not Ricardo Montoya’s style. I knee-walked over the empty mattress to keep it from sliding off his shoulders. He didn’t need privacy from me in the front, but he was conditioned to keep his scarred back covered and untouched.

“You’ve been a little sick and I’m your night nurse,” I cooed to calm him down.

He frowned again. After the horrors he’d faced, no wonder he had temporary amnesia. That we could reconnect as lovers before those traumas pushed to the surface was a gift. Helena had been right.

I ran a daring finger over where a particularly long thick welt had disfigured his back. Ric bucked away like a bronco again, then his face registered shock. “You… touched my back.”

“So?”

“It felt… good. My back feels-”

“Smooth and creamy?” I asked provocatively, pushing into a full frontal embrace, running my fingers over the faint smooth tracks of the erased scars, feeling his torso quiver with pleasure instead of flinching away.